Washington Post extends an invitation to you – and to everyone else – to search for the tomb of the Mongol emperor:
Through a Web site called Field Expedition Mongolia, which [University of California at San Diego researcher Albert] Lin and his colleagues developed jointly with National Geographic, volunteers are helping sift through 85,000 high-resolution satellite images of Mongolia.
Every time volunteers log in to the site, they are shown some of these images. An online tutorial instructs them on how to look for particular objects and tag them as “roads,” “rivers,” “modern structures” or “ancient structures.” They can zoom in and out and scroll in all directions.
They are also told to simply tag places as “other” if they see something peculiar. This is the sort of vague judgment that humans can perform but that computers cannot, Lin said.
“What a computer can’t do is look for ‘weird things,’ but when you ask a human brain, you don’t have to tell it what ‘weird’ is; we know,” Lin said.
If you can read this, you can be an archaeologist.