US Air Force Aircraft Identification Chart
Posted on 11/01/2009 8:49:58 PM PST by justlurking
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today announced the DARPA Network Challenge to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. The competition requires participants to discover the exact position of 10 large, red weather balloons that DARPA will place in undisclosed locations across the continental United States. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons will win a $40,000 cash prize. The balloons will be positioned on December 5, 2009.
“It is fitting for DARPA to announce this competition on the anniversary of the day that the first message was sent over the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet,” said Dr. Regina E. Dugan, who made the announcement at a conference celebrating the anniversary. “In the 40 years since this breakthrough, the Internet has become an integral part of society and the global economy. The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems.”
The DARPA Network Challenge is open to individuals of all ages, reflecting DARPA’s interest in attracting students to pursue careers in the areas of science and technology, including emerging specialties in the social sciences. Open to participants worldwide, the Challenge enables collaboration across borders, mobilizing individuals and groups to address difficult problems aided by the Internet.
This is the latest example of DARPA’s interest in reaching nontraditional sources of ideas and talent. The Grand Challenge competitions were started in 2004 to foster the development of autonomous robotic vehicle technology for use on the battlefield. The competition model for stimulating technological development enabled significant strides that will someday keep our men and women in uniform out of harm’s way.
“The DARPA Network Challenge taps into the same fresh thinking that made the earlier competitions a success,” said Dr. Norman Whitaker, who led DARPA’s most recent Challenge. “Future innovation depends on the upcoming generation of technologists who are discovering new, collaborative ways to approach problems that were not dreamt of 40 years ago.”
The 10 balloons will be placed in publicly accessible locations in the continental United States and will be on display for one day (December 5th) during daylight hours. The first participant to identify the latitude and longitude of all 10 balloons will receive the cash prize.
Event details can be found at www.darpa.mil/networkchallenge and updates on Twitter.com/DARPA_News.
I propose that if we when the prize, it goes to Jim Robinson and get a head start on the next Freep-a-thon.
Ping.
US Air Force Aircraft Identification Chart
Sounds like a good deal to me.
ROFL!
At first read, I thought this was supposed to be solved by means of some fancy technology, but with the one-month lead time this is apparently a social networking problem. FreeRepublic is actually a very good candidate for accomplishing it, though it would take more effort than the average freep to accomplish efficiently.
Off the top of my head, here would be the issues:
1.) organization: someone has to lead the collection and collation of reports as they come in.
2.) participation: a few Freepers would be very diligent and drive around all day looking for the balloons, but most others would do nothing more than look out their windows.
3.) technology: There are easy (and even low tech) methods of getting lat/long coords, but how many people are going to know how to do them?
4.) operational security: FR is a publicly viewable forum, in a competition, it would be simple for a competitor to view locational posts and reuse them with little to no individual effort (this may be part of the project’s findings)
5.) integrity: a balloon is located at lat/long X, how accurate is that location, and how can one trust that position to deliberate or accidental misreporting?
IMHO, This would be a great family activity in addition to being an opportunity to assist advanced scientific research. Take the kids out for a long drive on a saturday morning. They can even use their fancy cell phones to help with research and determine locations. Perhaps this could be a cross-generational learning experience.
I beleive there is some sort of study behind this. The question is what balloon. Does it emit radio frequency? Does it have infrared signuature? Does it fly at high altitudes that requires enahanced sensors? Is it planned to be launched at night? Does it have any signuature that is different from other ballons? What is the course of the wind on that day? I believe this is more than searching the skies. IF Free Republic volunteers are going to join, we may need night vision camera, telescopes to spot far in the sky, examine the weather conditions, and develop an HUMINT as well as SIGINT infrastructure of social network to search for possible individuals flying balloons on that day. Use of Free Republic special thread and other on-line features may be examined.
Answer to number 5 is GPS and laser range finder. Low tech method is maps, including those on-line.
There should be enough of us, family and friends to quickly find the 10 balloons. Unless they put them near college campuses, our internet network should have a decided advantage.
Strategy:
1. Everybody pick a public accessible area or two and put about 10 miles on the car (city) or 20 miles (country).
2. If you find one, post on this or specially designated thread (by the webmaster) just the state and county where the balloon was found.
3. If you have a navigator in your car, use it for the coordinates.
4. Upload Google Earth before the 5th if you haven't already. Zoom in where you saw the balloon and put your pointer over the spot. The coordinates will be in the bottom left hand corner of the picture.
5. Create a designatee (webmaster?) to contact DARPA for the win.
6. Once we believe we have all 10, then e-mail the coordinates to the designatee.
What happens if folks start putting out fake red weather ballons?
Yup, that's the point. :-)
FreeRepublic is actually a very good candidate for accomplishing it, though it would take more effort than the average freep to accomplish efficiently.
I'm not sure it would take more effort. I'm not suggesting that we have a big search -- I simply think that if everyone knows about it, they can keep an eye out for it during their daily commute, or whatever.
1.) organization: someone has to lead the collection and collation of reports as they come in.
One thread in breaking news or popular articles. Observers post the positions as they are discovered. One person enters them on the website.
2.) participation: a few Freepers would be very diligent and drive around all day looking for the balloons, but most others would do nothing more than look out their windows.
I think that's good enough.
3.) technology: There are easy (and even low tech) methods of getting lat/long coords, but how many people are going to know how to do them?
Once a location is spotted, the observer can determine the lat/long however they want. If they can't, post it and someone else in the area can help determine it, even if it requires a trip to the site.
4.) operational security: FR is a publicly viewable forum, in a competition, it would be simple for a competitor to view locational posts and reuse them with little to no individual effort (this may be part of the project’s findings)
There's not much we can do to avoid that. Of course, it works both ways. :-)
5.) integrity: a balloon is located at lat/long X, how accurate is that location, and how can one trust that position to deliberate or accidental misreporting?
Lat/long has to be within 1 arc-minute of accuracy. There's not much we can do to avoid mis-reporting, except to verify it independently. Some massively distributed computing products wait for results from two different nodes, and enlist a third if the first two disagree.
I don't know how the contest rules will be set up -- will we be able to enter locations as we find them, or do we have to wait until we have all of them? Can we enter an update if we come up with a more accurate position?
I have come to another conclusion on question five. DARPA also needs to know its current position of the balloons, which means it is likely to have some sort of communication device. Weather balloons often have these. Therefore, we may need people to monitor suspicious radio frequencies beaming from the sky, but the question is what are the electronics that allow this. Meanwhile, if these weather ballons are going to fly at high altitude, it will be very difficult to see in naked eyes. It could be beyond the clouds. What are the sensors availible as a commercial product that will allow to track weather ballons at high altitudes up to 20,000 feet above ground in the Stratosphere?
The U.S. is too much ground for even Freepers to cover. Twitter will have the info first, but there’s likely to be a lot of chaff, with people announcing balloons that don’t exist. We could even introduce chaff ourselves so that others don’t win the prize!
We could have Freepers visually verify Twitter-announced sightings, and have some Freeper responsible for compiling the verified list.
http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/
The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.
It will look like this: 
Will DARPA need permits to deploy the balloons?
“Coordinates must be entered with an error of less than one arc-minute”
How much distance on the ground is one arc-minute?
This is a social networking type of hunt. Those with large facebook or twitter accounts will have somewhat of an advantage. FR is a little too disorganized to have a chance but hey, luck happens!
The Mods would have to highlight it extensively though and I’m not sure they would want to hang their hat on this?
Seems to be about a mile +/-
Another problem is what to do if you are outside distant from your home PC, when you need to connect to Free Republic. Carrying around notebook or a palm top may give connectivity to the Internet, but what else? Cell phones with integrated browsers?
DARPA may need FAA permits ... they could already be on file unless closed by court order .. use FOIA to access ...
“99 Red Balloons”
That’s 89 too many. We’re only looking for ten.
DOT webcams
Some second thoughts:
I think lower-tech Freepers would be fine reporting in mile markers and an “o’clock” direction from the highway if we have a mile’s leeway if they happen to spot a balloon and are able to post a report during the day. Some good, old fashioned map reading could be employed to get the location and minimize the barriers to entry for participating (likely, everyone here can read a mile marker and an analog watch, but working a GPS unit may be a less universal skill for this community).
As for reporting to DARPA, I’d go for a more-the-merrier approach. Preferably, the submitters from FR would all agree to donate the award to the website, but given the open nature of the contest (and our limits on organization) , it’s not guaranteed and as likely that a hostile lurker snatch the goods just before us. It would be more likely that FR would “win” if multiple submissions be made in the site’s name rather than one.
I guess there’d have to be some limit on the amount of submissions per individual, since it would be way easier to write a computer program to guess the positions of unknown balloons and submit them than it would be to actually find them in the first place.
When the game starts, there is a need to put this thread onto the sidebar (Front Page News?), so it doesn’t flush down the page by newer threads, unless the Admin would have a special page or thread to let all visitors have a chance to help.
It's a two way street. To optimize the reporting of balloons it would have to be confidential. Someone correctly reporting IN AN OPEN FORUM that there was a balloon on the top of Mt Diablo outside Walnut Creek, CA would soon have that intelligence ripped off.
Of course if there was a competing Facebook team, whatever they discovered would be open to pillage unless they had a highly closed system. Clearly it's to each teams advantage to monitor the others reporting system for leaked intelligence...So while a large team has an advantage, the team with a quick, confidential reporting system would likely win.
Nena: 99 Red Balloons
You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'Til one by one they were gone
Back at base, bugs in the software
Flash the message, something's out there
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by
Ninety-nine red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
Where ninety-nine red balloons go by
Ninety-nine Decision Street
Ninety-nine ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it, boys, this is war
The President is on the line
As ninety-nine red balloons go by
Ninety-nine knights of the air
Ride super-high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a superhero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
As ninety-nine red balloons go by
As ninety-nine red balloons go by
Ninety-nine dreams I have had
And every one a red balloon
It's all over, and I'm standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you and let it go
Or in the original German:
99 Luftballons
Hast Du etwas Zeit für mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer Dich
Von 99 Luftballons
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont
Denkst Du vielleicht grad' an mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer Dich
Von 99 Luftballons
Und dass sowas von sowas kommt
99 Luftballons
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont
Hielt man fuer UFOs aus dem All
Darum schickte ein General
Eine Fliegerstaffel hinterher
Alarm zu geben, wenn es so war
Dabei war da am Horizont
Nur 99 Luftballons
99 Duesenjaeger
Jeder war ein grosser Krieger
Hielten sich fuer Captain Kirk
Das gab ein grosses Feuerwerk
Die Nachbarn haben nichts gerafft
Und fuehlten sich gleich angemacht
Dabei schoss man am Horizont
Auf 99 Luftballons
99 Kriegsminister
Streichholz und Benzinkanister
Hielten sich fuer schlaue Leute
Witterten schon fette Beute
Riefen: Krieg und wollten Macht
Mann, wer haette das gedacht
Dass es einmal soweit kommt
Wegen 99 Luftballons
99 Jahre Krieg
Liessen keinen Platz fuer Sieger
Kriegsminister gibt es nicht mehr
Und auch keine Duesenflieger
Heute zieh ich meine Runden
Seh die Welt in Truemmern liegen
Hab' nen Luftballon gefunden
Denk' an Dich und lass' ihn fliegen
"There's not much we can do to avoid that. Of course, it works both ways. :-)"
~~~~~~~~~~~
Actually, we do have a way to defeat (or seriously limit) that: FReepMail...
If we have a designated "Data Collector" (say, the one who posts or maintains the thread), anyone who finds a balloon could simply FReepMail the info to the "collector", and put a "I found one!!! You've got FReepMail" message in the thread.
Of course, I would suggest making a digital photo of each find. If the location is not too obvious from the photo, post the photo on the thread, too...
Arc minute = Circumference of the earth divided by 21,600
~~~~~~
Earth's Circumference Between the North and South Poles: 24859.82 miles
That great circle is divided into 21,600 arc minutes
One (1) arc minute = 1,852.2223 Meters = 1.8522223 KM = 1.15091759 Miles
That is pretty sloppy accuracy. You could get that close by reading coordinates off of a paper topographic map. GPS or reading off of Google Earth, etc. should be much closer...
I am willing to help the FR cause any way I can.
I will manage a ping list on this if y’all feel the need.
An interesting bit of trivia for the iPhone users: If you take a picture with your iPhone 3G or 3GS, it tags the picture with the latitude and longitude of the phone
It sometimes will take the phone's GPS awhile to "lock", as it doesn't run all the time. So, I've found that for best results, turn on Google Maps and show your current position. Wait for the position to resolve into a blue dot and for the blue circle (showing the potential error) to shrink to the desired accuracy.
Then, quickly switch to the camera and take a photo. Whether you transfer the photo off your phone with the camera wizard, or you email it to someone, the position in the photo's meta-data will be retained.
I haven't checked to see if the position info is retained if the photo is sent via MMS to another mobile phone.
That's one nautical mile.
However, note that it's only 1 NM at the equator. An arc-minute of longitude will become progressively smaller as you approach either pole.
If anyone can win this prize, it is Kevin Bacon.
Bottom line is: if we are accurate to a statute mile, we're probably okay at CONUS latitudes...
We’ve got a strong team that’s going to give all the money to charity (Red Cross). If you’d like to help, report your balloon sightings to
http://www.ispyaredballoon.com/
or at facebook
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=201028633372
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