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Automated Pool System Saves Swimmer
An anonymous reader writes "An automated swimmer tracking system installed in a pool in Wales has saved a young girl who just collapsed and sank to the bottom, by paging lifeguards when it could not detect her moving." This is the first time a UK swimmer has been saved by the £65,000 Poseidon system since it was installed in March of 2003.
Mastercard will love this one. Poseidon: 65k. Saving a young life: priceless. For everything else...you get the drill
In late 2006 they will Install Poseidon Vista, which makes the entire pool searchable, have an "aqua" interface and tranparant water. A new filtersing system is also planned, called PoseidonFS, but will probably come with service pack 1.
After all, she only had an 11% chance of survival, but Will Smith had a 40% chance.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
That's all well and good re: the girl, but Wales has a far more serious problem:
Wales suffers from a lack of vowels. All the time you see signs like this:
LLWLLDLCNDLWLDLLWLDLLDWLDLWLC - 4 km
It's tragic to listen to Welsh mothers teaching their children traditional songs like ``Old MacDonald Had A Farm'' and lapsing into heart-rending silence when they get to the ``E I E I O'' bit.
If any of you have surplus vowels, please send them to your local VFW (Vowels For Wales) office.
nt!mcrsft!grgj (already sent mine in!) (the above concept courtesy of Dave Barry, some syndicate or other)
Erh, I guess that should be pennies :-)
> by paging lifeguards when it could not detect her moving.
Let's hope they never deploy this where I work!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That's a FANTASTIC idea (no sarcasm), and if I believed in patents I would urge you to patent it ;-)
"An automated swimmer tracking system installed in a pool in Wales allowed lifeguards to ban a man that was urinating in the pool"
I will not step foot into a pool that has this kind of system installed!
There is no reason for our municipal pools to be used as a tool for the government to spy on our swimming habits. This is ridiculous! I do not want government cameras watching me and my loved ones bathe. As father of 4 little girls, my first concern would be that these swim videos would be traded on the French black market.
I believe Thomas Jefferson put it best, "The man who has traded liberty for security will not get either."
RTFA, the British don't call it pool, they call it Billiards!
Simple solution: start a rumor that womens' swimsuits frequently fall off on-camera. Problem solved, plenty of volunteers to watch the monitors tirelessly!
My 229 is all the Sig I need http://thegunwiki.com/
Considering what a bastard I was (am), I would have consistently gotten the watch wet just to irritate my parents who made me wear the stupid thing. I'm relatively sure that, barring any other source of water, I would have pissed on it (but only because I'm the sort of person who will piss on their arm just to not have to do something ELSE they wouldn't want to do).
As an offtopic aside - I spent a lot of time grounded as a child. : )
But ... "It then compares images to a database of thousands of examples of swimmers in trouble. " ... seems like an inefficient and error prone way to solve this problem.
Ah hah! Your database doesn't have a single image of an octopus attacking a motorcycle rider after he accidentally drove his motorcycle into a pool, *does* it!
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.