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System Measures Stress In Emergency Callers' Voice
cylonlover writes "Chances are that if you're calling 9-1-1 (or 9-9-9, or whatever it is where you are), you're not likely to tell the operator that your case isn't all that urgent, and that it can wait. The problem is, sometimes emergency dispatch centers are so overloaded with callers – all of them stating that they need assistance right now – that some sort of system is required in order to determine who should get help first. Dutch researchers claim to have developed just such a system, which analyzes callers' voices to determine how stressed-out they are."
Afghani freedom fighters organise a denial-of-service attack by playing back Frodo in the Lord of the Rings to the telephone.
How well does this thing work with child callers, or those with developmental disabilities who do not respond 'normally' to emergency situations?
I had a girlfriend who's mom would freak out at the most silly things, and not so silly too, accentuating her voice to make this overtly apparent.
Should have seen her when I accidentally ran over her cat. Very unfortunate, and people react very different in panicked, or life threatening, situations.
I wonder how well this detection will hold up, 4% margin of error seems quite low.
This is very nice from the signal analysis perspective, but the implication that emergency call may be delayed if the caller is not stressed is a bad idea
How well people deal with emergency situations varies hugely. This system would prioritise a 5 year old ringing about a huge splinter she just got over a military veteran reporting a 3 car pileup with limbs everywhere. Can't beat human judgement in a job as important as this.
So, panic means better service and calm rationality means you'll be ignored?
However, the stress in the callers voice may not indicate the severity of the emergency.
Some people can be calm and collective in very high stress situations, whereas some people freak out when someone has a dizzy spell. Additionally an outside observer may be less stressed, for example someone calling in a 5 car pile up or reporting that someone in their store just collapsed. And then there are children making calls... which probably introduced a whole new level of random.
The article mentions an error rate, but doesn’t really seem to elaborate as to whether that error rate is stress to emergency, or the algorithm’s ability to identify stress. Before deploying something like this, I hope they do some kind of study to determine if stressed voices correlate to actual emergency severity in the majority of cases (which they may have already done, the article isn’t clear).
how it will deal with a Scottish accent .
Seriously? What good is this. All this will do is measure how urgently the person *thinks* they need help.
Example 1: Person A loves their cat, it's stuck up a tree. The system registers very high stress in their voice, because this person cares a lot about their cat and is also the kind of person who gets into a hysterical panic over the slightest thing.
Example 2: Person B has witnessed a road traffic accident. They weren't personally involved and don't know any of the people involved, so they aren't especially stressed about it. They phone the emergency services and relay the important information in a calm and reasonable manner.
Which one gets the priority?
...if I say in a completely calm and steady voice "my wife is bleeding out of her eyes and has turned blue", this sytem will not treat the call as urgent?
Huh.
Caller stress doesn't correlate well with how important the call is. It correlates with how closely involved the caller is in the incident.
Besides a lot of people will panic like crazy at, say, a small car accident where no-one was hurt.
this would only be a theory and nothing more.
So a sociopath trying to save a life is going to the bottom of the list. Yea, this is an awful idea.
This may seem counter intuitive, but it's a horrible idea. This will provide artificial priority for the histrionic personality type.
"112" in most if not all of Europe. Unless you plan to never leave your home town it would be useful to make sure you know the emergency numbers where you're going.
Though still a bit sloppy for self-conciously intarwebz-savvy people to forget the other emergency number with coverage larger than 999. Do slashdot readers, hopelessly provincial merkins that they all are (I know this to be true as every single poster is obviously an accurate representation of the entire readership), hope they can ignore the global interconnectedness that the internet unleashed, or do they prefer to arrogantly not spend it a single thought at all?
Sure, that's a troll. But the point it raises isn't entirely invalid, now is it?
Some contributors have already pointed out that a high stress level on the caller's side need not necessarily indicate an increased urgency of the situation. But there are scenarios where automated stress level detection may be helpful: Think of some catastrophic event with very many callers. If there's not enough staff at hand to serve all the callers, it may be helpful to select those first who are able to report calmly.
...since while my wife is fairly hysterical and stressed when an emergency occurs, I actually tend to get calmer (since freaking out doesn't help anyone.) Being level headed means my call would get automatically triaged as less important?
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My ex gf was phobic, when she would see a mouse or rat she would freak out and behave irrationally. Anyone seeing her have an episode might think she's in genuine danger.
Does this mean she'll be first in the queue before someone that really needs emergency services?
Heck, some people stress out about World Of Wankers.
Seems like you'd be much better off promoting non-emergency hotlines like the 311 in many US cities.
I have seen people get hysterical over a fender bender screaming "Oh my baby!" and I have seen people laughing while trying to control a broken airplane. Just hire dispatchers with a bit of common sense.
This is like the TSA always trying to find a machine to do the job that a human could do way better if they were allowed to do it with common sense.
So people that remain calm and do not panick during an emergency will get lower priority and have to wait, whereas people that totally freak out and start to cry because the cat doesn't come down from the tree will get help immediately.
Should emergency dispatch centers be staffed by enough people that are adequately paid instead?
Just dial 911 and scream HELP!!!!1!. Be sure and put lots of stress in your voice. Calmly report the location and nature of the emergency? No. Just shriek.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Surely this system is flawed due to the fact that stress is relative in comparison to the person that is ringing up?
A 70 year old woman would find two men leaning against her wall much more stressing than a 21 year old.
Why don't they better train the agents taking the calls.. this reads to me like a scene in Idiocracy where the guy goes to the hospital and the triage nurse has a big panel with icons representing different ailments.. Maybe if the agent knew that 'gun-shots+big pools of blood' > 'I didnt get my chicken nuggets' they wouldnt have this problem.
First responders and others trained in giving assistance in emergency (medical) situations are often trained not to treat first the people who are crying out loudest for help - but to consider the quiet, comatose ones as being more seriously in aid of help. Maybe this system would be better used to prioritise the cool, calm, considered callers rather than the hyperactive, hysterical ones.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If people who can't sound calm are more likely to get emergency help. then over the generations they'll be more likely to survive emergencies to go on and reproduce, while the relaxed-sounding people will bleed to death in the streets. In a few generations, the overall stress level of the human race will be artificially boosted until we all sound like Gilbert Gottfried.
What if I shot my wife and calmly called 911...would they put me at the back of the queue, thus putting her life at risk?
I know, I know.. not likely; I'd be ecstatic and they'd misinterpret that for stress.
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Natural selection will provide some interesting long-term consequences.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Collect taxes so municipalities can actually afford to staff their 911 call centers. What's that you say? Rich people have their own personal doctor in-house and shouldn't have to pay just so those sniveling poor people can call the cops? How sad.
Never heard of 311, and why would it be "the" 311 -- the 311 _what_? Is that Losangeles-speak like "the" Orange County or "the" Interstate Highway 5? (Apparently that is short for "the Interstate Highway 5 limited access highway" -- well they say "freeway" which just means limited access highway -- talk about redundancy)... stamp out useless "the"s! ... anyhow 311 sounds like it's more for finding out when trash pickups are than for reporting not-quite-emergency situations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-1-1
Haven't you heard? Emergency services has a new number. It's 0118-999-881-999-119-7253.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
if someone calls 911 because they want help figuring out their taxes or wants to complain about the neighbors dog pooping on their lawn, they need to be fined, with jail time for those who can't seem to get the message. and jail time for those who purposefully prank 911. an exemption for toddlers who call 911, and elderly who might be confused, is in order, of course
but otherwise nonemergency concerns are wasting operator's time and putting people with genuine time-critical needs in mortal danger
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Insurance companies have been using this for years to detect fraudulent calls.
There is no replacement for an experiences operator that makes an informed decision about the level of urgency. This system may even make matters worse. It is just another exceedingly stupid attempt to replace human intelligence and experience with something cheaper but vastly inferior.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Dear Customer,
thanks for calling the emergency service. As you certainly know, the Dutch emergency service is overloaded with calls.
Therefore, you've been put onto a waiting list. A lottery will be used to determine next person being served. Don't worry, you don't need to do anything, we already entered your name into the lottery system. You just have to wait until served.
Thanks for your patience, we all work together for a better system!
I mean, stress can be enhanced by pain. So, I am good if I say, stub my toe. But what if I am in schock? I guess I won't get the help I need.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
I'm getting tired of this trope, especially as it's used as keyword to get immediate panic reflex.
The fact is, in any given society, resources for healthcare will be limited, and generally smaller than what is perceived as necessary by the public.
This will automatically cause a need for prioritizing, as some medical threats are more immediate than others, and should be treated first.
These researchers have been looking into a way for making that more effective. However, it has not been implemented! So 'the Dutch' aren't doing anything here.
Given that waiting lists have been exceedingly long in NL for quite some time now, not due to lack of funding per se, but lack of trained personnel, it's also more than a little irrelevant.
Lastly, I'm just going to assume you live in the U.S.A here, since you're using the rationing healthcare rhetoric. May I remind you that this is done on a large scale in your country already? Only in your case, it isn't rationed based on need, as any decent person would want, but based on how much money you have. Yes you can, in a few select places in the U.S.A, get the best possible healthcare, but only if you have the enormous amounts of money that's asked for it. Normal people have to do with less healthcare than any given Dutch person gets, for much more. Rationing is not so much our problem, as yours.
I don't understand this article at all because emergency dispatching is not prioritized based on the caller's choice of priority. I could have ten calls at once all insisting they are the top priority and that information would be irrelevant. The nature of the emergency is what's important, not how badly the caller wants assistance.
I dispatched during the L.A. riots and believe me every caller wanted someone to help them RIGHT NOW and I don't blame them. But calls for people being beaten got priority over property crime calls. I question the thought process behind this article that dispatchers do not or cannot already properly prioritize calls.
Why are there hyphens in the number? Where is that key on my phone?
Those few times when i had to call 112 (911 in EU) i remained as calm as usual .. now it sounds as if this is a disadvantage?!
The mere possibility of the thought to speculate about it hadn't even crossed my mind.
There have been systems in place and commercially available that measure the stress level of a callers voice for some time. They are typically used to alert a supervisor if a caller (or agent) is becoming irate, giving them a chance to coach the agent or step in and address the problem.
If you have a problem with this, say "no" when they advise you that the call is recorded for quality purposes. The law varies from state to state but in many cases they cannot record without your consent.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I wonder how well this system will cope with detecting crank calls. The emergency services in the UK get them all the time. Will this system help by calling the cops to the location where the crank call was made from?
Given there was a incident recently in the UK where a woman died because the call she made to 999 wasn't panicked, so they flagged her as low priority...
I mean seriously, I'm a very nervous person and I don't like talking to people on the phone. Just speaking to 999 would make me sound panicked.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
With a lot of the call centres I've experienced that would mean never talking to anyone, because that message is usually an automated one. Your only option would be to hang up.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Let's not dwell on the fact that it should be, quite literally, impossible to overwhelm emergency services (hint: If you fill up capacity, YOU! NEED! MORE!).
Let's just rest assured that the most hysteric people will go through while the people who manage to remain calm will wait forever.
But that does not matter as this is a non-fix to the symptoms, not a fix to the actual root cause.
of the emergency call center operators job getting worse. Now *everyone* has an incentive to freak out even if they're not missing a limb or watching a loved-one choking on a hot dog.
Apart from the status of "national emergency number" in quite a few places, 112 works anywhere in the world when using a GSM-family handset (= vast majority of mobile phones; or simply "...of phones" for some time now)
One that hath name thou can not otter
is 112.
One person is liable to be more stressed about their cat being stuck in a tree than another who is reporting an injury accident.
Proverbs 21:19
Whenever I got into a car accident, or other true emergency situations, I called 911 (upon maximal necessity) but I always spoke calm and collected. I list the problem, and they ask you the questions that they need answers to.
Instead of analyzing my voice (I generally don't land well in these "assumptions", and statistically speaking since a kid I was an outlier), I would prefer to be asked questions such as: "Are you bleeding?" "Is anyone around you bleeding?" "Does anyone look in need of emergency medical assistance?" "Is anyone in immediate danger?" etc., carefully constructed questions (unlike the ones I listed) would benefit the most in determining whether I should go up on the emergency queue, or go down. Not some dumbass voice recording software.
The problem is that we all react differently to stress and trauma. I'm an old scout, and we were taught to stay calm in emergency situations. When you practice such things enough, they become part of you. I've had to make a number of 9-1-1 calls over the years, but I've always stayed calm, just as I was taught (so you can make sure you communicate clearly, and convey all the appropriate information).
Not everyone responds the same way, however. Get a parent who can't stand the sight of blood and the system might prioritize the hysterical caller even though the wound might be minor. A tiny head wound can present a lot of blood in a short period of time. Or, get someone with no first aid or medical training, and they might call 9-1-1, panicked, if they see someone have a seizure. I was with someone who had grand mauls seizures regularly, and I knew what to do. No ambulance was needed, and I could deal with everything. When one occurred in a public place, however, a number of panicked people called 9-1-1 and an ambulance was dispatched. She didn't need to go to the hospital--she just needed to rest--but the complex owner (likely for liability reasons) insisted that she be transported. [Which doubly sucked, because she ended up stuck with the ambulance service and ER bills.]
In short, such a system could prioritize someone screaming about a big sliver while someone like me, who can remain calm, does not get priority, even though I might be calling in a more serious problem.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
If I spot an accident or something, and I phone, and I'm surrounded by people who aren't very happy at having been very injured, I will probably speak very calmly so as not to panic everyone around me anymore than they already are.
Secondly, when talking about something important, I'd speak calm and clearly so they can understand the location and stuff, not get delayed because they misheardly.
Thirdly, first aid lessons taught me that if there are multiple people injured, often the ones who are hurt the worst will be quieter. If someone took a heavy blow to his head and is feeling sluggish, he'll sound dased, not panicked. Basically, if you have the energy and oxygen to sound panicked, you're probably less urgent than the person who's bleeding out.
The abundance of calls to emergency lines during crises is dicult to handle by the limited number of operators. Detecting if the caller is experiencing some extreme emotions can be a solution for distinguishing the more urgent calls. Apart from these and there are several other applications that can benet from awareness of the emotional state of the speaker. This paper describes the design of a system for selecting the calls that appear to be urgent and based on emotion detection. The system is trained using a database of spontaneous emotional speech from a call-centre. Four machine learning techniques are applied and based on either prosodic or spectral features and resulting in individual detectors. As a last stage and we investigate the eect of fusing these detectors into a single detection system. We observe an improvement in the Equal Error Rate (eer) from 19.0 % on average for 4 individual detectors to 4.2 % when fused using linear logistic regression. All experiments are performed in a speaker independent cross-validation framework.
Taken from here. The International Journal of Intelligent Defence Support Systems web site doesn't appear to be updated with this year's 2nd volume yet. [The English is a bit clunky, but the researchers appear to be Dutch so I forgive them that, at least.]
I'm in shock, you insensitive clod!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I, for one, never panic in these situations, I realize that calm accurate reporting is best.
I give my name, address and phone number, then briefly describe what I am calling for:
Hello, I am Frodo Baggins and I live at 123 Hobbit Hole, My number is 555-1212 and ...
there is a creepy little man trying to steal my ring. He is short, thin and has a greenish cast to his grey skin.
He is outside my home as we speak, and since I live in Texasshire, I may shoot him. Please hurry,
he is threatening me. Yes I will hold
All Phony Hobbit stuff aside, this is what I do when requesting emergency services, I may add
we need police or ambulance or fire response, based on the situation.
Giving the dispatcher the correct info allows for triage. Screaming about some idiot at a drive-in window
messing up my taco order is a waste of time.
Where in the story does it say that it would not give you a person / teller when you called? It's more likely this will pop up as a value on the screen they are at, or function internally for forwarding to different people - some people may be better at managing extremely stressed individuals and more likely to get the needed information out of them, while a calm person only needs an operator that is going to pay attention to them.
I don't have access to the paper (aside from the abstract I copied in another comment) and the article is lean on details, but perhaps machine learning took care of most of the issues people have been bringing up. Maybe "calm" callers with real emergencies show signs aside from overt stress reactions that the algorithms picked up on. For instance, I imagine I would speak particularly slowly and clearly if I were actively trying to be calm, and would speak faster otherwise. It's not clear what the 4.2% error rate refers to--incorrectly recognized urgency of 9-1-1 (or equivalent) calls? Incorrect detections of "strong emotion" in general? Without more info, I tend to give researchers the benefit of the doubt.
So basically when they say "don't panic," that'll turn out to be the wrong advice?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I love when applying basic logic to researched and developed systems reveals them to be retarded.
I can already see ambulances speed across town to overprotective parents who went bananas 'cause little precious sneezed twice in a row.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Since when do we wish to reward those who lack emotional control above those who remain calm? The ranting screaming caller should be the one served last.
Then there are the other situations in which a veteran, quite used to heavy combat, remains dead calm while trying to summon help. Or an emotionally detached party who is simply not at all upset by mayhem and loss of life but fills the role of trying to help by making the emergency call. The funny thing is that the ones who are not upset are the ones likely to describe well the exact location, number of injuries and be able to warn approaching rescue workers of hazards at the scene such as a downed power line on the north side of the wreck or that pesky sniper who caused the wreck in the first place.
I have doubts about this. What about people who (genuinely) freak out over minor things? I have known some such, and they weren't acting, they were legitimately (if inappropriately) extremely stressed about sometimes the littlest issues.
I could be wrong, but I predict failure in the real world.
AT&T testing this new technology: ... if it was made my AT&T
... that just sounded like Tweak making another prank call.
CSR: (painfully upbeat) Thank you for calling AT&T! How may I improve your life today?
Caller: (almost panicked) Argh! I'm a T-Mobile customer and I just found out that AT&T bought T-Mobile! Aaagh!
CSR: (calming) Don't worry. During the transition period all T-Mobile customers will be receiving the same high quality customer service and cell coverage that all our AT&T customers receive.
Caller: (fanatic) Aagh! That's what I was afraid of!!
[CLICK!]
CSR: Hey boss, I think this new stress meter just broke.
Boss: Nope, just working as designed
[WINK]
CSR: Should I report this?
Boss: Naw
Obligatory onion news video: http://www.theonion.com/video/new-google-phone-service-whispers-targeted-ads-dir,17470/
What's wrong with asking the person what's wrong and determining priority based on situation not how much the person freaks out. I have known people to get stressed out and screaming about scratch, while other people like a faller I knew called on the cb radio calm as can be that he hates to bug people but could someone drive him to the hospital he just had the chainsaw go though half his leg and he can't hit the gas pedal to drive himself.
It does not take into account 3rd party callers either. For example, I'm driving along and see a horrible accident right in front of me.
I call in, calmly describe the detached body part in the road, the 5 cars involved, and the blood on the pavement. Then compare it to the guy who lost the blood or the finger or whatever calling in completely hysterical.
Same situation, one person much calmer than the other. It is a common occurrence. Ditto friend vs spouse or parent or child.
Definitely cool technology, but assuming the article is accurate, not a good usage.
As someone who reads http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=257985 I think I can safely say that the emotional state of the caller has NOTHING to do with the urgency of the situation.
Wouldn't that penalize those of us to take great efforts to keep calm and explain the details of the emergency instead of screaming "HELP! HELP!!! HELP!!!!!" into the microphone?
Very much the same argument as The Archon V2.0 just gave above, but posted anyway, to signify that I concur and feel sorry for people that I might try to call an ambulance for in the future...
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
They're trying to use "voice stress" as a proxy for how bad the situation is (for priority queuing purposes), and I would argue that's a fundamental mistake. What if someone is simply cool under pressure (due to training or natural inclination)? Then they'll be doomed by this system. What you need is a human making a decision about how bad the scenario actually is; admittedly that's tough, but just surrendering to a computer doing a totally different job is really tragic. Bad metrics like this can result in a system that kills people.
This occurs to me because I've had numerous doctors/dentists say I have an unusually high pain threshold, and I've had some problems with bad diagnoses due to me not responding to pain signals like they expect.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Stupid. I've been in this situation; one of the people with me was a doctor, and another person with me was having some kind of seizure or attack. The doctor made the 9/11 phone call and stated all the details very calmly and distinctly while everyone else was trying not to flip out. Under this kind of system, he'd have received a low priority.
So there is a bad car crash and some military vetern who has seen it all, been in it all and keeps his cool under pressure. Cannot raise help for the other may by 8-10 people who really really need help?
Is it just me or does it seem like keeping a lot of people on hold when they call 9-1-1 is a bad idea? Seems to me the better approach would be 1. Stiffer penalties for non-emergency callers 2. More people answering calls You could even have lesser trained staff to handle the less serious calls in order to keep lines open to the fully trained staff and defray cost.
ISTR that 90% of emergency calls are not emergencies but pranks and non-emergency police/firebrigade/ambulance business. That's what this is designed to cut down on.
The theocrats and 'law and order' crowd haven't got to that agenda bullet point yet .
I've done a WestPac on a LA Class submarine, and did 13 months in Iraq. In both of those things there were times were I was obviously stressed. If this thing can tell the *stress* in someones voice, I guess It would pick up on that when I'm talking during emergency situations. Now if this thing just looks for hysterical sounding voices that's another thing entirely.
As many have pointed out, voice-stress levels are not going to be a reliable indicator of the severity of a an emergency call. Some callers will over-react to minor or non-emergency situations, and some callers will stay calm (or seem calm, due to shock) even in the most dire emergencies.
I see this as being more useful for tech support or customer service. As callers come into the queue, they will interact with the voice response system, or they may talk back to the response system or talk to someone else in the room with them. Voice-stress analysis can identify the callers with the highest stress levels, and route those calls to the representatives that the supervisors dislike.
I worked as a System Analyst in a 911 call center. There was a lot of analysis about people calling on the phone. They called their initial finding of a victim a 'freak event', and if there are other things (like having to roll the victim over and finding a bloody and broken leg) that are called 're-freak events'. Also some people are much more likely to scream and swear and loose their composure than other people. Some people would nearly go crazy, could barely answer questions, refused to attempt any instructions from calltakers (calltakers give instructions on CPR even for people who have never done it before). If its 9 minutes between call and arrival, 9 minutes can be life and death, but some people would only scream 'HURRY! HURRY! Whats taking so long, where are you already? (Thinking the fire trucks and ambulances could arrive instantly). Everyone swore like sailors, (dispatch staff know more blue words and phrases than you, trust me), but some would insist on hanging up right after the call (they are supposed to stay on the phone till help arrives), everyone insists on first giving address, rather than phone number first (phone number is more important than address, if you hang up, they call you back), and many would scream and cry over childrens cut fingers, while others were calm while applying CPR for the first time on loved ones. Thats why I question 'panic register' software like this. Some panic over spilled milk, others can remain calm and cool when observing a nuclear blast only a few miles away.
If a service can't keep up with demand, "wait your turn" is equivalent to "go away". The waiting list grows without bound, except that people die on the waiting list.
Somebody making triage decisions is equivalent to a Death Panel whenever the demand truly (not just this moment) exceeds supply.
Given that PDAs can play voice files, I wonder if there'll be an app for that?
Whether this is of any beneficial use depends on how it is used.
A system providing some data that a skilled operator may choose to consider can, provided it works consistently, be a tool of (however minimal) benefit only.
A system attempting to provide an excuse for call queuing systems, or with the aim of being able to use less skilled operators, is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unfortunately most systems seem to be designed to introduce "cost savings". If it's not the entire point then there's at least something thrown in so marketing can make the claim and the buyer can justify it up the chain.
What you need is an app that mods your voice to fit the high priority profile automatically. Then you have competion between callers for who's app can best convice the call center computer that it's a real emergency.
an old lady with a cat stuck in a tree can sound pretty stressed.
A horror fan hardened, medical drama watching, cold intellectual freak like me can sound calm with a parent lying before me having a heart attack.
At some point you're talking to a live person. Otherwise there's nothing to analyze, right?
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Was already developed for the 1992 movie 'Sneakers'. Classic.
And so if I act like a lunatic, I go to the front of the line? So now everyone who calls will shriek and scream. I'm sure that will be a big improvement.
Why is it that governments can't figure out that people have minds, and will adapt their behavior to govt programs?
Nah, that's Fark.com.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
A person who's in shock may seem completely and utterly calm, outwardly.
Or worse: laugh hysterically.