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Japan Considers '911' Calls From Twitter, Social Networks
itwbennett writes "The Japanese national Fire and Disaster Management Agency today hosted the first of 3 panels to discuss allowing emergency calls to be placed through social networks. For the event, Twitter's Japanese blog posted entries on how to use the service during emergencies, one of which advised: 'If your circumstances allow, please add #survived to your tweets. This will help when family and friends that are worried about you search on your welfare.'"
Acting like these proprietary cloud services are a legitimate case for discussion is disgusting. I find it deplorable that we give these organizations so much attention every time somebody has a horrible idea. If a 911 center is to take calls via the Internet, it needs to be done with some sort of standard, and as the Internet was designed, there is no way that this could be reliably implemented. Case Closed.
During the earthquake and Tsunami in Tokyo in 2011, the cellular networks were completely jammed, but the internet was coasting along just fine.
I agree, that we're giving too much power to these social networks which are centralized and not distributed, but using the internet for emergency calls isn't a bad idea in and of themselves.
Blah blah blah. We're not getting off you're lawn, gramps.
Despite the rather large noise-to-signal ratio, overall, Twitter has the potential to help disaster management through crowdsourcing. Don't worry, I hate buzzwords like "crowdsourcing" just as much as the next slashbot. Bear with me.... First responders for big disasters have a big problem: where do you spend your resources? You start by sending out search teams, but big cities like New Orleans are, well, big. You just do not have enough manpower to rapidly triage the whole city to know where you should spend your resources. So you guess, and you put triage teams on the 911 lines to take calls, but again, there are many more callers than 911 operators, and those operators need to manually enter a lot of information. This is where Twitter comes in. Citizens that are hurt, or that come across people that are hurt, make tweets like "Man lying hurt, legs crushed under car near Second and Main". Volunteer crowdsourcers re-tweet these events in a format a computer can easily parse, such as "Man crushed by car #location ". A computer gathers all these tweets and presents them in a nice summary format. Even better, this is already being done:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419368/how-twitter-helps-in-a-disaster/
http://epic.cs.colorado.edu/?page_id=11
Could we design something more reliable from scratch? Probably. But that would cost $cash to design and deploy, and then you'd have to convince people to actually use the damn thing. Twitter has a large active user base right now, so it makes perfect sense to exploit the tweets as much as possible. (Note also that TFS says "Japan considers '911' calls from Twitter" not "Japan considers replacing '911' calls from landlines with Twitter".)
p.s. Landline 911 works over proprietary lines owned by AT&T et al. ... you might want to rethink your use of the scare term "proprietary".
So wait, you mean a company that has it's own internal phone system and exchange can't expect reliable 911 service, and it's disgusting and deplorable to even give such a problem attention?
Emergency service should be available by whatever means people are going to have to connect to it. It would seem to me that if you can connect to twitter or facebook or the like you have some other connection mechanism, but not every country is the same and technology plods along. If you only have a device with 3g data service and no voice and no texting (who needs texting if you can do it in app) then you should probably have 911 service available through that. If people are going to use twitter to ask for help in an emergency, as stupid as it sounds today, you might want to plan ahead to be able to figure out how to support that.
When I was a kid we didn't have 911 (or 999) service, and were supposed to keep the number for Police, Ambulance and Fire next to the phone, 911 service existed, just not in my area. So why the push to get 911 everywhere when it seemed really straightforward to just print the fire/police/ambulance numbers on a card that sat under the phone handset? Because in an emergency people don't think straight and programming people to be mindless little zombies that can call 911 from the age of 4 is a much better plan than trying to get them to read off a number. Please don't take this statement as belly aching on my part here, but my grandfather died in a retirement home trying to use the phone back in 2008. To dial 911 he needed to dial an extra 9 (9 for an outside line) - and the emergency number for the nurse on the main floor was printed on his phone. No one knows what number he was trying to call (it could have been his estranged wife and not 911 for example), but I'd like to think if he was trying to dial 911 that 911 should have, in all circumstances worked. No extra '9' for an outside line shit - that is far too confusing for someone in an emergency situation, he had trouble with '9 for an outside line' to call US in no stress situations. Every even microscopic thing costs time, confusion and potentially lives.
Especially as we look to the future, emergency service operators have to figure out how they're going to cope with communications being potentially handled by a handful of different companies than the phone and cable companies they're used to. Without voice or texting plans (or devices) we may end up in a world were 'texting' is just some app that uses the phone service like an IM program, voice calls might be handled through any number of services rather than through the phone company directly, and you need to build both a legal and technical framework *before* that becomes a problem. 10 years ago people really needed to think about the problem of 911 service on cell phones so that they could build the technology and rules for cell phones of today, back then there were payphones and landlines everywhere, it seemed silly to even try and get accurate location data for cell phones (they only know what tower they're connected to not where they are right? Oh right...). This might be preparing for nothing. It might be something we all have to deal with, and in the case of Japan they are the forefront of disaster planning because pretty much every type of disaster you can think of afflicts them, so they have the ability to try out a hundred different ideas for the rest of us.