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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.
Joe Sixpack Help! My home is burning down and my kids are trapped inside!
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Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Listen Americans, "911" is the AMERICAN emergency number. The rest of the world doesn't use it. In Japan, its "119", as TFA says. In Australia it's "000". In the UK it's "999". If you really think Americans are too dumb to understand that, just write "emergency number" instead of confusing everyone by trying to "translate" a number.
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".