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Google Helped Cause the Mysterious Increase In 911 Calls SF Asked It To Solve (bbc.com)
theodp writes: Android users have long complained publicly that it's way too easy to accidentally dial 911. So it's pretty astonishing that it took a team of Google Researchers and San Francisco Department of Emergency Management government employees to figure out that butt-dialing was increasing the number of 911 calls. The Google 9-1-1 Team presented its results in How Googlers helped San Francisco Use Data Science to Understand a Surge in 911 Calls, a Google-sponsored presentation at the Code for America Summit, and in San Francisco's 9-1-1 Call Volume Increase, an accompanying 26-page paper.
Sorry, not going to start carrying a murse.
Read the document instead of relying on a poor, click-baiting summary. There's an actual problem with ass callers.
Although the source data (i.e., whether a call is coming from a landline, cellphone or business) can be passed from the telephone system to the CAD system, technical issues can require human intervention to capture this data in CAD. For example, in 2014, DEM discovered that telephone routers could take 2-8 seconds to transmit ANI/ALI information (which includes source data) to dispatcher phones. However, if ANI/ALI information is not present at the time the dispatcher begins typing in the CAD Incident Entry window, source data is not captured, and dispatchers would need to manually port source data into the CAD Incident Entry window. Given this, source data (particularly for wireless calls, labeled as “W911”) was lacking in the CAD dataset which impacted the ability to identify the number CAD incidents created from wireless calls. Correspondingly, the number of CAD incidents resulting from wireless calls is significantly underrepresented, given that ~60% of DEM’s call volume comes from wireless phones.
lucm, indeed.
Your translation is wrong. The problem is not the 911 software. The problem is the delay in getting the caller id from the PSTN, and this is not something they can accelerate from the 911 data center.
Imagine that your boss tells you that he wants to receive emails within one second of any client or potential customer sending them. The problem is not his Thunderbird or Outlook settings, the problem is that email has to cross multiple boundaries, from one ISP to another, from one SMTP server to another, and nobody has control over the entire process.
In the case of 911, how can they fix it? Operators get thousands of hang up calls for which they don't get the caller id immediately when the form pops up on their screen. Instead of spending 20 seconds tidying up the call information they dismiss it with the "ass caller" flag. The call is logged but no details are entered in the database, and while technically they probably are able to reconcile calls using the switch logs or some other mean, it's just a huge pain in the ass that nobody has the budget to deal with. Typical big data problem.
lucm, indeed.
They just need to change the button from a press to a slide or something like that... simple to access but not simple to accidentally press.
I find it works better to revert to an 80s wardrobe. With cargo pants I always can choose a decent pocket for each device.