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Comment by apsurd | Hacker News Reader

Is there any system currently able to mass-call all cellphones from any/all carriers within a given geo-location radius? Or any type of push notification service for natural disasters.

Seems like this happened during the day but watching the news made me think about disasters that happen at night. How are people notified to get the hell out of there??

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How are people notified to get the hell out of there??

Are you familiar with the term "air raid siren"? The coast is wall-to-wall peppered with squack boxes. About a minute prior to the earthquake there would have been a "Earthquake is imminent -- brace yourself." broadcast and within a minute there would have been a "A tsunami warning is in effect for (here). Go to shelter immediately. Repeat..."

There are a couple levels of alerts they can pull, from "Be careful" to "MOVE NOW." Miyagi just got "MOVE NOW."

Thanks Patrick, that's refreshing to hear.

Problems Japan does not have #1: insufficient spending on public works projects In Case Shit Happens, because shit happens so often that when people in several dozen countries say shit they're speaking Japanese.

Can I tell you my favorite outsourcing story? Apologies for those who've heard it (and yes, this actually happened):

India: We can't log into the test server.

Patrick: Then you didn't set it up right.

India: No, we did, but we get an error message.

Patrick: What error message?

India: We can't read it.

Patrick: sigh Please take a screenshot then.

India: Here you go.

Patrick: Oh, that is just a weather report which correctly reflects the state of the test database. The system is operating normally. Please proceed with your testing of the function you were assigned.

India: Are you sure it isn't an error? It is written in red. And why would you put a weather report on the login screen anyway?

Patrick: Q1) That is because if you ignore it you'll die. Q2) See Q1.

Holy cow, I've been on Hacker News far too long:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422043

A bit off topic but how did you dig that up? Given how active you, you would have clicked next on your comments several hundred times.

SearchYC + a few words I remembered of it. (I have an anomalously good memory for things I've written, which is one reason I write so much. It's like Delicious except Yahoo can't lose my bookmarks.)

You and me both.

Reminds me of QA at Yahoo! Japan. They make sure that every page that is going to be released is capable of showing the EMG1, EMG2, and EMG3 tags.

Here is a screenshot of EMG1 and EMG2 both being shown at the same time, it was the first time for me to see more than one shown at the same time in production.

http://i.imgur.com/mZxyA.png

I forget what EMG3 is used for.

what is the point?, and cant that be just another name instead of India?

I thought it would be an amusing story to relate regarding our disaster preparedness: don't worry about us, we're so on top of this we have disaster warning systems built into the class schedule portals college kids access from their cell phones. It's amusing because out outsourcing operations in India were... less successful than they could have been because of frequent... inefficiencies in communication and pervasive... opportunities for improvement in engineering skill levels.

No, company policy and common sense would not let me tell you the names of the engineers I had that conversation with. You can read it as "An Employee Of A Japanese Megacorp's Indian Subsidiary" if that makes you feel better. I'm assuming most people understand I do not actually mean everybody in the country.

Besides what patio11 said, there is something similar to the US National Alert System which gets used quite often. It puts alerts on the top of every TV channel when an earthquake starts... unfortunately my TV then fell off the cabinet so I took that as an alert and climbed under my table.

Right about the tv. I was just thinking "what if it had been in the night?" People will be asleep so if there's any window of warning available, how can they get the message?

On CNN the newscaster is repeatedly mentioning how people on the ground are waiting in line to use the pay phone to notify loved ones etc...

I use my phone as an alarm so that's why I just thought it might be helpful if there was a public alert service you can sign up for or even a part of the phone (like emergency 911 always works on a cell phone even if you don't have minutes) that will make it ring, beep or do soemthing stupid to get your attention.

There are the air raid sirens. They use them all the time: for typhoons, for missing persons. Oh, and for earthquakes.

Every town in Indiana above maybe 1500 people has tornado sirens. And we're not best known for our public spending.

It's not a bad idea. A variation of your idea has actually been implemented in here as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTT_DoCoMo#Earthquake_warning_s...

Sirens are common. Cell phones? You'd just overload the network.

There's just such a system for several municipalities in the U.S - the reverse 911 system, which robo-calls your home or cell phone in the event of a natural disaster or other emergency. I just signed up for it in Mountain View CA, and my mom got a reverse-911 call for the Boston water main break this winter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_911

Yes, but how many people signed up for that? The parent proposed contacting everyone, remember...

Have we all forgotten what the word broadcast means? If sending everyone the same signal at the same time is hard, you're doing it wrong.

The doesn't work very well when each device requires a separate communication channel like a cell phone.

There may be a 160 byte block of space in the normal traffic your phone makes to the towers in order to let it know where you are. Maybe they should look into using that for something like this.

It should be much easier for cell phones, since the underlying physical medium is a broadcast medium. It takes significant engineering effort to get rid of this capability.

That would require a completely separate, unencrypted broadcast protocol. Yes, you could design that, but who will pay for it?

Interesting. However, it is something that the governments should be handling rather than a private company. Just an opinion.

Or a central database and disaster management site where you just register the contact details of your loved ones including yourself. Also a good idea is a general notification for groups.

So say I learnt about it and am in the other end of the world, I would want to leave a beep so shrill that my family gets the hell out and run.

Another easy solution is setting up a reminder service from local trends on twitter+natural language processing+ Bloody loud notification depending on threat levels.

I think close cooperation between private companies and the government has been a trait of Japanese society for a long time. Instead of a single governmental alert service, you'll get the government, NHK, cell phone companies, transport companies, etc., cooperating to get the information out there quickly. For example, the weather service website was being hammered and rather hard to access, but you could see reports on the NHK and Yahoo! websites while the quake was still going on, including tsunami predictions - it's automated, very fast and effective.

The siren systems are also automated. The signal is relayed by governmental offices.

Yes. http://www.theage.com.au/national/victorians-receive-fire-te...

// Although that was a warning message -- not an emergency one.

There are push notifications of major earthquakes, though I think they're opt-out-able, which kind of defeats the purpose.

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