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  #61  
Old Posted Nov 27, 2020, 8:37 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
Based on my reading, I think the desired scenario would be something along the lines of

n kids abducted, 0 three-in-the-morning alarms
1 impending nuclear armageddon, 1 alarm
This appears to be what it's boiling down to.
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  #62  
Old Posted Nov 27, 2020, 10:42 PM
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Originally Posted by ac888yow View Post
I'll try one more time.

I'd like you to tell me which alerts are worthy of being sent to your phone and which are not. There may be productive discussion to have in there.

Otherwise it's just complaining.
The system these alerts use has more than one way to alert people. The Canadian implementation just happens to use the highest level of authority for every kind of incident.

The most appropriate way to alert people in an amber alert situation is a lock-screen alert without an alarm. There is no need to wake people up, or distract them from the road, but they all receive the alert the next time they pick up their phone. To the best of my knowledge, the system already has this capability, they just don't use it.

On the other hand, in case of an earthquake, or tornado watch or something, a high level alert like they use now for everything is appropriate.
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  #63  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2020, 3:24 AM
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Originally Posted by manny_santos View Post
I'd be curious if Quebec would send out an alert if there was an abduction in Ottawa.
I don't even know if they have a similar system as in Ontario.
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  #64  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2020, 3:48 AM
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Originally Posted by Loco101 View Post
I don't even know if they have a similar system as in Ontario.
Yes we do have the system.

I am pretty SW Quebec at least (Montreal-Gatineau) gets GTA Amber Alerts.
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  #65  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2020, 7:45 AM
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Originally Posted by ac888yow View Post
You're right, I don't understand. I get the fatigue concept but I'm fixated on the suggestion that you can quantify random events.

0 kids abducted, 0 alarms
1 kid abducted, 1 alarm
n kids abducted, n alarms

Obviously it'll be more than that given tests and it's usage for other things, also mostly random.

You're looking for a reduction in these alarms. Cool. What's your criteria for doing so?
I think proximity should be the major criteria for the loud alarms. Is there something immediate authorities want people to do at 3am (evacuate Pickering because of a nuclear accident, watch out the window for a recently kidnapped child, take shelter from a tornado, lock doors because an active crime spree appears to be underway.

If there is nothing immediate they expect people to do (next time you are on the road you should be on the lockout for a white Camry that may have an abducted child, a nasty storm is coming, you should cancel planned travel to Pickering, etc.) then a lock screen notification should suffice.
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  #66  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2020, 11:57 AM
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
Yes we do have the system.

I am pretty SW Quebec at least (Montreal-Gatineau) gets GTA Amber Alerts.
I still have a Gatineau phone number even though I’ve lived in Ottawa for almost 5 years (Quebec cellphone plans are much cheaper so I never bothered to change it). I’d say I get 90% of the alarms my wife gets, including tornado alerts in the Ottawa area and child abductions in the GTA. I don’t however recall getting an alarm for an abduction that would have occurred anywhere west of the GTA.

Edit: from what I read, if my phone is on the LTE it may consider I am in Ontario so that makes things a little more complex than I thought.
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  #67  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2020, 2:44 PM
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I'm pretty conservative when it comes to matters of safety so I think the alarm is appropriate at any hour. It's not like they're conspiring to wake us all up at 3AM. These events happen when they happen. I think the abducted child deserves better than to have his/her alert suppressed (audibly) until waking hours so that we can sleep uninterrupted. There's enough night owls on the roads/highways overnight where a spotting could occur, saving precious time.

I can see some argument for a proximity based approach, perhaps even different alarms for different types of situations. I'm also pretty sure that under the current approach an alarm is sounded when the child is found or the alert cancelled. That seems like overkill.
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  #68  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2020, 2:56 PM
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I don't think we should be making our emergency response policy based on some sort of virtue signaling. It should be based on evidence. There is good arguments with some backing by research (though the research in this area seems somewhat limited) that using alarms where they are not warranted desensitizes people to them. If we want amber alerts to be effective, we have to make sure that we notify people of them in a manner that doesn't lead to them just clicking it off and ignoring it. A 3AM air raid siren does nothing to help a missing child, but it may cause people to ignore the message that the government is trying to send. Do we want to actually help missing kids, or do we want to just put on a performance that looks like we're doing all we can, but actually undermines our goals?
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  #69  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2020, 3:58 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by le calmar View Post
I still have a Gatineau phone number even though I’ve lived in Ottawa for almost 5 years (Quebec cellphone plans are much cheaper so I never bothered to change it). I’d say I get 90% of the alarms my wife gets, including tornado alerts in the Ottawa area and child abductions in the GTA. I don’t however recall getting an alarm for an abduction that would have occurred anywhere west of the GTA.

Edit: from what I read, if my phone is on the LTE it may consider I am in Ontario so that makes things a little more complex than I thought.
I still have an Ontario number and I received BC’s alert test this week.
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  #70  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2020, 4:05 PM
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I was going to point out Quebec doesn't have such alerts. Never, ever received one.

I go back to sleep easily if woken up at 3 am by a false/irrelevant alarm so I personally wouldn't mind them, but I can see how many people would find that intolerable.
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  #71  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2020, 5:09 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ac888yow View Post
I'm pretty conservative when it comes to matters of safety so I think the alarm is appropriate at any hour. It's not like they're conspiring to wake us all up at 3AM. These events happen when they happen. I think the abducted child deserves better than to have his/her alert suppressed (audibly) until waking hours so that we can sleep uninterrupted. There's enough night owls on the roads/highways overnight where a spotting could occur, saving precious time.
We're told about how the annual switch to daylight savings time interrupts sleep patterns and leads to a rise in car accidents the next day. What do these screeching alarms going off in the middle of the night do?
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  #72  
Old Posted Nov 29, 2020, 5:23 PM
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Originally Posted by acottawa View Post
I think proximity should be the major criteria for the loud alarms. Is there something immediate authorities want people to do at 3am (evacuate Pickering because of a nuclear accident, watch out the window for a recently kidnapped child, take shelter from a tornado, lock doors because an active crime spree appears to be underway.

If there is nothing immediate they expect people to do (next time you are on the road you should be on the lockout for a white Camry that may have an abducted child, a nasty storm is coming, you should cancel planned travel to Pickering, etc.) then a lock screen notification should suffice.
Proximity is something Ontario's system just doesn't seem to ever do.

The entire province got the Pickering nuclear false alarm, even though it was only intended for people within 10km of the Pickering plant.

As I mentioned a couple pages back, I once got a tornado alarm on my phone, even though I was 40km away from the edge of the area Environment Canada issued the tornado warning in.

The alerts are sent out to cell towers, and a person gets an alert on their phone if the cell tower they're connected to receives the alert. Given that the maximum range of an LTE broadcast is 3-5km* at the absolute most, pinpointing within 5km is absolutely possible. I have no idea why they aren't doing that.

*Older, slower connection types, like 3G or 2G, have larger broadcast areas, but even then, it caps out to 10km at the absolute most.
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  #73  
Old Posted Nov 29, 2020, 5:42 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ac888yow View Post
I'll try one more time.

I'd like you to tell me which alerts are worthy of being sent to your phone and which are not. There may be productive discussion to have in there.

Otherwise it's just complaining.
Any are worthy, provided that I can turn off the alarm system when I'm highly unlikely to be able or willing to help, such as when I'm asleep and the kidnapping is not occurring in the hallway outside the door of my apartment.

Nuclear armageddon ... just let me sleep through it unless I'm right on the edge of the blast zone and could walk to safety in 5 minutes or less. If they want to hit anything vital or important it's unlikely they'd be targeting downtown Toronto anyway.
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  #74  
Old Posted Nov 29, 2020, 6:19 PM
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Originally Posted by CityTech View Post
Proximity is something Ontario's system just doesn't seem to ever do.

The entire province got the Pickering nuclear false alarm, even though it was only intended for people within 10km of the Pickering plant.

As I mentioned a couple pages back, I once got a tornado alarm on my phone, even though I was 40km away from the edge of the area Environment Canada issued the tornado warning in.

The alerts are sent out to cell towers, and a person gets an alert on their phone if the cell tower they're connected to receives the alert. Given that the maximum range of an LTE broadcast is 3-5km* at the absolute most, pinpointing within 5km is absolutely possible. I have no idea why they aren't doing that.

*Older, slower connection types, like 3G or 2G, have larger broadcast areas, but even then, it caps out to 10km at the absolute most.
When we were on Wolfe Island this summer my wife and I both got text messages advising of quarantine requirements, presumably because we pinged a cell tower close to the border. Surely this technology could be implemented for emergency alerts.
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  #75  
Old Posted Nov 29, 2020, 10:27 PM
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I agree it's annoying. I put my phone on airplane mode before bed so I won't hear it.
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  #76  
Old Posted Nov 30, 2020, 2:45 AM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
So if I ever want to abduct a child in Ontario, all I have to do is abduct it in Kenora and immediately head west, while having a laugh thinking about the people in Cornwall and Ottawa who'll get brutally woken up at 3 am by the Imminent Nuclear Armageddon Alarm.
Seems that way. Also, an amber alert is only issued when the vehicle and often abductor are known and can be described. If you don't know those things, telling people to keep an eye out isn't helpful.

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Originally Posted by p_xavier View Post
Now you just made me realize that I paid $200 to have my HVAC system gas input analyzed because I thought it was the carbon monitoring going off. It was just the damn phone alert.
I had a malfunctioning smoke detectors that I thought was alerting me to carbon monoxide and when the firefighters came and said that's what it was, they were incredibly rude.

Quote:
Originally Posted by CityTech View Post
Proximity is something Ontario's system just doesn't seem to ever do.

The entire province got the Pickering nuclear false alarm, even though it was only intended for people within 10km of the Pickering plant.
To be fair, that was a total cock-up and probably didn't have any geographic setting on it. They're lucky they didn't alert the entire country to it.

And also that was at 7:23am, not 3am. But it was a Sunday. I actually heard it on the radio before I got the message on my phone. It happened right around the time the US killed General Suleimani and it was looking like we were going to end up in nuclear war with Iran. Remember that time, just before covid? It was a simple time.
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  #77  
Old Posted Nov 30, 2020, 2:58 AM
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I had a malfunctioning smoke detectors that I thought was alerting me to carbon monoxide and when the firefighters came and said that's what it was, they were incredibly rude.
That exact same thing happened to me once.
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  #78  
Old Posted Nov 30, 2020, 3:04 AM
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Originally Posted by CityTech View Post
That exact same thing happened to me once.
What is their problem? I assume I interrupted their video games or something.
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  #79  
Old Posted Nov 30, 2020, 3:15 AM
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Originally Posted by vid View Post
It happened right around the time the US killed General Suleimani and it was looking like we were going to end up in nuclear war with Iran. Remember that time, just before covid? It was a simple time.
I can totally imagine your disappointment! Getting woken up in a panic at 3 am by the Alarm of Doom, expecting the excitement of a nuclear war, and it turns out it's just a stupid amber alert in Ottawa, 1500 km away.
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  #80  
Old Posted Nov 30, 2020, 3:58 AM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
I can totally imagine your disappointment! Getting woken up in a panic at 3 am by the Alarm of Doom, expecting the excitement of a nuclear war, and it turns out it's just a stupid amber alert in Ottawa, 1500 km away.
Every time I've gotten woken up by one, I've thought "that's sad, hope they find the kid" and then go back to sleep.

I think, living beside a railyard, I'm just better at sleeping through loud noises.
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