Text To 911 Has Low Adoption Rate

Only 5% of the nation’s 6,500 emergency dispatch centers are capable of receiving and responding to emergency text-to-911 messages.

That’s not good enough for more than 41,000 signers of a Change.org petition. They want Congress to pass legislation requiring emergency centers to update their systems to accommodate texting.

Text-to-911 would have provided much-needed help for Lisbeth (not her real name), a mother of two who said she was repeatedly battered by her boyfriend in her home over several years. One day three years ago, when he was yelling at her, she tried to call 911 on her cell phone for help, but he broke down the door where she was hiding and demanded to know whom she was calling.

“I was trying to whisper, but he got in and punched me and asked me who I was talking to,” Lisbeth said in an interview. That time, a neighbor overheard the fight and called 911 to bring police to the scene.

“911 works, but I wish it worked with text,” she added. “If they had it back then, it might have made a difference.” Lisbeth later moved into a shelter for abused women in California’s San Fernando Valley and said her life has improved for herself and her children. “Anybody who is going through the same situation as I was should ask for help,” she said.

The Federal Communications Commission last yea rrequired U.S. carriers and makers of some texting apps to provide emergency texting with their services, but the FCC doesn’t regulate the nation’s emergency dispatch centers. Instead, the centers are regulated locally by 3,200 different states, counties and cities, even though many of those jurisdictions receive federal funds for the dispatch centers.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai last August expressed concerns that FCC mandates for carriers might give the public a false impression that they can send texts to emergency responders when so few are prepared to receive texts.

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IBM’s Watson Goes To Africa

IBM has detailed plans to apply its Watson supercomputer the critical development issues facing Africa.

The machine is capable of holding more intelligent conversations than most Big Brother contestants, and in 2011 it beat human contestants on the US TV game show Jeopardy.

However, in Africa it will be used to help solve the pressing problems facing the continent such as agricultural patterns and famine relief.

The initiative, named Project Lucy after the earliest human remains discovered on the continent, will take 10 years and is expected to cost $100m.

“I believe it will spur a whole era of innovation for entrepreneurs here,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty told delegates at a conference on Wednesday.

“Data… needs to be refined. It will determine undisputed winners and losers across every industry.”

The technology will be used to find ways to enable the developing world to leapfrog over stages of development that have hitherto been too expensive.

One example cited was Nigeria, where two companies have already committed to use Project Lucy to analyse the poorly maintained road system and determine project priorities for repair.

IBM recently announced that it will invest $1bn to spin off Watson into a separate business unit, however this could be quite a gamble as Reuters reported that although Watson has proved to be a quantum leap, it has yet to make any significant money for the company, netting less than $100m in the past three years.

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