Next Generation 911

Yesterday the Diane Rhem Show had a piece on the 9-1-1 emergency phone system which itself was motivated by the recent NYT opinion column written by the chairman of the FCC. The basic point in both stories was that our 9-1-1 system is horribly out of date, and it will take a lot of effort and money to get it up to speed.

I have known for a while that cellphones were sort of a problem for 9-1-1 since it is hard to track the location the call is coming from. I had also heard that some areas are upgrading to accept text messages, though it was not until the story yesterday that I learned at least one reason that would be desirable (to silently notify police of an intruder). The thing that I had not considered before is all the benefits we could have if 9-1-1 were fully modernized including pictures and video (send a picture of the intruder, have a paramedic be able to see the injury, probably countless other things).

One of the guests on the Diane Rhem show commented that he expects the number itself to be about the only thing that is still the same five years from now. According to David Furth from the FCC, the US system is still pretty good on a global scale, but we have a lot of work to do if we want the system to perform in the best way possible.

Stupid Users

Fundamentally, humans are error prone. I just came across the "e-counting game" where you ask a class to count the number of letter "e"s in a 400 word document and offer $20 to the first person who shouts out the correct number. The author mentions that if you're ok missing 10-25% of the "e"s, you're fine. But most times we try to have people inspect things we really want the missed number to be a lot closer to zero.

There are many ways people try to reduce the error rate. Standards (righty tighty, lefty loosey) can help some. So can visual instructions (A giant "Pull" sign on a door). But the best tools focus on how the user actually interacts with whatever it is. The Toyota Production System has "Poka-yoke" which asks you to design something that cannot be put together wrong (think of the children's shape sorter boxes). An example of good visual implications is that newer stoves often have the knobs in the same arrangement as the burners themselves.

In short, there are some tasks humans are naturally bad at. And so if you find yourself paying for something online and the website asks you to enter your account number twice, you really should actually type it out each time.

Multi-objective decision making

In optimization we like to provide The Optimal Solution and as an OR person I like to apply the same principles to my daily life. However, any time there are multiple goals, the meaning of The Optimal Solution get fuzzier. Deciding the best nut butter to buy is one example of multi-objective decision making. As a company, we can say that a particular decision is objectively better if it leads to higher profits. But once you have more than one goal (taste and cost in the nut butter example, though you could add others like effort to make your own or nutrition), things get trickier. 

The linked post tries to get at this by having a region of worthwhile choices and a region of not-worthwhile choices. That is more or less what most optimization algorithms do. Generally if you have multiple objectives, you give them all weights and choose the option that maximizes the weighted sum. However, those weights are fundamentally subjective. The Pareto frontier attempts to partially get around this by capturing all possible sets of weights and identifying the set of good solutions. But you still typically have to choose one of those options, which takes us back to a subjective decision.

Making a subjective decision is not a bad thing, and weights are a pretty good way to formalize the subjectivity. But it still helps to recognize that taste and cost aren't truly substitutes for each other.