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Most of the phones have likely ran out of battery. Also, there is a big chance that there are phones without victims. Not a good way to find people.
by boredpudding 10y ago
Most of the phones have likely ran out of battery. Also, there is a big chance that there are phones without victims. Not a good way to find people.
- mixedbit 10y agoI don't think that false positives disqualify such approach.
- nibnib 10y agoYou can easily combine techniques. Send rescue dogs and handlers wherever phone signals are traced.
- deadbunny 10y agoHaving worked for companies trying to detect mobile phones this would be about as useful as guessing. Triangulating a signal (if you could even get one from under 2 tons of rubble) is not an easy task in the real world, especially one that would need to be accurate to within 1m or so.
- maxxxxx 10y agoThat's probably what they are doing. These people are not dummies that need to be lectured by some hacker news guys.
- OJFord 10y agoIt would be a waste of resources to rescue an ownerless phone.
- tamana 10y agoIt is a waste of resources for rescuers to sit doing nothing because they ignore leads.
- andrepd 10y agoFalse dichotomy. You can do other things besides chasing a very high false positive-rate indicator and sitting still doing nothing.
- mseebach 10y agoWhich is why you'd correlate with lists of known missing and known not-missing people before digging in.
- OJFord 10y agoMissing people won't lose their phone in a disaster?
- nkrisc 10y agoUse your imagination. No one is suggesting rescuers dig for ownerless phones. They would be just another signal used to determine where trapped people might be.
- OJFord 10y agoIt would be a waste of resources to rescue an ownerless phone.
- wongarsu 10y ago>Most of the phones have likely ran out of battery I would suspect that a notable number of phones are still on. As long as you don't turn the screen on and don't use any battery-draining apps, modern smartphones can easily have a battery life of a week or longer (even outside airplane mode). Using that big screen, the quad-core CPU and the high speed internet are the battery drains, all of those are mostly in low-power mode while the phone is just in your pocket.
- 24gttghh 10y agoIf the issue is no cell coverage due to earthquake damage, and the victims do not enable airplane mode, those phones would likely die within a day searching for a signal; irregardless of the screen being off.
- maxxxxx 10y agoIt's one of many ways they are probably trying to find people. Seems worth a shot to me.
- andrepd 10y agoNot if it's so massively inefficient that the number of false positives mean that you waste time chasing air.
- mentat 10y agoMassively inefficient meaning that 100x phones are not paired with people? That seems unlikely.
- moheeb 10y agoIf people were at home when the quake struck it doesn't seem unlikely to me that only 1 in 100 would be in the immediate vicinity of their phone. (Maybe 1 in 100 is a strech, but 1 in 20?) Who carries their phone in their pocket at home?
- takeda 10y agoSmart phones. I miss the time when I needed to charge my phone once per two weeks (I used it infrequently).