Skip to main content

SMS 51969 in the following format WB taxi HWH R

Police put up a poster for citizen information.
I noticed a very nice hoarding by the police department in a bus shelter on the highway NH2, this was during my recent visit to Kolkata, Samabay Pally to be very particular.

Independent of the "punishable offence under the section ...." the degree of punishment was quite intimidating and I hope this would deter a possible culprit before they harmed a possible victim.

As a footnote there was a mention of what one could do if a Taxi refused fare. I was particularly attracted to this information because the previous two days every time I spotted a free taxi and approached it to hire it ... there was a "nice refusal" approach adopted. The common theme was.

Me: "Can to come to Samabay Pally?" (in Hindi|Bangla mix)
Cab driver: " I will come, but to the place that you want to go, at this hour, I will not get a fare back"
Me: "I will pay you a little more than the meter" (cajoling | bribing?)
Cab Driver: "Can you give me INR xyz instead". (xyz > 2.5* fare)

If I had see this advertisement by the police earlier, would I have SMSed? I asked myself.

  • Was he refusing? 
    • Probably yes.
      • Would I send an SMS?
        • Probably Yes
          • Was it easy to send the SMS in the format (SMS 51969 in the following format WB taxi HWH R )
            • Probably Yes
              • Is it easy to send the SMS in this format when you are desperately looking for a cab?
                • Probably Not
                  • Do nothing.
            • Probably Not
              • Do nothing
        • Probably Not
          • Do nothing                                                                                             
    • Probably Not.
      • Do nothing

Looks like which ever way I think I do not think I would have sent the SMS. Probably because it is not easy to send an SMS given the scenario or the context. So what would have been better?

May be, an mobile application, which allowed me to take a picture of the cab and submit the information. The mobile application could automatically identify the number using OCR (see Mobile Phone Based Vehicle License Plate Recognition for Road Policing) and geo tag the picture using GPS. Given that most taxi using folks (sorry to use this phrase) would own a data plan + a smart device this is not a problem. Complaint lodged. Simplified. Probably action taken.

SMS in the current scenario and that too in a specific format; is a NO NO.

See:Natural language mobile interface to register citizen complaints (2008)


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visualizing Speech Processing Challenges!

Often it is difficult to emphasize the difficulty that one faces during speech signal processing. Thanks to the large population use of speech recognition in the form of Alexa, Google Home when most of us are asking for a very limited information ("call my mother", "play the top 50 international hits" or "switch off the lights") which is quite well captured by the speech recognition engine in the form of contextual knowledge (it knows where you are; it knows your calendar, it know you parents phone number, it knows your preference, it knows your facebook likes .... ). Same Same - Different Different:   You speak X = /My voice is my password/ and I speak Y= /My voice is my password/. In speech recognition both our speech samples (X and Y) need to be recognized as "My voice is my password" while in speaker biometric X has to be attributed to you and and Y has to be attributed to me! In this blog post we try to show   visually   what it means to pro
Post a Comment
Read more

BITS Pilani Goa Campus - Some Useful Information

You have cleared the BIT Aptitude Test and have got admission to BITS Pilani Goa Campus. Congratulation . Well Done. This is how the main building looks! Read on for some useful information, especially since you are traveling for the first time to the campus and more or less you will face the same scenario that we faced! We were asked report on 29-Jul-2018 (Sunday) to take admission on, 30-Jul-2018.  We reached Madgoan (we traveled by train though the airport is pretty close to the BITS campus, primarily to allow us to carry more luggage!)at around 0700 hours (expect a few drizzles to some good rain - so carry an umbrella) on 29-July-2019. As you come out you will be hounded by several taxi drivers, but the best is to take the official pre-paid taxi. It should cost you INR 700 to reach the BITS campus. We had booked a hotel in Vasco (this is one of the closest suburb from BITS campus, a taxi should charge you around 300-350 INR; you will make plenty of trips!) and
2 comments
Read more

Authorship or Acknowledgement? Order of Authors!

 {Personal views} Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors.  Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.   However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These days labs write papers
Post a Comment
Read more