A Preview of Computers in the Fire Service
COMPUTERS
Some time ago, the telephone company (there was just one then) conducted a study and found that seven digits (e.g., 5551212) was the most that the average person could remember without much effort. That is, without a lengthy memorization process or by using memory tricks such as dividing the number into two groups and casually remembering each group [e.g. (617)555-1212],
The seven digits (9999999) that the telephone company thinks we can handle seems like a lot, but it’s really only a single number that covers less than 10-million possibilities— not enough for a country of 300-million people. To remedy this, we use area codes. This further tests our ability to deal with even a single telephone number.
The human brain handles ideas, concepts, facts, and dreams quite well. But, when it comes to numbers, there’s seven and then there’s a bunch. How many fires did you have last month on the east side of town? Five, you say. How about in the last six months? There were probably a bunch.
Is this year’s bunch larger than last year’s bunch? Are the bunches growing? What’s your gut feeling? You say that you could pull the records and count. You could do that. But, by the time you finished counting you probably would have forgotten what it was you wanted to know. Could be that once you added up all the numbers you’d never do it again.
Computer handles complex numbers
A computer is a machine for dealing with large numbers and with large groups of numbers (called arrays). Now, it’s perfectly understandable that people don’t understand what that means and don’t see much of a need for it. After all, we’ve done without it this long.
If you’re like me, you’re not even all that fond of numbers. You’ve had bad experiences, such as hearing someone say: “You can’t argue with numbers.” Now, we all have a bad taste in our mouths from hearing that bit of nonsense. Everyone has been told that at one time or another by someone who, our gut instinct told us, was counting up the wrong things and really meant: “You can’t argue with me.”
Then there’s always the feeling that if we assemble a bunch of numbers, someone will use them against us.
Because the human brain is not good at dealing with large numbers, and is worse at dealing with large groups of numbers, it responds by simply not dealing with them at all. We’ve developed all sorts of other ways of arriving at conclusions and generally leave the numbers to statisticians and bookmakers. Our strong points are intuition, imagination, and vision. Hunches and gut feelings are big, too.
It’s probably just as well that we didn’t use numbers for decision making when all we had to work with was a tool that has trouble with more than three phone numbers, not to mention the arrays of numbers neatly lined up and moved around for comparative analysis. We’re just not used to using numbers for decision making. We’re not comfortable with the concept and, for the most part, would just as soon forget the whole thing.
Still, the idea of mastering numbers intrigues us. We now have access to a machine that is virtually unlimited in its ability to store and manipulate numbers and groups of numbers. A whole new field of information is opened to us.
Intuition tells us that we’ll soon be using the machine to analyze the numbers and that these analyses will be very important to the fire service. Some of you may be ready to accept the challenge of putting this new tool to work.
Computer questions
The first three questions we must ask are:
- What kind of numbers do we want to collect for the fire service?
- How are we going to go about collecting the numbers?
- How are we going to analyze the data?
We’re all just a little afraid that if we allow the computer to do our analysis for us, that some of our pre-conceived notions will be shattered. It’s not that we’re afraid of the answers the computer may reveal. The real problem may be that we aren’t sure of the questions we need to ask in order to uncover these answers. That’s scary.
Perhaps you envision yourself having the following conversation with the chief or the city manager:
“Why do you want a computer?”
“To get the answers.”
“What answers?”
“To my questions.”
“What questions?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll have to see the answers first.”
Dispatching and the computer
Dispatching is the middle ground. We are familiar with storing thousands of run cards in drawers. Converting them to computer storage for instant recall by various numbers, such as Jones,* is something that we can learn to work with. The questions we need to ask for a dispatching program are easy enough: Where is it? How do I get there? What will I find?
Using a computer to organize the run cards is a step that’s easy to take, even though the concept of storing them under various categories simultaneously may be a little difficult to accept at first.
To get started with this new tool, the first step is to collect the information that you think you might want digested by the computer. Again, dispatching is the middle ground. It’s obvious that you’ll want to know the owner’s name, street address, box number, hydrant location, etc.
Perhaps a less obvious fact you might want to know is the distance to the hydrant. If you had that number, you could ask the machine the average distance to a hydrant for all locations in the city or any part of the city. Perhaps the hydrant flow might be interesting information. But, you know that, at the very least, you want to enter all the information that is already on the manual run cards.
Other uses
Incident reporting, gathering information about the fires, is more difficult to transpose onto a computer. What is it that we want to know, anyway? About all we’ve tabulated in the recent past is how many fires there were, and we’re not even certain of that figure.
* Jones is the owner ‘s name to us, but the machine sees Jones as 7479786983, a 10-digit number. Mr. Jones’ address, 14 Maple Street, is 4952077658076690838482696984. That’s a 28digit number. The machine converts everything you tell it to into numbers (it’s very weak with ideas, concepts, facts, and dreams). It manipulates the numbers a bit and then converts them back for you.
The numbers generated by the new tools, computers, are going to provide a lot more information. So what, we ask. We didn’t have the information before and we got along all right. Yeah, and your granddad used buckets. As long as buildings still burn, we haven’t fully mastered our craft. There’s room for improvement.
It could be that after we gather all the numbers we’ll ask the machine what burns and when. Then we could be there with a hose waiting. Sure, I know that’s simplistic, maybe even dumb, but think about it.
We’ll need experience with the new tool to learn what information is important to gather and what questions to ask. Because we have no access to the numbers from the past and, up until recently, no tool to handle them, we were never able to amass any great body of knowledge that would help us know what questions to ask. No one wants to ask a dumb question, even of a machine, and, unfortunately, in our society there is a tendency to think that if we, or a machine, don’t already know the answer, the question must be dumb.
We now have the tools to ask how many toaster fires occurred on the second floor on Tuesdays. Now, you would probably say that’s not a significant question. It probably isn’t. But, the fact is that you really don’t know the value of the question until you know the answer and perhaps the comparison with the number of toaster fires on the second floor on other days of the week.
Still, it probably is a dumb question; certainly not one for which you would exert a lot of effort to find an answer. However, in the future, computers will be able to answej questions like that without a lot of effort, without any effort beyond your asking the question. Not so dumb anymore, especially if you discover one smart question for every 100 dumb questions. If the computer were fast enough, no one would even know that you had asked the dumb ones.
If you have the vision (another thing that computers lack) to ask the right questions (even if it takes a few tries), the numbers may give you some very interesting answers.
