Thursday, August 20, 2009

This is a blog readable post

My university is installing and testing a new, campus wide alarm system, which they are calling the Siren Outdoor System (SOS). Is it overkill? The whole campus and surrounding areas are already under constantant video surveilance, and they have a pretty good emergency texting program. I don't know what this says about the student body (or more importantly, their parents) if they can't feel safe with out a giant alarm system safety net, but if the university has got the time and money to burn, god bless. That's not the point of my post.

To quote one of the notification e-mails about the system:
The purpose of the SOS is to transmit voice intelligible emergency messages and alert tones to the outdoor campus environment during crisis events.

I do believe that a "voice intelligible" emergency message is one which is intelligible to voices. At best, it might be a message which is intelligible as a voice. I don't think it can really mean what they want it to mean: an intelligible voice emergency message. See: "human readable".

Perhaps I'm suffering from a bracketing error, and they mean it's a

[ voice [ intelligible [ emergency message ] ] ]

but based on the rest of the e-mail, it seems pretty clear that they mean it's a

[ [voice [intelligible] ] [ emergency message] ]

It just can't mean what they want it to mean.

Disqus for Val Systems