- published: 14 Feb 2014
- views: 40727
Alert is a colloquial term used to define a machine-to-person communication that is important and/or time sensitive. An alert contains user-requested content such as a reminder (important), a notification (urgent), and ultimately an alert (important and urgent). Alert messaging or alert notification is the delivery of alerts to recipients.
Alert messaging emerged from the study of Personal Information Management (PIM),[citation needed] the science of discovering how people perform certain tasks to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information relevant to them. Alert notification is a natural evolution of the concept of RSS[citation needed] which makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner. Alerting makes it possible for people to keep up with the information that matters most to them.
Alerts are typically delivered through a notification system and the most common application of the service is machine-to-person communication. Very basic services provide notification services via email or SMS. More advanced systems (for example AOL) provides users with the choice of selecting a preferred delivery channel such as e-mail, Short Message Service (SMS), instant messaging (IM), via voice through voice portals and more. Novel approaches provide users with the ability to schedule their own alerts (for example Google Calendar). The most sophisticated service providers embrace all capabilities, aggregating a multitude of reminder, notifications and alert, catering the delivery system to the specific context of the content being delivered thus enabling users to create sophisticated scenarios.
An AMBER Alert or a Child Abduction Emergency (SAME code: CAE) is a child abduction alert bulletin in several countries throughout the world, issued upon the suspected abduction of a child, since 1996. AMBER is officially a backronym for "America's Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response" but was originally named for Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old child who was abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas in 1996. Also an AMBER alert corresponds to the color of highway warning signs that are activated in AMBER alerts, the signs display messages in a reddish orange or an amber color. Alternate alert names are used in Georgia, where it is called "Levi's Call" (named after Levi Frady); Hawaii, where it is called a "Maile Amber Alert" (named after Maile Gilbert); and Arkansas, where it is called a "Morgan Nick Amber Alert" (in memory of Morgan Chauntel Nick). Frady, Gilbert and Nick were all children who went missing in those U.S. states.
AMBER Alerts are distributed via commercial radio stations, internet radio, satellite radio, television stations, and cable TV by the Emergency Alert System and NOAA Weather Radio (where they are termed "Child Abduction Emergency" or "Amber Alerts"). The alerts are also issued via e-mail, electronic traffic-condition signs, the LED billboards which are located outside of newer Walgreens locations, along with the LED/LCD signs of billboard companies such as Clear Channel Outdoor, CBS Outdoor and Lamar, or through wireless device SMS text messages.