Supplementary memorandum submitted by
Ostrich Media
As promised, here is a description of the random
selection process as discussed with Heleln Southworth during the
Select Committee Inquiry.
(i) When a caller has dialled the Quiz Call
number they are either randomly played a message stating that
they have not been entered into the competition, or a message
that they have been entered the pool of entrants to be chosen
from and placed on hold.
(ii) When a call is put through to the studio,
our computer looks at:
(a) the number of callers in the last 30
seconds;
(b) the number of SMS text entries in the
database in the last 30 seconds; and
(c) the number of web entries submitted in
the last 30 seconds.
This method chooses whether to select a telephone
caller, an entry from a SMS or web submission.
The way in which these numbers are obtained
is via a request, called a "SOAP" request to the IVR
for telephone callers, or SQL queries to the DB for the Web and
SMS entries.
(iii) Based on the number of calls in each category,
the computer selects one.
So if there were 7 telephone callers, 1 web
entry and 2 SMS entries, the probability of each being selected
would be 70%, 10% and 20% respectively.
The algorithm is basically: if "T"
is number of telephone callers, "W" is number of web
entries, and "S" is the number of SMS entries, then
the computer selects a random number between 1 and T+W+S.
If this number is between 1 and T, then select
a telephone caller, if the number is between T+1 and T+W then
select a web entry, otherwise it will select a SMS entry.
(iv) Once the type of caller has been chosen,
one is picked from their group. If it was a telephone caller the
IVR picks one from the pool of callers on hold.
If the type selected was a web entry, then the
computer dials the telephone number left by the web entrant.
If the type selected was a SMS request, then
the computer dials the telephone number left by the SMS text entrant.
(These callbacks to text and web entrant's phones
are free to the viewer as they are paid for by ourselves)
(v) One of the callers speaks directly to the
presenter and offers their answer.
Naturally, we would be happy to provide you
with the computer coding that this e-mail is the simplified version
of.
4 January 2007
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