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An alarm (Old French: À l'arme - "To the arms", "To the weapons", telling armed men to pick up their weapons and get ready for action, because an enemy may have suddenly appeared) gives an audible or visual warning
Warning

selfref|For templates used to warn users who vandalize Wikipedia articles, see...
 about a problem or condition.

Alarms include:

Alarms have the capability of causing a fight-or-flight response
Fight-or-flight response

'The 'fight-or-flight response', also called the fright, fight or flight response', 'hyperarousal' or the 'acute stress response', was first described by Walter Cannon in 1915....
 in human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s; a person under this mindset will panic and either flee the perceived danger or attempt to eliminate it, often ignoring rational thought in either case.






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An alarm (Old French: À l'arme - "To the arms", "To the weapons", telling armed men to pick up their weapons and get ready for action, because an enemy may have suddenly appeared) gives an audible or visual warning
Warning

selfref|For templates used to warn users who vandalize Wikipedia articles, see...
 about a problem or condition.

Alarms include:
  • burglar alarm
    Burglar alarm

    Burglar , Fire alarm, and safety alarms are all electronic today. Sensors are connected to a control unit via a low-voltage hardwire or narrowband RF signal which is used to interact with a response device....
    s, designed to warn of burglaries; this is often a silent alarm: the police or guards are warned without indication to the burglar, which increases the chances of catching him or her.
  • alarm clock
    Alarm clock

    File:Clock radio.jpgAn alarm clock is a clock that is designed to make a loud sound at a specific date and/or time. The primary use of these clocks is to Awake people from their sleep in order to start their days in the mornings, but they are sometimes used for other reminders as well....
    s can produce an alarm at a given time
  • distributed control manufacturing system
    Distributed control system

    A distributed control system refers to a control system usually of a manufacturing system, process or any kind of dynamic system, in which the controller elements are not central in location but are distributed throughout the system with each component sub-system controlled by one or more controllers....
    s or DCSs, found in nuclear power plants
    Nuclear reactor

    A nuclear reactor is a device in which nuclear chain reactions are initiated, controlled, and sustained at a steady rate, as opposed to a nuclear bomb, in which the chain reaction occurs in a fraction of a second and is uncontrolled causing an explosion....
    , refineries
    Refinery

    A refinery is composed of a group of chemical engineering Unit processing and unit operations used for refining certain materials or converting materials into products of value....
     and chemical facilities also generate alarms to direct the operator's attention to an important event that he or she needs to address.
  • alarms in an operation and maintenance (O&M) monitoring system, which informs the bad working state of (a particular part of the) system under monitoring.
  • safety alarms, which go off if a dangerous condition occurs. Common public safety alarms include:
    • tornado sirens
      Civil defense siren

      A civil defense siren is a Machine or electronic device for generating sound to provide warning of approaching danger and sometimes to indicate when the danger has passed....
    • fire alarms
      • "Multiple-alarm fire
        Multiple-alarm fire

        Fires are sometimes categorized as one-alarm, two-alarm, three-alarm fires, or higher. The number of alarms correlates with the level of response by local authorities, with an elevated number of alarms indicating increased commitment of resources....
        ", a locally-specific measure of the severity of a fire and the fire-department reaction required.
    • car alarm
      Car alarm

      A car alarm is an electronic device installed in a automobile in an attempt to discourage theft of the vehicle itself, its contents, or both. Car alarms work by emitting high-volume sound when the conditions necessary for triggering are met, as well as by flashing some of the vehicle's lights, and notifying the car's owner via a paging sy...
      s
    • community Alarm
      Autodialer alarm

      An autodialer alarm, or community alarm as it is known in United Kingdom when it is run by the County council, is an electrical device that usually has a push button transmitter which an individual may use to summon assistance to their location....
       or autodialer alarm
      Autodialer alarm

      An autodialer alarm, or community alarm as it is known in United Kingdom when it is run by the County council, is an electrical device that usually has a push button transmitter which an individual may use to summon assistance to their location....
       (medical alarms)
    • air raid siren
      Civil defense siren

      A civil defense siren is a Machine or electronic device for generating sound to provide warning of approaching danger and sometimes to indicate when the danger has passed....
      s
    • personal alarm
      Personal alarm

      Personal alarms are small hand-held electronic devices with the functionality to emit a loud siren -like alarming sound. It has a button that when pressed sets the siren off, or a tag that when pulled sets the siren off....
    • tocsins — a historical method of raising an alarm


Alarms have the capability of causing a fight-or-flight response
Fight-or-flight response

'The 'fight-or-flight response', also called the fright, fight or flight response', 'hyperarousal' or the 'acute stress response', was first described by Walter Cannon in 1915....
 in human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s; a person under this mindset will panic and either flee the perceived danger or attempt to eliminate it, often ignoring rational thought in either case. We can characterise a person in such a state as "alarmed".

With any kind of alarm, the need exists to balance between on the one hand the danger of false alarms (called "false positives") — the signal going off in the absence of a problem — and on the other hand failing to signal an actual problem (called a "false negative"). False alarms can waste resources expensively and can even be dangerous. For example, false alarms of a fire can waste firefighter
Firefighter

Firefighters are rescuers extensively trained primarily to put out hazardous fires that threaten civilian populations and property, to rescue people from car accidents, collapsed and burning buildings and other such situations....
 manpower, making them unavailable for a real fire, and risk injury to firefighters and others as the fire engines race to the alleged fire's location. In addition, false alarms may acclimatise people to ignore alarm signals, and thus possibly to ignore an actual emergency: Aesop
Aesop

File:Aesop pushkin01.jpgAesop , known only for the genre of fables ascribed to him, was by tradition a Slavery in Ancient Greece who was a contemporary of Croesus and Peisistratos in the mid-6th century BC in ancient Greece....
's fable
Fable

A fable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate, or nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim ....
 of The Boy Who Cried Wolf
The Boy Who Cried Wolf

The Boy Who Cried Wolf, also known as The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf, is a fable attributed to Aesop . The protagonist of the fable is a bored shepherd boy who entertained himself by calling out "Wolf!"....
 exemplifies this problem.

Etymology


See also

  • Alarm management
    Alarm management

    Alarm management is the application of human factors along with instrumentation engineering and systems thinking to management the design of an alarm system to increase its usability....
  • Burglary
    Burglary

    Burglary is a crime the essence of which is entry into a building for the purposes of committing an offence. Usually that offence will be theft, but most jurisdictions specify others which fall within the ambit of burglary....
  • Burglar alarm
    Burglar alarm

    Burglar , Fire alarm, and safety alarms are all electronic today. Sensors are connected to a control unit via a low-voltage hardwire or narrowband RF signal which is used to interact with a response device....
  • Clock
    Clock

    A clock is an instrument used for indicating and maintaining the time and passage thereof. The word clock is derived ultimately from the Celtic languages words clagan and clocca meaning "bell"....
  • False alarm
    False alarm

    A false alarm, also called a nuisance alarm, is the phony report of an emergency, causing unnecessary panic and/or bringing resources to a place where they are not needed....
  • Fire alarm notification appliance
    Fire alarm notification appliance

    A fire alarm notification appliance is an active fire protection component. A notification appliance may use audible, visible, or other stimuli to alert the occupants of a fire or other emergency condition requiring action....
  • Physical security
    Physical security

    Physical security describes both measures that prevent or deter attackers from accessing a facility, resource, or information stored on physical media and guidance on how to design structures to resist various hostile acts....
  • Smoke detector
    Smoke detector

    A smoke detector is a device that detects smoke and issues a signal to a fire alarm system, or issues a local audible and/or visual alarm from the detector itself....