Rescuers Question What3words' Use in Emergencies (bbc.com) 122
AmiMoJo writes: Mountain rescuers have questioned the accuracy of using a location app, citing dozens of examples where the wrong address was given to their teams. What3Words (W3W) divides the world into three-by-three metre squares, each with a three-word address. It is free and used by 85% of UK emergency services. Reasons for the errors were not given, but were likely to be things such as mispronunciation or spelling errors. W3W said human error was "a possibility with any type of tool." The mapping system was created by an algorithm which assigned three words to each square in the world. Mark Lewis, the head of ICT at Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW), said that the use of the W3W app had been "testing" for rescue teams. He gave the BBC a database from the last 12 months which listed 45 locations across England and Wales that rescuers received from lost or injured walkers and climbers, which turned out to be incorrect.
Not to mention, language barriers (Score:4, Funny)
"Hello, Italian 112? I need help: I'm located at Van Fang Coolio."
That'll work...
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Well there's a vans.fang.cool in the middle of the desert in Arizona so we'll look for you there
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https://map.what3words.com/can... [what3words.com]
is troublesome, especially given it's geographical position.
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What's crazy is that cancel.this.search is adjacent to joking.responds.phones.
Re: Not to mention, language barriers (Score:3)
Examples included:
- jump.legend.warblers which was in Vietnam
- duties.factory.person was located in China
- dignitary.fake.view turned out to be in India
- refuse.housework.housebound was in Australia
- middle.plugged.nourished was in the US
- demand.heave.surprise was actually in Canada
- flesh.unzip.whirlwind was in Russia
I'd love to know where they actually were, and what the mix-up was...
Apparently plurals and singular versions of the same word are in the W3W dictionary, that seems dangerous - I wonder what other suffixes and prefixes are included to get jumbled up by a lost hiker?
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Given enough iterations, I'm waiting for "whos.on.first" and "whats.on.second" ... and where they'll be.
Re: Not to mention, language barriers (Score:2)
Who's on third? :)
Disambiguation (Score:3)
People have been complaining for a while that nearby locations sometimes have very similar words. It's not likely that there's a new problem that nobody knows about. The trick for this company, which has been very aggressive about prosecuting people with similar technology, is that they basically have to redo everything, but that would decrease the value of what they've done so far. Effectively, this was loaded with technical debt out of the gate. A clean break with proper disambiguation is really the only way to make this work.
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People have been complaining for a while that nearby locations sometimes have very similar words.
I thought avoiding that was the whole patentetable trick they did?
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People have been complaining for a while that nearby locations sometimes have very similar words.
I thought avoiding that was the whole patentetable trick they did?
Sounds like a variation on graph coloring [wikipedia.org], it's NP-complete but there's a bunch of good approximation algorithms. Of course you've got regions of similarities you want to avoid instead of simple vertices, but I don't think it's too dissimilar.
I'm sure you could get a patent, but it sounds more like a tough assignment in an algorithms course.
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What's wrong with latitude and longitude? It's universal, doesn't require a special app. Every map has lat/long.
Can be as precise as you want.
Re:Disambiguation (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah but older people invented it, it has existed and worked for decades and so the younger generation think they can do better and replace it with their own solution.
See also: "using latitude and longitude is not trendy".
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Yeah but older people invented it, it has existed and worked for decades and so the younger generation think they can do better and replace it with their own solution.
See also: "using latitude and longitude is not trendy".
That and it's solving the wrong problem. Every phone knows where it is, so if somebody has cellular service to ask search and rescue to come find them in the first place, then the phone should be automatically transmitting its location to the emergency services line as data, right along with the call. Dispatch should then be transmitting that location as data to search and rescue. There should be no human transcription at all, anywhere in the chain.
The problem is the protocols used in phones are inadequa
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What's wrong with latitude and longitude? It's universal, doesn't require a special app. Every map has lat/long. Can be as precise as you want.
Not much, actually W3W just maps lat/long from the GPS to squares that have a three word name.
But when pronouncing the coordinates over a poor connection or trying to remember a location, the three word name have some obvious advantages for many. But hey, you can be someone like me that still remembers the 10 digit number off my library card I had in my early teens, the one that expired at least 30 years ago.
I think it is a neat idea, although I am not too fond of W3W's attitude. Great idea but it should be
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While it might initially seem to be a good idea it is not enough. W3W is language dependent, so for example you can't use the NATO phonetic spelling to spell out all location words that my local language uses nor the majority of the 48 languages W3W uses. You need to display the local spelling alphabet.
But modified like that, why not submit it as a feature request to W3W? It could definitely be useful.
Anyway, I think the basic idea of W3W is good: to give people who struggle to grasp the cartesian coordinat
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In part it's the same problem the international radio phonetic alphabet solves; it's easier for human hearing to copy the data "X-ray yankee zulu" over a noisy audio channel than it is to copy "X Y Z".
The really innovative thing here isn't really the *solution*; it's the rather narrow but useful problem they've chosen: transferring a coordinate from one human to another by speech with sufficient precision that the humans can locate each other. If I need to transfer the coordinate 42.514792100005614, -71.27
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Your example is absurd. You have 15 digits after the decimal point which takes you to subatomic precision. Three digits or four is sufficient for finding people on earth.
I contend that numbers are easier to pronounce and understand than words.
Using these ideas we can construct a table of what each digit in a decimal degree signifies:
The sign tells us whether we are north or south, east or west on the globe.
A nonzero hundreds digit tells us we're using longitude, not latitude!
The tens digit gives a position
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Eight digits are still harder to remember than three words and still harder to transmit by voice. That's the point. The example I chose happens to be from a file I'm working with right now; obviously you would chop off some of the least significant digits, but how many? It depends. the answer is different at 0 degrees latitude and 45.
Really lat/lon aren't used much as working coordinate systems, except by amateurs. My original data was in state plane coordinates, I converted to WGS84 for export to a GP
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People have been complaining for a while that nearby locations sometimes have very similar words. It's not likely that there's a new problem that nobody knows about. The trick for this company, which has been very aggressive about prosecuting people with similar technology, is that they basically have to redo everything, but that would decrease the value of what they've done so far. Effectively, this was loaded with technical debt out of the gate. A clean break with proper disambiguation is really the only way to make this work.
Funny, nearby locations having similar latitude and longitude numbers is actually a benefit.
Maybe you could make a hybrid system where long/lat integers are replaced by words, but the specific location still uses the remaining decimal location. Might give you back some user friendliness without all these problems. So just straight lat/long might be better.
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> A clean break with proper disambiguation is really the only way to make this work.
Agreed, Mixing singular and plural versions of the same word!? That's like mixing 0 and O in your license key. The time spent to address all the support tickets would be better served just creating a less ambiguous system to begin with.
Re:Disambiguation (Score:5, Insightful)
Mr Tierney told the BBC: "This is not an algorithm issue. Something like 73% of What3Words addresses contain a word that can be changed just by adding or removing a letter."
That's definitely an algorithm issue. The algorithm which assigned words to locations failed to collpase phonetically similar words into identical tokens. That's the key linchpin of this sort of effort and they got it wrong.
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I don't think there's enough words in the english language that you can remove that possibility and still map to 3x3 meters with only 3 words. Especially since you'd also want to remove ordering issues (a,b,c and b,a,c both existing is bad because people mess up order like that) so you need to pick words without replacement.
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People have been complaining for a while that nearby locations sometimes have very similar words.
The true stupidity is that we've decided to reintroduce a human element of actually telling someone their location than simply using ELS to transfer the GPS data directly from the handset to emergency services.
These tech industry startup morons need to leave this shit alone.
How to solve (Score:1)
1) Make sure an English region/dialect is selected
2) Have a built-in error reporter so you can see which words are commonly miscommunicated
3) Automatically ban words once they reach some threshold from #2
Maybe there'd be some cool algorithm to predetermine miscommunicated words, which would obviate #2-3.
Re:How to solve (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: How to solve (Score:2)
Because reading GPS coordinates over the phone could never lead to an error?
Not sure why UK emergency services adopted this standard, how bad was previous system? In the US it is a novelty, nothing more.
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Open Location Codes [wikipedia.org] have been a thing for a very long time now.
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Amateur radio has long had a position system. Useful for hams.
https://www.qrz.com/gridmapper... [qrz.com]
Again, what's wrong with latitude and longitude?
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Reading out a location, be it in regular coordinates format or in W3W format, is a really dumb idea anyway. In Finland, they have a national 112 app that, when you run it and press the big "CALL 112" button, calls 112 - unsurprisingly - and automatically sends your location to the emergency services. Not spelling out anything, no misinterpretation, no stupid proprietary English-dictionary-based encoding.
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What if you have GPS device and a phone as two separate devices? Or an old fashioned radio transmiter/walkie-talkie
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A standalone GPS device probably wouldn't have W3W.
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Right.
Still I think W3W is a nice solution for specific situations, like a spelling alphabet for GPS coordinates. No more, no less.
However, like the ICAO/NATO-Alphabet it must not be closed source or patented. It probably should be governed by the same standardization body as other spelling tables. There's more to a spelling table than picking random words that start with a certain letter. There's a reason why it's Bravo and Zulu and not Beta and Zeta. And 45 mislocations are a hint that there are to many s
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Google maps (and others) send lat/long without having to read numbers. Precise and unambiguous.
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This assumes emergency services have easy app integration the central office can forward the lat long to.
I'd like to think so, but...
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It's called a fallback.
Automatic position transmission is nice and dandy - if it works. You may be on vacation and have a phone that doesn't support national/local standard, not the right app installed, data not working, but voice still is (will be an issue sometimes until everything is full 5g)
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The same number as you call. Most emergency services respond to text. And pretty much all of them can just grab the GPS coordiantes automatically, they're sent along with the call for emergency services. This has been automated for a decade now. I pocket dialed 911 back in 2008 and they asked me to confirm what corner I was standing on (they already knew it).
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I don't know where "here" is for you, but that is NOT the case in 99% of the world.
Re: How to solve (Score:4, Informative)
Neither do I. In the UK, an OS six figure grid reference used to be the standard and will locate you to within 100 metres, which is probably good enough for locating somebody needing rescuing.
e.g. TQ290796 represents exactly one 100 metre square in the UK. It's a bit longer than three words but can still be read over the phone fairly easily.
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A six digit number isn't perfect. During panic, reading a number out loud might be difficult. You know the feeling where your legs shake and you can't think? It's an uncommon phenomenon, but I imagine it's common in people that need rescue.
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And in that level of panic you really think W3W will do any better? If they can't read a short number, they're not going to be clear with 3 non-common words.
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Looks like W3W is prone to error. People mispronounce words or garble the reception.
Numbers are much easier than words.
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You can share location directly from Google Maps and half a dozen other apps. No reason to read a location.
And for actual emergency services, e-911 can pull the GPS right from your phone automatically when you call them.
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Several years ago I did some work on systems supporting military close-in air support, and surprisingly, it still entailed voice transmission of coordinates and other data at least in certain cases. Historically this has resulted in deaths from friendly fire.
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Three words are much easier to convey than seventy nine point zero six five two four four by negative five point zero nine one seven seven.
Re:How to solve (Score:4, Insightful)
Not when 'hidden.forbidden.playground,' 'hidden.forbidden.playgrounds' and 'ridden.forbidden.playgrounds' are all vastly different locations.
I'd rather say 'seven nine point zero six five two four for by negative five point zero nine one seven seven' than 'romeo india delta delta echo november dot foxtrot oscar romeo beta india delta delta echo november dot papa lima alpha yankee golf romeo oscar uniform november delta sierra' personally.
Three decimal places gets rescue parties pretty damn close. I kind of like the idea of W3W for saying 'this is the door you want to knock on,' though it doesn't help with multi-level dwellings, but it fails utterly as an emergency location protocol, due to needing to communicate very precise pronunciations over poor quality voice links.
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I'd rather not say anything at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Which means you don't need W3W at all, you just use your phone to tell people where you are.
Wait... why are you telling people where you are at all? Android has had Emergency Location Services since version 4 and Apple introduced a similar system years ago. Why are we not expecting emergency services to actually know where we are already when we call them?
Re: How to solve (Score:2)
#3 sounds like a great idea, but in practice you don't want to start changing the names assigned to locations after they've been in use a while.
Imagine the fun if your local gov't decided to either rename your street or re-number houses along your street because there were 'too many errors'?
I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: I don't understand (Score:2)
This is for mountain hikers, there used to be a system that was replaced by W3W. And before that system was a previous system, and one before that, and so on...
The question, still unanswered by this craptacular reporting, is how does W3W compare to the previous system, and what were the issues with the previous system that provoked the move to W3W?
All this reporting tells us is that W3W, in the field isn't perfect. We're left to imagine how it compares to all previous systems used.
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Yea, I seem to recall seeing stories about people being told to download and install the application when they're in trouble. It would be a hell of a lot easier for everyone involved to just download an app that just sends your precise GPS co-ordinates to the rescue service in the event of an emergency.
If you're regularly going off the beaten path you should really buy an emergency beacon.
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On an iphone, easily.
1) Goto maps;
2) Press and hold a location on the map to drop a pin; or tap your current location pin;
3) Swipe up or tap on the info dialog, bam: Latitude and Longitude displayed.
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On open up Maps. With data turned off you'll see your blue location dot on a blank screen. Click that dot you get lat and long.
Or you can have one of the many apps handy that simply give you GPS without data or internet access.
Or in western countries you can just rely on AML which doesn't need data to send emergency services your GPS location and not have to look up or do anything at all.
If you have a w3w app, why not just use GPS? (Score:2)
Make dialing the equivalent of 911 emergency services automatically enable GPS location so that this insertion works. For the duration of the call.
Sounds like a stupid solution looking for a problem. I guess it might be fun if you are a geocache fanatic, my cache is at 'whiskey tangerine fork'. Sounds cool for about 3 seconds.
Re: If you have a w3w app, why not just use GPS? (Score:2)
I heard the UK changed their 911 number...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
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911 has never worked in the UK. It's always been 999 and now you can use 112 too.
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You should use the correct emergency number for the jurisdiction you are in. In North America that's 911, and in the UK it's 999 or 112.
For interest's sake. In North America the first emergency services number used in the late 50s was in Winnipeg MB, and they used 999 since the UK already established that at least a decade earlier. And then by the 60s, the rest of North America started adopting the idea, too. But because some places in North America allowed use of 999 as an exchange or nxx (and still do),
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112 should work everywhere from a GSM mobile phone. It's part of the GSM standard.
Re: If you have a w3w app, why not just use GPS? (Score:2)
Woosh. You didn't click the link, did you?
Re: If you have a w3w app, why not just use GPS? (Score:3)
Don't cell towers already capture/calculate your location?
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Don't cell towers already capture/calculate your location?
They do. Well enough that when a friend was suicidal, and I called 911, they found her in time using her cell phone location, just from me giving them her phone number.
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With 2 you can get quite a lot better. 1 cell tower gives a range from the tower (really a ring around the tower, due to uncertainty in the measurement). 2 towers reduces you to the intersection of those 2 rings, which will meet in 2 places. A 3rd will get you down to 1 intersection. But even 2 is enough to go on if you can send 2 teams.
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Obfuscation (Score:3)
The big problems with W3W are:
1. the words themselves have no bearing on location. When you have lat/long, you can use it to navigate: if your destination has a larger Lat number, you have to go North until the numbers match. If you're in grid square 'correct horse battery' there's no telling which way to go (or how far) to 'tower staple enemy' unless you run their app.
2. you have to rely on proprietary technology to encode and decode. W3W is just another website/app that can go down at any time. My phone will produce lat/long without any network connection.
3. pronuncation of the words. Lots of ambiguity in the English language. Numbers are easy (esp if you use the NATO convention of 'niner' instead of 'nine') by comparison.
Re: Obfuscation (Score:2)
As someone that takes credit cards over the phone a few times a day, long numbers are not as easy as one may think.
Especially if there's no natural grouping for reading them out in a pattern.
W3W should be easier, and errors should be more obvious (though a few mistakes have been found with similar locations having similar words).
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People tend to want to read numbers in groups ("twentythree"), I find reading them individually instead makes for fewer mistakes.
More so in languages that swap the word order (in Dutch, 23 is 'drieentwintig', or three and twenty).
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Three decimal places of accuracy in GPS gets you to about 110 meters accuracy. 'I'm at 70.156 by 123.456' is a lot easier to communicate than 'I'm at achievement.tacklers.heap'.
And there's a problem when 'hidden.forbidden.playground,' 'hidden.forbidden.playgrounds' and 'ridden.forbidden.playgrounds' are all vastly different locations.
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I would argue that vastly different locations is a strength and not a weakness. It allows for a sanity check that missing the second decimal of GPS does not.
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No the big problem is that people are using it for emergency services in the UK when the UK emergency services specifically with British Telecom invented a damn automated and these days (in the west) universally adopted alternative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
45 failures out of how many searches? (Score:2)
What was the failure rate before What3Words, and how does it compare to the 45 'failures' over the reported 12 months?
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The past 12 months have been atypical enough that I'd be wary of making a direct comparison with, say, 2015.
Re: 45 failures out of how many searches? (Score:2)
Percentages, rather than raw numbers, would likely provide a useful metric for comparison.
It's safe to assume the previous system had errors, otherwise why adopt W3W?
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It's not about adopting W3W. Nobody is doing that, pretty much. W3W is a product, and the guys who made it are working hard to sell it. That is the only reason it's used by anyone. Not because it has any actual advantages.
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Sure, the previous system probably wasn't perfect either. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was OS map coordinates, and the problem was that fewer walkers nowadays buy and carry OS maps (or know how to locate themselves on a paper map using a compass and a couple of landmarks). But my (overly implicit) point was that the confusion about what forms of exercise and travel to/from exercise were and weren't permitted at various stages of lockdown might have changed the demographic of who was out getting into
Use Technology but don't put your faith in it. (Score:2)
Like most technology, you should use it if you can, as it will help you do things better. However you should know its limitation and use your own best judgement with what it gives you.
He say's the sheriff is near (Score:1)
HELP! I'm lost in (Score:1)
Deeply flawed (Score:5, Insightful)
Just for fun, I decided to see if 'Hidden Forbidden Holyground' exists.
It does not. Strike 1.
However, there is a hidden.forbidden.playground, cool.
There is a also a hidden.forbidden.playgrounds. Not cool. Strike 2.
There is also a 'ridden.forbidden.playgrounds'. Very not cool. Strike 3.
The system is not suitable for communicating over any sort of voice link, because it's too ambiguous. If you're reduced to spelling out 'hotel india delta delta echo november dot foxtrot oscar beta india delta delta echo november.papa lima alpha yankee golf romeo oscar uniform november delta sierra' you might as well just read off latitude and longitude in degrees decimal.
Re:Deeply flawed (Score:5, Insightful)
The aim is to make a cool looking, but deeply flawed, scenario, propose this as a super duper solution to people looking for the next unicorn to invest, take their money and keep taking their money till they realize this ain't no unicorn on its way to 4 billion market cap.
The rubes that got bilked should count it as tuition paid to the University of Life.
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It's also English centric. Numbers are far more universal, Arabic numerals are pretty much universal. What's more most languages have figured out how to communicate them clearly over every kind of link because they are so fundamental.
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On the plus side, xkcd fans will be glad to know there's a "horses.battery.staple" location near Gjoa Haven, Nunavut "battery.staple.correct" near Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Newfoundland; "batteries.staple.correct" near Greenstone, Ontario... and several other near-matches.
Perhaps the most relevant location is in Multia, Central Finland - or as the locals like to call it, "useless.twit.apps"
New 4 Word Universal Location for W3W (Score:2)
Never understood why anybody would consider this (Score:3)
I mean it's a trivial, but proprietary, system to change coordinates into words. It uses badly curated lists of words where misheard words or different spellings will lead to different coordinates.
It's just one of those things that doesn't make sense. It's not even particularly clever, like being able to give positions at different levels of accuracy. All they do is to use a trivial algorithm to divide the earth's surface into roughly squarish sections, number them from pole to pole, split it up into a "3 digits" base n number (with n being the number of words in the database) and choosing the word based on the digit it represents. This is something any borderline competent programmer can come up with and throw together in an hour or so.
There is no substance behind it, it's all marketing for idiots.
What's the advantage over latitude and longitude? (Score:2)
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SOS (Score:2)
Isn't SOS good?
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Well yes, you could do this. You'd take the number of the "square" and process it via some sort of error correcting code. Or you'd make sure people can distinguish all of the words chosen in the word lists. However that would take work and or intelligence, apparently a rare commodity in that company.
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I'm suspicious of people who don't realize how very tiny the deviation from a true square is over the distance of 3 meters, happens to be 7.06E-7 meter