They forgot to mention how many times it helped to find people in need. its easy to say 45 times there was an error - imagine how many times emergency services around the world get sent to the wrong or unaccurate location...
Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
21–30 of 109 posts
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#22The article seems wrong about some of these locations: > duties.factory.person was located in China I get Switzerland [1] > refuse.housework.housebound was in Australia I get Belarus [2] > demand.heave.surprise was actually in Canada I get China [3] Now that's really confusing. Is that a bug in the system that changes the locations of three-word-codes, or is that (very) poor reporting? [1] https://what3words.com/duti…
On the same token, further down the article says:
> So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames.
The second one is in South Dakota for me: https://what3words.com/circle.goal.leaders
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#23The article seems wrong about some of these locations: > duties.factory.person was located in China I get Switzerland [1] > refuse.housework.housebound was in Australia I get Belarus [2] > demand.heave.surprise was actually in Canada I get China [3] Now that's really confusing. Is that a bug in the system that changes the locations of three-word-codes, or is that (very) poor reporting? [1] https://what3words.com/duti…
Is it possible the reporters were using a different localisation of w3w, and translated the words before giving them to the rescuers?
Edit: scratch that - it doesn't really lead to this problem does it.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#24They forgot to mention how many times it helped to find people in need. its easy to say 45 times there was an error - imagine how many times emergency services around the world get sent to the wrong or unaccurate location...
That's not how emergency comm is supposed to work
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#25The article seems wrong about some of these locations: > duties.factory.person was located in China I get Switzerland [1] > refuse.housework.housebound was in Australia I get Belarus [2] > demand.heave.surprise was actually in Canada I get China [3] Now that's really confusing. Is that a bug in the system that changes the locations of three-word-codes, or is that (very) poor reporting? [1] https://what3words.com/duti…
that algorithm should be extremely easy to implement with a unit test feasibly testing every single possible coordinate.
Fundamentally this is nothing different than say a base 10 to base 32 conversion as an algorithm and while its possible to mess something like that up if you are amateur enough it would show a huge level of technical incompetence.
Generally its a sign of a company that spends money and thoughts on marketing than on their product.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#26What are the scenarios where you know the 3 words but not the lat-long?
None. Any app that can lookup your words can show you the coords. The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone. I only don't like that it's proprietary and the company responsible is pretty aggressive about enforcing their rights - there shouldn't be a place for that in public emergency services.
> The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone.
I mean.. as opposed to two numbers? A slow speed high error correction audio encoding of them would be easy. Call emergency services, press the button, they decode the tones, immediate, accurate, simple.
If you mixed the calling and playback into a single action, you could make calls and direct people without even the ability to speak.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#27https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System
this is widely in use in the ham radio circle and it works great--if you know phonetic alphabets, it's easily understood over the air, truncation is well-behaved, and so on and so forth.
edit: for SAR you probably need 8 characters not the customary 4/6 character version
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#28Google "Plus Codes" are being used in India - especially in underserved communities like slums. https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ . If you want to use this tech + operations expertise in other geographies...just reach out to them. They intend to share their knowhow and expertise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs Also from what i understand, after the success in Kolkata, this was then used in Native…
For a moment I thought you meant Google+ had some kind of location system that'd found a niche use!
Thanks for the link though, hadn't heard of plus codes.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#29> jump.legend.warblers which was in Vietnam
So they knew exactly that it was wrong. So it worked perfectly.
If you want to be hip you could write a program to work out what was actually said given other information, ie what cell tower it came from.
I hate 3 words, I can't remember why, maybe it was copyright or something, but this article isn't selling why it's a problem.
Rescuers will also get all the normal info like the parents who might know the track, and everything else said.
Saying just use latitude and longitude co-ordinates, is like saying "MREW is keen to encourage anyone planning a day in the outdoors to carry a paper map and a compass"
Latitude and longitude is scary and complex. Rescuers might think it's easy but I'm sure there's plenty of things they find scary and hard other people find easy. Just the appearance of most of the latitude and longitude apps is technical. 'What 3 Words' sounds like teddy bears.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#30The article seems wrong about some of these locations: > duties.factory.person was located in China I get Switzerland [1] > refuse.housework.housebound was in Australia I get Belarus [2] > demand.heave.surprise was actually in Canada I get China [3] Now that's really confusing. Is that a bug in the system that changes the locations of three-word-codes, or is that (very) poor reporting? [1] https://what3words.com/duti…
On the same token, further down the article says: > So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames. The second one is in South Dakota for me: https://what3words.com/circle.goal.leaders
It's circle.goals.leader, which really underlines the point.