Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
bbc.co.ukGoogle "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 American communities.
P.S. Plus Codes are open source - https://github.com/google/open-location-code And they are well researched.
>The character set for Open Location Code was selected out of over eight billion possibilities, using a word list of 10,000 words from 30 languages. All possible sets were scored on whether they could spell the test words, and the most promising sets evaluated by hand.
>Plus codes can be encoded and decoded offline.
>Plus codes do not depend on any infrastructure, and so are not dependent on any organisation or company for their continued existence or usage.
If it wasn't funded and publicised by Google, I think Plus codes would have disappeared already. These codes feel quite difficult to remember and less logical than the long/lat that they try to replace; additionally, the letters are very ambiguous to pronounce in English for a non-native (E and I, J and G).
It feels like it was a quick hack of base64-ish encoding of the long/lat that evolved into a product to get an internal promotion
this was deployed in Indian slums - which is probably the largest , non-native English speaking cohort as it can get.
The fake image carousel which is actually a lightbox on https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ is one of the more interesting things I've seen on a website
Weird stuff. I guess the webdev took a screenshot from some other website and it included the arrows...
You wrote "lightbox" and I read "mapbox", I thought someone implemented an image carousel by adding photos instead of map tiles in a Google Maps-esque UI (like this but with unconnected pictures: https://www.nightcity.io)
That's what happens when you send a non specific support request to someone who doesn't care.
> An Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems
https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...
>Making a mistake with a code may simply display somewhere else - for example, on What3Words, "banana rabbit monkey" is a location in Argentina, "banana monkey rabbit" is in Russia.
That's a problem if you don't know anything more than the three words, but it's quite useful if you do. For example, if you know someone is travelling in South America then the huge difference means one is obviously wrong. It would be more problematic if the two locations were similar.
Making it clear when something is incorrect for a given context is quite a helpful feature. But you need to have the necessary context.
Does W3W offer an easy way to see the locations of potential typos? E.g. can you put in a country constraint and have W3W give you the most similar (by edit distance, word swaps, etc) locations to the one you input that match that constraint?
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.
So few people know about this. I actually wish it was used a lot more.
It uses Latin alphabet. Most countries with Latin alphabet have an address system already in place for centuries.
https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...
I mean, if receiver will write a text in the address box, then parcel will be delivered to him.
This W3W system relies on the correct English spelling of 3 words, in the correct sequence to identify the location.
Can't help but feel that this is a bad idea. From writing code, we know that the more code you use, the higher the chance of bug entering the code.
Also felt that the authorities are trying to extend the UK postcode system to the rest of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
https://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
The 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/duties.factory.person [2] https://what3words.com/refuse.housework.housebound [3] https://what3words.com/demand.heave.surprise
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.
Yes, this really demonstrates how this system doesn't live up to its promise. As someone previously involved in a SAR team I find the growing expectations on W3W very frustrating. It's like watching a slow train wreck. Ambulance and police services here are rolling it out in a kind of shadow-IT form way too rapidly. The largest problem I have with it by far though is pegging all these organisations to a reliance on a tech startup and a closed license.
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.
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.
Many years ago me and some friends were geocaching late Into the evening.
Around midnight, we called it quits after standing in the middle of a major highway holdings a large metal plate with mag mount on it.
Hooked up to a gps that only displays lat long.
It's a little weird the algorithm doesn't ensure minimum edit + soundex distance between all cell pairs.
They optimized for doing it with three words, they obviously didn't even consider how it would fare against errors.
W3W is a proprietary algorithm that has threatened people who published analyses of their algorithm. They got whatfreewords.org censored for publishing an independent open implementation.
It's also not well designed, as plurals and homophones are not accounted for.
Avoid using or promoting this system.
The problem with the site you mentioned is that it was a clear cut case of copyright, trademark, and patent infringement all in one. I think the creator remained anonymous because they knew this.
I agree that it's not well designed and shouldn't be used.
What copyrighted work was it infringing upon?
The word list
In the UK, my understanding is that "skill, labour, and judgment" have to be involved in the compilation of a list for it to be eligible for copyright.
TFA seems to suggest that this isn't such a list.
The article is not about the copyright lawsuit but about some issues related to using this for emergency services.
But if you take a look at the ripped off algorithm (google what free words, take a look at the html and the script block inside it), you'll see it includes an array of words with a specific order.
That list and the order the words are in are copyright protected. Copyright is about protecting the particular form of something. This a very specific word list in a very specific order (the indices matter). It's a clear cut case of those specific words in that specific order being protected under copyright. If you want to be compatible with w3w, you have to use that specific list.
If you write a book, poem, or article that's clearly a copyrightable work even if all of the words are commonly used ones. This not different in any meaningful way from the point of view of the law. The fact that the words in that order spell out nonsense is not relevant. Copying and using it in its entirety is not fair use and a clear infringement.
You could use the same algorithm with a different word list and then you'd merely be facing patent infringement here. I would not recommend building a business around such a thing until the patent expires.
Someone must have put time (labour) into making the list. There's law specific to database copyright in the UK https://www.cooleygo.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-uk-data...
Here’s the result of @cybergibbons’ reverse engineering into the distribution over w3w terms that only differ in singular vs. plural: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...
The examples given here seem like the best case of it going wrong, they’re in a different country and UK rescuers know within seconds that they’re wrong.
I think this case further down is much more concerning:
> He found that the algorithm behind W3W often gave similar-sounding words and plural versions of words for locations in close proximity, which could cause confusion.
> So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames.
I wonder if the algorithm could somehow make it so similar sounding words like this aren’t anywhere near each other physically. It’s not as big a problem that leader and leaders sound the same, if you guarantee that only one of them is in the UK or at least within the same city/national park etc.
It's literally in the article:
"So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames."
That's potentially catastrophic, without an easy way to spot the mistake.
That's the exact example used in the comment you're replying to...?
Unless I was asleep replying(there is a 5% chance of that), I'm pretty sure their comment didn't say that at the time.
Such an example is presented in the article.
Recent and related:
Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271 - May 2021 (35 comments)
Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27029706 - May 2021 (3 comments)
What3Words: App used by emergency services under scrutiny - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26985759 - April 2021 (14 comments)
I wonder if a more efficient system for this kind of use-case would be possible by giving up on "global" positioning.
by relying on context you can lower the area you need to have address combinations for. In practice you would simply repeat the addresses every couple of 1000km or so.
needing help and calling in rescue from the other side of the world while also being unable to say you are in such and such area is presumably not something that happens too often.
In addition, the user knows their own location by virtue of having access to a GPS device - for W3W to work they've used a GPS and it's really just an in-band voice protocol for exchange of location.
It strikes me that W3W will eventually be replaced by the emergency location standards built into mobile which effectively SMS your location to the control centre on starting the call. Then there's little need for voice based W3W exchange - at best it could be a dialogue between caller and call handler to confirm the approximate area and location, and to take details like (for urban environments) if it's an apartment block or house etc. Or off the beaten track, which side of the mountain route they walked up to reach their current location.
The few times I've accidentally called emergency services, my Android phone asks me first if I want to allow the phone app to access my location...
It would've been more logical to automatically share it, to be honest...
maybe some type of encoding that sends it via audio. Would probably be the most robust way plus you can use the same encoding everywhere no matter the communication medium or cell net support.
At a minimum the scheme should include a checksum.
Sounds like they need to prune the word list and/or group together possible mispronunciations, misspellings and misreadings. If "correct horse battery" is a location, then "correct hose battery" and "correct house battery" need to be synonyms of the same location, not alternate locations. Either that or remove horse, hose and house from the word list entirely.
Shouldn't those things be as far apart as possible? Then the conversation would be
Person: "emm, I'm lost on the Yorkshire Moors...".
Rescuer: "no problem sir, just take advantage of the completely flawless wireless telephony system we have to download this app..."
Person: "ok, it says I'm at correct house battery"
Rescuer: "hmm, I'm showing you at the top of a mountain in Nepal. Let's try that again..."
I think if this is to be used by emergency services, then the time it takes to go "Let's try that again..." could mean the difference between life and death. I'd rather the system were designed in a way not just to make human error detectable, but rather make it not an error in the first place. (and I assume you're joking about asking someone to download an app they don't already have while on a call with emergency services, that can obviously never be the best solution)
It would be safe enough if the ones that are close are *guaranteed* to be exceedingly far apart and the lookup algorithm allowed specifying an area.
If correct horse battery is in England and correct house battery is in China and you have a well designed lookup it would know you're looking for something in England.
correct house battery is in China at x, y. Do you mean correct horse battery in England at z, w?
The real danger comes when the mistakes are a few miles apart.
I have to mention Geohash because it's easy to spell, licence free, variable precision, what else? Plug: https://demo.mro.name/geohash.cgi
That said, having familiar words in your (local?) alphabet is charming. But for public good it HAS to be public domain (the alphabet + algo, not the service, however).
I always thought that a combination of a geohash-like z order curve over a 15km radius, with an offline gps coordinates list of the 5000 most populated cities on earth would be sufficient to cover 99% of people on earth.
Not sure what's the average number of characters required for a 20m to 100m precision with such method.
It's true that the idea of plus codes of using city names makes a lot of sense.
I once heard a really unique orientation talk about http://www.volksnav.com – based on the idea of polar coordinates like on an imagined clock dial flat on earth centered at your local reference point (e.g. city center) and 12 o'clock = south. Used in one city in Brazil, I think.
Terrible: based on a single language, proprietary, IP owners being assholes, creates problems to the user case it was supposedly designed for, doesn't feature distance computing algorithms, takes even more space in a DB cell than latlong, I can go on for days.
Use numbers.
There are really are issues with such a system and you listed some of them, but your recommendation makes me feel like you didn't read beyond the headline.
They need a way to transfer location data by the word of mouth, which is extremely difficult when you're using numbers. With longer numbers, such as a comparatively precise location, you have a high risk of errors on both ends, so searching for a solution makes absolute sense.
Nevertheless, based on the proprietary IP maybe the rescue services should consider building an own solution or evaluating open source alternatives if there are any
Though What 3 Words requires you to download a custom app & for the emergency services to use a back-end for the same app when handling incoming calls — if we're doing that, could we not just have a simple app that checks your GPS and then dials 999 with your lat/lng added to the phone number?
My bank get me to key in my sort code & account number while using telephone banking. If we did the same here, we could get the precision of GPS without the user needing to call out any numbers
In New Zealand if you call the emergency number 111, the operator can automatically request the location of the device from the telco (with no opt out) if they belive there is a serious emergency and the location is not communicated. There is also some standardised way for the mobile phone to automatically send GPS coordinates to emergency numbers.
There's a standard for automatically sharing the current location with emergency services, which is supported by both Android and iOS [0]. According to the wiki article, the UK is even one of the countries that uses AML.
Bonus points: all modern browsers understand coordinate based location, no need to add an app.
AFAIK, this is required in the US. If you call 911 they can request your GPS position. All cell phones for that reason are required to do GPS. Even simple feature phones can do GPS in some way. They can acquire the GPS signal and then will forward that to the cell tower, which then is able to do the required calculations to translate that in coordinates. Somewhere around that line it was working, IRC.
Why would I read only the headline and comment? To gain imaginary internet points which I can spend literally nowhere? No worries my friend, I don't have ADHD and can read 2 minutes long articles.
It's not clear to me how a stupid system like this is used in favour of, say, 5 numbers+5 numbers (4 decimals coordinates lead to a ~5.5m radius)
I'm not sure I understand what you mean with "high risk of errors on both ends", as there is no chance of mispelling. How do I know that? Because numbers are used in military standards for comms that have to be clear even through unreliable channels. Languages that have numbers which might be misunderstood specifically use a different number set (one example is the military in China).
Building your own solution when you have a GLOBALLY ACCEPTED standard that took YEARS to be agreed upon is criminal in my opinion, rescue missions on the Alps where different cultures meet being a great example why you should stick to numbers.
have you ever tried providing a phone number/account number/id number over the phone? how easily/correctly was it transferred?
Now add in hypothermia, noise, weather, or bodily harm to that equation.
The only improvement would be if the app could provide the NATO phonetic alphabet version of your coordinates to you - but you're not going to remember those without looking at your screen while talking - which is multitasking in a situation that you probably aren't going to do it well in.
Finally, the verbal transfer time is about 1/3.
I don't like this thing for the reasons provided (proprietary and clearly has issues), but would rather see this in use than trying to provide ten numbers while bleeding out.
Have you tried having an injured foreigner spell words, maybe foreign, in the exact same situation? Yeah
I can ask the same about knowing and pronouncing numbers.
regardless, this is an article about a UK company's product being used by UK emergency services. An injured foreigner who can't speak English is going to have trouble with numbers too (granted, you may learn numbers first). You don't just make a call to emergency services and start spewing out numbers with no other vocabulary.
I can see your point on an international scale, and agree with you that this product is not globally scalable. Language barriers are language barriers until we all have the fictional babel fish.
edit: besides, you can always provide phonetic 'translations' if you want in to a foreigner's language/script if you must - not my preferred solution either though.
In military your are speaking about trained people to use proper pronunciation to eliminate disambiguation.
In rescue we are talking about untrained people how give an initial communication by word of mouth. This data is then translated to coordinates and then communication by then trained people in the chain of rescue.
So the problem is this initial communication by untrained people.
It's less about difference between words and numbers for encoding information and about the fact that what3words have chosen a very, very bad way of reliably encoding information in words. With their set of words there is an extreme risk of error and miscommunication, searching for a solution makes sense but their particular solution is not it.
There's a lot of research on how to choose words to ensure reliability of communication and reduce risk of misunderstandings, for example, the criteria used for Aviation Phonetic Alphabet - and what3words fails to take all that into account.
You don't want separate things that are pronounced nearly the same, what3words fails in this regard as it contains many pairs like wants/once, secretary/secretory, ordinance/ordnance.
You'd want a person that can reconfirm that word multiple to be certain that they've got that right, but what3words includes singular and plural wordforms (e.g. leader/leaders) which has caused miscommunication even when the responder has understood that they've got the right concept for the word or when the person who recites the three words from memory mistakenly thinks they've memorized it right.
You'd want to ensure that the words are limited to a set of sounds that are clearly pronouncable and understandable by non-native speakers of different backgrounds, what3words does not even attempt that.
In short, the particular system is poorly designed and fundamentally flawed because of that.
> Nevertheless, based on the proprietary IP maybe the rescue services should consider building an own solution or evaluating open source alternatives if there are any
Weren’t there a bunch of people trying to do exactly that (FOSS, translatable etc) only to get sued or as-good-as by what3words?
> They need a way to transfer location data by the word of mouth, which is extremely difficult when you're using numbers.
That doesn't sound correct. Numbers are universal, easier to remember, and less ambiguous than three English words. I don't see how it's more error prone to use numbers based systems, which many organisations and communities have been using for decades. And also considering the length of the three words which is roughly the same.
Woah I really have to disagree with numbers being easier to remember. I would imagine 3x words is far easier to remember than 12-16 numbers, and I don't see how it couldn't not be the case. The problem with using words that I see are as you've said - English locale isn't global, words without context can be misheard easily etc
Most people nowadays don't even remember their own phone number, let alone can remember two 4-5 digit numbers for their location. If I'd take 100 peoples to test what combination they can remember easier, I bet they have a harder time remembering 5.2345 + 6.2342 than dog.fridge.coffee.
> With longer numbers, such as a comparatively precise location, you have a high risk of errors on both ends
Although the numeric location gets more precise as you add more numbers - if they only get 3 decimal places, that's about 110x80m in the UK.
If you use degrees, minutes and seconds, you only need 6 numbers to get ~30x20m in the UK (and a decimal place on the seconds brings it down to ~3x2m - the same as W3W.)
What about geohash?
Not sure it's good enough over a crappy phone line...
I was thinking the exact same thing.
With a geohash someone only needs to provide 7 to 9 characters depending where they are and the accuracy needed.
Also as each additional character in the hash adds accuracy it should be easy for an operator to easily sanity check i.e caller to operator "I am hiking in the lake district...my geohash is ..." the operator only needs the first four characters to confirm if the general location is correct or not.
I guess it's still prone to spelling errors from operators inputting the data from a call.
As others say if you are installing an app to give you a location i.e. a geohash you can use an app to give a lat/lng.
Actually, w3w has localized their system for multiple languages. You can select a different language on their website. They have customers in several of the countries speaking those languages.
You can trivially do distance calculation by using their algorithm (which works offline if you use their sdk) to get the coordinates. The DB space is completely irrelevant: this algorithm is intended for humans being able to memorize three words. So, not sure what you are going on about here. Again, they have paying customers that are getting value out of this. Hard to argue with that, which you seem to be attempting here.
I'm not aware of a better solution that is usable by normal people. Good luck communicating a geohash to the emergency services. It's not going to be a thing as much as I like using them. Placekey seems one of their competitors but they don't produce human readable codes and they are US only. In any case, most people don't even know their latitude or longitude to any kind of precision. Coordinates are hard for people.
Regarding the IP, they use a combination of patents (the algorithm) and copyright (the word list) to protect their IP. They built a customer base around this stuff and they are well within their rights to protect their own work, which is what they are doing. IP law is what it is and w3w is simply using that as it was intended (protecting IP). That's just normal behavior for VC funded startups. Try to get some IP through some honest work, protect it, build a business around it. They are not being patent trolls here.
The way I see it, w3w has built their business without edge cases like in this article being a major obstacle to them. You could argue emergency services are important enough that they might want to improve their word list a bit. But still, it's not a basis for dismissing their business model, solution and general right to exist.
IMHO they are a bit over valued at this point and a likely acquisition target for someone so the investors get their bail out. Their current strategy is a long term dead end from the point of view of people adopting this. The proprietary nature of their solution is an obstacle for that. Once patents expire, similar solutions might emerge with different word lists, numbers of words, etc. that are more successful. Alternatively, post acquihire, a visionary company might just use some more liberal licensing to make this a bit more attractive.
I don't envy the team. It's a great idea but falls short once it leaves the lab. Everything gets really dirty in the real world especially during high stress or emergencies.
Moving to four words could really help remove the need for plural and words that sound similar. Accents really do make things tough.
Yeah the general idea is OK, but the practical usage just doesn't pan out unless you remove all plurals, all words that sound similar (including if spoken with different accents), etc etc. Then you end up needing 4-5 words, most with multiple syllables, and you're back to it being just as easy to tell the lat/long or using some other system.
You should envy the team. They've raised tens of millions of dollars for licensing of an algorithm that people RE'd in a day.
Their business now involves lots of bizdev droids and threatening open source implementors with baseless copyright lawsuits. It's nice work if you can get it.
I am surprised they've never tried to introduce some kind of erasure coding or error correction coding. A 4th word from a finite set could act as a "check word" that would detect wrong order of words, mis-spellings of words etc.
I also feel like the solution W3W is trying to deliver is a short term patch until we get emergency SMS location from phones themselves delivered to the control room - having in band spoken location works until you have that, but W3W leaves a lot to be desired. Given it is an app, it might be easier for it to show the user words to read, which are themselves all just NATO phonetic alphabet words to spell their location. You'll get far more redundancy and human error correction over the voice channel using the phonetic alphabet than words.
It wouldn't be as shiny a solution though, and that probably doesn't play into W3W's marketing strategy... Even if it would help save more lives.
It's not a great idea it's a stupid idea.
One of my favorite atomic tourism sites is near charm files rush (Red Gate Woods, outside Chicago, home to the remains of Chicago Piles 2 and 3), or is it charm file rush (Which is in Brazil), or is it charms file rush, on the border between New Hampshire and Maine?
Not a good system.
analogous to hash collision? what4words would reduce it. But you can't stop english language pluralisms (for instance) and if you start to make all plurals synonymous, you reduce the wordcount massively.
According to wolframalpha (Log2(surface area of earth / 9m^2)) about 46 bits of information.
So basically using A-Z 0-9 you could have it geocoded using 3 x3 signs (for example 2J4.KI9.999)
One can be more cute and come up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
You only need a lexicon of about 700 words to get a resolution of 50m with four words, which I reckon would be good enough for rescue work (i.e. the one niche w3w has managed to establish itself in).
What 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.
Well yeah, I'm not convinced either, but I also don't deal with panic ridden callers to emergency phone lines. I think I've called emergency 3 times in my many years.
Maybe it helps with an issue they have noticed with certain callers that I'm not aware of.
And its proprietary coding scheme :(
At least wiki brightened my mood : The site has been parodied by others who have created services including What3Emojis[29] using emojis, What3Birds[30] using British birds, What3fucks[31] using swear words and What3Numbers[32] using OpenStreetMap tile identifiers.
There's two scenarios here. Either you're looking up an exact location (either w3w or ll) as the information is required and then communicating it to others, or you're doing that in advance for an area you're familiar with and then memorising it.
In situation A, it's going to be a lot quicker and clearer to communicate w3w than an ll pair (for the same precision a ll pair requires 12-18 digits, plus specificity on +/-).
In situation B it's going to be a lot easier to remember the w3w descriptor, and you still have the same advantage as in situation A.
For spoken communication, w3w's rival is "it's 123 Fake Street, I'm the bloke in the green parka", not ll pairs.
None. Lat longs usability isn't the best (people don't like long numbers). But it's failure mode won't send you to Vietnam when you meant a public park in the UK. even if this system is constrained with simple, short, not confusable words (which would entail shrinking the earth or lowering the resolution) the fact that addresses are randomly assigned extremely reduces it's utility. Can you look at 2 addresses and know immediately where they are in relation to each other? Not the best tool for most map problems.
Getting sent 1km or even 100m away by accident could be critical depending on the geography. The closeness of the numbers increases that possibility. And an error that reports Vietnam is easy to coorrect.
Easy to recognise. I'm not sure the emergency services having to play a process-of-elimination word game is 'easy to correct'.
The app I have used makes it very clear. It autocompletes options as you type with a little flag. It is worth trying out if you have never used it.
Also you can send your location using popular messaging apps anyway right?
What? Why not just give a fucking location? What the hell is this?
The goal is to share a precise enough location without copy pasting, so with spellable and memorable words.
Morse code and other maybe newer concise encodings are inevitable.
once we escape our ubiquitious communication problem we will have no issues understanding one another
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...
That's not how emergency comm is supposed to work
> 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.
>> jump.legend.warblers which was in Vietnam
> So they knew exactly that it was wrong. So it worked perfectly.
Okay, but what if they got the invalid location and then the caller disconnected? Calling them back might be difficult. And if you do get the caller to repeat, can you now be sure that "jump.legends.warbler", which is in the UK, wasn't supposed to be "jump.legends.warblers", which is also in the UK? And how many cases are there that they didn’t mention, which were in the correct country, but a few kilometers off the real location?
Lat and long are scary? It's 2 numbers eh.
Lat/Lon is already integrated in all mapping apps or GPS devices.
You can easily make a lat/lon visualizer with simple html and JavaScript; it would require GPS and a web connection, but so does this stupid what3words.