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Apple Filling Out its 'Ground Truth' Mapping Team with New Regional and Local Job Listings
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HA! Not a single one of my reported problems from the first month of release has been fixed. Good luck waiting for Apple to fix their map disaster.
One of the purposes of a ground truth team would be to follow up on reports users send through the app itself. They can't simply rely on the mapping equivalent of "autocorrect" because some reports are unintentionally inaccurate (cough, cough, Yelp, cough) and some will be attempts at intentionally polluting location data.
The other thing Apple could do with a team like this would be to assign an accuracy score for location correction reports by device or Apple ID (i.e. someone reporting the Washington monument in the Potomac could be assigned a low score which could require subsequent reports be correlated with other reports prior to being acted on or, in more extreme cases, could even be safely ignored).
Hopefully, this post passes muster with the grammar Nazis.
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I only checked the posted screenshot and did not see London. Did you actually go to the website? You may be taking this job opportunity more seriously than I thought.
People Forget
Everyone is comparing Maps to GoogleMaps. They forget that GoogleMaps was terrible for a few years. Roads marked as paved when they were really logging tracks that vanished in the woods after a few km. Enter an address and it would pin it somewhere within a few km of the real location, or often thousands of miles away (For a long time it would point me toward Taunton England even though I entered Taunton MN). It had a lot of trouble with bad data it imported from public databases. It's taken years for them to refine it to the state it's in now. It will take just as long for Maps to reach the same state. I do agree that Apple should have had this ground truthing team on the ground BEFORE Maps was released though.
Everyone is comparing Maps to GoogleMaps. They forget that GoogleMaps was terrible for a few years. Roads marked as paved when they were really logging tracks that vanished in the woods after a few km. Enter an address and it would pin it somewhere within a few km of the real location, or often thousands of miles away (For a long time it would point me toward Taunton England even though I entered Taunton MN). It had a lot of trouble with bad data it imported from public databases. It's taken years for them to refine it to the state it's in now. It will take just as long for Maps to reach the same state. I do agree that Apple should have had this ground truthing team on the ground BEFORE Maps was released though.
Apple Maps has been great where I live and travel as long as I have an accurate address. It's the Yelp-sourced POI data that seems to be the problem. Type in an address like 123 Fourth Street and it's fine; type in the name of a business and it can be a bit of a crap shoot.
Hopefully, this post passes muster with the grammar Nazis.
I disagree that the ground truth was needed before release. Apple, however, should have labeled the product a beta.
Do you think companies post a different, separate ad for every position?
They don't. Multiple people will apply for the job, and they will hire as many of those applicants as they deem necessary. You don't need to post multiple ads to hire multiple people.
The perils of trying to be secretive. They should have done all this before releasing their Maps, which everyone knew was coming anyway.
It's a full-time, ongoing job and it's for accuracy, not initial map creation from the ground up. Get a former delivery person and you'll have a major city corrected in a week. Since it's a full-time gig they can expand past that and cover a country in no time.
There is no reason that Apple should have to fix every corner of it's maps instantly especially since no map service is perfect.
Either's valid, but having neither 'of' nor an apostrophe is incorrect.
When do I start?
Explain to me how an apostrophe is appropriate here? Apostrophes are for contractions or to show possession, neither of which applies here.
This year's sales - Possessive
This year's especially hot - Contraction
I have five years experience - neither
Edit:I stand corrected
Apostrophes in Time (Temporal) Expressions
Apostrophes are used in time expressions such as 3 years' insurance (also called 'temporal expressions'). In a temporal expression, the apostrophe is positioned before the s for single units of time and after for multiple units of time.
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You always have to ground truth. Just this morning I heard on the local news a construction company in Quesnel BC called before they dug. They got the OK, From FortisBC, no lines where they were working, but the first scoop from the backhoe broke a gas line. The map made by FortisBC, who put in the line was wrong. A map is just an idea until it's checked.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti.../07/31/bc-fortisbc-gas-emergency-quesnel.html
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OK here's the best guide to the use of the Apostrope that I've ever run across
At launch it was sooo bad in LA. :/ Made me pick up google maps and never look back.
Apple's Maps is a joke (new idea on these forums?). I can appreciate the effort and money they're putting towards fixing it. However, if any third party app had failed as miserably and been as inaccurate and reflected so poorly on the device and OS it was made on as Maps has, Apple would've pulled it from the App Store and blacklisted the developer. Admittedly, Google's map app has its own problems as well but I expected more responsiveness to the issue from Apple which has been passive at best.
Forstall was first to go and Tim Cook should be held partially accountable if the next large update fails.
Forstall was first to go and Tim Cook should be held partially accountable if the next large update fails.