Category Archives: Professional Surveyor Archives
Education In Surveying: The Crucial Role of SaGES
The 24th bi-annual meeting of the Surveying and Geomatics Educators’ Society (SaGES) took place at Tyler Junior College in Tyler, Texas, June 16-20, 2013. This year it was combined with a FIG (Federation Internationale des Geometres) 2013 regional conference as an integral part, for the first time. The meeting was hosted by Patti Williams and Willace Johnson, both instructors in the...
Feature: CERN
Surveying in support of sub-atomic research. “The actual state of our knowledge is always provisional and … there must be, beyond what is actually known, immense new regions to discover” – Louis de Broglie “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire” (European Council for Nuclear Research), the celebrated research center in Geneva, Switzerland and home to...
Editor’s Desk: Why? Because It’s Our Future
At the Florida Surveying and Mapping Society annual meeting in St. Pete’s Beach last month, I enjoyed hobnobbing with surveyors whom I’ve gotten to know over the past few years. But perhaps even more so, I relished chatting with members of our next generation of surveyors, the 20- and 30-something-year-olds. As I listened intently to their...
Picks and Clicks: Assorted Carlson Tips and Tricks
Because my last column focused on tips and tricks for those who use AutoCAD or IntelliCAD, for this issue I put together a few of my favorite tips for working in Carlson Software. Non-Surface Points and Entities Like other survey/civil software programs, Carlson gives you several ways to specify the data that’s to be included...
Where Theory Meets Practice: The Geiod and Leveling
As mentioned previously in this column, the geoid is the equipotential gravitational surface on which all elevations are referenced. An equipotential surface is where the force times distance is a constant. Gravity provides the force, and the distance is the height above this surface defined along the plumb line of an instrument. As shown in Figure...
Fraud in Surveying
Editor’s Note: If you think that today’s surveying and geomatics schools are simply cranking out technology-fueled “button pushers,” think again. In her senior paper, Claudia Barrueta, recent graduate of Fresno State’s Geomatics Engineering Program, offers a thought-provoking case study of a surveyor who recognized a fraudulent situation and chose to do the right thing (here a...