Category Archives: Professional Surveyor Archives
Business Angle: Staying Current with Marketing
For small- and medium-sized businesses, marketing tasks can be difficult to establish and keep current. Many times, simply determining what the marketing tasks should be for your firm can be challenging, especially if there isn’t an employee assigned to manage them full time. This can result in problems like an archaic corporate website, existing clients...
Feature: A new Twist on “Study Abroad”
An enterprising surveyor completes her master’s degree online while surveying for the U.S. government in Afghanistan.On the Saturday morning before Christmas, students at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi marched across a stage in caps and gowns to collect their diplomas, but it was business as usual for graduate Teresa Smithson, working as a civilian...
Feature: Under Thin Ice
An exceptional set of explorers surveys the caves inside a dying glacier on the side of Mt. Hood in Oregon. All photos courtesy of Brent McGregor, except where noted. Editor’s Note: High-profile scientific questions permeate the public consciousness, and surveying, mapping, and field data collection are the “ground truth” element of geophysical scientific research. This...
Editor’s Desk: #geohipsters
Who are these young folks who are quietly changing the geospatial world? They are talented, resourceful, and influential. They harbor some of the same misgivings that surveyors have about old-school GIS, but you might be surprised to find that they also hold surveyors in particularly high esteem. You should get to know a few. As...
Feature: Babysitting Bertha
Monitoring critical infrastructure above the world’s largest tunneling machine in Seattle involves overcoming seismic, geotechnical, and historic challenges. Seattle’s SR 99 Tunnel Project, which will provide a traffic bypass under two miles of downtown Seattle, employs Bertha, the largest-diameter tunneling machine ever built. Folks can follow the progress of Bertha with her own twitter feed...
The Political Surveyor: The Surveyor, GIS, and Privacy
Imagine that a surveyor is contacted to provide property surveys and topographic mapping for the planning and potential design of a major new highway project. All the initial processes—the collection of parcel information to conduct a corridor analysis, to study alternative alignments for the road, to select a right-of-way, and to identify properties for which...