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 excitement about their futures, I kept in the back of my mind the content that was being worked on for this issue of PSM.  While I wasn’t supposed to divulge our plans, I was bursting at the chest to tell them.

Now, some of you are wondering why an issue of Professional Surveyor Magazine would be pursuing and publishing a story about our exclusive and very rare visit underground to the Swiss scientific research facility where a 27km-diameter sub-atomic collider needs to be recalibrated by large scale metrologists (basically, surveyors with Ph.D.s behind their names). AND a feature where another of our own, Rudy Strickland, RLS, GISP, spent a couple of days visiting and learning about the plans of Google, Inc. 

Well, folks, let me ‘splain, as they say in these parts of Maryland. 

It’s no longer the world of exclusively boundary surveying that is capturing and exciting our young people. It’s the exciting worlds of precision measurement and positioning, no matter what the tools or what the project may be. Boundary work is an essential and exciting part in its own right, but not the whole.

If you have any doubts that these new technologies and systems we bring to your attention with increasing fervor every month don’t work, check out this month’s article on unmanned aerial systems, where field tests of UAS photogrammetry reveal verifiable results that could very well complement traditional surveying solutions.

Folks, as Bob Dylan assured us back when we were young’uns:  “The times they are a changin’.”
 
—Neil