Monday, January 18, 2010

January articles posted

Editorial: America the Beautiful
After a rough wagon ride up to Pikes Peak in 1893, it was the view from the top that inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write a poem that became known as "America the Beautiful." Later set to music by Samuel Ward, its images have become part of our national conscience. Few there are who cannot sing at least one stanza of the four. It's no secret to ....Read the Article
Brass Caps and Bandanas—Monumenting Anaktuvuk Pass
The Inupiaq are Eskimo people that live along the Arctic Ocean coast of Alaska's North Slope. In the last few hundred years a nomadic splinter group of the Inupiaq known as the Nunamiut moved inland away from the coast to follow the Caribou migrations and settled at Chandler Lake and the Killik River in the ....Read the Article
GIS Mapping—­Campus Style
When Craig Moore switched from the academic side of Virginia Tech in October 2004 to become an engineer for site development in the campus' Facilities Department, he inherited a GIS that was not easily updated, and maintaining it was a problem. As a result, "it trailed off to nothing," he said. At that time the system focused on ... Read the Article
Rabley 1-10
Alleviating Poverty in the Developing World—Leveraging Property Rights with Geospatial Technology
According to renowned economist Hernando de Soto, the inability of persons worldwide to gain formal recognition of their real property rights is a major stumbling block to alleviating poverty. This lack of formal legal recognition of property rights is ...Read the Article
Crattie 1-10
A Dividing Line Brings Us Together
Oh, the lines. The shortest distance between two points? A line pulled to ring a bell? A colonial boundary between two long forgotten counties? Lines of dialog in a television documentary? The lines marked of legal secession from an illegally seceded state? Soup lines during the depression? A line connecting a hook to ....Read the Article
Stocking 1-10
Conference Review: Leica HDS 2009—Simplifying the Complicated
When GPS technology first began to filter into survey work, it was necessarily complex, depending, as it did, on satellites, atomic clocks, relativistic equations, and the like. Surveyors took this in stride and accepted that working with such arcane magic would always require expensive equipment, lengthy training, and endless hours of ....Read the Article
FeedBack
Clarification Regarding 2009 Manual: I found the article "Why a Federal Surveying Manual is Relevant to the States," by Steve Hansen intriguing [Sept. 2009]. I interpret the author to mean that the new manual soon to be published (2009) is binding on all recovery, restoration, and retracements of the Public Land Survey regardless of the date of ...Read the Comments
Vantage Point: Going Out with a Sigh
The story I'm about to relate took place over the space of seven months, and the outcome ratcheted up so much emotion that it was impossible to write at its last turning point. On October 1, 2009, the backhoes revved up their engines at 8 A.M. sharp, the earliest time allowed for such noise in my township, and La Ronda began falling to ...Read the Article