Vol.7 No.6 Article Posted

Editorial: Maps as a Metaphor
"I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us--everything that exists--proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision." There are many surveyors and mappers and members of the precision community who concur with these words of Thomas Edison. Economy, too, hangs on immutable laws. One of the ....Read the Article

Measuring a Caribbean Disaster On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the city of Port-au-Prince, the capital and largest city of Haiti. Tens of thousands of buildings collapsed, and more than 200,000 people died in the disaster. Earthquakes are not unexpected in Haiti. The country sits astride several fault lines, among them the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault ....Read the Article

3D-Laser Scanning and Surveying Collide LandAir Surveying started business in 1988 performing site surveys and topographic surveys for contractors in Georgia and surrounding states with two survey crews and a total staff of less than 10. By 1998 the firm expanded to surveying cell tower sites for the telecommunications industry (more than 3,000 sites in four years) using ...Read the Article

Another Triumph! He's done it again. Javad Ashjaee has released an impressive state-of-the-art product that enables surveyors to expand their GNSS capabilities. On June 29, 2010 Javad unveiled the Triumph VS at the company's 40,000 square foot newly designed headquarters and JAVAD EMS boardmanufacturing facility in San Jose, California. Over the decades ...Read the Article

Product Review: Hemisphere GPS R220 One of the recent trends in precision GPS manufacturing is the enclosed, fully integrated receiver. This is no doubt in response to market demands by surveyors in the field for gear that offers more durability and less complexity in setting up and getting to work. This trend has certainly offered surveyors many benefits, however, it has also ushered in a few limitations. For instance, many of these ...Read the Article

Comprehensive Collection Recording the location, dimensions and physical attributes of every piece of equipment constituting rural utilities throughout the United States might seem like a tall order. But information tools used to build a GIS have advanced so much in recent years that the endeavor is not only possible, but plausible. Great Falls, Montana-based GeoNav Group International, Inc. recently acquired the technology to pull ....Read the Article

Feedback Doing a Proper Job: I have a better reason for the legal profession insisting on a metes and bounds descriptions for dependent resurveys than clerk mentality or ancient check lists. In his article "Rewriting Legal Descriptions" [Vol. 7, Num. 4], Gary Kent's example of "the most egregious example of description rewriting is the preparation of a metes and bound description for a property that is a lot in ...Read the Comments

Vantage Point: "Just" What?
Several months ago my husband and I were working on a rail to trail conversion in our neighborhood, digging out debris and planting trees. At one point I was separating the junk found in the digging process from the recyclable beer cans and glass bottles when someone walked up and started talking to me. With my head still down, in the midst of trying to subdue a long strand of barbed wire into a ...Read the Article

Stanislav "Stas" Sila-Novitsky, GNSS Pioneer and Longtime Javad Associate, Passes in Russia

Stanislav "Stas" Sila-Novitsky, GNSS Pioneer and Longtime Javad Associate, Passes in Russia

Written by Glen Gibbons

Wednesday, 02 June 2010

Editor's note: The following article, by Glen Gibbons, the editor and founder of Inside GNSS, recently appeared on Glen's blog. We at The American Surveyor knew Stas very well and always considered him to be a friend. On our visits to Moscow he went out of his way to make us feel like family. In the next blog posting is a slide show that highlights some of the visit to the Izmailovsky Craft Market Glen mentions, as well as the JAVAD GNSS User Conference in 2008: Very sad news from Moscow. Earlier this month, Stanislav Sila-Novitsky — Stas to his friends and colleagues — died unexpectedly after a short illness. A member of the executive staff of Javad GNSS, Sila-Novitsky had a long career in space electronics engineering. During the Soviet era, he was the department head with the Russian Space Agency’s Institute of Space Device Engineering, which was responsible for the development of the overall GLONASS system electronics. Around 1990, Sila-Novitsky joined Ashtech Inc., which had established a Moscow operation in the final years of the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of a 20-year relationship with Javad Ashjaee and the series of companies that the latter operated in Russia. During those chaotic and difficult economic times, I heard from more than one Russian engineer this observation about the government, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” And, like many Russians, Stas’s humor also tended toward the ironic — but it was a gentle irony that I never saw veer into sarcasm. I first met Stas in the mid-1990s but didn’t really get to know him until I visited Moscow in 2005 and 2007. Somewhat taciturn around strangers in settings outside Russia, he clearly became more comfortable, even expansive in his native land. Although several pleasant memories suggest themselves — outings to Red Square on Moscow's Metro system — one stands out: the afternoon that he took time away from his work responsibilities to guide a small group of us personally through Moscow’s amazing Izmailovsky Craft Market. He was careful about his guests' well-being. At night, when Stas accompanied us back to our hotel, he led us down this street, not the other one that looked the same but with dangers in the shadows. Then we watched as he walked back alone to Leningradsky Prospekt, where Stas would wave down a passing private car willing to serve as one of Moscow impromptu taxis and take him home. I never learned a lot about Stas’s personal background. As echoed in his name, his family had come to Russia from Poland — or Russia had come to it as the borders moved back and forth in the 19th and 20th centuries. I always meant to find out more about that history and thought there would always be another right time for that. But it never came, and now that moment has gone forever. So, Stas’s passing teaches us the lesson once again: tell all our stories and ask for all theirs, drink all the toasts, take all the photos, visit all the sites desired but unseen, voice all our apologies and welcome their joys and regrets. When the opportunity to meet old friends appears, don’t turn aside or rush right by. For life is uncertain, but death is not. And time flies; it doesn’t take the bus. —Glen Gibbons Source: http://www.insidegnss.com/node/2110