Interesting Case from Pennsylvania

This is as big as Kelo v. City of New London

A 3Mb PDF of a newspaper article from the Potter Leader-Enterprise can be downloaded here: http://www.amerisurv.com/PDF/Potter_County_Article.pdf

September articles posted

Editorial: Surveyors Get the Point
For me, the 6th annual ESRI Surveying and Engineering Summit represented a sea-change. While earlier meetings I attended were designed to attract surveyors into the world of GIS, the trend has taken hold and surveyors everywhere are busy incorporating GIS into their work flows. I like the way ....Read the Article

Point to Point: Can Retracements Be Confidential? Do your clients have a right to expect that the survey you conduct for them will be confidential? Let's assume for a moment that mandatory survey recording laws did not exist (and indeed, they do not exist in most areas) and that no other obligation to divulge the results of the ....Read the Article

WowFactor: TPC Desktop 2008 Global Background Clearing TPC Desktop 2008 is all about making it easier to work with your survey data and drawings. It's about doing less work and getting more done. Their new Global Background Clearing is a good example. We put a lot of information on drawings. Take a typical ALTA or site survey-- they can ... Read the Article

Wildfire Maps Keep Agency Missions Blazing Forward Blazing out of control wildfires have been sweeping across northern California this summer just as they did last fall in the southern region of the state and many times previously, leaving in their path death and destruction. These fires are ...Read the Article

Applanix: Solutions for Mobile Mapping and Positioning It's a given that Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) don't work everywhere, for example if the signals are sufficiently blocked by such things as tree canopy, or urban canyons. Because of the need to locate things everywhere, a great deal of ....Read the Article

RTN-101: Mapping (Part 14) Much of what surveyors do is essentially mapping, and much of mapping is/could/ would/should be characterized as surveying. But what certainly raises the blood pressure of many surveyors is when one puts the two terms in the same sentence, as I have just done. The debate over....Read the Article

The Marriage of GIS and Land Surveying (No Shotgun Needed) Too often the GIS professional and the surveyor are at odds; a hoity-toity GIS guy looks askance at a muddy-booted surveyor who wants to pin him down on accuracy and ...Read the Article

Software Review: I-Site Studio 3.0 and 4400 Laser Scanner It seems that every surveying magazine now overflows with stunning 3D images of everything from people, to cars, to historic landmarks, to infrastructure. Point clouds of intricate structures and shapes naturally captivate the geometrically adept mind. But what about the ...Read the Article

Product Review: SECO Poles and Prisms Tired of prism pole slippage and non-adjustable prism pole bubble levels? Tired of tilting prism target assemblies that slip as you are walking back to the instrument or having to lift the prism pole out of the bipod ring, or not being able to adjust the "spring" out of ...Read the Article

Vantage Point: If Not Now, When? June was a difficult month. A friend less than a year older than I am quickly succumbed to a resurgence of breast cancer. A colleague three years younger suddenly died of complications related to diabetes, although he had looked fine just a few months ago when I last saw him. Such events make ...Read the Article

Surveying `Da Situation: The Last Straw
It is bad enough that we've already had to endure months of election campaign rhetoric, but I read an article awhile back that was the last straw. I happened to be scanning the newspaper when I came across a piece reporting that the rock star Bruce Springsteen had ...Read the Article

The American Surveyor July articles

Editorial: Machine Control Electronic technology such as EDMs, total stations and data collection have radically transformed the way we work by reducing manpower requirements, enabling us to produce higher quality work in less time, and hopefully, increasing the profit margin. Technology has also made our work more ....Read the Article

Point to Point: Good Data, No Fences In his recent commentary "Good Data Make Good Fences," that appeared in Forbes online, Peter Huber argues that technology has progressed to the point of being able to trivialize finding property boundaries and other constraints on the use of property. Boundary locations have been....Read the Article

The WowFactor: Heads-up Rod Level by SECO In late 1999 the folks from SECO were clearing out some old imported auto-levels that had been a total disaster due to poor compensator design and manufacturing. But all was not lost. One of the cool features on the auto-level was a circular bubble that was viewed by looking straight into ... Read the Article

Stonehenge on Ice: The Story of Making a Frozen Replica The idea to build a full scale replica of Stonehenge in ice came at the convergence of two events in the middle of the hottest mid-summer July day in Fairbanks, Alaska. I was the chairman of the 41st annual Alaska Surveying ...Read the Article

Day of Reckoning: Fatal Flaws in America's Construction Industry Our wasteful construction industry has always been an expensive problem. But factor in a massive national deficit and the economic and safety threats caused by our aging ....Read the Article

Vantage Point: How "Hard" Must "Hardship" Be? Our governments, whether local, state, or federal, have a certain amount of say-so and control over our real estate. All three have the power to exercise their powers of eminent domain to condemn private property for public uses, providing that just compensation is paid to ....Read the Article

RTN­101: Mounts Count (Part 13) Reframing Reference Frameworks. There are few aspects of the subject of RTNs that are not in some way controversial; not uncharacteristic for new ideas. Before we look at mounting and monumentation options (and there are plenty of...Read the Article

Software Review: Adapx Digital Pen and Capturx for ArcGIS It all started with Dick Tracy and his radio wrist watch. Now we have a pen that is a data collector. The Adapx digital pen is both Bluetooth-enabled and a USB device. The pen weighs just over an ounce and is about the size of an average ballpoint pen. Communication is either ...Read the Article

Software Review MicroSurvey CAD 2008 MicroSurvey CAD 2008 (MSCAD) represents the latest incarnation of their popular desktop drafting software. MSCAD is a fully integrated COGO and design suite developed for the IntelliCAD platform, specifically, IntelliCAD version 6.4. For those of you unfamiliar with...Read the Article

FeedBack On Elevation Matters. I read, with interest, Wendy Lathrop's article "Insure and Regulate­Elevation Matters" [March 2008]. I agree that we, as professionals, need to advise clients about the technical aspects of developing in floodplains. That presumes we have an understanding of ...Read the Article

Surveyors Report: Doing the Right Thing
Everyone faces this dilemma: "Will I do the right thing, even if it will cost me something, or do the wrong thing, because it's easier or others do it?" When I was a teenager, my mom would ask, "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?" Of course it depended on how ...Read the Article

Bad Trees Make Good Neighbors

Unbelievable.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/05/29/pkg.ne.tree.cut.in.half.ketv