Guest Editorial: SPAR 2012 Recap
As they say, everything is bigger and better in Texas and SPAR 2012 was no exception. With a theme of "End-to-End 3D", 850 participants were educated by 60 exhibitors and 100 presenters over three and a half days. The conference program had 5 tracks--Industrial Facilities, Civil Transportation & Building, New Technologies, Security Planning & Law Enforcement, and ....
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Monitoring a Cruise Shipwreck
With 14-decks, the Italian-made Costa Concordia cruise ship was a gargantuan-size vessel by any accounts. It measured 290 meters (950-feet) long, 35.5 meters (116 feet) wide, and weighed 114,500 tons. It was the biggest of a half-dozen "dream class cruise ships" owned and operated by Costa Crociere, a subsidiary of ....
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Getting in and outa Dodge
The Port of Miami seaport is located on Dodge Island in the waters of Biscayne Bay in the City of Miami. It is the busiest passenger cruise seaport in the world, having handled over four million passengers in each of the past four calendar years. It's currently the 11th largest cargo container port in the United States, and the ....
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Frames for the Future—Replacing NAD 83 (Part 4 of 4)
The Need for a New Geometric Datum. To support improved GNSS positioning a new geometric datum is required. An excerpt from the aforementioned NGS 10-Year plan states "NGS [will redefine] the national horizontal datum to remove gross disagreements with the ITRF" (the ITRF is defined below). While ....
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Connecting the Dots—An Interview with Tom Greaves
At a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs told the students, "... you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards." He was referring to the fact that he had dropped out of college, but had learned about the beauty of typography in a calligraphy class he took after ...
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Product Review: Champion TKO GNSS Receiver
In a sea of seemingly sameness among GPS receivers, it can at times be difficult to wade through and find much of a reason to be excited over newly announced RTK devices. Humanity has managed to bridge the technological hurdle of putting all of the necessary components for RTK in a single, cable-free housing, and has done so with aplomb. Welcome to the 21st Century...(where's my ...
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Footsteps: Fripps Versus Walters
In 2005 a California court case involving the boundary common to portions of a PLSS ¼ section was decided. In this installment of Footsteps we will examine that case for lessons we can glean as boundary surveyors. We'll start with a discussion of the timeline for the events in the case. This timeline will include transactions involving the two parcels on either side of the ...
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Blazing the Trail for Advanced Cadastral Mapping
Alberta, Canada has a long history of providing reliable, accurate and high-quality digital mapping data that has been achieved through the province's commitment to an advanced cadastral mapping system. Since its inception more than 20 years ago, the system has flourished, leading to the creation of many new datasets and products that promote the efficient delivery of government ....
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Vantage Point: The Future of Riverbed Ownership
In December of 2011, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments about who owns the beds of three Montana rivers. Since the Supreme Court does not hear ownership cases very often, that in itself is of interest. But more importantly to surveyors, the outcome could possibly alter the course of boundaries in rivers. Judges start out as attorneys, and not all attorneys are intimately (or ....
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