At a crossroads

by Ilse Genovese

The ACSM Bulletin is at a crossroads. Because of the negative impact of the economy on revenues, the final three 2010 editions, beginning with this one, will be provided online only. A “digital Bulletin” has been in the works for some time, as the archive of past issues at
www.webmazine.org attests. This August issue is a step up; it’s a dynamic digital edition that you can read as you would a printed magazine. In fact, what you love about the ACSM Bulletin in print, will now be delivered to you online—and more. more >>

Want to read the magazine's dynamic edition? Click here.

Protecting low-lying coastal areas

by Landon Blake

Levee networks are an important part of flood control systems that protect real property parcels from damage by floods. Land surveyors play a critical role in creating and maintaining these levee networks. This article will help you understand what a levee is and how levees link to form levee networks. I will examine the impact of levee networks on land use and land planning in low lying coastal areas and explain how land surveyors working in low-lying coastal areas create and maintain levee networks. I will share with you information from my own experience working as a land surveyor in the California Sacramento / San Joaquin Delta. more>>

Ushahidi Haiti and Chile

by Sophia B. Liu, Anahi Ayala Iacucci, and Patrick Meier

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, began as a one-off deployment for mapping reports of post-election violence after the December 2007 Kenyan elections. Ory Okolloh, co-founder of Ushahidi, initially shared reports she received about the violence through her blog. She soon became overwhelmed by the amount of crisis data she was receiving and asked if it was possible to create a website that would allow anyone to publicly report crisis information and “put” it on a map so that everybody could see where the information was coming from. This resulted in a group of volunteer developers and designers in Africa and the U.S. creating a website enabling public collection of near real-time crisis information via mobile phones, e-mail, and the web submission page. more>>

Surveying and mapping
the universe in 3D

by Tony Rogers

As laser scanning technology advances at an unprecedented pace with never before seen capabilities and applications the question facing the market is no longer ‘can we scan it?’ but rather ‘what do we do with our scan results?’ How is point cloud software helping surveyors around the world? more>>

Draft 2011 ALTA/ACSM Survey Standards approved

by Gary Kent

The final draft of the proposed 2011 Minimum Standard Detail Requirements for ALTA/ACSM Land Title Survey Standards was approved by a joint committee of the American Land Title Association (ALTA) and the National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS) which met in Chicago on August 11, 2010. The document will go up for a vote by the membership of ALTA in October and the NSPS Board of Governors and Board of Directors in November. Assuming both organizations approve the new document, it will become effective on February 23, 2011. 
more>>

Understanding the Cultural Landscape

by Brett Wallach; reviewed by Gerry Curtis

I have to admit right now that I opened "Understanding the Cultural Landscape" with some apprehension about reading just for pleasure and general interest a book that gave every indication of being a textbook. The author is or was a teacher of geography at the University of Oklahoma, after all. Then I read Mr. Wallach’s introduction and was even more apprehensive. His first two sentences in that introduction are “Geography is a strange subject. You may think you know what it’s about, but stick around.” Uh-oh! Those sentences were both scary and somehow appealing, like the introduction to a particularly graphic mystery novel. The surveyor/map reader in me was hooked. more>>

Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs, and the rise of Modern Mathematics

by Amir Alexander; reviewed by N.W.J. Hazelton

Dawn, May 30, 1832. Two young men meet at Gentilly on the outskirts of Paris to fight a duel. At issue is the honor of a young woman. Both men are members of revolutionary groups and have been active in the political upheavals of the era. They have agreed that only one of the pistols will be loaded, leaving the affair to chance. The face each other, and at the signal a shot rings out. One falls, mortally wounded, and is taken to the nearby Cochin hospital. The next morning, Évariste Galois dies in the arms of his brother, Alfred. He is just 20 years old. more>>