Work Of Surveyors Research Articles

The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide by Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher

Reviewed by: The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide by Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher Vicki L. Tinnon The Old Federal Road in Alabama: An Illustrated Guide. Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2019. pp. vii and 164; maps, diagr, photos, notes, and index. $24.95 Paper (ISBN 978-0-8173-5930-0). Originally, the Federal Road was created to provide a shorter distance of travel between Washington and New Orleans. Prior to the creation of the Federal Road, postal riders and travelers made their way from Washington to New Orleans through the Appalachian Mountains to Nashville, and then down the Natchez Trace. This was a 1,500-mile isolated route and travelers had to pack their own food and water and risk the possibility of being attacked by robbers. The Federal Road would decrease the travel distance by approximately 500 miles. Though the Federal Road traversed many states, Braund, Waselkov, and Christopher focus on the history and geography of the Old Federal Road in Alabama. The book is composed of two parts — one focusing on the history and geography and the other on driving tours. The first chapter delves into the early history of the paths and roads in the region. Using published accounts, the authors detail the early work of surveyors trying to map the potential route. Of particular interest in this chapter is the account of Isaac Briggs and his assistant, Thomas Robertson. The pair entered the Creek Nation from Georgia on October 6, 1804. The obstacles they faced are well documented, including the fact that they got lost and wandered. According to Briggs, they wandered for 112 miles. One of the goals of this expedition was to calculate the latitude and longitude for several points along the route. The only instrument Briggs had was a surveyor’s pocket sextant. On a humorous note, the authors state that Briggs only came up with three points along the paths that would become the Federal Road. The latitude calculations were quite accurate and close to those we use today. The longitude calculations, however, “were consistently too far west by 11 to 21 minutes” (22). Briggs did not have a chronometer and had to rely on astronomical observations to calculate longitude. The second chapter focuses on the building of the Federal Road. It is also noted in this chapter that many Native Americans objected to roads through their land. Officials, like Benjamin Hawkins, worked to expand the transportation network across the Mississippi Territory through negotiation and treaties. The treaties contained information that indicated the indigenous land would eventually be used for immigration traffic. However, the most pressing need at this time was the creation of a route that would allow for efficient mail service. Over time, traffic on the route increased substantially. Much of the route went through wilderness so travelers often dealt with potential danger — anything from accidents to snake bites to being injured from attack. The authors state that as traffic increased, Creek opposition to the Federal Road also increased. [End Page 290] The Creek War and the defeat of the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend are briefly discussed in the third chapter. The authors touch on the Creek War (and the War of 1812) to point out that travel on the Federal Road was essentially halted during that period. After the war, the Federal Road was once again safe for travel and immigration soared. It is also noted that there were immense changes in the cultural landscape between 1814 and 1820. There was still tension between the Red Stick Creeks and the United States. As a result, the Gulf Coast region was militarized. Also of significance in this chapter was the discussion on the maintenance and funding of the Federal Road. The federal government only maintained the road during the territorial period. Once Alabama achieved statehood in 1819, most of the funding and maintenance fell to state and county officials. In the fourth chapter, the authors used published accounts of travelers on the Federal Road to document what the experience was like. These accounts not only provide information on what...

Tanah Rata and the Development of the Cameron Highlands, 1925–2030

The Cameron Highlands is named after William Cameron, a surveyor working for the British colonial administration who explored the region in the mid-1880s. In 1931 a township site was selected for Tanah Rata, with designated areas for public buildings, residential use, the armed forces, and recreation. Planning for the town was based in part on the garden city movement, whose supporters included Charles Compton Reade, the first town planner of the Federated Malay States. Economically, the town depends on income from agriculture and from tourism, both of which are expanding and creating environmental problems.

Proposals for Changes in Surveying-Legal Procedures for the Needs of Cadastre in Poland

Abstract The aim of this paper is to present the need for changes of geodetic-legal procedures for the cadastre and real estate management. This problem was analyzed both in theoretical and practical terms. In order to better present the analyzed technical and legal procedures, a study of several cases of surveying documentation was made. On their example the problems associated with the surveying services were shows and the formal and legal procedures, on the basis of which described surveying works were done were verified. The problem presented is current and valid not only for the comfort of the surveyor's work, but also from the point of view of the structure and modernization of the real estate cadastre, constituting the backbone of the real estate management. The article emphasized the need to unify the databases of state registers and the digitization of the National Geodetic and Cartographic Resources (PZDGiK). Research has shown that despite the continuous changes of legislation, there are still many shortcomings and gaps, which often complicate the surveying works. The surveyor must analyze and verify all materials he uses, including those obtained from the Centre of Geodetic and Cartographic Documentation (ODGiK). The quality of the geodetic and cartographic elaboration depends largely on the work of the Centre of Geodetic and Cartographic Documentation. The need of modernization of the Land and Buildings Registry, which acts as a cadastre in Poland, has been demonstrated. Furthermore, the unification of data used as reference systems both for plane coordinates and elevation has been proposed.

СОЗДАНИЕ ВЫСОКОТОЧНОЙ НАВИГАЦИОННОЙ СИСТЕМЫ В РЕСПУБЛИКЕ АРМЕНИЯ

Medium-Earth orbit satellite systems make it possible to provide services on time coordination and navigation support for a wide range of consumers. At present, there are global navigation satellite systems GLONASS (Russia) and GPS (USA). Users of these systems have an opportunity to determine their location accurately with the given characteristics of their navigation devices. In all developed countries the progress of geodesy and cartography is closely related to the implementation of advanced new technologies in both scientific and industrial areas. The introduction of new technologies and equipment in production is essential for the development of geodesy and cartography, bringing the existing geodetic networks and cartographic materials to modern condition. In the Republic of Armenia there are also plans on introduction of the systems for monitoring and management of vehicles for various purposes, as well as it is proposed to establish and implement an effective satellite navigation system to monitor and control traffic on the basis of advanced satellite technology. The article describes the basic steps to create the network of reference stations, GPS, aerial photography of much of the territory of Armenia, the creation of digital terrain model and the new maps by orthophotoplans. The analysis of the materials were carried out, on the basis of which in the Republic in 2015 a high-precision navigation system will be created. Due to the hard work of surveyors, cartographers and topographers the Republic was brought to European states level.

ANDY WOOD, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Sense of the Past in Early Modern England.

ALTHOUGH recent decades have seen the emergence of ‘memory studies’ in the humanities and social sciences, ‘studies of senses of the past in early modern England have been almost monolithically elitist in their focus. … Much of early modern popular memory remains an undiscovered country’ (29–30). From its bourne, however, a traveller returns, armed with fascinating riches of information. Andy Wood, astoundingly, has studied for The Memory of the People some 20,000 depositions by ordinary people in national and regional archives (38, n 135), and is thus singularly well-placed to argue the particulars of the case that, whilst the upper classes cultivated a sense of national history, ‘the local was the most important site within which popular memory was constructed’ (12). Documented here from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, popular memory of the local conceived its landscape substantially as a ‘taskscape’ (198), the ground of arduous material subsistence. ‘Millennia of relatively dense settlement ensured that early modern people occupied a humanized landscape of fields, hedges, ditches, roads, lanes, churches, dwellings, ruins and crosses’ (235). As generations ploughed, fished, and gathered in this accumulated landscape, locality thus signified a complex and highly particular nexus of inherited jurisdictions and property boundaries (individual and collective), of labour rights and obligations, of resources and communal use-rights. Together these created ‘a sense of place that was grounded in common practice’ (105), produced custom and customary law, and came to be codified in common law. Historically, custom proved ‘an especially sensitive discursive field within which subaltern groups felt able to make effective claims to land [and] power’ (289), for the story here is one of a shifting and hard-fought balance of power between lords and commoners. When the Black Death precipitated feudalism’s collapse and the emergence of a fluid market for labour and tenancies, peasants shifted the language of custom from Latin into English, and forced popular rights into custumals. From around 1500, changed circumstances enabled the counter-movement of fiscal seigneurialism, as lords and gentry enclosed common land, challenged tenant claims to low rents, and denied use-rights. Customary boundaries and entitlements were therefore assiduously memorized by every fresh generation of commoners, for defensive deposition in disputes. The process of state formation compelled gradual creation of written parish archives, textual records so important that they had often to be kept in elaborately locked chests within the parish church—whence they could no longer be stolen by land-hungry gentry and lords (260–271). Erosion of oral culture by the domination of the written word was thus not, as often claimed, the triumph of an intrinsically oppressive state medium, for the written document was produced through collaboration with the customary law of the commoners. ‘There was nothing fundamental about the written word that made it the bearer of elite state interests’ (250). The work of surveyors, however, was clearly redefining land in terms favourable to the interests of the upper-class employer, imposing a cadastral episteme, selling off assets such as woodland and restricting access to resources hitherto held in common. Locals responded with evasiveness, memory haze, or even threats. ‘[I]s not the field it selfe a goodly Map for the Lord to looke upon, better than a painted paper?’ remonstrated tenants, whose rents stood to be raised. ‘The worlde was merier, before measurings were used then it hath beene since’ (242).

Study on the Applications of Neural Networks for Processing Deformation Monitoring Data

Accurately estimating the deformation of high-rise building is a very important work for surveyors, however it is very difficult to get an accurate and reliable predictor. In this paper, artificial neural network has been applied here because of its good ability of nonlinear fitting. On the basis of the high-rise building monitoring data, three prediction models including the BP, RBF and GRNN neural network prediction models were established, the comparative analysis for the prediction accuracy of the three models was obtained. The results show that neural network is capable for prediction, and GRNN possess higher capability in prediction and better adaptability in comparing with other two neural networks.

La passation de questionnaire – Chronique d’un solliciteur de l’espace public

Filling Out Questionnaires - Chronicle of a Public Space Solicitor: In a composite public space where people are increasingly exposed to solicitations of all kinds, distributing and collection questionnaire survey data can be problematic. If the culture of solicitation is widely accepted by most, refusal mechanisms are equally culturally established. The aim of this paper is to profile the solicitation work of surveyors through the ethnographic description of a questionnaire interviewer's work. This article relies in particular on the need to understand the interaction framework that both unites the interviewee and the interviewer, and determines the efficiency with which the questionnaire is administered. The ability to cope with this framework – the set of tangible and intangible elements that structure and limit, but also permit the completion of the interview – constitutes an important skill of the interviewer in action.

Thoreau the Land Surveyor (review)

Thoreau the Land Surveyor. By Patrick Chura. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. Pp. 212. Cloth, $34.95.)Reviewed by Dominique ZinoScholars of Henry David Thoreau have tended to dismiss the ways in which Thoreau earned his living - selling and making pencils, teaching occasionally, buying a rundown farm, and surveying - ultimately leaving undisturbed the assumption that Thoreau's books are the main expression of his philosophy. Lawrence Buell has claimed that while Thoreau took pride in his skill and success at [surveying] ,such work forced him to anesthetize his proper sensitivities.1 Patrick Chura's book, however, thoroughly complicates this neat opposition between politics and vocation, and between literature and life. Rather than explain Thoreau's laws as superseding or apologizing for the rest of his life's work, Thoreau the Land Surveyor proposes that Thoreau's ideas about possession, property, duty, and nature are cultivated through the one hundred and sixty-five surveys he conducted in and around Concord from 1840 through 1861.Chura places himself, literally, behind the surveyor's compass, using the practice of surveying as a way into the historical conflict over territory that is central to our national relationship to ownership. The crossfertilization of geography, surveying history, and textual scholarship in this study demonstrates that not only might Thoreau's ethics be in conversation with his fieldnotes but, more interestingly, his fieldnotes and surveys can lend us access to a view of nature that underlies his Transcendentalist beliefs. Making the surveyor's work his own, Chura attempts to redraw the boundaries of historical and literary fields, resituating a range of texts, including Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Waiden (1854), A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859), and Life without Principle (1863), in relation to the fieldnotes.Thoreau the Land Surveyor begins by offering various accounts of the significance of the surveying profession during some of the earliest moments in American literature, history, and mythology, reminding us that George Washington's first career was as a surveyor in Virginia County. Noting the surveyor's complicity in reinforcing the hierarchical order of the colonial aristocracy, Chura provides a sense of the complexity of the concept of possession within American ideology plagued by ambiguous relation to property, both human and territorial. With regard to Thoreau, he identifies the various ways in which the surveying profession forces the writer and naturalist to compromise his own antiinstitutional persona. Waiden and Cape Cod are read in light of the U.S. Coast Survey, the rhetoric of which linked scientific advancement, national responsibility, and a belief in Manifest Destiny in antebellum America, particularly in the decade leading up to the publication of Waiden (47, 49). Chura proceeds to highlight the merger of Thoreau's manual and intellectual labor, providing a compelling analysis of the ways in which his 1846 survey of Waiden Pond subverts professional surveying standards in favor of higher ideals, often ignoring personal property lines. Chura is bold in his claim that the surveying notes of Waiden Pond may have in fact preceded Waiden itself and thus might be an urtext of Thoreau's masterpiece (41).New students of Thoreau often feel scandalized when their teachers reveal that the Fitchberg Railroad ran less than fifty feet from Waiden Pond and suggest that the text itself is effort to regain the kind of freedom and autonomy that the landscape lacks. …

Grey Forecasting Model Refining in Deformation Prediction Based on Semi-Parametric Regression

Accurately estimating the deformation of dangerous rock is an important work for surveyors. Aiming at the limitation of the traditional GM (1,1) model, we propose that the error term in GM(1,1) model have an important influence on this model’s precision and adaptability. From this point of view, a novel new model termed SRGM (1, 1) is proposed. In this proposed model, the work modifies the algorithm of GM (1, 1) by integrate within semi-parametric regression model to eliminate the error term resulted from the traditional calculation of background value and initial value. According to the experimental results, our proposed SRGM (1, 1) model obviously can improve the precision of prediction and therefore can be adopted to deformation data analysis.

An Effective Combined Approach Based on GM and AR for Deformation Analysis of High-Rise Buildings

Accurately estimating the deformation of high-rise buildings is a very important work for surveyors, however it is very difficult to get an accurate and reliable predictor. In this paper, a combined modeling and forecasting approach based on grey theory and the autoregressive model is proposed to forecast the deformation of the modern buildings. The results of experiments show that this method can forecast the deformation precisely, which provides a basis for performance analysis and forecasting. Meanwhile, it can also be concluded that the combined method has a higher forecasting precision to the complex problems than the single models, and therefore can be applied to deformation data analysis.

Novel High-Precision Grey Forecasting Model and its Application of Deformation of Tunnel Surrounding Rock

Accurately estimating the deformation of tunnel surrounding rock is a very important work for surveyors, and we adopted grey model as a forecasting means because of its fast calculation with as few as four data inputs needed, however, the original GM (1, 1) model is not fit for dynamic and long data prediction. For this purpose, we propose a novel approach to improve prediction accuracy of GM(1,1) model through optimization of the initial condition and adoption the technique of rolling modeling, the new forecasting model termed RnGM(1,1). By using the optimized model to analyze and predict the deformation of tunnel surrounding rock and comparing this optimized model with other models, we finally draw a conclusion that this optimized model is able to improve the precision of prediction and therefore can be applied to deformation data analysis.

Mapping in Michigan and the Great Lakes Region (review)

Reviewed by: Mapping in Michigan and the Great Lakes Region Barbara Belyea Mapping in Michigan and the Great Lakes Region. David I. Macleod, ed. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007. Pp. 448. US$69.95 This volume collects papers from a conference held in 2004 and subsequently published in the Michigan Historical Review. Mary Pedley pays tribute to Louis Karpinski's work to copy and catalogue maps of Michigan. G. Malcolm Lewis writes on three centuries of Native cartography. Keith Widder, J.P.D. Dunbabin, and Francis Carroll follow shifts of imperial control in boundary commission maps and an early proposal for colonization at Michilimackinac. Margaret Pearce and Helen Tanner trace the rapid dispossession of Native tribes to make way for the territory's first land surveys. The influx of settlers and their 'progressive' outlook, documented in sectional surveys, plats, fire insurance maps, panoramic views, and county atlases, are considered in articles by Cheryl Lyon-Jenness, David Patton, Amy Lobden, Bruce Pape, and Kenneth Lewis. State publication of highway maps to promote Michigan's automotive industry is studied in exhaustive detail by Jim Ackerman and Daniel Block. Gerald Danzer describes Michigan's distinctive geography as a Great Lakes state. The collection aims at 'inclusive coverage' of the state's cartographic history, spanning about 350 years from contact to the present. Theoretically the essays range from considerations of accuracy and [End Page 168] form to probing for motives and effects, 'teas[ing] out new meanings, hidden agendas,' as Brian Harley recommended two decades ago. The risk for those concerned with accuracy is narrowness of conception; for the Harleians it is an emphasis on context rather than analysis. Malcolm Lewis's paper exemplifies a conservative approach. Lewis focuses on the material composition of Native maps and their usefulness to European explorers. He is also interested in how, and how much, Native 'graphic and oral intelligence' was altered and interpreted to produce the surviving paper transcripts. Inevitably Native maps are judged according to the norms of European scientific mapping. Most of the essays on boundaries and settlement follow Harley's revisionist direction. Diplomatic negotiations, successful businesses, and state-sponsored tourism are offered as explanations of the maps of settlement. But the Northwest Ordinance Survey was a condition of settlement, not its result. As Danzer remarks perceptively, 'Statehood would emerge as the work of surveyors rather than out of geographic circumstances or the processes of historical development.' The revolutionary, cartographically driven land-use system by which European coordinates were imposed as property lines on American ground should be a huge issue in the mapping of Michigan. Yet Danzer, like most of his fellow contributors, seems to regard it as uncontroversial and inevitable: 'Publication of separate maps of Michigan seemed to wait for the surveyors and the arrival of American ways.' The outstanding article of the collection is Pearce's study of 'holes in the grid.' Pearce shows that the Northwest Ordinance was indeed controversial. Surveyors came on the heels of treaty negotiators who used 'threats, annuity payments, alcohol and deception' to dispossess Native inhabitants. While one group of surveyors laid down the sections, another established temporary reservations in limited consultation with Native leaders. Every attempt was made to fit the reservations into the sectional grid; Prairie Ronde, for example, was surveyed as a perfect square. Nevertheless, some of the reservation lines were offset and persist to this day on USGS topographical maps. Pearce presents the stages of dispossession as they are evidenced on a series of maps. Other contributors recount events and describe conditions in order to understand the maps. She is the only contributor to use maps as the key to understanding a historical process. A remarkable hole in the collection is specific treatment of French maps of the region. Pedley acknowledges Karpinski's view that 'French [End Page 169] archives and repositories were intimately linked to the European . . . exploration of the Great Lakes.' Although Karpinski's photostats illustrate her article, Pedley does not discuss these maps. Danzer contrasts Guillaume Delisle's map of North America (1700) with his later map of Louisiana (1718). The first map shows the three great axes of continental penetration: Hudson Bay, the St Lawrence/Great Lakes...

Survey of surveys: dampness

Research is being carried out into the performance of surveyors undertaking a Homebuyer Report. The background to that research was published in Hollis, M. and Bright, K. (1999), Structural Survey, Vol. 17 No. 2. This paper is a sub‐set of that work and deals with the public perception of survey standards relating to dampness, the duties of the surveyor, and the knowledge requirement for a surveyor working in 1999. It looks at the observation and the reporting of dampness within a sample of ten survey reports completed within a period of two weeks on the same house. The research concludes that there is an unexpectedly high level of reporting that falls below an acceptable standard. Recommendations are made for the improvement of standards, an assessment of the skills required and the requirements for the education process for surveyors.

More work for surveyors - or the demise of the building survey?

More work for surveyors - or the demise of the building survey?

The End of Libraries, II: A Preemptive Strike?

In a provocative work published. a decade ago, James Thompson suggested that the computer, as a preemptive technology, would rapidly create a sea change in librarianship and make it impossible to conduct library affairs as previously. With a decade of online public access catalogues now behind us, and the recent availability of gigantic files on CORaM, there can be no doubt that radical change has already occurred and even more radical change may be in the offing; a question for today is whether this preemptive technology may at last be ready to rival the very institution that has so assiduously fostered its development. There is evidence that such a conceptual shift may already be occurring: a recent editorial in American Librarieisuggests that in the delivery of information services and products an increasingly aggressive commercial sector might move the library profession out of the mainstream, much as in surveying computerized measurement techniques have all but done away with the professional work of surveyors. Although the early hopes of researchers in artificial intelligence have not been realized, research continues and experimental new systems that promise to displace expensive staff are bound to continue attracting those who must finance information systems. It is little comfort to claim that in quality of results first-rate librarians consistently out-

The push button surveyor – Instruments used to detect problem areas within buildings

Surveying buildings is an art. Verifying the cause of the failure is a science. The surveyor's work involves a combination of both the art and the science. The art of the inspection evolves over many years of examining buildings and identifying failures. The appearance of each failure is committed to memory, often subconsciously, and is recalled when similar problems are encountered at a later date. This process is evolved over the working life of the surveyor, and there are few short cuts to this ‘hands‐on’ experience. For generations surveyors were unable to escape from the mystique of the elder brethren of the profession. Fortunately many of the elders passed on their knowledge to young surveyors who had no alternative but to learn their trade within the profession.

Care in wording the surveyor's report

It is not my intention to write upon the complexities of the law of professional negligence but to use this article to start the reader thinking; I propose to do this from the viewpoint of a practical Building Surveyor and to concentrate particularly on one aspect of a surveyor's work, namely. ‘Structural Surveys’.

An ecumenical approach to urban surveying in Australia

Abstract This article deals with the change in the cadastral surveyor's work from the survey of rural property to that of urban property. The suggestion is made that the cadastral surveyor has restricted himself to a field which is too narrow, and that he should consider entering the broader field of land economy.

THE WORK OF THE LAND SURVEY DIVISION OF THE GREATER LONDON COUNCIL

The work of surveyors in the Local Government sector of the profession is probably the least known of all the land surveying activities in the United Kingdom. This is not surprising since the qualified practitioners in this sector form only about five per cent of the total membership and the nature of their duties does not seem to project the glamorous image associated with other organisations which are required to practise the more sophisticated arts of the profession. It is thought that the Land Survey Division of the Greater London Council, although undoubtedly the largest of its kind in the United Kingdom, is nonetheless fairly typical of the other local authorities in the scope of its land surveying operations and it seems appropriate to take the opportunity provided to briefly sketch in the background against which these surveyors work up and down the country.

The application of terrestrial photogrammetry to large scale survey work

The photo-theodolite and the terrestrial camera are little known instruments to surveyors or photogrammetrists. Perhaps the most publicised use of the camera for precise stereo measurements is its use in Europe for mapping the scene of motor accidents or on the odd occasion where photogrammetry has been used for architectural purposes. These instruments can be very valuable to the surveyor, particularly the surveyor working on engineering projects. Not only is the terrestrial camera useful for mapping construction sites at scales as large as 5 ft. to 1 in., but the photographs can be utilised in a suitable instrument for taking off quantities for earthworks or stock-piles and for directly plotting tunnel profiles and other varied uses. At the other extreme the photo-theodolite can be employed for mapping at small scales and even for extending control.