I recently finished reading National Land Parcel Data: A Vision for the Future, and I think it serves as a call to action for all surveyors. The book articulates the demand for a good national parcel database, including some excellent policy discussion on how to get started and how to make progress. Every surveyor who plans to work for the next 10 years should read this book.
Planners constantly make decisions and have to think on their feet. Though the voices of elected leaders and officials ring loudly in their minds, planners must be careful to listen closely to the voices of the citizens they serve. Planning for the people requires involving communities from the very onset of the planning process, which must be comprehensible, transparent, legitimate, and interactive. When planners fail to engage communities and only follow the status quo, the outcomes are undesirable at best.
Reducing the risks caused by climate change is an immense challenge. Scientists, policy makers, developers, engineers, and many others have used GIS to better understand a complex situation and offer some tangible solutions. Technology offers a means to assess, plan, and implement sustainable programs that can affect us 10, 20, and 100 years into the future.
Over the past 30 years, technology has revolutionized the pipeline industry. We moved from total stations to GPS for survey activities, paper-and-pen field data collection migrated to mobile devices, and generation of alignment sheets is now completed by automated processing. While we have implemented these changes and many others, we continue to use the same system for defining the position of pipeline and inline assets: stationing.
Smart grid is about four things:
The winds of change are blowing. A White House memo [PDF] recently sent to all executive department heads and agencies provides policy principles for submitting future agency budgets. This memo calls for place-based considerations in 2011 budgets. Picking up on the theme that “everything happens somewhere,” the Obama administration has connected the dots!
Most insurers are grappling with the consequences of a soft market and increased financial volatility. With trust levels at their lowest in over 50 years, insurers who do not fully understand the risks they are writing face a tough future. The property landscape has changed dramatically, and credit markets remain tight. More uncertainty is introduced every day as globalization, climate change, and ever-moving patterns of land use, crime, and arson alter the geography of cities forever.
