Passive Voice

I write my professional reports in the passive voice. Business letters usually get the active voice, and proposals can go either way depending on circumstances.

Poetic License

(I have one of those too. The exam isn't very hard, obviously)

Regardless of voice, my point should be clear,
Just use iambic to say what is dear.
Pentameter’s nice, and useful for such,
But seldom in reach and not worth too much.

Don

Poetic License

:good: :good: :good:

> Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead MICROSOFT WORD!!!
>

Shouldn't that be :

"The torpedoes were damned and the engine was advanced to full speed"?

or would that be:

"The committee decided that the torpedoes are to be damned and the engine is to be advanced to full speed" ?

My two centavos are that you should write the report using the Raymond Chandler manual of style. This is land surveying, dammit; go for pithy whenever possible. It makes more of an impression on the reader. :>

On the other hand, I'm working on a report that contains this short paragraph:

>A further difficulty arose from the practical fact that many of those early rights and titles in Hays County attach to surveys made before the middle 1850’s when hostile Indians posed an important risk to surveying parties. This meant that often speed in field work won out over meticulous measurements and great care, using methods that would leave problems and irregularities in the surveys to be identified and possibly rectified at some future date. In this case, that future date is now, much more than a century later.

> .... This meant that often speed in field work won out over meticulous measurements and great care, using methods that would leave problems and irregularities in the surveys to be identified and possibly rectified at some future date. ...

Sounds like maybe they used RTK...?

> Sounds like maybe they used RTK...?

It probably would be worth writing a monograph on all of the errors that posterity will find in surveys made via RTK. As technology advances, the intelligent application of it declines. What future surveyor would ever dream, for example that an RTK user would create a new transformation every day in the field by the so-called "calibration" or "localization" method to recreate the coordinate system used in previous days's work?

“On the other hand, I'm working on a report that contains this short paragraph:

A further difficulty arose from the practical fact that many of those early rights and titles in Hays County attach to surveys made before the middle 1850’s when hostile Indians posed an important risk to surveying parties.”

I am always interested in books about the trials and tribulations of the first surveyors. In your research for the report or other writings have you come across any you’d care to recommend?

Have a great week!

Interesting.

Establishing a basis of bearing from two existing monuments is a form of localization. Holding one or more points in a network adjustment is a form of localization, a treverse between two knows is a form of localization. In one form or another almost all types of surveys are localized, or calibrated, or adjusted, or whatever. When it comes to geodesy, the earth continues to move, and there are velocities, and that is why new values are established, and if someone has an old project they need to localize in some manner if they wish (or thier clients) to reference to the older values. Are the NGS geodesists idiots for having a system of active CORS, and tools like HTDP, periodic adjustmentsd and reccomending localization?

I just want to be clear on this. Are you asying RTK has no value for surveyors. If that were tru the use should have been dropping by now insterad of increasing. If all that surveyors did for their clients had to be done to such exacting standards they would go out of business. Clients and thier do not always demand that.

RTK, scanning, mobile mapping, GIS, and more. How fun it must be to jeer at even more ships that are passing surveyors by while some argue over how many parts per million they can pack on the head of a pin.

> I just want to be clear on this. Are you asying RTK has no value for surveyors. If that were tru the use should have been dropping by now insterad of increasing. If all that surveyors did for their clients had to be done to such exacting standards they would go out of business. Clients and thier do not always demand that.

Actually, the reason land surveying is organized as a profession is that land surveyors are supposed to be able to determine what standards are appropriate because clients typically cannot or, if left to the whims of their own fevered imaginations, will choose standards that become a public nuisance.

What the topic of the monograph would be is a detailed accounting of all of the different ways in which RTK GPS has been grossly abused. Some of the wacky practices are such that posterity might not be able to otherwise imagine. Knowing the substandard methods that were commonly used can be a real asset in survey retracement to help reconstruct what went wrong that the record doesn't fully reflect.

> I am always interested in books about the trials and tribulations of the first surveyors. In your research for the report or other writings have you come across any you’d care to recommend?

The only ones I know of are accounts of surveying in Texas, "A League to Each Wind" and "Three Dollars per Mile".

You did not answer the question. Does RTK hold no value for our profession and clients?

Surely there has been misuse and abuse of any tools past an present. Every pieceo of gear in our kit has limitations.

A client requires only 10cm for some oil lease work, if the crews that do the survey for us were to run a traverse up through the oil patch taking extra hours or days and not RTK becuase they were trying to preserve some kind of purist ideal, they'd be so intelligent as to found themsleves out of a job.

There was a Dana Carvey SNL skit that would always end in "and we liked it!"

> You did not answer the question. Does RTK hold no value for our profession and clients?

RTK itself has no value whatsoever, aside from possibly what you can sell the hardware for on eBay or to the nearest farmer. :> The value of RTK for land surveying lies in the proper use of the equipment with an expert assessment of the results, i.e. whether or not they meet some minimum accuracy standard.

What I've concluded is that not that many RTK users have a realistic idea of whether their methods are adequate or not to meet many common minimum accuracy specifications. Without that knowledge in the system, I think that the use of RTK in land surveying will continue to generate problems that ought not to exist in the 21st century.

As for the use of RTK in GPS-guided farming, I think it's a great technology. The same for various other activities that don't require sub-centimeter accuracy.

Passive Voice and Darwin Award

I can respect your opinion, and would agree that there are some poeple who have no idea what their kit is capable of doing or not doing.

But another question about the last line in your post. Does all surveying require sub-centimeter? No.

I do not think you will have much luck convinving peopleto give up their RTK. It would be good to try to encourage better practices, yes. Just trying to throw water on something so widely used because it does not meet some positional purity test that only applies to part of what our profession does, would not really be helping.
If it is beneath surveyors to do things that do not require cm accuracy then there are plenty of people eager to do it. Willing to throw out a lot of what surveyors do for that purity test? Not going to get many takers for that kind of view.

Seeing the other posts today about Darwin Awards makes me hope that the kind of positional snobbery does not spread too widely in our profession and we end up seeing surveying with its own Darwin Award. I talk to a lot of surveyors and geodesists who think that has already happened to some degree. Sowing our oewn downfall through sloppiness or overkill? I think both can be harmful.

Tx, I'll look them up.

Have a great week! B-)

Passive Voice and Darwin Award

> If it is beneath surveyors to do things that do not require cm accuracy then there are plenty of people eager to do it. Willing to throw out a lot of what surveyors do for that purity test? Not going to get many takers for that kind of view.

Oh, I thought we were discussing land surveying, meaning cadastral surveying. There are, I assume, standards in Canada that apply to the accuracy of cadastral survey results, aren't there? Weren't there accuracy standards before there were EDM's, or is it only in the era of RTK that professional associations have seen fit to police that aspect of professional practice?

> Seeing the other posts today about Darwin Awards makes me hope that the kind of positional snobbery does not spread too widely in our profession and we end up seeing surveying with its own Darwin Award. I talk to a lot of surveyors and geodesists who think that has already happened to some degree. Sowing our oewn downfall through sloppiness or overkill? I think both can be harmful.

Well, anyone who believes that being able to accurately mark positions on the face of the Earth is somehow overkill or unnecessary has pretty much written the traditional role of land surveyors out of existence already, have they not?

Defintion, standards, and costs

You do open that long running debate about the defintion of surveying. If it is cadastral only I would agree with you, for the most part. I have looked over many definitions, from varoius states, provinces and countries, and I see quite few other positioning functions included, like that which support design, construction, like topo and so on. But that is another broad discussion.

About the term overkill.
Of course a surveyor can deliver better accuracy than the client specifies. That is a splendid thing to do for the client, especially if it does not add costs.
But if you propose delivering that better precision by greatly increasing cost, maybe doubling it, then the client is completely justified in calling that "overkill".

So does all cadastral require ALTA level accuracy? Not all.
First example that showed up on a web search is below. The excpectations decrease in less dense areas, and that is because the risks decrease. Urban and rural hold different risks and the framers of such standards recognize the costs of higher precisions.

I do not think people should be sloppy, but I also recognize that they should choose the msot cost effective tool for the required accuracy, if they don't they might lose those contracts to those who do.

OKLAHOMA STATE BOARD OF LICENSURE for Professional Engineers & Land Surveyors

C.In suburban or rural residential or industrial tracts where the length of lines does not exceed 1000 feet and the area of tracts is between 2 and 40 acres, the allowable closure error is 1:7,500 and the allowable positional error is plus or minus 0.50 feet.
D.Rural tracts of 40 acres or more where the corners of the tract may be connected with traverse legs in excess of 1000 feet, the allowable closure error is 1:7,500 and the allowable positional error is plus or minus 1.5 feet.
E.Rural tracts of 40 acres or more in rough or tree covered terrain where the corners of the tract must be connected with short traverse lines because of poor visibility between the corners of the tract, the allowable closure error is 1:5,000 and the allowable positional error is plus or minus 3.0 feet.

Defintion, standards, and costs

> Of course a surveyor can deliver better accuracy than the client specifies. That is a splendid thing to do for the client, especially if it does not add costs.

> But if you propose delivering that better precision by greatly increasing cost, maybe doubling it, then the client is completely justified in calling that "overkill".

> I do not think people should be sloppy, but I also recognize that they should choose the msot cost effective tool for the required accuracy, if they don't they might lose those contracts to those who do.

[really bizarre Okie standards omitted]

Well, if you're reduced to quoting Oklahoma standards (an oxymoron, I know) for anything, you've already conceded the point. May one assume that you looked at Oklahoma because the Canadian provincial regulations are much more demanding?

The whole idea that it is outrageously expensive to actually survey anything properly runs contrary to experience. How much money do you think it costs to make blunders and how much does it cost to guarantee reliability? The cost of a blunder is one of those "to be determined" quantities after the dust settles, isn't it? It isn't as if blunders really are an acceptable, insurable risk when methods are used that avoid detecting them in every day practice.

Defintion, standards, and costs

Sorry, for poking the hornet's nest and running. I guess it was just some juvenile fun.

I, too, have a bit of a hard time with RTK for cadastral work. Not to be mixed up with doing topo-work, or having some kinds of checks and locates; just doing that kind of work for setting of corners. If I were to survey with angles and distances up to a controlling corner in the mountains, and tie it in and come back to my traverse control below, I might take a handheld GPS reading on the monument and even publish it to the order of precision for that machine to help some other surveyor find the corner one day, but I would make that clear what I was doing and it would not be math to be used for replacing the monument if lost. Same for RTK.

We talk about "jack-leg" surveyors underbidding us all the time, and right out of the other side of our mouths, we criticize naysayers of RTK as not accepting technology and not realizing the time- and cost-savings it could be incorporating. (one man's efficient surveyor is another man's lowballer). I don't know where to draw the line, but I think I would be interested in doing some of the testing Kent refers to prior to running out and locating hundreds of boundary marks and setting the ones I need with that particular tool. I, along with many of you went to school, and went through rigerous calculations for figuring out the error circle of one set up and its angles and distances to another point. We applied this work and understanding to our angle-and-distance traversing to be able to come back and brag about our closures. I want to be able to say more than "I've done this for a long time and have a level of comfort in my mind about it" I want to be able to say I have done xyz testing and my findings are that I hava a precision of abc with 95% certainty, and I have run checks on my marks to ascertain if they seemed reasonably accurate to my level of certainty. At that point I may say "hey this RTK is a great tool" (at least for such-and-such) type of surveys.

Having said that, everyone I know is using RTK for boundary work I think. (Or everyone I have talked to about it) I am certain some don't. What bothers me even more, is that if I were to find their corners in a job retracement, I would be hard-pressed not to accept them.

I think I have some of my own soul-searching to do on this matter, I am sure. (or back to the topic: much soul-searching may need to be done on this matter)

Defintion, standards, and costs

> Having said that, everyone I know is using RTK for boundary work I think.

Well, the subject that is worth pursuing is the strange ways in which RTK has been used for boundary work that the professional land surveyors who will follow some of the misadventures will scratch their heads over.