Category Archives: Civil/Transportation
What is xyHt?
Stand in the place where you live Now face North Think about direction Wonder why you haven’t before “Stand” – R.E.M. Why an obscure geodetic expression? It’s not all that obscure—it represents a foundational element requisite to nearly all human endeavor. It touches your life explicitly and in the abstract. All of the ways that...
What’s ROI?
In 2008 after a nine-year run selling GIS software, it was time for me to move on. I received an offer to head the western region sales team for a GPS company competing in the difficult fleet management market. This career move was based on my belief that GPS applications have a lot in common...
Setting a Standard in Railway Renewal
A highly traveled section of the UK’s West Coast Mainline rail corridor (between Warrington and Preston) required the renewal of three miles (five km) of track among four major junctions. In an intensive, nine-day continuous spell, the innovation team at Network Rail completed the work almost 16 months earlier than proposed—and avoided disrupting rail travel....
USACE GIS Cadre Mapping Team’s Future
The cadre is a team of Army Corps employees from throughout the nation who are GIS subject-matter experts. When a federally declared disaster occurs the team gets ready to deploy and can be on the ground in just hours, setting up their own equipment even before other agencies are on the scene.
CERN
“The actual state of our knowledge is always provisional and … there must be, beyond what is actually known, immense new regions to discover” – Louis de Broglie “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire” (European Council for Nuclear Research), the celebrated research center in Geneva, Switzerland and home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), holds...
Can You Hear the Shape of a Room?
There is a sort of scientific “sweet spot,” a window of discovery. It occurs when science turns a question into a potential solution to practical problems, even to problems that had been long dismissed as a “bridge too far.” If you can identify this sweet spot, you can trace the scientific roots of an emerging...
