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We're proud to present our third annual supplement to Professional Surveyor Magazine: Aerial Mapping 2008.

This 64-page supplement focuses on this constantly growing segment of the surveying and geospatial world, with articles on the basics of aerial mapping as well as technical innovations and new applications. It also features corporate profiles of aerial mapping firms and case studies of their projects.

It's a comprehensive overview of a critical field.

Click here to view it online and click here to order a copy.

Professional Surveyor Magazine is proud to introduce the 2008 Surveyor's Red Pages, in print annually and online as a continuously updated directory.

• Click here to view the 2008 Surveyor's Red Pages e-Edition, the online version of the print edition sent out with the November 2007 issue of Professional Surveyor Magazine.
• Click here to view the updated online directory.
• Click here to contact Rachael Mock about the 2009 Surveyor's Red Pages print edition.

In honor of the 35th anniversary of Hewlett-Packcard's introduction of its HP 35 scientific calculator, so popular amongst surveyors, Professional Surveyor Magazine will be giving away 35 of Hewlett-Packard's newest HP35s. Every month, three new questions will be posted on our website. The answers can be found in the content of the 2008 Red Pages. We will randomly select three winners every month from the correct responses, and each winner will receive a FREE HP35s calculator, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard and Professional Surveyor Magazine. The contest ends soon, so enter NOW to win!

• Click here to see the current questions and enter to win!
• Click here to view the e-Edition of the 2008 Red Pages

This book is similar in format to Wilson's prior publication, Interpreting Land Records. Both books are largely compilations of court cases and other authoritative statements (in this case, some made by real persons, such as Dr. Henry C. Lee, the writer of the Foreword to the book, others by fictional characters, such as Sherlock Holmes, Wilson's idol if not alter ego). Both books are addressed to boundary surveyors, title searchers and attorneys (this one more than the other to surveyors). And both focus on procedures, this book on the procedures of fact-finding, but it includes rules and principles when they are pertinent (though the frequent citation of rulings, which are principles in the form of precedents, actually overshadows the elaboration of procedures).

The books are also companion pieces topically. Land records and field data must be collected in order to be interpreted. Inasmuch as they must be collected before they can be interpreted, this book is, in effect, the prequel to the other.

Not unexpectedly, there is at least some apparent overlap between the two books. Forensic Procedures contains several chapters, the titles of which come straight out of Interpreting Land Records: "Interpreting the Evidence" (Ch. 7), "Land Records" (Ch. 8), and "Dealing with Words, Punctuation and Numbers" (Ch. 9). But their objective is different. Chapter 7 deals with the interpretive value of information that is gathered, instead of its meaning; Chapter 8 deals with the less commonly consulted sources of land records, rather than the most important; and Chapter 9 deals with the effectiveness of the use of words, punctuation, and numbers, not their possible ambiguity.

As educators specializing in geospatial technologies, we are usually the biggest geo-champions on the block and the first persons to stand up and shout, "Geospatial technologies can be applied anywhere for any kind of activity imaginable!" So when a Middle-Eastern business gentleman from Dubai (UAE) got hold of us in autumn 2003 and inquired if we would be willing to tackle a GIS project for the Ministry of Tourism of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, we were suddenly faced with having to live up to our boasting.

After a number of false starts and unsuccessful trips, our consortium partners and we finally obtained a written contract to begin a Tourism Master Plan project in July 2005. As anyone who has ever undertaken overseas contract work for a developing country will undoubtedly tell you, international work can have its challenges. The traditional tenets of success for business in a Western world context—completing work on budget, on time, within resources—is quite simply irrelevant when it comes to dealings with an emerging nation from within the world's most ancient civilizations. What was originally intended to be a three-month contract was repeatedly extended. Final substantive completion was just approved this past January 2008.

What Was That Again?

You might ask how exactly geo-technologies fit in with a tourism master plan, and who in their right mind cares about tourism in a war zone? Glad you asked… GIS, one of the geotechnologies we use, is quite simply a spatial analysis tool, and in fact readily put to work by planners in a multitude of disciplines, not least of which can be tourism. From an abstract perspective, tourism planning revolves around identifying activities in physical (geographic) space that are anticipated to draw or attract participants from varying levels of demographic, socio-ethnic, and socio-economic markets; in many ways, this is classic geo-oriented thinking.