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The ANZAC Book
Les Carlyon | April 27, 2010On 26 March 2010, I had the honour of giving a speech at the launch of The ANZAC Book at the Australian War Memorial. It’s a great book, and as we all get back to work following the ANZAC day long weekend, I’d like to share this transcript of what I had to say on the day.
I guess many of you here today would know of the English author Antony Beevor, who’s famous for his account of the battle of Stalingrad.
I had a yarn to him in Melbourne last year when he was here to promote his new book, which is on D-Day (D-Day: The Battle for Normandy).
I made the remark – and I thought it sensible at the time – that he was fortunate that so many survivors of D-Day were still alive and able to tell him things.
He surprised me by saying that this didn’t count for much.
Why? I asked.
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1918 Year of Victory
Ashley Ekins | April 21, 2010On 11 November 1918, after more than four years of continuous warfare, the guns of the Western Front finally ceased firing, bringing to an end the bloodiest conflict the world had then known. An eerie silence descended along the 760-kilometre-length of the Western Front – a silence still recalled each year ‘at the eleventh hour’.
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Getting up to speed with workplace flexibility in SMEs
Juliet Bourke | April 15, 2010As a partner in a business, plus an outspoken advocate on workplace flexibility, I am very conscious of practicing what I preach and maintaining a competitive business edge.
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Better Formats for Privacy Notices: Food Safety labels? Symbols?
Malcolm Crompton | April 15, 2010Some interesting research has emerged from CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University.
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The Spatial Enablement of Society in conjunction with Spatial Data Infrastructures
Darren Mottolini | April 15, 2010FIG2010 has provided many insights into all aspects of Surveying and Land related activities.
Surveying is not only related to cadastral land surveying as it covers all activities involving land as highlighted in my previous post.
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Data Automation and the Changing Face of Spatial Data Management
Michael Dixon | April 15, 2010Mapping is a practice that has been undertaken for many hundreds of years.
There was a time when Burke and Wills traipsed through the Australian desert country, manually mapping the Australian terrain, to make maps available to the community and avid explorers.
Today, mapping and the collection of map data, is highly technical with the use of sophisticated equipment to obtain the same end result – a map. The use of electronic GPS units in the bushfire recovery efforts, GNSS CORS Networks to undertake precision farming, and remotely sensed elevation models for coastline mapping, all demonstrate how far mapping, and the management of the map data, has come.
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Young Surveyors Building the Capacity & Facing the Challenges
Darren Mottolini | April 13, 2010The International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) congress rolls into town this week (Sydney April 11-16) and from all the hype surrounding this congress it will no doubt be well received and a great learning opportunity.
Of course, FIG is not primarily aimed at traditional surveyors, the ten commissions setup cover everything from education and standards to spatial data infrastructures, planning and development , real estate, valuations and also construction economics. In all, FIG covers everything to do with land and as we are seeing more and more evidence of, almost all information collected is being linked back to the land.
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A National Positioning Infrastructure for Australia
Peter Woodgate | April 13, 2010The XXIV FIG (Fédération International des Géomètres) Congress to be held in Sydney 12 – 16 April 2010 will help highlight a critical opportunity for Australia; the opportunity to create a national positioning infrastructure.
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Mr Koala from Cairo to Sydney
Mark Gordon | April 13, 2010FIG holds its Congresses once every four years, and annual Working Weeks in between. So what makes the FIG2010 Congress in Sydney different?
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Daring to question “Open Identity”
StephenWilson | April 11, 2010Is the Open Identity movement making the world simpler? Or more complex?
There’s been intense renewed activity in cyber security under the banner "open identity". See http://openidentityexchange.org and http://informationcard.net. But something about the word “open” has never sat well with me in the context of "open identity". I wonder if the open identity community has co-opted the word as one of those unquestionably good adjectives … and twisted it a little?
Open standards and open government are obviously good things, and it’s clear what they mean. And open source has a lot of goodness attached to it, even if it’s not without controversy. But what exactly does “open” mean in open identity?
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Banksia Awards celebrating Australian sustainability innovation
Grazyna van Egmond | April 8, 2010It’s easy to become numbed by media saturation and apparent inaction over the ‘big’ issues such as ETS, carbon emissions and greenhouse gas, but for a change I’d like to celebrate the positive.
Sustainability and responsible environmental stewardship in Australia has come a long way since the inception of the Banksia Environmental Awards, 22 years ago.
In the early years the awards were dominated by initiatives such as farmland regeneration and pollution clean up schemes.
Obviously these types of projects were, and are, critical to improving and maintaining the environment around us, but contemporary environmental activists are just as likely to be wearing a suit as a pair of gumboots and tie-dye.
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Art, Archaeology, Crime and the Surveyor
Prof John Fryer | April 8, 2010When the XXIV FIG Congress hits town Sydney will be awash with surveyors. It’s an opportunity to highlight what a great career surveying can be. Surveying has many more possibilities and is far more wide reaching than most people imagine.
