Today's "We used the electronic equipment as a substitute brain" story

You would have thought they would have realised a little bit sooner than

I didn't realise when I posted this that the Telegraph (or Torygraph as some call it) has a leader on it titled 'Brain not supplied'

Cheers

PeteS

Cheers

PeteS

I thought the UK went metric decades ago. What's with all the distances given in miles?

Mark

I was buying carpet around London in 1976 when the U.K. had just gone metric - and happily measured up my new flat in metres. Every carpet shop wanted to quote me for square yards of carpet (at the slightly lower rate) so my calculator did overtime, and the carpet shops were still quoting for square yards when I moved down to Brighton in 1979 and up to Cambridge in 1982.

The last time we bought carpet we did get quotes per square metre, but in guilders, in the Netherlands ....

This can happen to even those who know better.

About three years ago I read a story in a surveying (land) magazine about the data used in underlying GIS systems. In this case the accounting standards for town assessments of their infrastructure (used as a basis for towns/counties in issuing bonds) had changed so the fiscal dept of the California town sent out an accountant with a consumer grade GPS (avg. accuracy about 70 meters or so) to count all the fire hydrants (amongst other things) in the town. For why the data was collected (as an inventory with general location as an identifier) this is a fine solution. However . . . .

When the data was collected and put into the GIS system it was imported to 2 decimal points (implying centimeter accuracy). The fire department saw the data in the GIS and recalculated all the fire routes based on the new information.

Needless to say this caused some serious delays in the arrival of equipment to some fires and very high property damages occured (It was just fortunate that no one was killed).

The view of the articles author was that if the GIS had been under control of a licensed surveyor this wouldn't have happened but because the GIS was run by the IT department the data wasn't properly vetted and the town was negligent. It would be interesting to see the result of the ensuing lawsuits that were filed by the insurance company but I do know that a bill in the New York legislature to limit control of GIS systems to surveyors failed.

Anyway the moral of the story is "keep thinking" and "verify the data".

Kevin