ArtMan

I'm not at all sure what the workflow is like at NGS, but I'm finding that photos often show up on the datasheet before the recovery reports do. For example, my recovery of DF7916 (reported October 9) and JC0020 (October 12) are not yet reflected in the datasheets, but photos I submitted are linked to the datasheet. -ArtMan-

I posted this earlier this year, but it might be useful info on this topic. (My files will be slightly out-of-date as they are based on NGS data from February.) Partly to answer my own question, and partly to learn some Linux tools, I extracted key data from 776,099 benchmark datasheets for 50 states plus DC. In a delimited file — easily imported into your favorite spreadsheet — it's one line per station, like this: HV4442;DC;DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA;WASHINGTON MONUMENT 1913;NAD 83(2007);38.88946741;-77.03524049;ADJUSTED; with the following fields: PID State County Designation Datum Latitude Longitude ADJUSTED, HD_HELD2, SCALED, etc. There is one file that covers the entire U.S. (10 mb), plus the following regional files North Central (2.2 mb) IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, MT, ND, NE, SD, WI, WY North East (1.9 mb) CT, DC, DE, KY, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VA, VT, WV South Central (1.8 mb) AR, AZ, CO, LA, NM, NV, OK, TX, UT South East (2.1 mb) AL, FL, GA, MS, NC, SC, TN West (1.9 mb) AK, CA, HI, ID, OR, WA The links will take you to Google Docs, where you can download the files in 7z format. There is a readme file in each archive. (If you don't use 7-zip, you should. It's noticeably faster than winzip, and compresses significantly better. Download it from http://www.7-zip.org/) Feel free to use, mash up, or add to your website. -ArtMan-

As noted, this is an old problem that mainly afflicts benchmarks located in plain sight near a popular geocache. And as AZcachemeister notes, it's just something we'll have to live with. -ArtMan-

Just back from a couple of weeks in France filled with visiting some folks, playing tourist, and maybe a bit of eating and drinking, as well. Also, I slipped in a little casual benchmarking. The French equivalent of NGS, known as IGN, publishes benchmark datasheets online. The site is in French only. Google Chrome does an adequate job of translation, though if you know a bit of French, it obviously helps. Starting on the Benchmark page, click on the map on the right side of the page. It works pretty much like other GIS applications you've probably used. Zoom in on the area of interest, (use the "+" control), then select the point of interest (the "I" control, as in upper case eye, for information). Download the PDF. The datasheet has a map and photo, but otherwise has much less description than is typical of NGS datasheets. One mark I recovered was in Cancale, a town on the north coast of Brittany famed for its oysters. Justly famed, I can attest. Mmmm. But this mark was a mile or so from the port, where freshly-harvested oysters are on offer. It — the benchmark, not the oyster sellers — looks like this. The elevation is stamped on the mark plus/minus one meter, but the datasheet gives it as "52,583 m;" note the continental practice of using a comma where we use a dot. Anyway, here's the area photo, showing the benchmark at about knee-high on the cemetery wall. I believe the datue point leveled to is the top of the red frame. The line near the top of the datasheet, "Repère vu en place en 2012," indicates it was last seen in place this year. But otherwise the datasheet does not include the kind of recovery reports that many of us contribute to the NGS. à votre service, ArtMan

The user interface is definitely not as user-friendly as it could be. There is a learning curve, and I prefer other tools for photo editing and labeling. But I think there is a lot of utility here, and some of my favorite and most useful programs (e.g., LAME, ImageMagick) took a fair amount of effort to master. For many users, the result is worth it. ~ArtMan~

Very excellent mark. And a good question you raise. Thanks, too, for the fine photos. It looks like NGS has already scraped some of your photos posted on Geocaching.com and added a link to their datasheet, so in a sense they already are on notice, sort of. But as to whether to report this as POOR, I don't see any harm in it, provided you make clear in the text of your recovery report that the station is threatened, but remains usable for now. I would question, however, whether any action would be taken as a result of a POOR recovery report. For one, there is the bureaucratic question: this is a USGS station, so would a report to NGS — a totally separate agency within a different Cabinet department — even come to the attention of the U.S. Geological Survey? Maybe you should contact USGS directly. Then there is the funding question: does either agency have any money to shore up a threatened bench mark? And where does this particular station stand in a queue of other threatened stations? Sadly, I would not be optimistic that this mark will survive very long into its second century. -ArtMan-

http://beta.ngs.noaa...ap/NGSMap.shtml Horizontal and vertical stations overlaid on a Google Map. A Just discovered this and haven't had a chance to play with it, but it seems to be a vast improvement over the previous (and quite outdated) map tool. Not sure when this went public, but the caption says it was last modified yesterday (May 3). Brian Shaw (brian.shaw@noaa.gov) is the contact person. -ArtMan-

It was pretty obvious that the O'Fallon Municipal Tower (JC1711) was long gone, but it was nice to find a photo showing that it was once there. The water tower was on the site of what is now the city hall, but was originally St. Mary's convent. I googled "St Mary's O'Fallon water tower" and came up with an 81-page document nominating the facility to the National Register of Historic Places. These Registration Forms, if you can find them, are wonderful compilations of history, architecture, and photographs. And sure enough, this one had historic pictures of the site ... including the benchmark water tower ca. 1930 and another aerial view, from the 1960s, showing the complex without the benchmark water tower. (In this latter photo, there is a water tower elsewhere on the site.) I used Photoshop Elements to extract the photos to include in my log. Not often I get this lucky, so I thought I would share my experience with some external research. -ArtMan-

Important to remember that the NGS datasheet that appears when you click on the "View Original Datasheet" link on a Geocaching page is actually an approximately 10-year-old version of the datasheet. To see the current datasheet, it's best to get it directly from NGS. Probably the easiest way is via a URL that looks like this — http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/ds_mark.prl?PidBox=hv1131 — (obviously with the last six characters replaced by the PID you are interested in. -ArtMan-

I recently submitted a recovery to NGS for DF7525 in St. Charles County, Missouri. I also submitted several photos through DSWorld. The recovery report has now been added to the datasheet, along with a link to the photos. But the photos are not as I uploaded them. They are smaller and have been relabeled. My photos are 900 px (longest dimension) and mostly 200-300 k. The published photos are smaller, both in dimension and filesize. The label text is the same, but is smaller and blurrier than in my original. Mine is black text on a yellow background; the published labels are black on white. I don't understand why this was done. Has anyone else experienced this? -ArtMan-

Incidentally, the Geocaching.com snapshot (ca. 2002) of the NGS database has 736,425 PIDs, according to the homepage of the benchmark section. My count of datasheets downloaded last month includes 751,984 marks, a difference of 15,559, or a 2.1 percent increase. However, since a certain number of stations included in the decade-old database are no longer publishable, the number of new marks added over the past decade is larger. ArtMan

Partly to answer my own question, and partly to learn some Linux tools, I extracted key data from 776,099 benchmark datasheets for 50 states plus DC. In a delimited file — easily imported into your favorite spreadhseet — it's one line per station, like this: HV4442;DC;DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA;WASHINGTON MONUMENT 1913;NAD 83(2007);38.88946741;-77.03524049;ADJUSTED; with the following fields: PID State County Designation Datum Latitude Longitude ADJUSTED, HD_HELD2, SCALED, etc. There is one file that covers the entire U.S. (10 mb), plus the following regional files North Central (2.2 mb) IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, MT, ND, NE, SD, WI, WY North East (1.9 mb) CT, DC, DE, KY, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VA, VT, WV South Central (1.8 mb) AR, AZ, CO, LA, NM, NV, OK, TX, UT South East (2.1 mb) AL, FL, GA, MS, NC, SC, TN West (1.9 mb) AK, CA, HI, ID, OR, WA The links will take you to Google Docs, where you can download the files in 7z format. There is a readme file in each archive. (If you don't use 7-zip, you should. It's noticeably faster than winzip, and compresses significantly better. Download it from http://www.7-zip.org/) Feel free to use, mash up, or add to your website. I have never done anything like this before, so I'd appreciate any feedback. -ArtMan- (edited to add file sizes)

Surveyors checking whether cracked Washington Monument sank or tilted in wake of earthquake By Associated Press, Published on WashingtonPost.com March 13 WASHINGTON — The Washington Monument cracked and crumbled when a 5.8-magnitude earthquake shook the nation's capital last year. But did it sink or tilt? A team of government surveyors is trying to find out. On Tuesday, surveyors were on the grounds of the 555-foot-tall obelisk, taking measurements from several long-established points in the ground known as bench marks where survey work has been done in the past. They're not expecting to find any major changes — perhaps fractions of an inch. But the findings could affect plans for repairing the monument, which is expected to remain closed to visitors until next year. "Obviously the event was not so significant that we see big cracks in the ground," said David Doyle, chief geodetic surveyor with the National Geodetic Survey, which is conducting the survey. "Whatever changes have occurred here would be much, much more subtle." The monument sits about 15 to 20 feet above sea level and has sunk about 2 inches into the ground since it was completed in 1884. It is on land that was once underwater. Most of the National Mall was created with soil dredged from the Potomac River. That's one reason why the structures on the mall are prone to settling in the ground, leading to problems that required major renovations of the Jefferson Memorial plaza and the Reflecting Pool. Several large cracks and dozens of smaller ones formed in the top portion of the monument during the earthquake on Aug. 23, and chunks of stone were shaken loose on the exterior and interior of the structure. Although it remains structurally sound, repairs are expected to cost at least $15 million, and the monument could remain closed until August 2013. The last survey of the monument was conducted in 2009, so any settling could likely be blamed on the earthquake, although it's impossible to prove what caused it. "What are the effects of that earthquake? We don't know," Doyle said. "So that's why we're here." Although the current survey, which started last week, could determine whether the monument has tilted, that likely won't be known until examiners place a global-positioning device on the top of the structure, which last happened in 1999. That won't be done until repairs are under way. The NGS is a division of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, an agency created in 1807 by Thomas Jefferson that's responsible for the nation's altitude, longitude and latitude measurements. Among the points where the height of the monument has been measured in the past is a structure beneath a manhole cover near the base that's known colloquially as the "mini-monument." It was put in place when the monument was completed. The surveyors also use two steel rods drilled into the base of the monument in 1984 that can provide especially accurate measurements. Preliminary results from the survey are expected in about two weeks. ___ Follow Ben Nuckols on Twitter at http://twitter.com/APBenNuckols. Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

ArtMan, Did you get a zipped file; which, when opened, has a " _dbf Text Document" about have way down the list? That text document can be copy/paste into Excel and converted via the 'DATA'> 'Text to Columns' feature. kayakbird No - the zip files I've seen are just the text files of data sheets. Where did you get this one? ArtMan

Perhaps one of our data gurus can help me with this. I have a spreadsheet with several thousand PIDs, and sundry info related to each PID, but not the latitude or longitude. I want to add the coordinates for each PID in the spreadsheet, preferably in decimal form, so I can teach myself some mapping of the data. Although I am not a programmer, I probably could do this by retrieving the datasheets, capturing the coordinates with GREP, and parse it out This would seem to require downloading state archive files from the NGS FTP server (ftp://ftp.ngs.noaa.gov) for states with a lot of PIDs, and retrieving individual datasheets (http://www.ngs.noaa....-bin/ds_pid.prl) for the rest. This seems tedious. Alternatively, I could probably run WGET against the list of PIDs (e.g., http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/get_image.prl?PROCESSING=list&PID=AA1234) in a BAT file (Windows) or script (LINUX) to retrieve the datasheets, then GREP the info. This seems rather Rube Goldbergish to me. Any other thoughts? Thanks for you help ArtMan

Actually, I considered it an unexpected anniversary gift — my first benchmark recoveries were logged 10 years ago this summer. Seriously, no one was more surprised than ArtMan. (And speaking of which, I want to go on the record as saying that I am no relation whatsoever to Kansas City pediatrician Dr. Michael Artman, who commented in an AP story on some amazing work at Stanford, where surgeons gave a pacemaker to a premature, 3.5-pound baby, possibly saving her life. Since I am not an MD, perhaps I should modify my handle to differentiate myself.) I think it would be unseemly to have people lining up for autographs, but perhaps Malcolm, in exchange for using my recovery log in his Webinar, will provide copies of the excellent DSWorld software to members of the Benchmarking community absolutely free. Be sure to mention how much you appreciate his work on the software and in providing support to the community of users. Mr. ArtMan

Interesting for me that the corrected mark was CQ1199. "CQ" has long been used by writers and editors to signify that something is correct, even though it looks like it could be wrong, e.g. "Elvis Aron (CQ) Presley." The origin is unclear, though I've seen suggestions that it derives from "correct but queer." Not to be confused with "CQ," the amateur radio — and, before that, telegraph — code meaning "calling anyone." Your font of useless information, -ArtMan-

And quite a few previous Webinars are archived and available on demand at http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/corbin/online_learning.shtml

Checking a few random PIDs, it looks like the big (well, up to 600 px, anyway) are back! -ArtMan-

I'm not sure about this, but maybe one answer is to let NGS handle the photos. I have some problems with how NGS implements photos, notably a utilitarian interface and a lack of free-form captions that could be helpful in interpreting the photos. But I believe they are now allowing images up to 1024 pixels (long side), and — most critically — I trust that they will be in business a lot longer than Geocaching.com and will be a better steward of the data. -ArtMan-

Dave, I think his complaint is with the NGS recovery report page, not DSWorld. I've also experienced a recent malfunction using the NGS recovery form. On Jan. 7, I entered my information, hit the SUBMIT button, and got an error message: "Program message: Could not open Sybase connection to NGS Server NGSBASE. Exiting from the program." I emailed Deb about this but didn't get a reply. -ArtMan- (Edited to remove a redundant sentence.)

Keep in mind that Geocaching.com has never updated its benchmark database since the benchmark feature was added around 2002 (?), so it's a pretty fair bet that this one will never show up on Geocaching. On the other hand, NGS, keeper of the real benchmark database, does continually update theirs, but as you say there is often an interval of months, sometimes years, between when a mark is set and when it appears as an NGS datasheet. (And most marks are never included the NGS file, either for technical reasons or because the entity that set the mark doesn't want to go through the time, effort, and expense involved.) -ArtMan- Disclaimer: not a specialist, just a benchmarker.

I have actually been hoping for a Nobel Prize in Benchmarking, but while I'm waiting for that elusive honor, I'll take this random and unearned distinction, such as it is. Your humble benchmarking servant since 2002, ~ArtMan~

Reports about restoring the large (well, largish: 600 px) pix to benchmark logs seem to have been premature. Or at least I'm not seeing anything more than 300 px on the longest dimension as of this morning. -ArtMan-

... so what is it? Small bronze plaque set atop a square concrete post about 3 feet high in Pere Marquette State Park outside Grafton, Illinois. I didn't measure it, but the plaque is about 2 x 3 inches, and reads as follows (the best I can transcribe it): WATER 2.5' —> STA. 11 — 19.8 < 8° 49 RT There may be a vertical line after the arrow on the second line, though there is no obvious water two and a half feet approximately north from the post (unless it's an underground pipe). The symbol on the last line (before the '8') looks like it might be the geometry symbol for an angle. The location is near an lookout platform overlooking the Illinois River at approximate coordinates 38 58 43.6, -90 32 29.1 Thanks for any ideas.... -ArtMan-