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The Power of the Unspoken Word

True North | Fall 2021

Pat Hills

In data networking, an acknowledgement (ack) is passed between processes to confirm the receipt and understanding of a message. Conversely, a nak is returned to deny or reject a message or to report an error. In the context of computing, ack and nak are basically a yes or a no based on formulas and expected outcomes. In the case of in-person human interaction, our facial expressions, posture, and body language convey the same things, albeit on a sliding scale between yes and no with an infinite number of permutations. This unspoken data exchange contributes intent, emotion and nuance to the words we use, and can vary among different cultures and languages.

Early on in my career, I learned that when one of my Japanese colleagues cocked his head and drew breath in through his teeth, he was respectfully disagreeing with me (the Japanese are not so rude as to call B.S.). This would signal to me that the conversation needed to go in a certain direction. There are countless examples of this.

In March and April of 2020, we all pivoted to Teams and Zoom style meetings exclusively. The first thing I noticed was that without a person’s video turned on, the unspoken ack/nak was also turned off. The visual cues that normally communicated yes, no, maybe, anticipation, enlightenment, disagreement, acknowledgement, etc. were muted. Did she register my point? Did he think that was funny? Did he leave to go get a sandwich?

Where am I going with this? Well, we’ve missed SEEING you!! At Cansel we have yet to return to internal face to face meetings, but we are meeting customers on site, performing professional services and proof-of-concept meetings with our Trimble MX9 mobile scanning system, MicroDrones MDLiDAR quadcopter, and the Trimble SX12 scanning total station. And here’s hoping that this winter will signal a return to in-person Annual General Meetings with the professional land surveyors across the country.

You can’t see my face but this is what I look like:

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On to this edition of True North! I love the article by Jonathan Calve. I have personally had a great number of rich conversations in my career with Surveyors around the grid-to-ground predicament. One slip or miscommunication here and your project is in peril. Sure, it’s a metre, but is it a metre on the ground, on the grid or on the geoid? Trimble Business Center’s management of this scenario helps to ensure all your sensors are talking the same language.

Thanks also to Akram Afifi for his second submission around Cansel’s CanFlow solution. This data workflow automation tool has effectively addressed the communication gap that exists among project stakeholders. See Akram’s first article from this past summer.

Meet Marie-Ève St-Hilaire and Norm Ferreira from Cansel, who join us in our hometown spotlight and check out what’s new in our Five Observations section of the newsletter.

Lastly, I’d like to thank all our Cansel customers, new and long-standing, for your support and patience with us as we have navigated together through turbulent waters over the last eighteen months. I can’t see your faces when you read this, so I’ll have to be content when I imagine you looking like this as you ACKnowledge my sentiment:

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Cheers everyone and have an accurate day!

Pat Hills
Editor and Technical Marketing Director
Cansel