Related Links: High Schoolers Are Engineering Early Birds ROSENBAUMIf you spent any time this year volunteering at a low-performing high school—thank you! As a math and engineering teacher in such a school, I know how disorienting the experience can be. Teenagers can be all gas pedal and no brake. That's especially true for my students, many of whom are from families in which neither parent finished high school. As disoriented as you may feel in a classroom in which most students score below or far below basic levels on state standardized tests—and too many still count on their fingers—you might consider
The long and sorry saga of litigation between Tampa Bay Water and HDR Engineering over needed repairs to the six-year-old C.W. Bill Young Regional Reservoir has taken yet another turn for the worse as TBW’s board apparently will insist on pursuing an appeal from the federal court that hosted the jury trial TBW lost earlier this month.
The deteriorating state of our aging infrastructure has become a pressing concern at all levels of government, but one part we don't hear much about is underground storm piping culverts and sewer systems. The owners of such systems have long recognized that the only way to adequately ensure a product's service life is to confirm that ithas been both designed and installed correctly. Most operators now also recognize that some type of post-installation quality assurance is essential to confirm that the pipe system was not damaged during construction in a way that could result in inadequate structural capacity, excessive maintenance
The Keystone XL pipeline—an approximately $7-billion project that complements the original Keystone Pipeline and nearly doubles the size and capacity of the system with an extension to the Gulf Coast—has been in the planning stages since 2008.
Related Links: Read the Comments on Don Short's The Competitive Advantage Nobody Needs Blog Series I recently overheard a contractor bragging about how he could gain a cost advantage over his competition. It caught my attention, so I listened.It seems that in his bidding practices, the contractor priced materials and equipment that were not approved in the specifications. To avoid giving away the bidding advantage to his competitors, the contractor decided not to request these items to be approved in the bidding period. After he was designated the low bidder, the contractor planned to press for the materials to be
Courtesy Thomas Dunne Books A New York City contractor's memoir In 1956 I arrived at the office for my first day of work at the company then called Kreisler Borg in Westchester County, N.Y. The firm was one year old and had completed its first two jobs with a total contract value under $75,000. I was welcomed with jovial sentiments, then promptly presented with the plans and specifications for the next project to be bid.I remember it well: the repairing of wooden fenders on the Cross Bay Parkway Viaduct in Queens. The work consisted of removing and replacing large creosote
Michael Beitzel A view of the Huey P. Long Bridge Rehabilitation in New Orleans. Related Links: Public Works Financing Newsletter As money and power grow more concentrated in Washington, the line of supplicants stretches all the way to Monticello. That has created a "barbarians at the gate" mentality among conservatives and budget experts who guard the Treasury. Infrastructure advocates claim great benefits from public investments, but so do many others.Peter Ruane, CEO of the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, calls Washington a "fact-free zone." The firewall that for 56 years has protected the federal Highway Trust Fund from being
Courtesy of NASA The space shuttle docked with the International Space Station. Courtesy of NASA The Space Shuttle on the ground. Last year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration selected four sites to permanently display a space-shuttle orbiter, and the California Science Center in Los Angeles will house the Endeavour. As an aerospace engineer, architect and believer in the modernist tradition, I have some suggestions for the exhibit.The plans so far call for exhibiting the orbiter both horizontally and, later, vertically, as if it were ready for launch. But I have another concept: Dock the Endeavour to a full-scale mock-up
It's time for the design profession to have the same protection as the medical profession with regard to peer-review privilege. Just what is a "privilege"? In order to encourage full and candid disclosure, the law protects certain communications from being revealed in court. This protection is called a privilege, and it applies to discussions and writingbetween, for example, a lawyer and a client, a physician or psychologist and a patient, or an accountant and a client.New York passed the first such law in 1828 to create a privilege for doctors. However, a question remained about whether a doctor's "peer review"
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