Video courtesy of EarthCam One World Trade Center time lapse video, 2004 to 2013 Related Links: World Trade Center webcam site EarthCam, Inc., a Hackensack, NJ-based provider of webcam content, technology and services, including job-cams for construction projects worldwide, posted an edited time lapse video of 12 years of construction at New York City’s World Trade Center to commemorate the anniversary of the attacks that brought down the trade center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001.The video spans the period from October, 2004 to September, 2013 and was hand-edited from hundreds of thousands of high-definition images captured of work at
Related Links: Black & Veatch, 2013 Strategic Directions in the U.S. Water Industry Report McGraw-Hill Construction Water Infrastructure Smart Market Report Municipal water delivery systems around the world range from the rudimentary to the mind-bendingly complex. And their customers regard the water those systems deliver as either rare, precious and costly or overabundant to the point of inconsequence and cheap. But although many users take the water delivery systems themselves for granted, when they fail, perform badly or their managers seek funds to improve, many ratepayers can be counted upon to howl in complaint.Water-system managers walk a tightrope between the
Elon Musk, well known as the founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, is now also well known for his recent Hyperloop Alpha Proposal outlining what he calls a “fifth mode of transportation.” But is this fifth mode of transportation feasible from an engineering and construction view, and how can engineers improve upon it?The hyperloop is like a muted, trackless version of a vactrain—a system to propel a vehicle along a maglev track inside a vacuum tube. Proponents claim the hyperloop could reach speeds of thousands of kilometers per hour. Similar vactrain and maglev ideas have been circulated and researched
Related Links: The NEON project site Project description at LEO A DALY We will soon add the nation’s ecology to the evolving and expanding “Internet of Things.” Scientists have embarked upon a nationwide project to create a linked network of sensor-studded towers to study, for the next 30 years at least, the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on the ecology at 60 sites across the U.S.A. The first goal is to establish a baseline of data representing the state of the ecology at those 60 locations before external influences begin to cause change.But before that
Paul Doherty First ever AEC Hackathon. Related Links: AEC Hackathon Hackathons have long been staple events in the Technology Industry since the late 1990’s. A Hackathon is an intensive event that brings together computer programmers like software developers, graphic designers and user interface specialists along with industry process experts and professionals to identify issues and create software solutions, usually within a weekend.The first meaningful Hackathon took place in 1999 at Sun Microsystem’s JavaOne Conference, where Sun challenged the attendees to develop Java for the new 3Com Palm 5 mobile device. The event was a wild success. Our design and construction
Courtesy of InfoSense SL-RAT sends sound waves through pipes to find blockages. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, N.C., Utilities Division (CMUD) uses CCTV cameras to inspect its underground sanitary sewer pipes for blockages and interferences, but a new device that sends acoustical waves through sewer pipes is giving the utility a more accurate view.“Often, the [CCTV] images were so dark and murky or the system would get hung up, and we couldn’t get a clear picture,” says John Fishburne, senior engineer in CMUD’s field operations division. “We wound up cleaning pipes that, in many cases, didn’t need it.”In 2005, CMUD commissioned Ivan
Some contractors believe the primary purpose of a Project Engineer is to digest information flooding onto a project and divert it to the proper channels—a seemingly indispensable role. But what if technology comes to work so well that the information routing is automatic and the inefficiencies we now battle in our workflows disappear? Will Project Engineers disappear too?I don’t really think so: I have no doubt Project Engineers are here to stay. But I do believe their roles will shift in response to the paperless jobsite movement, if that movement can overcome its own hurdles of inefficiency that currently exist.
Related Links: Newforma ENR: What’s the biggest problem facing the construction industry and how can we solve it?Ian Howell, (CEO of Newforma Inc.): The construction industry is forecasted to grow to 11% of global GDP: a $12-trillion industry by 2020. McKinsey Global Cities research suggests that by 2050 we will need twice as many buildings as today.But today, project delivery is all too often a broken process. Using conventional project delivery methods you can get pretty disastrous results. BBC Headquarters in London, New York East Side Access and Chicago Millennium park projects are examples that were hundreds of millions of
Translating design intent is a worthy goal with today's 3D modeling tools, but that vision does not have full control over the reality of put-in-place construction.
Courtesy DreamHammer Inc. Related Links: Dream Hammer Inc. Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Like a real-life Tony Stark—the engineer-protagonist of the "Ironman" movies—software developer Nelson Paez has created a technology that could help augment and automate operations of everything from military weapons to construction machinery, pushing forward the unmanned-systems industry. But also like Stark, Paez doesn’t want to license his technology exclusively to the armed forces. His new software for controlling unmanned vehicles will be commercially available this August.“Exactly what happened in the mobile and in the PC industry can happen in the unmanned-systems industry,” says Paez,
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