Courtesy of New York City Health and Hospitals Corp. Superstorm Sandy's floodwaters submerged the basement and subsequently inundated nine to 12 inches of the first floor of the Health and Hospital Corp.'s Coney Island hospital. Health-care owners, contractors and other stakeholders are grappling with a host of issues in Superstorm Sandy's wake. As the storm's waters filled hospital basements and, in many cases, reached first floors, one question that has arisen is where to relocate the information-technology and other critical systems and equipment that typically reside there. While the 2001 terrorist attacks caused many hospitals to install wide-area networks and

Related Links: Aconex Touts Integration With New Field App U.S. ERP Vendor Viewpoint Reels In U.K. Collaboration Service 4Project For every project team that uses 3D building information models and punch-list apps to improve productivity on a jobsite, the handoff of the building to its owners and building managers is still, for many, a paper-driven affair.Leigh Jasper, the CEO of project collaboration-software company Aconex, is on a mission to change that handoff process to digital documentation with the firm's release of its latest operations-and-management (O&M) suite of tools.Called Smart Manuals, the offering aims to align construction project information through O&M

Related Links: QR Codes Unlocking Secrets of NYC Building Permits NYC Dept. of Buildings Website New York City's Dept. of Buildings has become a hub for apps that help users access building information with their smart devices.The latest release from the DOB's Digital Hub division is a free app that lets users look up information on nearly 1 million properties throughout the city's five boroughs.Available for Apple and Android devices, the app features a basic menu of search functions. After a user types in a building's address and borough, the app pulls up information such as the lot number, building

I started my career in a different era, developing software applications for DOS, Mac computers and Unix systems.Software development was complex in those days. For example, we had to establish special code to render screens on three different platforms. Things became easier with the introduction of HTML and browsers, but the functionality was limited. Today, while we still have some complexities with multiple browsers and devices, developing software is much easier and faster and delivered at higher quality. The results are a huge proliferation of commercial and proprietary applications. Further, there are now hundreds of thousands of mobile applications that

Photo Courtesy of University of Alberta Roving Pilot Trailing up to 200 meters behind a tunnel-boring machine as it moves through the earth, a surveying robotic total station computes the TBM's geospatial position to within 3-mm accuracy in real time. Related Links: New Alignment System for Tunneling Machines To Be Tested The Inventor's Upcoming Fiatech Presentation After more than six months of full-scale field testing on the construction of a 1,000-meter sewage tunnel, a geomatics-based survey guidance system for tunnel-boring machines shows promise for reducing interruptions in surveying while delivering real-time as-builts of the tunnel's interior."We can easily save 10%

Photo courtesy of Georgia Institute of Technology Safety checks Georgia Institute of Technology graduate student Ebrahim Karan prepares to pilot an unmanned aerial vehicle (circled in red) to check a university jobsite. Photo courtesy of Georgia Institute of Technology A GIT graduate student monitors the images and video that the UAV's camera is capturing and transmitting back to the iPad from the UAV's jobsite inspection. Related Links: FAA's Website for Updates on Unmanned Aircraft Systems FAA Website For Testing Site RFP Information FAA's Feb. 13, 3013 Call for Proposals on Six U.S. Test Centers Electronic Frontier Foundation Website on Drone

Image Courtesy of university of california, berkeley Shock Waves Harmless shock waves known as primary waves (yellow circle) come seconds before slower, destructive secondary waves (red circle). Related Links: Video of ShakeAlert in Action Detailed ShakeAlert Proposal An early warning system that predicts an earthquake's approaching shock wave up to a minute before it strikes is ready to become operational throughout California. Further, a recently proposed bill would fund expansion of the system.The bill, introduced by state Sen. Alex Padilla (D), would support the ShakeAlert system, developed by the U.S. Geological Survey and an international coalition of universities. It is

Related Links: 4Projects The picture of software delivery for managing contractors' business processes, documents, projects and 3D model-based collaboration shifted on Feb. 6 with the announcement of an acquisition intended to consolidate those functions into one in-the-cloud integrated service.Viewpoint Construction Software, Portland, Ore., aims to integrate its enterprise-grade business-management software for contractors with the project management services, including collaborative BIM, of U.K.-based 4Project Ltd., a cloud hosting service. Viewpoint's business tools are offered via either internet software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery or on-premise provisioning.Privately held Viewpoint acquired 4Project for an undisclosed sum in a deal on Feb. 1.Twelve-year-old 4Project's current 2D construction-document

Related Links: Engineering News-Record Construction Tech Engineering News-Record IT The flow of young practitioners acquiring skills in building information modeling is shrinking, which may affect the industry for years to come. That decrease is one of the trends that is identified in a recently released survey report tracking the adoption of BIM in North America from 2007 through the fall of 2012.The data is reported by McGraw-Hill Construction Research & Analytics, a sister business unit of ENR.The latest report, "The Business Value of BIM in North America," analyzes survey data—which was collected in August and September from 582 respondents—against data

Photo Courtesy of APM Terminals Port of Callao workers circle a piece of equipment to demonstrate the 30-ft range of RFID sensors, manufactured by Avonwood Developments. Related Links: Avonwood's ZoneSafe Proximity Warning System APM Terminal's Callao Port In construction, radio-frequency identification devices, or RFIDs, are used for security purposes to monitor jobsites and track workers. At Peru's Port of Callao, the largest port on the Pacific side of South America, RFID technology is being used to avoid collisions between workers and loading equipment."In most ports all over the world, there has, for many years, been a problem to effectively separate