Photo courtesy of UT Austin Ph.D. student Li Wang demonstrates the design coordination data capture prototype system in the Texas Advanced Computing Visualization Laboratory, at the University of Texas at Austin. It often is said that experience is the best teacher, but what happens if the teacher is absent? How will the rising generation of construction professionals apply the insight of veteran practitioners in an industry where recent economic turmoil has driven droves of them to retire?This is a problem researchers in my lab at the University of Texas at Austin have been studying, and we believe we have a
Enormous amounts of data about projects in development can be analyzed through a browser-based search customized for the user's role in the industry, geographic area of interest and project type. Related Links: Dodge Global Network Dodge International McGraw Hill Construction's Dodge Global Network, a suite of information resources built on a database of current project leads and detailed project information, is completing transition of its subscribers to a new technology platform. The user interface coincides with the release of several new features. Early feedback indicates the system is now more useful and user-friendly.The transformation is due to a shift from
Courtesy National Corvette Museum The sinkhole swallowed eight priceless 'Vettes, including two on loan from General Motors. YouTube Watch a camera drone survey the damage. Related Links: Sinkhole Collapses Part of Corvette Museum in Ky. Sinkhole Hits National Corvette Museum Engineers probing the cause of a massive sinkhole that formed underneath the National Corvette Museum and swallowed eight rare cars have mobilized helicopter drones as a key inspection tool, underscoring the importance of the emerging technology in construction forensics."There is a cave that they have found in there with the drones," Katie Frassinelli, a spokeswoman with the Bowling Green, Ky.-based
Related Links: Electronic Stability Control System Rule State DOTs Focus on MAP-21 Policy Changes, and Next Transport Bill Under the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), the Federal Highway Administration's is promoting state-of-the-art technology, such as 3D modeling, by awarding up to 5% additional federal project funding to state transportation departments that use the technology. Other programs under the law require state departments of transportation to have an approved highway asset management plan in place."Using innovative technology can take the project from 95% to 100% federal funding," says Steven Stanfill, business development manager, civil engineering, Autodesk
Image courtesy of Trimble A Trimble SketchUp Pro model of a house under construction with projected shadowing, laid atop a Google Earth landscape. Related Links: Big Data, Point Clouds and GIS Delivering on Promises Building information modeling and geographic information systems should be natural partners. But they use different technology, standards and syntax, so users often find it difficult to exchange information between the two environments.BIM combines performance, scheduling, acoustics and other parameters with physical geometry. GIS analyzes spatial relationships within the natural and built environments. It can also perform complex modeling for a wide range of simulations. Together, the
The 100 million television viewers tuned in to Fox Sports’ broadcast of Super Bowl XLVIII on Feb. 2 saw a new visualization tool that displays on screen the swirling arrows of wind vectors inside the stadium.
Related Links: Ventev Outdoor Power Solutions Water Enviornment Award of Merit SCADA For years, large supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems have suffered from an annoyingly simple vulnerability: backup batteries in radio-signal extenders can die, causing a loss of communication. One large utility says a new monitoring device from Ventev Wireless Infrastructure solves the issue.The SCADA for Southern Co.'s electrical grid is a series of devices that sends signals to each other via radio, says Bob Cheney, team leader for the power-delivery test lab at the utility, based in Atlanta. If two of these devices, called "preferred sources," are
image courtesy of D-Link Little monster The DIR-510L router has an Ethernet port and two USB ports to charge devices and transfer data. Related Links: Wiki entry on 802.11ac D-link's 510L wireless router and charger Terms such as "256 QAM," "MU-MIMO" and "beamforming" might sound like jargon out of a "Star Trek" episode, but they are new tech capabilities to boost wireless router speeds. They are hitting the market in the wake of the new WiFi standard called 802.11ac by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association and the emergence, in January, of the first Wave 2 devices
A fleet-tracking company's new plug-and-play vehicle-monitoring device delivers detailed engine-use and driver-behavior reports to a cloud server and at lower costs than the competition.“I’ve seen a 25% increase in labor productivity and a 25% decrease in fuel consumption since using the device,” says Chris Parisis, president of CG Appliances, San Francisco. He says he chose Azuga’s G2 vehicle-tracking technology because it was plug-and-play.“A lot of our workers lease trucks. [Using the G2] we don’t have to spend $750 installing a vehicle-monitoring device on every one,” he says. The device plugs into a vehicle’s OBDII port under the steering column and
The building industry is divided into two separate, but equally important groups: property owners who make investment decisions and AEC professionals who turn concepts into reality. For the longest time, these disparate factions have relied on one another to drive development, but despite their alignment of goals, challenges arise due to their different languages and scopes of work. At the AEC Hackathon last October in San Francisco, there were a lot of interesting approaches on how to solve problems faced by building industry professionals. One in particular dealt with “hacking the process,” essentially working to develop a framework which encapsulates
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