Photo Courtesy of Sunlink Corp. The 20-ft by 20-ft shake table at PEER is the largest multidirectional shaking table in the U.S. For the first time, a solar racking manufacturer tested its ballast-only roof-mounted racking system on U.C. Berkeley's Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) shaking table in Richmond, Calif., and it appears to have passed with flying colors.The March 5 test "provided us with information on how our roof mounting system acted [when] not connected to a roof," said Mike Williams, senior vice president-engineering for SunLink, San Rafael, Calif. The product "acted like we thought it would," he added.SunLink
Photo courtesy of columbia university SENSING GREATNESS Cable mock-up under tension is encased within a custom-made corrosion chamber. Positive results from field tests of a corrosion detection and remote monitoring technology for suspension bridge cables have raised researchers' hopes the tools could be used for testing the health of bridges worldwide.The test confirmed that "we have the tools to reliably assess and quantify the level of corrosion on a suspension bridge for damage assessments," says Raimondo Betti, a civil engineering professor at Columbia University and lead project engineer on the $1.8-million collaborative research study. Before, the process involved subjective judgment
Related Links: Readers Recommend Wish List: What Readers Want the Most in Infotech What Readers Like About Their Infotech Today The information technology satisfaction index among ENR readers is high, but if past is prologue, users' bullish expectations for the future may be too optimistic, particularly with respect to their greatest desire: true interoperability of all their software and systems.That's the conclusion after studying 445 responses to a survey conducted in late February by ENR. We asked readers to tell us about the best new tech tools they use now as well as the tech tools they would like to
Related Links: Internet of Things' Is Changing Our World Shawn Pressley, PSP, is a civil engineer with 13 years of experience in project management systems and development. As vice president of information technology for construction manager Hill International, Inc., he oversees technology decisions in addition to his other duties with the Marleton, N.J.-based firm. His expertise includes design, planning, implementation and execution of project management software. He also specializes in implementation of financial accounting, CRM, employee relationship management and partner management systems.Although he's a fan of tablets and their potential to transform construction, Pressley has become wary of jobsites adopting
Courtesy of Boeing 'Spoofing,' or intentionally generating fake GPS signals, is a threat that governments have yet to be addressed. An American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel—a U.S. military drone—was flying over Iran en route to its Afghanistan base in December when, Iranian military engineers claim, they reconfigured the drone's global-positioning-system coordinates to fool it into landing, intact, on Iranian soil. The U.S. military claims the drone simply malfunctioned.On Feb. 22, GPS industry experts from around the world gathered in Teddington, U.K., to discuss the system's vulnerabilities. Bob Cockshott, a director at Britain's Intelligent Communications Technology Knowledge Transfer Network and a conference
Photo courtesy of Chicago Dept. of Aviation Chicago workers are shown working on O'Hares $6-billion modernization program. Related Links: Congress Clears Long-Delayed FAA Bill After 23 short-term funding extensions that dragged out over five years, the $63-billion Federal Aviation Administration authorization bill that President Obama recently signed is giving the aviation industry plenty to cheer—and plenty to loathe.On the bright side, experts say, the bill provides a predictable funding outlook until 2016 after years of uncertainty and a 14-day shutdown last summer, which put many airport projects permanently on hold. It also authorizes $2.7 billion annually for the FAA's facilities-and-equipment
Courtesy of ABEM A retired engineer uses an out-of-production device to read very-low-frequency radio waves to find water trapped in underground rock. In California, a retired electrical engineer has revived an out-of-production sonar device that uses very low frequency, or VLF, radio waves to locate underground water, and, as recently as Feb. 15, he has been successful. Using improved software, he found water where others had failed.Richard Varian, owner of Survey4Water, Willits, Calif., uses the WADI VLF-sonar device—developed over 25 years ago by ABEM, Sundbyberg, Sweden—to find water trapped in rock fractures and cavities."The fractures in the rock are where
FIRST READ COMMENTARY: Providing valuable, credible information can be the foundation of a sound business model, something the earliest online business learned in a hurry.Take Autobytel, for example. The web’s first car-buying website launched in 1995, supplying consumers with information they’d never before had access to: how much automotive dealers paid for new cars. “The dealers hated it,” recalls Thomas Heshion, a former executive.Autobytel will always be remembered as the first dot-com to advertise on the Super Bowl, but it’s thriving more than a decade later because it supplies information that helps car buyers better understand what they’re buying, and
Photo by Tom Sawyer Drag and drop Form builder for Android device lets users with no programming skills create apps. App development for mobile devices is surging, like lines of surfers picking up big sets of waves.Economists are beginning to notice "the app economy," saying that it is now responsible for 466,000 jobs in the U.S., up from zero in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced, according to a report published on Feb. 7 by TechNet. The report is based on research by Michael Mandel of South Mountain Economics LLC, a consulting firm that tracks the impact of innovation and
Related Links: Key Federal Technical Committee Says No Practical Solution to LightSquared's GPS Interference LightSquared Pushes for FCC Decision on GPS Network The Federal Communications Commission is preparing to turn out the lights on LightSquared's proposed $14-billion national 4G broadband network, following findings from a key technical committee that "there is no practical way to mitigate potential interference" with the nation's GPS systems.The FCC will open a comment period today on the recommendation from the National Telecommunications And Information Administration that the launch of the network should be killed.“NTIA, the federal agency that coordinates spectrum uses for the military and