Photo courtesy Nitto Construction Co. In a departure from traditional rebound hammer designs, a test hammer developed by a Japanese construction firm has a built-in accelerometer to provide a baseline for its calculations. An electronic concrete test hammer, developed by a Japanese construction company looking to improve non-destructive testing tools, is now available in the U.S. market along with a stateside product representative.Nitto Construction Co. Ltd., Monbetsu-gun, Hokkaido, Japan, began to develop the hammer after concrete delaminated and fell in the Sanyo high-speed rail tunnel in 1999.The company was dissatisfied with testers based on the widely used rebound design developed
Is it too early to start thinking about the 2012 IT Budget? The summer months are a good time to update the three- or five-year IT strategy. For many businesses and CIOs, the “quieter” summer months are the best and often the only chance to schedule longer-term planning and thinking.We’ve seen some major shifts in technologies over the last few years. Some of these are general technology trends like cloud computing, which has driven down the time and cost of implementing new infrastructure and has given new options for scaling infrastructure “on demand.” There’s the emergence of lower cost tablet
Image courtesy of Multivista Photographers integrate with the project team at an early stage to identify 'hot spots' in the plan and schedule. They then visit the jobsites on a regular basis to document the put-in-place work. They link the images to the plans on a web-accessible archive for the project team. A company founded by a former electrical subcontractor is successfully franchising a service to integrate digital photos with construction documents to create indexed, interactive construction databases.Multivista, Vancouver, British Columbia, sends photographers to capture project details in high-resolution images using high-end cameras and wide-angle lenses that can frame large
Graphic courtesy of Junta42 Have you ever picked up a company's brochure or flyer? Watched an infomercial or a shopping channel on television? Ordered a product DVD explaining the benefits of a new mattress or a vacation destination? Leafed through a company newsletter?These are just a few of the ways companies use content to market their products and services to customers.Content marketing is nothing new. Companies having been creating and distributing content for many years, both to attract new business and to retain existing customers. However, unlike traditional forms of marketing and advertising, using content to sell isn’t selling or
After years of chugging along, the development of the nation's first consensus-based standard for the use of building information modeling is finally picking up steam. The buildingSMART alliance, which is releasing the National BIM Standard-United States, or NBIMS-US, says a version of the standard will be out by year's end. Beginning on Aug. 3, the 30-day public-comment period will broach the 45 topics that form the core of the standard.“We're out of the back room,” says Deke Smith, executive director of the alliance, which is a council of the National Institute of Building Sciences, Washington, D.C.Smith and his colleagues have
Three recent app releases aim to raise the bar on roof-estimating tools. Two of them are free and modest in function, although one reaches for the stars. The other is pricey and complex by app standards. Photo by Tom Sawyer PITCH PERFECT Pitch Gauge 2.0 has a calculator that converts measurements into estimates of materials. One roofing contractor calls it a must-have. At the modest end of the spectrum is a roof-pitch-measuring app called Pitch Gauge 2.0, which came out this month for Android smart phones. The app, also available for the iPhone, uses the smart phone's gyroscope to read
A first-of-its-kind automatic, multisensor system for finding the safest escape routes in buildings is slated for installation in three Iowa campus structures this fall.
Inspired by the need to prevent employees who are working on far-flung project teams from entering inaccurate time and deficient information, the developer of a punch-clock application has linked its newest version to an evolving security feature. “The biometric fingerprint technology is our most important update. It adds the security of knowing an employee must be present to log their own hours,” says Michael Fullerton, president of CyberMatrix Corp., Vernon, British Columbia, Canada. “A lot of mobile tablets already have this fingerprint hardware built into the device.”The seventh version of CyberMatrix's Employee Project Clock, which has been out for two
U.S. Dept. of Energy laboratories are finishing up work on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stimulus-funded infrastructure work that could accelerate research for breakthroughs in energy, medicine and other areas. However, transferring that research and development to the marketplace poses challenges. Image courtesy Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Electrical upgrades will help power accelerated magnetic fusion experiments at DOE's plasma physics laboratory in Princeton, N.J. The Princeton lab received nearly $14 million in stimulus funding. Photo courtesy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Construction is nearly complete on a research building at DOEs Fermi lab in Illinois that expands R&D
Of all professional groups, architects and engineering and construction firms spend the least on marketing (3.1 percent), according to a 2008 study by Hinge, a marketing services firm. While the building professions are loathe to print brochures, nearly all have websites. And nearly all operate on a local or regional level. Given how easy and inexpensive it is to optimize a website for local search to help prospective clients find you, it's hard to understand why engineers and builders wouldn't take advantage of local search engine optimization. As far back as 2004, local search accounted for up to 25 percent of