PHOTO COURTESY OF INTELLIGENT TRENCH As head of public-realm city planning, Martin Whittles manages 20,000 street openings a year for Westminster, U.K. To reduce the number of openings, the London-area municipality is investing in a web-based system that allows utilities to work together to build a digital map that pinpoints specific belowground assets.“One of our biggest problems is congestion of public works and unnecessary damage to the streets by repeatedly opening the same patch of ground,” says Whittles. “At least 20% of the openings the utilities are making are exploratory.”To avoid this redundant work, Whittles is adopting Intelligent Trench for
Related Links: Tablets Take Off in Construction Q&A: State of the Slate Technology adoption in the construction industry is growing, especially with field management software and tablet computers that are helping firms control costs and manage risk on job sites.But for some firms, technology pain points can turn into sunk costs with no demonstrable return on investment, construction executives agreed during a conference sponsored by field management software firm Vela Systems. How to manage ROI in what can be a thicket of adoption complexity such as user training, tech support, and data security?“You have to communicate your overall plan and
Preliminary data sampling from a prototype system that blends observations, weather forecasts and combined water models with decision support tools to predict storm flood heights in coastal areas shows that, during the passage of Hurricane Irene, the system made highly accurate predictions in the sampled locations.
Anoto Technologies Anoto Technologies' infrared digital pen records the movements it makes on any of several thousand printable patterns. Anoto Technologies After trying their options, contractors supporting federal responders in a recent disaster mission say infrared digital pens are the most useful tool for rapidly collecting and distributing massive amounts of damage-assessment data.“Using the pen has cut the time it takes to collect and distribute our field data by 85%,” says William Spiking, a geographic information systems specialist for Tetra Tech Inc., Pasadena, Calif. Spiking manages a team that provides technical assistance to the Federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Technical
Remote access company LogMeIn has launched a beta test of software that promises to give tech support administrators the power to manage file access permissions on Apple phones and iPads in the field.The company says the software enables companies to implement policies that control what's being accessed, by whom and from what device. In addition, it says the software can enroll individually owned or company- procured iOS devices into a firm's mobile inventory.It also simplifies how iOS devices are configured for remote access to one or more company computers, including how they gain access to corporate applications and files. In
Everyone knows glass is recyclable. Until very recently no one realized just how far glass recycling could go in a digital environment. A video made for a Corning investor event in early 2011 has (much to the surprise of Corning executives and its agency) gone mega-viral on YouTube. With upwards of eight million views in four short weeks, it’s the most-watched corporate video in YouTube history. Maybe even in all of corporate video history. Every marketer with half a brain knows viral isn’t something you can buy in a bottle. And if it were, it wouldn’t come with a guarantee. But
A professor of applied mechanics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has borrowed a materials analysis technique developed for the car industry and applied it to pipe failure prediction software for offshore drill rig designs. A first test showed a very close correlation between predictions of fracture patterns in the riser of a sunken drill rig, with video images captured at the scene.Researchers at MIT's Impact and Crashworthiness Laboratory used video from the April 2010 explosion of the drill rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico for the project. They applied techniques used to simulate material deformation in car
if a new $10 hydraulic-flow calculator for the iPhone is any indicator, smart-phone apps are fast becoming the new disrupters of traditional software technology.Flo Hydraulic from Appadana, Baltimore, Md., is powerful, flexible and easy to use. Early adopters say it does just about every kind of hydraulic calculation they can think of, potentially overthrowing other widely used tools in the process.According to the App Store, which gave it a “new and noteworthy” billing, the software does 42 different calculations over 10 structure types. Entry screens are backed up by context-sensitive documentation, including formulae and tables, available at the tap of
Frank Bennardo, president of Engineering Express, which specializes in product evaluations, is on a mission to help speed product approval information. He thinks ApprovalZoom.com can help users get information faster.ApprovalZoom is compiling a collective registry of all building products. “We accept all building products that have some sort of approval rating,” he says.The objective, according to Bennardo, is to deliver powerful search engine results that sift through mountains of building products (more than 90,000 and counting) and group them by each approval standard they match, or fail to match.The site is now expanding to become the largest online collection of
Photo courtesy of Optech Inc. A mobile mapper equipped with a lidar kit can scan infrastructure at highway speeds. Image courtesy of HNTB Corp. A lidar point-cloud diagram shows engineers where roads, bridges and all the surrounding "street furniture" is located. Related Links: At FIATECH, Mapping Tool for Buried Utilities Generates View From Three Sensors (requires login) Surveying roads and bridges used to take weeks of on-the-ground work, but now it is as easy as going for a drive."We can do in a matter of hours or a day what would take months with traditional survey," says Paul DiGiacobbe, associate
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