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Author Archives: Cary Cooper
Finding the Needle In The Haystack – Managing the Lifecycle of Your Engineering and CAD Docs
“In 1989, one of our first clients came to us with a big problem. A disgruntled employee had waltzed out the door with electronic copies of top secret designs and went to work for a competitor.” Another horror story here: “During the late 80s, a client who used AutoCAD for machine design called us in a panic. The company had just built a $250K prototype of a paper machine from the wrong revision of a drawing.”
Since then, the folks at Synergis Software have been in the business of preventing these disasters from happening. Over the years they have developed a solution that not only makes managing your engineering document library easier, but safer as well.
Continue reading
Flood Plain Analysis and Mapping – The Geospatial Tools that Keep Us High and Dry
The ongoing flooding in North Dakota has presented a monumental challenge to all parties affected by the natural disaster. From residents living in the affected areas to the state and local government agencies in charge of coordinating sandbagging efforts and other preventative measures. Not to mention the relief and recovery efforts that will likely continue long after the water has receded.
However technological developments are making it easier for public works departments and emergency services to better anticipate and plan for, and hopefully prevent such devastating consequences as we are seeing in North Dakota. Continue reading
Breaching the Frozen Frontier – Studying the Poles via Geospatial Data
With a population that is expected to reach 7 billion in 2011, it is fascinating to contemplate that there are still reaches of the earth where humans have never set foot. However, thanks to the proliferation of satellites and ever-improving satellite imagery, there may come a time when we will have virtually set foot on every part of the earth’s surface. The planet’s poles are prime candidates for exploration via satellite. The harsh climates make physical exploration difficult, dangerous, and expensive. But thanks to advances in GIS technology, scientists of every discipline will have the opportunity to research previously unknown facts on an unimagined scale. Continue reading
How to Maximize the Efficiency of any Facility Electrical System with Power Analytics
For agencies seeking to comply with Executive Order 13514, recent budget cuts have slashed many opportunities to invest in newer, more efficient and sustainable facilities and buildings. So the issue shifts to one of energy management – and the question becomes – what is the best we can do with what’s already given, and reduce our usage to the most efficient level?
One option comes in the form of Power Analytics (formerly EDSA), the San Diego-based power analytics company. Power Analytics has been in the business of energy management for over twenty years and counts a range of U.S. military branches and numerous civilian agencies such as NASA among their customer base. Continue reading
Render Graphics without those Frustrating System Crashes
Graphics rendering requires high-powered computing systems, and many times hardware is not up to par, causing digital design programs to freeze up and crash. More than just frustrating and time-wasting, this can sometimes result in flaws within the models that require a long correction process, or in the worst case, escape unnoticed into the final design.
Since hardware issues are the cause of such design nightmares, the best way to overcome this obstacle is to find an appropriate computing solution that can handle the heavy workloads that are routine in the digital design world. BoXX Technologies’ range of desktop and mobile computing products (now available on GSA Schedule) are tailor-made for high-end design software such as Autodesk 3ds Max, that features highly demanding rendering processes, and massive file sizes that require high-end hardware to run smoothly. Continue reading
GeoEye Ups the Ante with its Geospatial Imagery of Earthquake-stricken Japan
On March 11, 2011, the world’s gaze turned toward Japan when a 9.0-magnitude quake and tsunami laid waste to Japan’s northeastern coast, costing thousands of lives and potentially causing a nuclear event at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power. While the world was glued to the TV and internet, watching the disaster and human interest stories unfold, two of the top geospatial satellites currently in orbit, GeoEye-1 and IKONOS, were chronicling the disaster from a very different vantage point – and potentially saving precious hours and millions of dollars in disaster recovery and re-build efforts.
Thanks to the updated satellite images, GeoEye was able to gather and disseminate to the government of Japan, other relief agencies, and even companies like Google, the hardest hit regions could be picked out, and recovery plans were able to be made more accurately than ever before. With the ability to implement the new data in mapping technologies, routes that were flooded or otherwise impassable were avoided without wasting time and resources that would have come with a trial and error approach required in the past. Continue reading
