I found this via Digg today: Sewer Cam Uncovers a Mysterious Creature
Now, even with my limited experiences looking at sewer camera inspections, I’ve seen some odd and disgusting stuff. But this one would certainly top the list.
Obviously, this is not a video to watch while eating.
Looking at a few comments, it sounds like the “organism” is actually a giant ball of worms that are just moving in unison. Either way, it’s gross.
03 Jun, 2009
Posted by: Skylar In: internet coverage| pavement| technology
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Wolfram|Alpha, which is a new way to find data online. A classic google search uses only information taken directly from the web, but Wolfram Alpha takes a bunch of facts and figures and uses various mathematical formulas to provide you with enhanced information. For the most part, it seems that this would provide a bit of entertainment, but it doesn’t seem extremely useful in it’s current state. For instance, a search for “stormwater” currently gives no result. But there’s a little section in the “Engineering” examples dedicated to “Civil Engineering”. I put that in quotes because it gives only two links - one of which seems to be more of a mechanical engineering calculation than anything else. Nonetheless, it got me thinking.
I tried another search for groundwater. This gives me the volume of the world’s groundwater. Thus, a search for “groundwater / world population” gives:
0.001533 km^3/person (kilometers cubed per person) (2006 estimate)
Here are some more “civil engineering” wolfram searches:
Asphalt
Elevation Kitchener
Length of a Dam
Dry Sand
Darcy’s Law
Bernoulli Equation
Darcy-Weisbach Equation
Manning’s Equation
…And I’m sure there’s plenty more where those came from. In short, yes - I’d say there’s some useful information on Wolfram Alpha. Right now it takes a lot of searching to find relevant information, but as the database expands, it has the potential to become a great tool for Civil Engineers.
Some reports suggest bin Laden earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979,[12] or a degree in public administration in 1981.
Anyways, I’m not going to say there is no useful data from Google Squared. It’s a great starting point to learn about new topics when you don’t yet know what to search for. I’ve found a few interesting tables, but nothing too revolutionary as of yet. In the future, I can certainly see this growing into a very valuable resource.
Got any good civil engineering Wolfram Alpha or Google Squared searches? Leave em’ in the comments!
13 Apr, 2009
Posted by: Skylar In: technology
The University of Texas & ASCE is hosting a workshop about the uses of computers and IT in the field of civil engineering. According to their website, topics include: Sensing, Mobile/Wearable Computing, Life-cycle Assessment and Sustainable Infrastructure, Design, and Cutting Edge Development.
These topics sound extremely interesting to me but alas the workshop is A) in Texas and B) too expensive. But is anyone going to this? Cause I’d love to hear about it!
Event Registration and Details [via advanced-infrastructure.com]
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I planned on adding some links and blogs to my site. I’ve compiled a list that is in no way complete, but I think it’s a great starting point. I’m going to introduce the list over a period of time to lighten the load and allow people time to digest the content I add. Feel free to leave comments or suggestions wherever you see fit.
I’ve done my best to split up the list into categories, though it’s hard to fit them all into one subsection. Nonetheless, today’s categories are “Stormwater” and “Water/Water Resources”. Here are the blogs that I think fit these categories:
A great post was recently featured over at Sustainable Stormwater Management about relining a CSP culvert with a new HDPE liner. The winning feature is the pictures that the author adds on the end. Who doesn’t enjoy construction photos? Okay, what civil engineer doesn’t enjoy construction photos?
Just saw a few really interesting videos via the Torontoist. I’ll embed one of them here for simplicity’s sake, but you can visit the original post to see more. This is a great way to visualize how traffic is greatly unbalanced throughout the day. Great video - many thanks to the creators!
(watch this in hd if you can!)
TTC Weekday Service (HD) from Kieran Huggins on Vimeo.
So, it seems like I jumped the gun by saying I could only add up to 15 results through the yahoo pipe. A quick look at the comments on the original post about this yahoo pipe shows that there’s an argument in the twitter search api allowing you to specify the amount of tweets to receive! It also shows you how to create a google map using the export to kml function. So here’s an updated map with a full 100 tweets. Note that a lot of them overlap because people have their location set to a city and not a set of coordinates.
In fact, almost half of these tweets are about a watermain break in Toronto re-tweeting that “Subways are bypassing Union Station due to severe watermain break that is flooding the station”. This is in part due to the fact that Toronto’s twitter users have started using twitter to provide real-time updates on the status of Toronto’s public transit.
[created from this yahoo pipe]
Try clicking the “view larger map” link so you can cycle through the tweets to see the overlapping ones.
While we’re at it, let’s try a few other search terms!
[original yahoo pipe]
This one’s a bit more spread out. Still focused a lot on the United States. My guess is that this is a result of a skewed user base and language differences, not the actual publicity for World Water Day. This map is probably more representative!
[original yahoo pipe]
View Larger Map
Any other great ideas for a tweet map? Leave them in the comments!
Pam Broviak recently commented on my original watermain + twitter post from a few days ago, asking if it’s possible to actually map out all the tweets about watermain breaks. Well, yes it is possible. And it’s actually quite easy, once I found a Yahoo! Pipe that automatically builds a google map out of a search term. The one real problem is that it only maps the last 15 tweets on the subject. [UPDATE: Check out my new map here!] Not exactly a good sample size to see where watermain breaks are happening. Not to mention that a lot of twitter users seem to tweet on news that is occuring in very different places than their own town (the app uses the user’s set location to map it).
Anyways, here’s the link to my map. In the future, it might be interesting to figure out a way of showing a larger sample of the tweets.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=b0610a96acc403e8a7f5a1d0c3af117a
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, but I still feel a need to share these articles with my readers. Back in February (I know - time flies!), Mel Lester from E-Quip Blog wrote a series of articles on proposal writing. The first article is entitled “Tired Yet of Mediocre Proposals?”, and focuses on the sad state of proposals in the industry today. Mel claims that despite advances in the look of proposals (partially due to technology and marketing firms),
The more important qualities of an effective proposal are (1) strong content that is (2) presented efficiently. In these areas, I’ve not seen that much improvement over the last 20 years.
His second post, entitled “Proposals: Two Chances to Shine” he discusses two strategies that can improve your proposal writing. The two key issues that he cites are “Client Focus” and “Skimmability”. If you’re looking for some help with your technical writing skills, this is a good article to read.
Lastly, in “Proposals: How David Slays Goliath” Mel presents a case study in proposal writing. The case study is a proposal he assisted with at a company that was “at a terrible disadvantage with the client determining that our qualifications didn’t even merit receiving the RFP!” Read the article to learn how you can use a proposal to leverage your company when you’re the underdog.
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