France will chair and host the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), from 30 November to 11 December 2015. The conference is crucial because the expected outcome is a new international agreement on climate change, applicable to all, to keep global warming below 2°C, a level that would ensure safety of the planet’s fragile resources. If that level is not achieved, it could have devastating consequences on world populations and survival.
One of the challenges of the Paris agreement, where heads of state will all gather, will be to establish a periodic – ideally five-year – review mechanism to raise the ambition of each Party and progressively improve the collective effort toward keeping global warming below 2°C.
Each country represented will obviously have reasons to participate but also issues, largely economic and political, that may create a climate of resistance to the review mechanism.
Royal Insight from Prince Charles
Prince Charles of the UK, The Prince, a tireless climate change campaigner for the past four decades, will deliver a keynote speech at the opening of COP21 next Monday.
He gave an exclusive interview to Sky News three weeks ago (well before the Paris attacks) about his ongoing concerns about climate change, saying he believes there is evidence to suggest that the reason for the Syrian conflict and resulting terrorism was drought. “We need to deal with the problem of the movement of people as a result of not being able to survive,” he said.
Autodesk’s mid-year release of InfraWorks 360 was discussed along with the latest release of Civil3D in a recent webinar. In this article we focused on InfraWorks 360.
Eric Chappell, Community Evangelist, Infraworks 360, noted that the latest version was released September 2. The release is divided into three areas:
The highly intuitive graphical interface of the Traffic Simulation module makes it clear when roads have exceeded capacity requirements and make it easy to identify where changes need to be made.
In an interview with Matt Mason, director of software development at IMAGINiT Technologies division of Rand Worldwide, we discussed the newly released IMAGINIT Utilities for Civil 3D 2016, IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Client 2016 and IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Server 2016, all of which are now compatible with Autodesk 2016 products. There are two new tools in IMAGINiT Utilities for Civil 3D: Pipe Grade and Multi-Part Swap. IMAGINiT is also introducing enhancements to IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Client and IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Server as well as a new tool in IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Server, Vault Command Line.
Rand Worldwide recently announced that its IMAGINiT Technologies division has released Scan to BIM 2016, point cloud software that is compatible with Autodesk Revit 2016. IMAGINiT has also introduced two new, time-saving Utilities for Revit,and Dependent View Copy and Adjust Pipe.
When I think of where Trimble SketchUp has evolved to, from its days as a simple but celebrated sketching tool for designers, I’m amazed at its versatility and application to so many important aspects of the AEC marketplace.
Trimble MEPdesigner V2 Cable tray with condulets and bendable conduit
Autodesk recently celebrated the one-millionth app download on the Autodesk Exchange Apps, a web-based design and engineering app store created for the Autodesk community. In three years since launching, the site has published 1,800 apps from third-party developers, which are available for download in 14 different languages and in 191 countries.
CADtoEarth 2.2 for Autodesk® Revit® extending a family of add-ins that establishes a bi-directional connection between CAD environments and Google Earth or Google Maps. The CADtoEarth 2.2 add-in now allows users to create personal accounts on the CADtoEarth web application and provides individual control over the visibility of uploaded data.
New features and enhancements AutoCAD Plant 3D plant design software and P&ID arriving with the new 2016 release of Autodesk products include replicating the plant database to distributed teams to make it faster and able to manipulate data. The main focus of Plant is to take something and process it into something else. The industries served include pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, and food and beverage, all who require special material needs such as stainless steel that must be cleaned daily.
BioGen has built their own cogeneration plant to provide efficient energy to all buildings on their Cambridge campus. The plant converts natural gas fuel into electricity. The waste heat generated by making electricity creates steam used to heat and cool their buildings.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Convention held in Atlanta two weeks ago, was the setting for a number of AEC vendors to announce new products and services.
Chris Scotton, president and CEO of ClearEdge, talked with AECCafe Voice about the latest release of EdgeWise, EdgeWise 5.0. In this release, the ClearEdge team has updated the core automated feature extraction algorithms. The EdgeWise 5.0 release is for the BIM Suite and the Plant Suite.
At Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure 2014 Conference in London in early November, Founder and CTO of Bentley Systems, Keith Bentley spoke on the topic of innovation.
“The ideas that start out to be the greatest start as small ideas.” – Keith Bentley, Founder and CTO, Bentley Systems
