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.
Kevin Lea, Product Manager, A&D Solutions, Tekla, a Trimble Company and Andrew Norman, Tedds Product Manager, Tekla, a Trimble Company talked about the recent release of the new version of Tekla® Structural Designer software that enables structural engineers to analyze and design steel and concrete buildings efficiently by combining analysis and design into a single, seamless process. And new features for its Tekla® Tedds 2015, a software that enables structural engineers to automate repetitive civil and structural calculations.
Upcoming this week in London at the Hilton Metropole is TheBentley Year in Infrastructure 2015 Conference, showcasing the latest product announcements from Bentley Systems, as well as the 2015 Be Inspired Awards, awarded for excellence in various areas of Architecture, Engineering and Construction Excellence. Winners are chosen from a group of finalists, who have submitted their projects for consideration.
After jurors have deliberated during the week to come up with the winners in each category, the Awards Dinner is the crowning event of the conference. Below are three project summaries of finalist entries from the following AEC categories: Innovation in Construction and Innovation in Structures.
We wish the finalists the best of luck in the competition, and hope to see many of you there. #YII2015
Zhiyue Youcheng Square Installation Company of the First Construction Engineering Limited Company of China Construction Third Engineering Bureau (South China) – (Foshan, Guangdong Province, China)
Matt Mason, director of software development with IMAGINiT Technologies, of Rand Worldwide, answered some questions for AECCafe Voice about the release of the new version of IMAGINiT Clarity, Clarity 2016.1. The new release includes new features in IMAGINiT Clarity, IMAGINiT Clarity Connect, IMAGINiT Clarity Connect LT and the newly released IMAGINiT Clarity Owner Data Portal (ODP), designed to aid AEC firms in capturing information from BIM models and to facilitate the transition from construction to building operations.
Evan Casey, National Director of Business Development at ARC Document Solutions, document solutions provider for the construction industry. spoke this week with AECCafe Voice about SKYSITE 2.0, the next generation of its cloud-based application for construction communication. The latest version of SKYSITE adds new features such as Request-for-Information (RFI) administration, photo management and punch lists to its capabilities in managing and distributing construction documents and information.
Jeff Wood – vice president, WW Product Management, Workstation and Thin Client Business HP and Josh Peterson- director, WW Product Management, Workstation and Thin Client Business , HP met with the press in a virtual press briefing prior to the announcement of the new HP Z240 Tower and Z240 SFF Workstations with next generation Intel processors and HP Z Turbo Drive options, raising the bar for entry-level workstations, while providing the reliability of a workstation at the price point of a desktop PC.
HP Z240 SFF Workstation and HP Z240 Tower Workstation
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.
Trimble SketchUp made a couple of announcements this summer: one being the SketchUp Mobile Viewer launch for both iOS and Android, an online presentation app, and the other the partnership between Trimble and Materialise to streamline 3D printing workflows by adding support for the STL file format in Trimble’s 3D Warehouse.
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.
