Mapping Local Resources Helps San Jose Battle Food Insecurity
Garden to Table volunteer collects fruit tree data with the Trimble Juno SB mobile device. Food security is a growing social and economic challenge that knows no political boundaries. Even in the United States, an astonishing 18 million households were labeled ‘food insecure’ in 2011 because they lacked the means at some point during the year to feed all of their members. The negative impacts of food insecurity can range from poor academic performance and rising healthcare costs to increased...
Smarter Driving Key to Sustainable Transportation Planning
In the popular mind, smarter, greener, and more sustainable transportation is generally equated with mega-projects like high speed rail, light rail, long tunnels for rail transport and, well, new subways and other versions of railway transportation. London’s Crossrail project—which will build ten new stations, dig two new tunnels, and lay many miles of new high speed railway—is a good example; it’s currently Europe’s biggest construction project. But academics and planners who study transport...
Achieving Model-Based Design for the Smart Grid
Smart Meters and SCADA Contribute a Big Data Perspective Smart meters and intelligent electronic devices provide granular data about the state of the utility network in near real-time. The availability of such data is in no small part what is making the smart grid, well, smart. Now, this data is being harnessed by utilities for greater customer insight and designs that are informed by performance. In one sense, the smart-grid is a dynamic real-time system that adapts and heals as condition...
Sewer Heat Recovery Provides Low-Cost Recycled Energy
In every urban area, heat that humans have generated to shower, wash clothes, cook, and so on flows underground — in the sewers, making them very warm. Today, sewers represent the largest source of heat leakage in buildings. Even toilet water, which is at room temperature, is warm compared to the ground. Sewer air, pipe material (and thus conductivity), surrounding soil type, and other factors also affect the final temperature of waste water, according to Genevieve Tokgoz, Project Engineer in th...
A Tidal Shift in Water Network Management
Water consumption worldwide is on the steepest of hockey stick curves—since 1950, annual consumption has tripled, and in 2006 passed 4,300 km3… that’s about 30% of the available supply of renewable water. Water consumption is expanding considerably faster than population growth—more than double the rate—and much of that growth is due to irrigation. Numbers like that mean that most regions, and especially densely populated areas, are thinking and planning seriously when it comes to water suppl...
Transgranular Perspiration is Not Sandy Sweat: New Discoveries in Ceramic Tiles at smartgeometry 2012
Since the early 2000s, the smartgeometry conferences have been held in venues as august and varied as San Francisco, London, Barcelona, and Copenhagen. At first glance, Troy, New York—this year's location—seems a little out of place in that lineup, but in fact smartgeometry 2012 was another spectacular event and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) proved to be the best possible host for this annual gathering of VSPs (Very Smart People) who are finding new ways to apply computational design to...
Video: New Roundabout Under Construction at McIver and Old Florence Roads in Darlington County
Promenade at The Point
June Issue 2026
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