Between the Poles

Breakdown of Construction-related Spending of the Economic Stimulus Package

The $787-billion economic stimulus bill, H.R.1 officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law by President Obama February 17.  According to the Architectural Record $130 billion of the bill is targetted on construction-related spending including

TRANSPORTATION: $49.3 billion
Highways: $27.5 billion
High-speed rail: $9.3 billion
Transit: $8.4 billion
Airport Improvement Program, construction grants: $1 billion
Coast Guard, acquisition and facility upgrades/construction: $98 million

ENERGY: $30.6 billion
Electricity grid, including “Smart Grid” activities: $11 billion
Energy efficiency and conservation grants: $6.3 billion
Renewable-energy loan guarantees: $6 billion
Home weatherization assistance: $5 billion
Carbon capture and sequestration demonstration projects: $1.5 billion
Clean Coal Power Initiative: $800 million

WATER/ENVIRONMENT: $20.1 billion
Department of Energy, environmental cleanup: $6 billion
Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Water and Drinking Water funds: $6 billion
Corps of Engineers, civil works: $4.6 billion
Agriculture Department, rural water and waste-disposal facilities: $1.3 billion
EPA cleanup, including Superfund: $1.2 billion 

BUILDINGS: $13.4 billion
General Services Administration (GSA), energy-efficiency upgrades for federal buildings: $4.5 billion
Facilities on federal and tribal lands: $3 billion
National Institutes of Health, facilities upgrades/construction: $1.5 billion
National Science Foundation, research equipment and facilities upgrades/construction: $600 million
Department of Homeland Security, new headquarters: $450 million
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, procurement, acquisition, and facilities construction: $430 million
Department of Homeland Security, ports of entry: $420 million
National Institute of Standards and Technology, facilities construction: $360 million
Department of Agriculture, facilities: $330 million
Border stations and ports of entry: $300 million
U.S. Courthouses and other GSA buildings: $300 million
Fire stations: $210 million
State Department, Capital Investment Fund: $90 million
Smithsonian facilities: $25 million

HOUSING/HUD: $9.6 billion
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Public Housing Capital Fund: $4 billion
HUD, redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes: $2 billion
HUD, Community Development Block Grants: $1 billion
HUD, energy retrofits, "green" projects in HUD-assisted housing projects: $250 million

DEFENSE/VETERANS: $7.8 billion
Veterans Affairs, medical facilities upgrades/construction: $1.25 billion
Department of Defense (DOD), facilities upgrades/construction: $4.2 billion
DOD, military “quality of life’ projects, such as housing and child-care centers: $2.3

SCHOOLS $79 billion in grants and tax credits

According to the National Clearing House for Educational Facilities (NCEF)

State Fiscal Stabilization Fund. $53.6 billion for education

School Districts' Share $39.5 billion "for the support of elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education, and, as applicable, early childhood education programs and services"

States' Share $8.8 billion "for public safety and other government services"

School Construction Tax Credits $22 billion in "qualified school construction bonds", a new type of tax credit bond for "the construction, rehabilitation, or repair of a public school facility

Qualified Zone Academy Bonds (QZAB) program for schools is increased by $2.8 billion

Impact Aid $100 million for construction grants to "Impact Aid" school districts

Academic Research Facilities $200 million to the National Science Foundation for academic research facilities modernization

Economic Stimulus: USGS To Receive $140 million for LIDAR Data Acquisition

According to my friend Gene Roe, the USGS will be allocated $140 million in funding from the Economic  Stimulus Package H.R. 1 to support LiDAR data acquisition. Apparently, it has been suggested that there is a need for an Elevation for the Nation program similar to the NSGIC Imagery for the Nation program.

Challenges Utilities are Facing Including Reducing Risk

The recent announcement Grant County Public Utility District Selects Autodesk Utility Software reminded me of an important question utilities face when planning to address some of the the most common challenges utilities are facing.

1. Improving Design Productivity

Design productivity has become critical as a result of the aging and shrinking workforce which means that organizations need to do more with less.  Organizations are losing experienced designers to retirement faster than they can replace them with younger inexperienced workers.  This means that they are not only facing reduced headcount, but also fewer experienced workers.

2. Eliminating In-house Developed Custom Code

IT departments in utilities and telecoms have realized that maintaining in-house developed custom code is expensive and are looking for COTS (commercial off the shelf) applications to replace their in-house developed code.

3. Breaking Down Barriers between Information Silos

The classic challenge that may utilities face is referred to as CAD/GIS integration, but there are other islands of information including construction, financial asset management, and operations.

4. Improving Flow of Design Information Between Field Staff and Records

The field staff are often frustrated by the poor quality of the facilities maps they receive with their work orders. They are also frustrated by business processes that more often than not discourage field workers from providing valuable information back to records about inaccuracies they observe in the field or about changes they have made. 

5. Resolving the As-built Problem

One of the major challenges in utilities and telecoms face is the “as-built” problem, a symptom of  which is the as-built backlog.

6. Eliminating Redundant Data

As Brad Williams of Gartner has so graphically pointed out, in many organizations the same information is captured and maintained independently by different groups within the organization .

7. Improving the Quality of the Facilities Database

Poor data quality has serious implications for the organization such as unreliable reports prepared for management and for regulators, which can lead to fines from the regulator, negative impacts on the productivity of field staff, longer times to respond to outages, and inhibiting the rapid deployment of new services because the design data critical for servicability calculations used to customer access to services such as broadband, cable, or power is either not available or unreliable.

8. Reducing Paper Flow

Organizations in all sectors are looking to reduce the flow of paper, not only as part of a green initiative to save trees, but also because paper flows result in data  and process redundancy, inhibit productivity, and impair the agility of the organization. 

9. Enabling Particpation

Organization want to enable everyone in the organization, as well as external users such as subcontractors and regulators with the appropriate security level, to access facilities data.

Risk

One of the things that everyone planning to address these issues is the question of risk.  Simply put, a firm planning to address the issues I've listed above can take either of two approaches.

Evolutionary

This approach that minimizes changes to existing workflows and attempts to leverage existing engineering and operations skills to minimize retraining, implement incremental changes to familiar business processes, and target extensions or enhancements to existing technology to address the specific issues I mentioned above.

Replacement

This approach seeks to replace existing workflows, retrain people in new processes, and replace existing technology with new technology.

I would suggest that the former is often less risky and frequently less expensive because you are building on what you already know and use.  For example, for a company with an engineering focus that has been using CAD desktop software and following engineering practices and workflows for many years, and whose consultants and contractors also use CAD software and follow the same workflows, the process of upgrading or enhancing the processes and software they are familiar with can be much less risky, than trying to replace existing with new workflows, replace existing with completely new software, and retrain everyone on the software and processes.

Economic Stimulus Includes $73 billion for Geospatial According to MAPPS

According to MAPPS, an association of private firms in the remote sensing, spatial data and geographic information systems, the economic stimulus bill H.R. 1 signed into law last week by President Obama includes more than $73 billion that will "require geospatial data, technology, services and applications in at least 24 Federal agencies."

Technology: Working While Windows Boots II

Last September I blogged about Splashtop which Asus was embedding on its motherboards, so when you turned the machine on it would boot Linux almost instantaneously, and you could do email, internet and other routine tasks, while you are waiting for Windows to boot up and do all its security checks.  Splashtop Linux runs on the Intel processors on the Asus motherboards.

According to EETimes, Dell has taken this one step further with something called Latitude On .  Latitude On is a fully dedicated subsystem with its own low voltage processor, WiFi and WAN, operating system, and essential applications like email (Exchange and POP), view attachments, and internet.  It is believed that the processor is ARM and Dell says the OS is an embedded Linux (not Splashtop).  Dell laptop computers with Latitude On run Linux within seconds of pushing the dedicated Latitude On button. If you just use the ARM/Linux subsystem, Dell says you can expect days of battery life, not just hours which is what you can expect if you boot Intel/Windows.  Of course if you need to do some serious work or play games, you can always boot Windows which will run using an Intel dual core processor.

Open Source Mandated on Government Computers in Vietnam

According to Slashdot, "The Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications has issued an administrative ruling increasing the use of Free Open Source Software products at state agencies, increasing the software's use both in the back office and on the desktop. According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird by the end of 2009."

I remember a Minister in the Government of Vietnam some years ago saying that the Government's strategy for complying with the World trade Organization's (WTO) guidelines for reducing software piracy, believed to be strongly motivated by Microsoft, was to replace proprietary software with open source. So this announcement is somewhat paradoxical.

I couldn't resist including the logo of the Vietnam Linux Users' Group (VietLUG), which is what you see to the right.

Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics, I Am Sad to Report ...

I have just received a very sad letter from Dr Dobb's Journal that in some ways signals the end of an era, "we regret to inform you that Dr Dobb's Journal ceased its standalone monthly magazine with the February 2009 issue."  Dr Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics began publishing in 1976. Among the firsts published by Dr Dobb's were the Tiny Basic interpreter and in 1985 Richard Stallman's seminal GNU manifesto, which began the free software movement.  I remember other magazines in the early days of microcomputers like Kilobaud Microcomputing and Microcornucopia, but Dr Dobb's was iconic of that wild time and, perhaps as a result, managed to survive long beyond.  According to Wikipedia the original name was Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia (Running Light without Overbyte).

Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E)

You might have noticed in my blog about the stimulus package that President Obama signed into law just recently that it included $400 million to fund the establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).  ARPA-E was created by H.R. 364 within the U.S. Department of Energy and the objective of ARPA-E is cross-disciplinary research on the US's most pressing energy challenges.  It will fund research that is perceived as too high-risk for the private sector alone and will bring together researchers from private industry, universities, and government labs.

ARPA-E is modeled on the well-known and very successful Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the Department of Defense.  DARPA was responsible for initiating the internet in 1969, when the DARPA Internet was designed as a network for wartime digital communications. The idea was to create a network that did not have critical nodes (exchanges), in other words, a system that was resilient to the failure of one or more nodes.  In 1975, DARPA transferred the DARPA Internet to the Defense Communications Agency. TCP/IP was adopted in 1983 for what was then called ARPANET and is basically what we know today as the Internet. This is a classic example of how government technology funding has created an entire industry.

Russia to Develop Linux-based National OS ?

According to a report on Slashdot, Russia is planning to develop a Linux-based national operating system (OS).  The original Russian report is translated here.

US Department of Energy Plans to Award $4.3 B to Upgrade US Electric Grid

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is setting up a competitive process to award $4.3 billion for projects to upgrade the US electric grid, which is one of important technology provisions of the economic stimulus package just signed by President Obama.  According to the bill DoE can spend the $4.3 B as 50 percent of the funding for two-year smart grid projects.  The Gridwise Alliance, of which Autodesk is a member as well as IBM, Google, and others , estimates that the DoE funds could create 75,000 jobs in first year of the two-year funding program.

The stimulus package includes $100 million for smart-grid worker training, $80 million for resource assessment and $10 million for the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) for a smart grid interoperability framework "that includes protocols and model standards for information management to achieve interoperability of smart grid devices and systems."

In the grand scheme of what needs to be invested in the US power grid, $4.3 B is not a lot of money.  I blogged earlier about a report called Transforming America's Power Industry which estimated that by 2030, the electric utility industry will need to make a total infrastructure investment of $1.5 to $2 trillion.