Stupid Publisher Tricks: My So-Called (Digital) Life Premises: There's a Place for Us... Practices: Plucky Purveyors of Print-N-Plot-Ware The LaiseBoy™ Philosophy, Part 7—Do As They Say, Not As They Do LaiserinLetterLetters™ Laiserin's Lemma™—Ramblin' Wrecks Go Up the Down Staircase Today's Top-Level Take-Away: "If I Had a Hammer..." A recent report from the ARC Advisory Group, noted that "The worldwide market for Building Automation Systems Hardware, Software, and Services exceeded $19 billion in 2001," and is expected to "exceed $24 billion in 2006." In IssueSix's "Top-Level Take-Away," we noted that the USA alone could save some US$100-billion per year in building energy costs through strategic design processess that include better building control automation systems. The problem, as noted in the ARC report, is that "The lack of integration between automation systems in many buildings today is a leading inhibitor to optimizing facilities management." If man has been called the "tool-making animal," why don't we make more intelligent use of our tools? JL Stupid Publisher Tricks: My So-Called (Digital) Life Investigators into a recent mid-air collision over Germany reportedly suspect the proximate cause may have been a pilot's choice to ignore instructions from his craft's collision-avoidance computer in favor of contrary advice from a (human) air-traffic controller. Rarely are folks in AEC, plant/process, and infrastructure industries faced with such immediate life or death consequences; nevertheless, we still need to evaluate our relative faith in computer output versus human judgment before signing and sealing computer-aided design documentation, or relying on such data. More... Premises: There's a Place for Us... Unlike computer-aided design, or CAD, which is useful mainly in managing project data during the first 2%-to-5% of a constructed asset's lifecycle, computer-aided facility management, or CAFM, handles the other 95%-to-98%. One effective approach toWeb-enabling CAFM, unsurprisingly espoused by all the leading pre-Web CAFM vendors, is to port existing desktop CAFM software to a browser interface. But, what if you launched a CAFM company and service after the Webolution was already in full swing? The result might look a lot like Centerstone's e-Center One. More... Practices: Plucky Purveyors of Print-N-Plot-Ware Free association test: San Francisco; Software; Start-up Company; 1999. Odds are these terms evoke images of the dot-comatose—clueless offspring of shotgun weddings between naive biz plans and lemming-like venture capital. However, not every San Francisco software start-up company from 1999 ended badly. Sepialine, Inc., which indeed started up in San Francisco in 1999, has steadily built a real business around "cost recovery"—the unglamorous but essential task of capturing and identifying the cost of prints, plots, copies, faxes, and so on. From "would be nice" status a few years ago, Sepialine's Cost Recovery Platform has become a "must have" in today's uncertain economic environment. More... The LaiseBoy™Philosophy, Part 7—Do As They Say, Not As They Do? According to a venture capitalist recently quoted in SiliconValley.com (a service of the San Jose Mercury News), "Conflict of interest is good." Is this just a post-millennial variation on the "Greed is good" leitmotif of the 1980's? Or, as we've been trumpeting here in the LaiseBoy Philosophy, are enlightened folks ready to embrace a new and more sophisticated understanding of personal communications in a world of networks and networking? More... LaiserinLetterLetters™ An occasional sampling of reader electron-mail, or "keep those waves and particles pouring in, folks!" More... Laiserin's Lemma™—Ramblin' Wrecks Go Up the Down Staircase In IssueFour (The LaiseBoy Philosophy, Part 3—"D-ness" Envy), while touching on the subject of industry migration to data-rich design modeling, we wrote, "In the short term, however, individual project entities, from designer to constructor to owner-operator, still need to spend a few years exploring and learning the many benefits and occasional "gotchas" of true multi-dimensional design." In response, our friends and colleagues at Georgia Tech, Chuck Eastman, Rafael Sacks, and Ghang Lee, were kind enough to share a pre-print of a paper on "Strategies for Realizing the Benefits of 3D Integrated Modeling of Buildings for the AEC Industry" (to be presented this fall at the International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction). Their findings may surprise you. More...