The engineering community at large, and the civil engineering community in particular, has the opportunity and arguably the obligation to promote a development agenda that considers not only the economics of development, but also the health of the environment and society at large. In this paper, we contemplate the challenge of sustainable development and its effect on project scale and scope. We discuss the inherent opportunity to drive the "creative destruction" of the development industry, using innovation to exploit inefficiencies in the planning and management of engineering systems to create a range of "future" products and services that challenge existing practice. We review the impact of procurement policy, contract pricing, prescriptive codes, and public policy on innovation. Several examples of innovative design and sustainable development introduced into the planning and management of Canadian civil engineering projects are provided. We assert that the most effective means of promoting the sustainability of built environment and civil infrastructure systems will be through inter- and intra-industry collaboration with the support of public policy-makers.Key words: sustainable development, civil, engineering, infrastructure, innovation, creative destruction, environment, collaboration.
B or H? A Chemist's Guide to Modern Teachings on MagnetismMany physical scientists feel uneasy about their understanding of magnetism and electricity. At school they were introduced simultaneously to these closely-related topics, but somehow, despite the many analogies between the two, magnetism seemed more difficult.The Systeme International d'Unites, or SI, takes note of the fact that electrical properties are in a sense more fundamental than magnetic properties. Magnetic quantities in the SI are defined in terms of electrical quantities rather than electrical quantities in terms of magnetic quantities as in the obsolete emu system of units. The increasing use of the SI gives an opportunity to clear away the confusion concerning magnetism and to simplify the teaching of magnetism as it relates to the study of chemistry. The simplification that seems to be especially worth making, which has not been suggested in previous articles in this Journal (1-3), is the emphasis on the quantity B rather than the quantity H in our chemistry teaching and the substitution of B for H in many familiar equations.
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