Stairway to... Mt. Washington


Every March a group of Shepley Bulfinch employees (and friends) makes an excursion to the summit of Mount Washington. Situated in the the Presidential Range of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, Mount Washington is notorious for unexpected weather changes. Average temperatures for the month of March are a high of 20 degrees and a low of 5, with sustained wind gusts of up to 60 mph at the summit that can easily create a subzero windchill. Hiking at the tail end of Winter often means that crampons, ice axes, interchangeable layers, and many pairs of dry gloves are required equipment.

The hike itself lasts approximately 7-9 hours, covering 10.5 miles and nearly 4,250 vertical feet. After many months of hibernation during the blustery Boston Winter, serious training is necessary to prepare for the quad-burning ascent. Beginning 6-8 weeks prior to the climb, individuals begin hiking the egress staircase of the office building with reams of paper in their packs to simulate the weight of equipment and provisions carried on the day of the climb. This year everyone began recording their training sessions to stir up a little friendly competition and here are the results...

There are 16 floors in the office building and an approximated 736 average steps per lap (all the way up and down once) after accounting for the stairs, landings, intermittent stretch breaks, etc. Therefore it is estimated that the entire team collectively climbed roughly 349 laps, 11,168 floors, and took 257,269 total steps.

It looks like Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were overwhelmingly popular for making the time to fit in stair training around busy work schedules and other committments.

Here is the breakdown of number of laps per person:

...And an analysis of the average time per lap:
Notice that as weight and amount of laps increased, overall time would often slow down significantly.

We lucked out this year with sunny, warm weather for the entire hike. Everyone summited successfully and it was another fun-filled team experience.

Special thanks to our fearless guide David Meek who year-after-year invests hours of preparation and tireless effort to ensure a safe journey for all!

When 'Moneyball' Meets Ski Racing

This winter I joined an adult ski racing league and got back into the sport for the first time in over a decade. Each week racer performance is entered into a complex scoring rubric that determines overall team standings. After seven weeks of racing, this rich dataset was too tempting for a data visualization enthusiast like myself to pass up.

How the scoring works:

  • Each team consists of four members, they can be any combination of males and females.

  • Races occur once a week and two courses are set side-by-side, one red and one blue.

  • Every racer gets two runs per race, once on each course.

  • The racers are ranked according to previous week performance and are paired up by number, this means that you are racing an opponent on every run.

  • 2 Points are awarded if you earn a faster time than your opponent on each run. If your opponent does not show up to race that night and you succesfully finish your run, you receive an easy Win.

  • 2 Points are awarded if your time on a particular course is faster than the time you earned on that course (red or blue) the previous week.

  • Up to 4 Points are available if you earn a time within a given handicap time range. The breakdown of these times is as follows:

How the adjusted handicap time is calculated:

  • Every week, one or two pacesetters will ski the course before all the racers. Their times are divided by their individual nationally-certified handicap percentages to determine the best possible time on that particular course.

  • The fastest of the two pacesetter times is then multiplied against all of the other racers’ times to determine each person’s adjusted handicap time.

[To become certified, they attend a Regional Pacesetting Trials event where their top times are compared directly to those of US Olympian, Ted Ligety. To learn more about pacesetting, CLICK HERE.]

Back to scoring:

  • Each week racers can earn up to 12 Points for their team.

  • The top three highest scores from each team are taken and added to the team’s overall total.

  • At the end of seven weeks, the top 5 teams from each night of the week (Monday-Thursday) are qualified to compete in one final championship race. The highest scoring team wins.

At first the results were posted as paper print-outs which resulted in a few hours of manual data entry to build the initial database. After establishing a database, complex calculations were required to reverse engineer the scoring system and then emulate the score keeping based on each racer’s weekly results. Once again I turned to Dynamo’s visual programming capabilities to build a tool that could process all of the information.

Eventually the Nashoba ATR staff began posting the results to their website on a weekly basis which eliminated the need for both data entry and using Dynamo to compute all of the adjusted times and scoring. I could then quickly scrape the latest data each week and dump it into an excel spreadsheet where specific metrics were calculated. After using the handy data reshaper add-in for Excel, each spreadsheet was pivoted and then imported in Tableau for visualization. Now the performance of teammates against the rest of the league could be easily understood graphically:

As well as overall league standings:

The complexity of the scoring system made for a relatively fair, enjoyable, and competitive experience regardless of age or gender. It also created some very interesting visualizations such as the breakdown of scoring by age and gender for the first four weeks:

And the median age and time per race:

[Notice how the more “experienced” racers generally smoked the rest of the field.]

Ultimately the data helped me quickly understand the league and identify the nuances in scoring that could help improve my performance. It felt to get back out in the course after so many years, I cannot wait to do it again next season!

Shout out to my teammates and special thanks to Nashoba Valley Ski Area for generously posting results online and weekly updates. The original dataset can be viewed HERE.

BLDGS=DATA

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BLDGS=DATA
Hosted by CASE Inc. (NYC)
The Standard High Line Hotel
May 28, 2015

Data For Understanding Cities
Blake Shaw, Head of Data Science - Foursquare

For those of you who have never heard of Foursquare, it was originally a mobile device app for sharing locations and activities with your social network - occasionally creating the opportunity for chance encounters when two friends find themselves in the same vicinity. Nowadays Foursquare has evolved into a powerful mechanism for tracking human behavior. With the exponential rise of people connected to the internet via mobile devices, how will the constant production of "data exhaust" be harvested and what can it tell us? How does a city behave as a living organism? What is the most popular activity on a hot summer day (answer: getting ice cream)? Foursquare continues to examine correlations among human behaviors and asks how we can better interact with the buildings we inhabit. Everyone experiences an environment differently but how can data derived from countless previous experiences be used to inform future experiences and provide valuable recommendations? Data is the key to optimizing the potential for enjoyable experience.

Data for Building Insight - Panel Discussion
Brian Cheng, Designer & Associate - HDR Architects Jennifer Downey, National BIM Manager - Turner Construction Peter Raymond, CEO - Human Condition

This session started off with each person sharing a little bit about technology efforts at their companies. At HDR they are utilizing a combination of a custom dashboard and parametric modeling to analyze health care program and massing test fits. In addition, advanced model sharing and co-location methods enable instantaneous coordination with engineers and consultants. Turner presented an example of how LEAN strategies, aggressive coordination and scheduling, thorough communication, all combined with robust project data have made a significant impact at their company and played a large part in the world record setting concrete pour at the Wilshire Grand in LA. Human Condition demonstrated a construction safety vest that tracks body position, biometrics, and worker location. With the further development of wearable technology, real-time information can be gathered on every worker at the construction site and a holistic safety culture can be established through the incentives of exemplary performance.

During the discussion it was pointed out that currently in the AEC industry there is a culture of "commodification of mistakes," meaning that contingencies are written into contracts, numbers are carried for unforeseen costs, and there is a standing assumption of labor inefficiencies and injuries on the job. How can BIM be better utilized to mitigate these costly errors and how can new technologies improve job safety and productivity? Perhaps tools like clash detection and co-location make for a more streamlined design and construction process. Furthermore, BIM as a platform needs to become a mode of communication between project constituents and facilitate a timely transmission of data. Another question that emerged was how can decades of on-site construction knowledge and experience be gathered and implemented much earlier on in the design and documentation phases? Strategies like pulling seasoned construction workers into the coordination meetings and using tools like a company intranet to archive knowledge and solutions were suggested. It is also imperative to seek feedback and document the process in order to ensure continuous improvement.

Data for Retail Roll-Out
Scott Anderson, VP Global Corporate Store Planning & Development - Estee Lauder Companies Melissa Miller, Exec. Director Corporate Store Planning & Development - Estee Lauder Companies

This team is responsible for identifying new opportunities for brand positioning within retail department stores and carrying out the requisite construction. After years of managing projects through email, Word, Excel, and Gantt charts it became apparent that tracking the transfer of information across multiple platforms was incredibly inefficient. The team set out to construct a custom dashboard that managed all communications, actions, specific information, and progress by project. Now project managers and company executives can enter the system at any time and review progress. The new system has enabled transparency and drastically reduced the duration of projects.

Data for Indoor Positioning
Andy Payne, Senior Building Information Specialist - CASE Steve Sanderson, Partner & Director of Strategy - CASE

With the emergence of indoor positioning systems that triangulate mobile device location using Bluetooth, wireless, and GPS, a team at CASE Inc. has embarked on a project to harness indoor location data. Using a custom app created to track employee movement throughout the workday, CASE recorded one month of data and produced this analysis. From this data, it was determined that only 2/3 of space is being actively utilized in this BRAND NEW office the company just moved into. In addition, some of the program was not being used as originally intended or seldom used at all. Disregarding the potential for future company growth, CASE has wondered how the results this post-occupancy analysis would have affected the planning of the office layout prior to signing their lease. This led to a larger conversation about the opportunity for implementation in design. For example, how can this technology be applied to doctors and nurses in a health care setting to monitor their daily routines and learn more about the way spaces are truly used? The potential for better understanding of human behavior and the development of theoretical simulations to analyze building program is very exciting.

More about the development of the app and beacon technology...

Data for Building Buildings - Panel Discussion
John Moebes, Director of Construction - Crate&Barrel Doug Chambers, CEO - FieldLens Todd Wynne, Construction Technology Manager - Rogers-O'Brien Construction

These three gentlemen discussed coordination and the use of data to avoid significant delays in project timeliness. At Crate&Barrel, many of the Autodesk software products are used on a small project team to design and build new stores throughout the world. Careful documentation allows the Crate&Barrel to bring the procurement of steel and materials in-house at a significant cost savings and drastically reduce the possibility of mistakes in the field that affect valuable components of retail design. FieldLens is a task management product that allows construction managers to better orchestrate the construction process. With the ability to assign particular tasks to specific individuals, save notes and images, review a 3D model and construction documents, and track workers on site, a superintendent can keep much better tabs on aspects of the job and managers can have a continual progress update on how the work is progressing.

Data for Galactic Growth
Roni Bahar, Exec. Vice Presedent of Development & Special Projects - WeWork

WeWork is a company that offers coworking office space worldwide via an hourly or monthly subscription model. In the last four years they have seen exponential growth leading to construction on an unprecedented scale to accommodate demand (12 new office locations in just the last year). In an attempt to manage this frenzy they have embraced modular construction as a method for standardizing construction technique, aesthetics, and material cost regardless of location or contractor. The kitchen units, cubicles, conference rooms, bathrooms, and common area furniture are all modular components built in Revit complete with detailed finish information, material takeoffs, and construction details. As much of a well-oiled machine the procurement and development arm of WeWork is, it was fascinating to hear that the one lacking component to the process is hard data and feedback. With such rapid growth and a relatively small project team, the company is building offices faster than research can be conducted to determine the success of the spaces they are producing. In the next few years as the WeWork begins to catch up with the pace, it will be interesting to see how they aggregate data to substantiate the success of the experience beyond sheer number of offices and dollars.

More on WeWork...

The BUILTRFEED team were also at the event and posted an excellent summary. Check it out!