# Portal:Infrastructure

Infrastructure Portal
 Welcome to Wikipedia's infrastructure portal, your gateway to the subject of infrastructure and its monumental importance for everyday society and the economy.

## Infrastructure Portal

State Street Bridge on the Chicago River in Chicago, Illinois.

Infrastructure generally refers to the basic physical structures and facilities, often government-owned, needed for the effective operation of a society or economy. They include the critical assets that are essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions. More specifically, infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services, the distribution of finished products to markets, and provision of basic social services such as schools and [hospitals. Public works and public capital are common terms for government-owned infrastructure. Examples of such infrastructure assets and facilities include the following:

## Selected article

Drinking water or potable water is water of sufficiently high quality that can be consumed or used with low risk of immediate or long term harm. In most developed countries, the water supplied to households, commerce, and industry is all of drinking water standard, even though only a very small proportion is actually consumed or used in food preparation. Other than consumption, other typical uses include washing or landscape irrigation.

Over large parts of the world have inadequate access to potable water and use sources contaminated with disease vectors, pathogens or unacceptable levels of toxins or suspended solids. Such water is not wholesome, and drinking or using such water in food preparation leads to widespread acute and chronic illnesses and is a major cause of death and misery in many countries. Reduction of waterborne diseases is a major public health goal in developing countries.

Although covering some 70% of the Earth's surface, most water is saline. Freshwater is available in almost all populated areas of the earth, although it may be expensive and the supply may not always be sustainable. Sources where water may be obtained include:

• ground sources such as groundwater, hyporheic zones and aquifers.
• precipitation which includes rain, hail, snow, fog, etc.
• surface water such as rivers, streams, glaciers
• biological sources such as plants.
• the sea through desalination
• Water supply network

The most efficient way to transport and deliver potable water is through pipes. Plumbing can require significant capital investment. Some systems suffer high operating costs. The cost to replace the deteriorating water and sanitation infrastructure of industrialized countries may be as high as \$200 billion a year. Leakage of untreated and treated water from pipes reduces access to water. Leakage rates of 50% are not uncommon in urban systems. Because of the high initial investments, many less wealthy nations cannot afford to develop or sustain appropriate infrastructure, and as a consequence people in these areas may spend a correspondingly higher fraction of their income on water. Read more...

## Diagrams

 Graphical phases in the life cycle of a facility Public Vs. Private Provision Infrastructure Systems Cash Flow

## Selected biography

Edwin Howard Armstrong (December 18, 1890 – January 31, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor who invented the modern frequency modulation (FM) radio. Born in New York City, New York, in 1890, he later studied at Columbia University and later became a professor there. He invented the regenerative circuit while he was an undergraduate and patented it in 1914, the super-regenerative circuit (patented 1922), and the superheterodyne receiver (patented 1918).

Armstrong was of the opinion that anyone who had actual contact with the development of radio understood that the radio art was the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae (known today as part of "mathematical physics"). His work, as important as it was in its own right, was a part of a continuum of progress in communications and electronics that since his time has brought forward color television, the personal computer, the Internet, cable and satellite radio and TV, personal mobile phones, audio, [[video] and computing, digital stereo radio on both the medium wave and VHF-FM bands, and digital high definition television on VHF, UHF, cable and satellite. Armstrong's FM system was used for communications between NASA and the Apollo program astronauts. Read more...

## Economic Analysis

${\displaystyle \scriptstyle ratio={\frac {PV(B_{2})-PV(B_{1})}{PV(C_{2})-PV(C_{1})}}}$
${\displaystyle \scriptstyle EAC={\frac {NPV}{A_{t,r}}}}$
${\displaystyle \scriptstyle FV=PV\cdot (1+i)^{n}}$
${\displaystyle \scriptstyle NPV=\sum _{n=0}^{N}{\frac {C_{n}}{(1+r)^{n}}}=0}$
${\displaystyle \scriptstyle \mathrm {PV} ={\frac {FV}{(1+i)^{n}}}\,}$
${\displaystyle \scriptstyle ROI={\frac {Profit}{Investment}}\ }$

## Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

Wikibooks
Books

Commons
Media

Wikinews
News

Wikiquote
Quotations

Wikisource
Texts

Wikiversity
Learning resources

Wikivoyage
Travel guides

Wiktionary
Definitions

Wikidata
Database

Wikispecies
Species