Geotechnical News • June 2016
19
GEOTECHNICAL INSTRUMENTATION NEWS
Introduction by John Dunnicliff, Editor
This is the 86th episode of GIN. Three articles this time.
People issues
I’ve often maintained that what I call
“people issues” frequently overshadow
the importance of technical issues.
The article by Martin Beth of Soldata
Group presents eight common sense
rules for successful monitoring, all of
which relate to people issues. In my
view this is
MUST READING
by all
who have a stake in our goal of obtain-
ing high quality and relevant data.
More on vibration monitoring
The previous GIN included an article
by Bob Turnbull of Instantel titled
“The fundamentals of vibration
monitoring – things to consider”. As a
follow-up to this, here’s an article by
Vincent Le Borgne of GKM Consul-
tants titled “Lessons learned in vibra-
tion monitoring”. The article presents
three case histories and conveys yet
again that people issues can often
overshadow technical issues.
General role of instrumentation,
and summaries of instruments
that can be considered for help-
ing to provide answers to pos-
sible geotechnical questions.
The previous two GINs included
articles about instrumentation for
braced excavations and embankments
on soft ground. Here’s one about cut
slopes and landslides.
Call for author(s) for one or
more articles on monitoring
embankment dams
I’d like to publish something similar
to the above three article for embank-
ment dams, but am not competent to
write it, so I’m looking for a possible
author or authors. Some suggestions
for content are given below.
It seems to me that the article should
have some or all of the following
content:
• Monitoring existing embankment
dams where there is no evidence of
a problem
• Monitoring existing embankment
dams where there is evidence of a
problem
• Monitoring new embankment dams
• Potential failure mode analysis
It also seems to me that, in contrast to
other articles in this series, the types of
instruments to be considered for help-
ing to provide answers to the various
geotechnical questions are too numer-
ous to be included, but perhaps some
general guidance can be given.
Any takers?
Closure
Please send an abstract of an article
for GIN to
co.uk—see the guidelines on www.
geotechnicalnews.com/instrumenta-
tion_news.php
Yung sing (“drink and win”) – China.
This from a website with toasts. We
lived in Hong Kong for several years
in the 1960s and became (very!) famil-
iar with the toast “Yam sing”, which
we understood to mean “knock it all
back without stopping”. Does anybody
know whether “Yung sing” means the
same?
