Geotechnical News • December 2019
31
Some parting remarks by John Dunnicliff, Editor
Introduction
For this 93
rd
and last episode of GIN
I decided to write about a few of
my pet subjects, mostly to do with
communication among us. But first,
John Gadsby, Publisher of Geotechni-
cal News, asked me whether I’d be
willing to identify ‘best’ GIN articles
among the 160 or so that are available
on
-
mentation_news.php.
‘
Best
’
GIN Articles
I was initially uncomfortable about
this, because I don’t want to imply
that any author was ‘second best’.
However, based on my ‘Golden Rule
Number 2’ for articles in GIN (I’ll
identify Number 1 later):
The goal of articles in GIN is to
provide information that will be
useful to readers in their
engineering practices. This is a
different goal from “I want to
share with you what I did”.
The latter goal is not acceptable.
and feedback from readers, I zeroed in
on these four:
• The Use of the Fully-grouted
Method for Piezometer Instal-
lation, Parts 1 and 2
by Ivan Con-
treras, Aaron Grosser and Richard
Ver Strate of Barr Engineering in
Minneapolis, June 2008. These
authors have been leaders in the
campaign to convince the rest of
us that the fully-grouted method
provides better quality, lower
cost, as well as easier and faster
installation than the “traditional”
method of sand, bentonite chips/
pellets/balls and grout.
• Update of the Fully-grouted
Method for Piezometer Instal-
lation
by the same authors as the
above article, June 2012.
• Remote monitoring of deforma-
tion. An overview of the seven
methods described in previ-
ous GINs
by Paolo Mazzanti of
NHAZCA in Rome, Italy, Decem-
ber 2012. I’d been very impressed
by the number of papers about
remote methods for monitoring de-
formation at the 2011 International
Symposium on Field Measure-
ments in GeoMechanics (FMGM)
in Berlin. Because I knew almost
nothing about several of these,
with their multiple acronyms, I
decided to find knowledgeable
people and ask each to write a
brief article for GIN. These seven
article were in GIN in March and
June 2012. Paolo Mazzanti (the
organizer of our annual monitor-
ing courses in Italy) agreed to
write this concluding article, with
a comparative analysis of the vari-
ous techniques.
• Eight Common Sense Rules for
Successful Monitoring
by Martin
Beth of Sixence Soldata, in Paris,
France, June 2016. Those of you
who know me will be aware of my
focus on ‘human factors’ as op-
posed to ‘technical factors’. This
article follows that focus. When
I told Martin Beth how useful I
thought this was, he replied, “But
everyone knows these rules”. Not
true!
Suggestions for Content of
Professional Lectures at Courses
Having directed many Continuing
Education Courses (that’s a North
American term; elsewhere they’re
usually called Continuing Professional
Development Courses) about geotech-
nical and structural monitoring, I’ve
learned a few lessons about content of
lectures during these courses.
1. The basic basic aspect is to be
clear in your own mind about your
objective, which seems to me to
be “To provide clear guidelines for
my audience on how to improve
their professional practices”.
2. And then the follow-up basic
basic question. “Will my planned
presentation keep my focus on
those ‘clear guidelines’ so that
my audience will understand and
remember them?
3. Inherent in this question is “Will
I be attempting too much?” i.e.
“Am I planning to present so much
information that the ’clear guide-
lines’ will be obscured?”
4. I suggest that you think of your pri-
mary theme as ‘Main Street’. Dur-
ing your presentation define Main
Street and stay on Main Street!
Turning left or right will detract
from your primary theme.
5. This is my Golden Rule Number 1
for articles in GIN - a quotation by
Joseph Pulitzer, which in my view
applies both to the written word
and to the spoken word at courses:
Put it before them briefly so they
will read it,
clearly so they will appreciate it,
picturesquely so that they
will remember it
and, above all, accurately
so that they
will be guided by its light.
Wonderful!
I have a story about when this quo-
tation came in very handy. The US
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