U of Minn Geotech Conference

[MRM]

Is anyone planning to attend the upcoming conference in St. Paul, Minn.? The date is February 25 of this year. I see that one of the themes this year involves uncertainties in soils, probabilistic methods, etc. among others.

I've always found this topic very interesting so I'm looking forward to it. I see that John Christian will give the Kersten lecture. Christian just had an article regarding geotechnical uncertainties come out in Journal of Geotechnical Engineering last month.

Anyhow, it's usually a good program. I've attended the last 2 in 3 years. I know that the middle of Minnesota in February is not where many of us would like to be, myself included, but what are you going to do, right? Just thought I'd give it a plug.
Try this link:

http://hosted.ce.umn.edu/mgs/conf/

For future reference, has anyone been to other annual conferences that they would recommend?

 

[BigH]

I'd love to - but it is a bit far. This is a good topic - there was a good paper by Muir Woods in a book I got here in India - drop an address or something and I will send you a copy - in this forum, we are allowed to give email addresses I think - mine is below; just put it all together. I'm hoping that we can be less "hidden" in here. See if you can get some paperwork on the conference for us that can't go.

bohica . fries
at bigfoot . you know what!

 

[MRM]

I'll see what I can do!

 

[ashjun]

Anyone attending the Rankine Lecture this year? Its free to attend!

http://www.britishgeotech.org.uk/meetings/230305.pdf

Would be good to meet one of you guys

Rgds

 

[Mccoy]

By the way,
John Christian has written, together with Dr. Baecher, the most updated and comprehensive book now available in the field of probabilistic geotechnical engineering.
Uncertainty sure is an interesting topic, we have to deal with uncertain data to begin with, and should be able in principle to know which is the uncertainty which regards the output data, the ones we use in designing foundations and structures (traditionally, this problem has been tackled simply by overdesigning, but by an unknown factor).
Subject is pretty wide, please MRM let us know if there has been some particularly interesting presentation (is there a list of abstracts somewhere?).

 

[BigH]

Thanks for the note on Christian's book. The only other one that I am aware of is M.E. Harr's book of some 1985 vintage. It was interesting in that it gave "Boussinesque" style curves but based on particulic media rather than elastic half-space.

 

[Mccoy]

There are (pretty few) others,
particularly some ASCE publications, a few papers on ASCE journal;
more material is available mainly in ICASP proceedings and something in ISSMFE proceedings. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to collect proceedings material lately, I'm doing many things, probably too many!
If someone would like to have a look at Harr's probabilistic method for the stress field under a strip foundation, I have an excel file ready (theory is on Fang's "Foundation Engineering Handbook", Holz 's chapter on settlements).
I've been interested in statistic and probabilistic methods for 10 years now, and am trying to put'em in practice in foundation reports. Tricky field, you have to sort thru the statistical mumbo-jumbo and be able to know what you are exactly doing and how to proceed.
But lately some good material has been published and some very handy softwares are available.
By the way, for a clear and brief report, you can have a look at Hoek's site, there is a chapter on how uncertainty is accounted for in some geotechnical problems; also, Mike Duncan's paper available on .pdf format which has repeatedly been mentioned in the foundation engineering forum .
I have to stop now, but the subject can be resumed anytime and, as far as I'm able to, I'm willing to clear up any doubts you may have on this topic.

 

[BigH]

Sure if you can send along - great! I'm off to a conference tomorrow about codal changed for deep foundations in India Code of Practice.
Chou