Should Temporary Structures be Designed with Higher Allowable Stresses?

Traditionally, designers of temporary structures for use in construction had little guidance binding on their designs. Some owners, particularly infrastructure operators, provided standards and guidelines that permitted increased allowable stresses for certain temporary conditions. Sometimes the increased allowable stresses were limited to new materials or were subject to other stipulations. However, this practice came from …

What Nate Silver Can Teach Engineers

Nate’s Silver’s book, The Signal and the Noise (The Penguin Press, New York, 2012) was released in the run-up to the 2012 election. Silver and the FiveThirtyEight.com project were well on their way to accurately predicting most of the electoral college and Senate results and there was a good deal of interest and controversy in the political media regarding …

What’s in Your Contract?

You might not think that a freelance writer would have much in common with an engineer or architect. However, I read this story and saw parallels to a big issue in the practice of engineering and architecture: If a Lawsuit Can Bury Gawker, What Could It Do to a Freelancer? It is not my intent …

Does Your Project Need a Foundation Specialist?

When I talk with people in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction industry, I often find that a lot of people working on building projects have complaints about the foundation engineering on those projects. These complaints have a few common themes: Inadequate scope or data collection for subsurface explorations and geotechnical reports; Excessively conservative foundation design recommendations; Inappropriate, incomplete …