Geotechnical engineering practice (and engineering geology etc.), like many other businesses, is filled with ethical dilemmas.  This category covers ethics of geo-engineering practice as well as business aspects of our industry.

Construction quality control and quality assurance is a high dollar business in our industry. Compaction control, earthwork inspection, soil testing, asphalt and concrete materials testing, special structural inspections, specialty geotechnical inspections...all are a an important part of any project.

Many times there is an adversarial relationship between engineers or geologists and contractors. But here at GeoPrac.net, we believe that there should always be a spirit of partnership...or at least mutual respect. Whether they are specialty geotechnical contractors, drilling contractors, drilled shaft contractors or something else, we want to hear from them in this  category.

Deep foundations such as drilled shafts, driven piles, micro-piles and auger cast piles are frequently the foundation system of choice when poor subgrade soils preclude the use of shallow foundation options.

Earthwork and embankments are part of nearly every construction project. Considerations include compaction factor, settlement, consolidation settlements, proctor data, nuclear density gauge, sand cone density and other construction QA/QC measures. Rock blasting is a highly technical field and can be a major cost component of projects in rocky terrain.

Field investigations for geo-projects include a wide range of methods, such as hollow stem auger drilling, rotosonic drilling, standard penetration testing, cone penetration testing, bullnose penetrometer, geologic mapping, rock structure mapping, seismic refraction, other geophysical methods. 

An important if unfortunate aspect of all engineering is the study of what went wrong, failures and forensic engineering. For geotechnical engineering this often involves landslides, damage to structures from settlement or other foundation problems such as collapsible soils or swelling clays.

Geotechnical engineering, geological engineering and other related disciplines are a diverse and complicated field of practice. This Miscellaneous Category holds geo-news that may be relevant to our readers but is somewhat difficult to categorize. 

Engineers and geologists can't get their job done without specialty software and spreadsheets. This category contains tutorials and reviews for visual basic for applications or VBA for Excel, finite element and finite difference methods, gINT boring log software, slope stability software, Geo-Studio, Rockware and other geo-software packages.

Geotechnical engineers and geologists are obligated to practice according to the applicable code standards. Whether it's AASHTO LRFD or allowable stress design, IBC, or some other code, this is the category for articles on the topic. Also, articles related to specification writing for geo-projects can be found here as well.