Technology makes vaccines available in Africa
As the third year of the pandemic begins, we know it won’t be over until people everywhere receive the vaccine—and maybe not even then. But it’s not just a matter […]
Insights
Managing the water footprint in construction
We’ve discussed the carbon footprint of concrete previously. However, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases aren’t the only environmental effects of construction. Making the best use of scarce resources is […]
Deep water cooling
Keeping interior spaces cool in summer is much less energy- and carbon efficient than heating them in winter. For this reason, most of the CALGreen provisions for making buildings energy […]
Why should we care about serviceability and durability?
There are generally three aspects to the performance of a structure. The first is structural. The structure needs to resist the gravitational, wind, and other loads to which it will […]
Learning from natural experiments
Experiments usually involve a controlled environment where we can limit the number of variables. In a traditional experiment, we hold everything constant except the thing we want to study. But […]
Becoming a Professional Engineer
We’ve discussed the importance of building codes and professional licensing in promoting the health, safety, and welfare of the public in previous blogs. But what does it take to become […]
What’s in the infrastructure bill?
On 15 November, President Biden signed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. So what’s in this infrastructure bill, and why is it important for the United States? According to John […]
Expecting the results to be different
We (erroneously) credit Albert Einstein with the definition of insanity as continuing to do the same thing while expecting the results to be different. But it’s such a common behavior […]
Link to Nov. 11 maturity and modeling webinar
Update: Here is the recording for the Nov. 11 webinar about maturity and modeling. Beton Consulting Engineers is once again teaming up with Giatec, a Canadian company with headquarters in […]
Q & A: Service life prediction
We’ve discussed concrete durability in quite a few blog posts, but we’ve only alluded indirectly to concrete service life prediction. Hossam Alalaily, a Beton lead concrete engineer based in Ontario, […]