When computers were frst invented in the middle of the last century, nobody ever anticipated that the instruction sets to program them would ultimately evolve to the point where many of them could be accessed freely, without charge, in ways that would become widely available to nonexpert communities. Nor did we ever consider that computers would penetrate every corner of social life, revolutionizing our social behavior, our science, and our politics.

What is cartography today? When I look back on the first and second editions of this book, it’s almost like seeing cartography as it progressed since 2009 and it now looks almost nothing like it did then. The expansion of what’s possible has been incredible. Massive technological change, accompanied by free, open, highly detailed, and reliable datasets, along with a surge of interest in the field from all corners, combined to make what was once impossible cartographically, possible.

The foundations will affect how the other elements of a building perform and so can be a major factor in determining whether or not the building achieves its intended purpose with satisfactory long-term performance. However, decisions concerning the foundations for low-rise buildings are often made by people involved in planning and other aspects of the building development who have little formal training in geotechnical engineering. This book has been written for the benefit of such people and their non-specialist professional advisors; these include architects, surveyors, loss adjusters, planners, insurance underwriters and property developers, most of whom are likely to have only a limited understanding of the engineering of the ground. The book brings together a large quantity of material relevant to building foundations published by BRE over many years. This introductory chapter defines the scope of the book.  <...>

Risk and Reliability in Geotechnical Engineering was originally conceived as an update to our 2008 Taylor & Francis book Reliability-Based Design in Geotechnical Engineering—Computations and Applications. However, R&D in this domain has gained pace over the past 6 years and it is the collective opinion of the contributors that it is timely to write a new book.

The spontaneous potential well-logging is one of the most common and useful welllogging techniques in petroleum exploitation. Since the earth layer can be regarded as a piecewise uniform medium, and due to electrochemical and other factors, there exists a jump of potential (spontaneous potential difference) on each interface of different layers.

Copper is the first metal which had really played a large part in human history. It is considered that Latin cuprus from which chemical name of copper originated was connected with the island of Cyprus, with the meaning ‘copper island’. But actually it is not so. The Greek word κύπρος has uncertain etymology. For copper the Greeks had a word ϗαλκός; the term “Chalcolithic” goes back to this word. Latin language had another word: aes. The combination aes cyprium meant “Cyprian copper”. Then cyprium was replaced by cuprum. All European words connected with it do not go back to a common Indo-European base. The Latin base is closer to them (Muhly 1973, p. 174, 175). <...>

Significant uranium deposits and mining were restricted to eastern Germany (until 1990 German Democratic Republic/GDR) while only few small uranium deposits have been mined in western Germany.

The characteristics, peculiarities, the development of the epikarst, and its role in karstifcation are described here. Epikarst varieties are differentiated, the development of these varieties is interpreted, and the factors infuencing the development of varieties are taken into consideration. <...>