We plan to add more detailed examples of the uses and abuses of analyses in geotechnical engineering to this site and encourage visitors to send us their own examples, with graphics in any reasonable format, and we will post the best examples. We also would welcome short discussions on this article! You may even use four-letter words but we reserve the right to edit those out before posting the discussion.

In order to get you started, we leave you with two of our favorite quotes (both by professors at the University of Texas at Austin).

On the limitations of analyses:

Steve Wright (at the ASCE Specialty Conference on Stability and Performance of Slopes and Embankments - II):
Never analyze a problem for which you don't already know the answer.

On the potential of analyses:

Roy Olson (in the users' manual for the computer program SD3):
Use of experience alone for design may be justified in a few cases, e.g., on very small projects where the cost of proper soil sampling, testing and analysis may not be justified; where soil stratification is so complex that a rational analysis appears meaningless; and where the designer has had so much experience in the same soil deposit with similar structures that nothing new would be learned from analysis. Experience, based on documented case histories, is invaluable in all cases. However, experience cannot provide a rational approach to design because there are too many variables in real problems to allow them to be sorted out based purely on experience, and because few engineers have well documented experience to utilize. "Experience" most commonly consists of re-application of designs used previously without any real knowledge of how they actually performed. In general, experience will be most useful if it is coupled with proper soil sampling, testing and appropriate theoretical analyses.