Excursus. Redressing the Balance in Higher Education: a Major Opportunity for Sir Ron Dearing's Inqu

Airship design Maurice Baguley writes from Redhill, Surrey: With regard to the interesting feature on 75 years of structural research at BRE by Messrs Armer and Buller (The Structural Engineer, 4 June 1996), the reference to the R100 airship hangar is incorrect. Verulam

The results obtained from a controlled field trial of strip foundations on a heterogeneous fill reinforced with stone columns are presented. Comparison is made with the performance of an identical foundation on the virgin fill and with results from numerical models. Comprehensive site investigation data are given, together with measured settlements, bearing pressures, and bending strains. It is concluded that the stone columns improved the performance of the strip foundation, although measured stress ratios were lower than computed values. Bending moments, deduced from the measured strains, suggest that hogging moments are unlikely to occur for a strip foundation on stone columns with a thickness of at least 400mm. Professor L.A. Wood, D. Johnson, K.S. Watts and A. Saadi

Dr D. Anderson (F) (University of Warwick) It is a pleasure to open the discussion because I believe that the paper is important in the development of design methods for composite structures.