Correspondence on BS 8002: Use, Abuse, and Relationship to Other Codes

I cannot claim to be an authority on the subject on ‘women in construction’. Therefore I have subtitled this article ‘a personal view’. That is what it is - the perspective of a 30-something consultant engineer on the lower rungs of the management ladder. My views are based on my own experiences, talking to colleagues and the contact I have had with many schoolgirls over recent years talking at seminars to encourage them into engineering, or showing them what it’s really like through work-shadowing. Jo da Silva

The Building Act 1984, which generally came into force on 1 December 1984 in England and Wales, allowed provision to be made for the approval of persons to give a certificate that the proposed work, if carried out in accordance with the deposited plans, will comply with the Regulations. B.A. Cox

This paper establishes an up-to-date measure of the variability of the material and geometric properties of commercial quality structural steel. A comprehensive set of measurements (over 7000 samples) was obtained and collated. The large data set was suficient to evaluate the type of probability distribution characterising variability. The results provide the detailed statistical evidence essential for reliability analyses of the type needed to underpin the selection and calibration of new design rules for structural steel components. The statistical data reported are compared with the measures of variability assumed during the calibration of Eurocode 3 (EC3) partial safety factors; it is shown that some of these may safely be reduced. M.P. Byfield and Professor D.A. Nethercot