The All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) has published the results of another inquiry of Moscow developers on the topic of administrative barriers. Such studies have been conducted annually for 11 years. The accumulated experience provides an understanding of how the participants’ moods have been changing over time. And although economic problems have now come to the fore, many entrepreneurs still have difficulty communicating with officials.

Eighteen percent of the inquiry participants said that optimization was needed in the preparation of documents for control geodetic surveys. Fourteen percent of the inquiry participants said that the most difficult thing was the concurrence the results of engineering surveys with the authorities.

Valery Fedorov, the General Director of VTsIOM, believes that it is necessary to optimize the construction industry in close cooperation with developers, but it is not good to follow only their interests. At a press conference at the international media center “Russia Today” on the topic “Administrative barriers in the construction sphere: a survey of Moscow developers”, he noted that there are also interests of the consumers, authorities, and transport sphere personnel.

This article tells about that VTsIOM survey – first of all, about what Moscow developers want and how they evaluate the work of officials who issue permits and control the construction business.

The interfactional working group “Baikal” is a voluntary association of deputies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation. It participates in improving federal legislation aimed at the refinement of the socio-economic and environmental living conditions in the Irkutsk region, the Republic of Buryatia, the Trans-Baikal Territory and at protecting Lake Baikal.

Sergey Ten, a deputy of the State Duma from the Irkutsk Region and the head of the inter-factional working group “Baikal”, told the editorial staff of the “GeoInfo” iournal about the legislative work on the topics related to Lake Baikal, BAM, needs of the local population, and the political ecologists’ goals.

The situation among job seekers is more competitive in the management field, than in the spere of ordinary engineering positions. As the “hh.ru statistics” service evidences, sometimes there are less than two applicants for one vacancy of an ordinary technical specialist, and there are up to seven applicants for one vacancy of the chief project engineer.

The editorial staff of the “GeoInfo” journal invited some experts to explain the peculiarities of the competition in these areas, as well as to reflect on what the chief project engineer should be able to do, where to find such a specialist, how to become one, and whether there are independent ways to this status.

In the spring in 2024, the National Council for Professional Qualifications under the President of the Russian Federation will celebrate its 10th anniversary. “We would like to celebrate this anniversary not with concerts, banquets, and buffet tables, but by stating that the National Qualification System has been created in our country,” – Alexander Shokhin, the chairman of this council, the president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, shared his plans.

At the international multimedia press center “Rossiya Segodnya” (“Russia Today”), Alexander Shokhin and Artem Shadrin, General Director of the autonomous non-profit organization “National Agency for the Development of Qualifications”, answered the following questions. Why is the emergence of independent qualification assessment justified? What to do with job seekers who, taking advantage of the difficult situation on the labor market, want high salaries? Why should employers become teachers? How to advertise the engineering profession to schoolchildren?

The amendments to the law “On the protection of Lake Baikal” caused a great public resonance. When the information about upcoming legal changes was made public in 2019, the noise and scandals began. And a compromise has not been found.

The most emotionally intense was the idea of forest clean cutting to modernize the railways of the Eastern Range of the Russian Railways company, which includes the Baykal-Amur Railroad and Trans-Siberian Railway. Previously, clean cuttings were prohibited there, so the current legislators have proposed making a temporary exception for significant construction projects. But the public opposed this.

The protesters are represent a diverse audience: “green” fanatics (including political ecologists, emotionally unstable people, and dilettantes); scientists concerned about the state of the lake; local residents who are inconvenienced by numerous environmental restrictions or who want to satisfy their business interests on the sly.

The editorial staff of the “GeoInfo” journal studied various positions and requested official clarifications from the Russian Railways company and from the State Duma.

The article considers a case history when mistakes in engineering surveys, design and construction led to the appearance of an emergency domestic building in the outskirts of one of the Russian workers' settlements. Thе residents of that building could not be resettled for almost thirty years. The author of the papre emphasizes that this is most likely a mass phenomenon, which is the result of construction in particularly difficult years for the country, i. e. during and after the breakup of the USSR. Yes, in Moscow and some other cities of Russia, housing stock renewals are currently underway (and even quite strong five-story buildings are often demolished, since land in cities is expensive and it is profitable for someone to build high-rise buildings there). But there are too many parts in our country where it is almost impossible to achieve renewals, even in the cases of really dilapidated and emergency prone houses. And people have to live there in unbearable and even life-threatening conditions. And the author tries to draw the readers' attention to this problem in this article.

In the city of Monchegorsk (Murmansk region) some “artists” in the field of engineering surveys were discovered. Perhaps they had been working in this direction for a long time, or maybe for the first time they depicted results of non-existent laboratory studies of grounds. And they received 1.5 million rubles from the budget under a municipal contract.

The public prosecutor's office assessed this creativity in its own way and opened two criminal cases under the article “Fraud committed on a large scale”.

Since falsifications of engineering survey documents, according to experts opinions, happen quite often (especially as they are easy to generate using a computer), the editorial staff of the “GeoInfo” journal asked some experts and official organizations about details of this problem.

We present an abridged and adapted translation of the report “The compressive strength of cohesive soil stabilized with microbial induced cementation” by Indonesian site investigators (Alkadri et al., 2022). This report was made at the 4th International Conference on Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2022 in Indonesia (ICCEE 2022). It was also published as an article in the journal “Earth and Environmental Science” by the publishing company of the British scientific society “Institute of Physics” (IOP) that is now virtually international. It is an open access article under the CC BY 3.0 license that allows it to be distributed, translated, adapted, and supplemented, provided that the types of changes are noted and the original source is referred to. In our case, the full reference to the original paper (Alkadri et al., 2022) for the presented translation is given in the end.

It should be emphasized that materials on soil biocementation methods may be of interest to Russian readers, because these methods are not common in our country, and there are very few domestic publications on them. But it is quite possible that as biotechnologies develop on an industrial scale more, methods of microbiological stabilization of soils will spread in our country, too.

The purpose of the study by the Indonesian authors is to evaluate the physical and mechanical characteristics of sandy loam strengthened by cementation using the microbiological method. For the biocementation, they used a bacterial culture of Bacillus subtilis aged 2, 4, and 6 days from the sowing in a liquid nutrient medium. The bacterial culture solutions were added to the soil samples (with optimal humidity) in quantities of 4, 6 and 8% of the sample weight. Then the samples mixed and formed. The exposure times for these samples were 3, 7, 14, and 28 days. Then they were undergone to unconfined compressive tests. The maximal compressive strength was demonstrated by the soil sample that had been treated with the 4-day bacterial culture solution in an amount of 6% by weight and had been cured for 28 days. Its compressive strength was 6 times more than the compressive strength of the original soil that was not subjected to biocementation. The authors consider that soils after biocementation can be used in road construction in order to stabilize the base, subgrade, and embankment. But for this, as they point out, full-scale field tests are still ahead.

We present an abridged and adapted (with rearrangements) translation of a brief article “Application of deep foundation pit support technology based on big data analysis in construction engineering construction” (WanYan, 2020) published in the Journal of Physics by the publishing company of the British scientific society “Institute of Physics” (IOP) that is now virtually international. It is an open access article under the CC BY 3.0 license that allows it to be distributed, translated, adapted, and supplemented, provided that the types of changes are noted and the original source is referred to. In our case, the full reference to the original paper (WanYan, 2020) for the presented translation is given in the end. This article is based on the corresponding report made at 8th International Conference on Applied Innovation in IT (ICAIIT 2020). The author of the report is Doujin Wanyan, chinese geotechnical engineer from the Xijing College (Xi'an).

In recent years, the rapid development of deep foundation pit support projects has become an increasingly important issue in the construction of buildings and structures in large and medium-sized cities. To ensure the safety of foundation pits and avoid accidents, it is necessary not only to strengthen supervision of engineering surveys, design, construction and other aspects, but also to apply modern technologies for monitoring of foundation pit support systems, surrounding grounds and neighbouring buildings and structures in real time, combined with digital simulation on the basis of Internet thinking when working with big data. This is the only way to improve forecasting and early warning technologies concerning possible dangers, so that engineering and design staff can take the necessary measures in time to prevent emergency situations. Indeed, at present, big data are used in the design, monitoring and prediction of the behavior of deep foundation pits, which is necessary for comparative studies of options for support systems, as well as for mathematical analysis and mathematical statistics for data verification. This article is devoted to a brief discussion of the mentioned aspects.

The article describes the development of automated systems for field monitoring of soil temperatures in accordance with GOST 25358-2012 along extended objects by AO NPP “Etalon” (“Scientific and Production Enterprise “Etalon” JSC). The implementation of the developed technical solutions makes it possible to increase the accuracy and reliability of measurements, to simplify the existing temperature monitoring systems, and to expand the fields of application of them.

We present an abridged and adapted translation of the report “Coastline changes monitoring induced by man-made structures using synthetic aperture radar: a new simple approach” by Ni Nyoman Pujianiki, Indonesian engineering surveyor (Pujianiki, 2022). This report was presented at the 4th International Conference on Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2022 in Indonesia (ICCEE 2022). It was also published as an article in the journal “Earth and Environmental Science” by the publishing company of the British scientific society “Institute of Physics” (IOP) that is now virtually international. It is an open access article under the CC BY 3.0 license that allows it to be distributed, translated, adapted, and supplemented, provided that the types of changes are noted and the original source is referred to. In our case, the full reference to the original paper (Pujianiki, 2022) for the presented translation is given in the end.

This study presents a new simple approach to detect the coastline changes due to the construction of man-made structures. The new approach used lowpass filter to reduce the speckles errors and Otsu’s thresholding method to create binary images. Then, a closing morphological operation was conducted to improve the binary image. In the final step, the canny edge detection was used for coastline delineation. The coastlines changes analysis was done by using the Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS).

In general, the processing steps of this new approach is semi-automatic processes, they do not require manual digitization to extract the coastline.

This method was tested using two independent images obtained from the ALOS-1 and Sentinel-1 satellites equipped with synthetic apertur e radars (SARs). The study area was located in the Pengambengan Port, Jembrana Regency, Bali, Indonesia. The new approach produced better results than other well-known methods. It detected clearly the man-made structures and the results of the impact of them on the coastal zone, i. e. abrasion and accretion. In addition, the results of this study can be used as evaluation parameters for the future development of the Pengambengan port or for redesigning the present structures.

The article considers the main features of the structure and the characteristics of ecological-geological systems (EGS) of clay ground masses that are common in the territory of Belarus. The authors show the decisive role of lithotopes composed of clay grounds in the formation of fertile soil on them and such biotic components as microbio-, phyto- and zoocenoses. The noted features must be taken into account in engineering-ecological studies and surveys in the territories composed of clay grounds.

We present a slightly abridged and adapted translation of the report “Engineering site investigations using surface seismic refraction technique” by Nigerian engineering surveyors (Adewoyin et al., 2020). This report was presented at the 4th International Conference on Science and Sustainable Development “Advances in Sciences and Technology for Sustainable Development” (ICSSD 2020) in Ota, Nigeria. It was also published as an article in the “Earth and Environmental Science” journal by the publishing company of the British scientific society “Institute of Physics” (IOP) that is now virtually international. It is an open access article under the CC BY 3.0 license that allows it to be distributed, translated, adapted, and supplemented, provided that the types of changes are noted and the original source is referred to. In our case, the full reference to the original paper (Adewoyin et al., 2020) for the presented translation is given in the end.

In this study, surface seismic refraction method together with drilling wells, digging test pits and performing cone penetration tests (CPT) were used to provide 2D information of the subsurface geological features. This approach simplifies the characterization of the subsurface conditions of a relatively large area, especially when it is required for engineering construction purposes.

The results of using the seismic refraction method revealed three layers that were characterized by different seismic velocities.

Comparing the results of using the seismic refraction method, drilling wells, digging test pits, and CPT indicated that the third (from the surface) layer was the most competent for construction. The depth of its top in the investigated site was varied on the average between 7 and 10 m.