Welcome to the April 2010 issue of Geotechnical Engineering. This issue consists of five contrasting papers of varying lengths with four of the paper's authors resident overseas. Being an assessor for the last 2 years, I have noticed a trend towards overseas contributions with fewer papers from the UK being submitted for consideration for publication. In 2009, there were 32 papers of which 21 were from overseas authors and 11 from the UK. Over a third of the papers were from authors in Asia. Papers from Asia tend to be highly theoretical whereas those from other regions often include field results comparing theory with practice. Two of the papers are concerned with numerical analysis while the other three consider how the results of theoretical equations compare with the physical records from site observations. As a practising engineer, and a believer in the observational approach, these latter papers are fundamental to our understanding of the behaviour of soils under load.