Korea - squandering a mandate for change?

In winning the presidential and legislative elections of 2007-8, the Grand National Party and its leader Lee Myung-bak have attained a potentially unique opportunity to influence South Korea's political, economic and diplomatic trajectory. This paper reviews Korea's 'once in a generation' election and prospects for change under President Lee. Despite the political capital accrued from his party's landslide victories, Lee appears set to replicate previous incumbents of the presidency, each of whom has been overwhelmed by the high expectations of the public on the one hand, and the harsh constraints imposed by Korea's geopolitical position on the other.

Three dimensional stability charts for slopes based on limit analysis methods

This paper uses finite element upper and lower bound limit analysis to produce chart solutions for three-dimensional (3D) natural slopes for both short- and long-term stability. The presented chart solutions are convenient tools that can be used for preliminary design purposes. The rigorous limit analysis results in this paper were found to bracket the true factor of safety within ±10% or better, which can be used as a benchmark for the solutions from other methods. The depth of the slip surfaces is observed to be generally shallow for most analyzed cases, particularly for the long-term slope stability problem. In addition, it was found that using a two-dimensional (2D) analysis may lead to significant differences in estimating safety factors, which can differ by 2%–60% depending on the slope geometry and soil properties. Therefore, great care and judgement are required when applying 2D analyses to 3D slope problems.

The end of the Keating-Howard-Rudd-Gillard era?

Australian political discourse is dominated by ahistorical hyperbole, every election defeat is a landslide, every consecutive electoral loss indicates complete political marginalisation, every poll slump is a crisis, and every struggling leader is the worst ever. Australian Labor is not faring well but we need to distinguish between the ebbs and flows of the political cycle and the fundamentals. Australian politics may be approaching a fundamental break. The political era that began in the early 1990s may be coming to an end and with it Labor's hegemonic position in Australian politics that has endured since Gough Whitlam.

Labor’s century in New South Wales 1911-2011

Examines patterns of support for Labor in New South Wales at a state level from 1911 up until the party's landslide defeat in 2011.

Pore pressure effect on slope stability assessment

Slope stability assessment has been an integral problem for geotechnical engineering all these years. While stability of slopes is affected by various factors, pore pressure is one of the common naturalelements that influence slope stability analysis. This paper studies the effect of pore pressure on slope stability assessment by using Limit Equilibrium Method (LEM). The results will be compared to the solutions of Hoek and Bray charts. In this study, slopes with different levels of water table corresponding to those of Hoek and Bray charts are investigated. It’s interesting to observe that the results obtained from the Hoek and Bray charts yielded different factor of safety compare to those in the study here-in. In fact, the different between the factors of safety could be up to 30%. Hence this issue should be taken into consideration during slope design.

Back analyses for slope failures in rock

Some of the geotechnical parameters used in the analysis may not be accurately measured directly from laboratory tests due to effects of sample disturbance and errors of tests. The back analysis or the observational method are thus often applied to determine the representative and/or dominant strength parameters based on field observations in practice. Based on the Hoek-Brown failure criterion, it was known that the disturbance factor (D) should be determined with caution. The difficulty of measuring rock mass disturbance accurately has been shown. Three rock slope failures will be investigated in this paper using back-analysis technique. In addition, various rock mass strength parameters are taken into consideration.