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The paper deals with determining the final value of simple systems reliability. Simple systems, the systems with simple interconnections, can be divided into a sequence of series and/or parallel subsystems. The paper presents the basic functional relationships used to assess the reliability of simple systems, however, they are also essential for understanding more complex systems. The paper graphically shows and analyzes the final reliability of the systems depending on the arrangement of subsystems, and also those depending on the number of subsystems.

The potential failure of a large bank presents vexing questions for policymakers. It poses significant risks to other financial institutions, to the financial system as a whole, and possibly to the economic and social order. Because of such fears, policymakers in many countries--developed and less developed, democratic and autocratic--respond by protecting bank creditors from all or some of the losses they otherwise would face. Failing banks are labeled \"too big to fail\" (or TBTF). This important new book examines the issues surrounding TBTF, explaining why it is a problem and discussing ways of dealing with it more effectively. Gary Stern and Ron Feldman, officers with the Federal Reserve, warn that not enough has been done to reduce creditors' expectations of TBTF protection. Many of the existing pledges and policies meant to convince creditors that they will bear market losses when large banks fail are not credible, resulting in significant net costs to the economy. The authors recommend that policymakers enact a series of reforms to reduce expectations of bailouts when large banks fail.

The academic and policy debate on state failure reaches back to the early 1990s. Since then, its empirical and analytical sophistication has grown, yet the fact that state failure is a regional phenomenon, that is, that it occurs in clusters of geographically contiguous states, has largely been overlooked. This article first considers the academic and policy debates on state failure in the Political Science/International Relations and Development Studies literatures, and offers a definition of state failure that is derived from the means of the state, rather than its ends. Subsequently engaging with existing scholarship on the concept of ‘region’ in international security, the article develops a definition of ‘state failure regions’. Further empirical observation of such regions and additional conceptual reflections lead to establishing an analytical model for the study of state failure regions and allow indentifying a number of concrete gains in knowledge and understanding that can result from its application.

Reviewing decades of thinking regarding the role of the state in economic development, we argue for the continued relevance of the concept of the ‘developmental state’. With reference to Argentina, Brazil, Ethiopia, Rwanda and China, we contend that new developmental states are evidence of a move beyond the historical experience of East Asian development. Further, we argue for the applicability of the developmental state framework to key questions of governance, institution building, industrial policy and the extractive industries, as well as to a wide variety of cases of successful and failed state-led development in the early twenty-first century.

Cemented paste backfill (CPB) has been widely used as local and regional underground support to reduce host rock wall closure in mined-out areas and also to reduce rockfall and rockburst incidents. However, analyzing the rock mass—CPB interactions in the first month after backfill placement must account for the CPB’s time-dependent strength, stiffness, and volume change characteristics during binder hydration. This article presents the first such comprehensive study made for CPB from the Williams mine in Ontario, Canada. Monotonic isotopically consolidated drained compressive triaxial tests were conducted on cured CPB specimens using the lubricated-ends test technique. The specimens had 3.0–7.5% Cement Content (CC); Curing Times (CTs) were from 3 to 28 days; and the confining stress ranged from 25 to 350 kPa. During shearing, all tests exhibited an initial contractive phase leading to a Characteristic State (CHS or point of volumetric strain reversal) followed by dilation with a maximum dilation rate corresponding to peak stress at the Failure State (FS). Both CHS and FS are adequately described by the Mohr–Coulomb criterion and a framework formulation was proposed to predict the evolution of CHS and FS based on CC and CT. Furthermore, the volumetric strains at CHS and FS can be defined as linear functions of the respective axial strains at the CHS and FS. Quantification of the observed behaviors through these functional relationships can help develop future constitutive models that better represent CPB’s transient response to triaxial stress loading while curing, which is essential to understanding as-placed backfill properties and its interaction with surrounding rock mass.

This paper provides an analysis of the lockdown politics implemented in Greece during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. It argues that Greece's pandemic politics deepened the crisis of the familistic social model that resulted from the austerity policies of the last decade. Although caring for the family became a high priority during the pandemic, resources for families and households did not increase. Likewise, while “essential” workers were much praised by officials, their wages and working conditions hardly improved. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis management in Greece has two peculiarities: First, the country entered the pandemic after a painful decade of austerity, interrupting the fragile, long-awaited economic recovery. Second, given the inadequate state of the public healthcare system after a decade of austerity, the lockdowns in Greece were among the strictest in Europe. Rather than being the result of state preparedness, these lockdowns can be interpreted as an acknowledgment of state failure.

Having recently emerged from its unenviable status as the runt of international law, the phenomenon of statelessness nonetheless eludes traditional international legal instruments. Confronted with questions of nationality that typically fall within the domain of sovereignty, international and regional human rights bodies struggle to rein in the increasingly creative measures that states adopt to obscure the production and persistence of statelessness. This Article uncovers and dissects the different ways in which states manufacture statelessness not through explicitly discriminatory laws and unequal treatment, but through manipulating ostensibly neutral criteria for nationality. The Article identifies three such criteria that are not traditionally considered “suspect” categories for the grant or denial of nationality: time, territory, and administrative practice. It also suggests doctrinal, policy, and strategic tools for identifying and responding to the types of statelessness that are not a collateral consequence of state failure or incompetence, but the outcome of state intentionality.

Previous research by Goldstone et al. (2010) generated a highly accurate predictive model of state-level political instability. Notably, this model identifies political institutions – and partial democracy with factionalism, specifically – as the most compelling factors explaining when and where instability events are likely to occur. This article reassesses the model’s explanatory power and makes three related points: (1) the model’s predictive power varies substantially over time; (2) its predictive power peaked in the period used for out-of-sample validation (1995–2004) in the original study and (3) the model performs relatively poorly in the more recent period. The authors find that this decline is not simply due to the Arab Uprisings, instability events that occurred in autocracies. Similar issues are found with attempts to predict nonviolent uprisings (Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2017) and armed conflict onset and continuation (Hegre et al. 2013). These results inform two conclusions: (1) the drivers of instability are not constant over time and (2) care must be exercised in interpreting prediction exercises as evidence in favor or dispositive of theoretical mechanisms.

The dilatant failure state in the stress ratio–plastic dilatancy relationship is crucial in the frictional state concept. This article presents a methodology for determining the dilatant failure state from the results of drained triaxial compression tests. For geomaterials undergoing dilative behavior during shearing, the dilatant failure state corresponds to the state of minimum plastic dilatancy. For contractive behavior, the proposed calculation procedure can be used to determine the dilatant failure state. In general, the dilatant failure state and the failure state are different. The points representing dilatant failure states in the stress ratio–plastic dilatancy plane can be approximated by a straight line (dilatant failure state line). Grain crushing and debonding during shearing significantly increase the slope of this line. The intersection of this line with the vertical axis determines the critical frictional state angle for granular materials. The dilatant failure state, with previously defined natural state parameter, allows for the determination of the critical state angle void ratio without physically reaching the critical frictional state. In general, given the fact that the dilatant failure state proceeds the failure state, the stresses and strains in the shearing specimen can be determined more accurately than in the ultimate, critical state. The frictional state concept may be viewed as an extension of the critical state concept developed over fifty years ago.