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An Overview of Disaster and Emergency Management Systems Models
No full textEmergencies and disasters can cause immense physical, emotional and financial losses to individuals, organisations, and larger scale countries. These emergencies and disasters can fundamentally cause casualties, and in many cases, loss of life. Psychological and financially the impacts on individuals, organisations and countries can be irretrievable due to the impact of the disaster or emergency. Emergency management systems provide a multi-level overview of emergency environments. Bearing the current emergency management models in mind, this article looks at reviewing the existing six models in order to provide a solution for a more comprehensive emergency management system for implementation. If emergencies are managed effectively, these negative impacts can be removed or at least minimised. The article evaluates with an extensive literature review, how to develop a holistic framework to address the shortfalls of existing models
An experimental and computational IR and hybrid DFT-D3 study of the conformations ofl-lactic and acrylic acid: new insight into the dehydration mechanism of lactic acid to acrylic acid
Get PDFBeachcombers: Vagrancy, Empire, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide
No full textRunaways, castaways and renegades, the beachcombers lived in the Pacific Islands, and were the vagrants of the South Seas. Historically, they were most prominent in the early nineteenth century, and belonged to the medial phase between the Pacific Islanders’ first contact with Europeans, and the formal colonization that followed. Roaming from one island to another, trading skills and goods with their inhabitants, the beachcombers were driven further and further afield as Western powers began to annex the Pacific Islands. By the 1880s and 1890s they had been thoroughly displaced by the missionaries and merchants who settled there; however, in spite of this, or rather because of it, the beachcomber became an increasingly prominent figure in British culture during this period. This article examines the importance of the beachcomber in the imperial imagination. It explores how the beachcomber was ambiguously presented as both an imperial pathfinder and a degraded buccaneer in popular novels and the periodical press, and how these portrayals were key to the public’s understanding of the Pacific Islands. This cultural and historical discussion then provides the context for a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894). Here the beachcomber, a vagrant figure who captivated Stevenson’s imagination, is shown to be essential to his construction and critique of empire in the Pacific
bmotif: A package for motif analyses of bipartite networks
Get PDF1. Bipartite networks are widely-used to represent a diverse range of species interactions, such as pollination, herbivory, parasitism and seed dispersal. The structure of these networks is usually characterised by calculating one or more metrics that capture different aspects of network architecture. While these metrics capture useful properties of networks, they only consider structure at the scale of the whole network (the macro-scale) or individual species (the micro-scale). 'Meso-scale' structure between these scales is usually ignored, despite representing ecologically-important interactions. Network motifs are a framework for capturing this meso-scale structure and are gaining in popularity. However, there is no software available in R, the most popular programming language among ecologists, for conducting motif analyses in bipartite networks. Similarly, no mathematical formalisation of bipartite motifs has been developed. 2. Here we introduce bmotif: a package for counting motifs, and species positions within motifs, in bipartite networks. Our code is primarily an R package, but we also provide MATLAB and Python code of the core functionality. The software is based on a mathematical framework where, for the first time, we derive formal expressions for motif frequencies and the frequencies with which species occur in different positions within motifs. This framework means that analyses with bmotif are fast, making motif methods compatible with the permutational approaches often used in network studies, such as null model analyses. 3. We describe the package and demonstrate how it can be used to conduct ecological analyses, using two examples of plant-pollinator networks. We first use motifs to examine the assembly and disassembly of an Arctic plant-pollinator community, and then use them to compare the roles of native and introduced plant species in an unrestored site in Mauritius. 4. bmotif will enable motif analyses of a wide range of bipartite ecological networks, allowing future research to characterise these complex networks without discarding important meso-scale structural detail
