Equivalent hazard magnitude scale

Hazard magnitude scales are widely adopted to facilitate communication regarding hazard events and the corresponding decision making for emergency management. A hazard magnitude scale measures the strength of a hazard event considering the natural forcing phenomena and the severity of the event with respect to average entities at risk. However, existing hazard magnitude scales cannot be easily adapted for comparative analysis across different hazard types. Here, we propose an equivalent hazard magnitude scale to measure the hazard strength of an event across multiple types of hazards. We name the scale the Gardoni Scale after Professor Paolo Gardoni. We design the equivalent hazard magnitude on the Gardoni Scale as a linear transformation of the expectation of a measure of adverse impact of a hazard event given average exposed value and vulnerability. With records of 12 hazard types from 1900 to 2020, we demonstrate that the equivalent magnitude can be empirically derived with historical data on hazard magnitude indicators and records of event impacts. In this study, we model the impact metric as a function of fatalities, total affected population, and total economic damage. We show that hazard magnitudes of events can be evaluated and compared across hazard types. We find that tsunami and drought events tend to have large hazard magnitudes, while tornadoes are relatively small in terms of hazard magnitude. In addition, we demonstrate that the scale can be used to determine hazard equivalency of individual historical events. For example, we compute that the hazard magnitude of the February 2021 North American cold wave event affecting the southern states of the United States of America was equivalent to the hazard magnitude of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 or a magnitude 7.5 earthquake. Future work will expand the current study in hazard equivalency to modelling of local intensities of hazard events and hazard conditions within a multi-hazard context.</p

Equivalent Hazard Magnitude Scale

Hazard magnitude scales are widely adopted to facilitate communication regarding hazard events and the corresponding decision making for emergency management. A hazard magnitude scale measures the strength of a hazard event considering the natural forcing phenomena and the severity of the event with respect to average entities at risk. However, existing hazard magnitude scales cannot be easily adapted for comparative analysis across different hazard types. Here, we propose an equivalent hazard magnitude scale to measure the hazard strength of an event across multiple types of hazards. We name the scale the Gardoni Scale after Professor Paolo Gardoni. We design the equivalent hazard magnitude on the Gardoni Scale as a linear transformation of the expectation of a measure of adverse impact of a hazard event given average exposed value and vulnerability. With records of 12 hazard types from 1900 to 2020, we demonstrate that the equivalent magnitude can be empirically derived with historical data on hazard magnitude indicators and records of event impacts. In this study, we model the impact metric as a function of fatalities, total affected population, and total economic damage. We show that hazard magnitudes of events can be evaluated and compared across hazard types. We find that tsunami and drought events tend to have large hazard magnitudes, while tornadoes are relatively small in terms of hazard magnitude. In addition, we demonstrate that the scale can be used to determine hazard equivalency of individual historical events. For example, we compute that the hazard magnitude of the February 2021 North American cold wave event affecting the southern states of the United States of America was equivalent to the hazard magnitude of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 or a magnitude 7.5 earthquake. Future work will expand the current study in hazard equivalency to modelling of local intensities of hazard events and hazard conditions within a multi-hazard context

The Long Shadow of Human‐Generated Geohazards: Risks and Crises

The purpose of this chapter is to focus attention on the “damage and risk” side of the geohazard (GHZ) phenomena rather than on their generating processes. Damage evaluations are indeed often neglected and oversimplified in predictive studies. As a result, risks are poorly understood and often considered as the mere expression of the probability or likelihood of an adverse event. In this chapter, we will use numerous real‐life examples and will discuss among other subjects: technical glossary of risk, damages, crises, multidimensional consequences analysis, and definition of risk tolerance. This chapter also focuses on ethical (geo‐ethical) issues linked to GHZs caused by human activities and their mitigation decisions and possible unintended consequences. The discussion includes the sometimes excessive and sometimes lacking (blindness) perception of risks by the public, corporate, and public officers. The root cause of some odd human behaviors when facing risks (biases) like the survivor bias is discussed. GHZs cast a long and often misunderstood shadow on human activities, development, and survival. By understanding how to model consequences and better evaluating risks and crises, we will be able to alleviate human and environmental suffering and foster sustainable development

Everyday Hospitality and Politics

The article explores everyday hospitality and politics through inclusive forms of integration initiatives in everyday life and urban communities in Denmark and Norway. It investigates how local initiatives and creative social strategies by local actors can empower and include refugees and immigrants in local communities. This article is based on participant observations of urban communities in Denmark and Norway working to welcome refugees and create new cross-cultural meeting places. We argue that people mobilize and take action when faced with emergency, and that the many welcome initiatives organized around theatre, food, dance and music can rework difference. The cases relate to the discussion of hospitality, the production of meaningful meeting places in a local context and the embodied encounters promoted by these activities. This article discusses everyday hospitality and politics in light of the transition in the Nordic welfare states, which has made the debate around inclusion of refugees and immigrants in local communities and the welfare state centre

Affective Multimodal Displays: Acoustic Spectra Modulates Perception of Auditory-Tactile Signals

Presented at the 14th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2008) on June 24-27, 2008 in Paris, France.Emotional events may interrupt ongoing cognitive processes and automatically grab attention, modulating the subsequent perceptual processes. Hence, emotional eliciting stimuli might effectively be used in warning applications, where a fast and accurate response from users is required. In addition, conveying information through an optimum multisensory combination can lead to a further enhancement of user responses. In the present study we investigated the emotional response to sounds differing in their acoustic spectra, and their influence on speeded detection of auditory-somatosensory stimuli. Higher sound frequencies resulted in an increase in emotional arousal. We suggest that emotional processes might be responsible for the different auditory-somatosensory integration patterns observed for low and high frequency sounds. The presented results might have important implications for the design of auditory and multisensory warning interfaces

A Multilevel Model of Collaboration and Creativity

The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. —FREEMAN DYSON, 1996, p.2 Creativity does not occur in a vacuum. An enabling environment must exist. Whether creativity is at the breakthrough level or a cluster of micro-level events, it requires environments with special facets—especially collaboration that enables knowledge sharing and idea synthesis

Hädaolukorra riskianalüüs Eestis

Today, natural and manmade accidents and emergencies are continual challenges for humanity. Disasters and catastrophes are events, which can bring about serious fallbacks within society and jeopardise sustainable development. The occurrence of accidents is connected with uncertainty and thereby also with the concept of risk. Therefore risk assessment is an essential component on a national as well as international level. The scope of this dissertation embraces the development and current state of emergency risk assessment in Estonia as one of the ‘new’ members of the EU. This dissertation is composed of national, regional-local and organisational levels. Comparison with the UK as an ‘old’ member of the EU has an important place in the entire thesis. The objective of this dissertation was to survey the development of Estonian emergency risk assessment since the restitution of Estonia as an independent state, and examines the impact of legislation and guidelines from other states and international institutions. The research materials were the legislation, guides and standards of Estonia and other countries, where the requirements regarding emergency risk assessment were enacted or included, methodologies, risk assessments outputs and other relevant information sources. In comparative studies the public outcomes of the national risk assessments of Estonia and the UK as well as the risk assessments of selected larger cities and conurbations were used. The results of this study showed that the development of emergency risk assessment in Estonia can be divided into three clearly distinct periods, where in addition to the development of the national legal system foreign systems were also of key importance. The example of the Swedish risk assessment methodology enabled the application and distribution of emergency risk assessment on local, regional and national levels. The example of the UK’s methodology enabled the unification and arrangement of approaches to risk ranking. The risks of epidemics or pandemics, severe weather conditions and floods were assessed as very high or high in the both countries: Estonia and the UK. The public outcome document of the British National Risk Assessment accomplished the broader aims of risk communication in comparison with the Estonian analogue. The studies in selected Estonian ISO 14001 certified organisations demonstrated that the identification of possible accidents and emergencies is performed in association with the identification of environmental aspects, and also considers external factors. Novel approaches in the dissertation are the comparative study of the national risk assessments of two countries and also the study specially addressed emergency preparedness and response in ISO 14001 certified organisations.Tänapäeval on loodus- ja inimtekkelised õnnetused ning hädaolukorrad inimkonnale jätkuvaks väljakutseks. Suurõnnetused ja katastroofid on sündmused, mis võivad anda ühiskonnas tõsiseid tagasilööke ning ohustada jätkusuutlikku arengut. Õnnetuste toimumine on seotud määramatusega ja sellest tulenevalt ka riski mõistega. Seetõttu on riskianalüüs kaasaegse elanikkonnakaitse oluline komponent nii riiklikul kui ka rahvusvahelisel tasemel. Käesoleva dissertatsiooni käsitlusala hõlmab Eesti kui Euroopa Liidu n-ö uusliikme hädaolukorra riskianalüüsi arengu kulgu ja praegust olukorda. Dissertatsioonis käsitletakse riskianalüüsi korraldamise ja teostamisega seonduvat riiklikul, regionaalsel, kohalikul ja organisatsiooni tasandil. Olulist rolli dissertatsiooniga haaratud uuringutes etendab Eestis praktiseeritava riskianalüüsi võrdlus Suurbritannia ja Põhja-Iirimaa Ühendkuningriigi kui Euroopa Liidu n-ö vana liikmesmaa vastavasisulise tööga. Dissertatsiooni põhieesmärgiks oli uurida hädaolukorra riskianalüüsi arengut Eestis alates taasiseseisvumisest kuni tänaseni, selgitades ühtlasi teiste riikide ja rahvusvaheliste institutsioonide õigusaktide, standardite ja juhendmaterjalide mõju. Uurimismaterjalideks olid Eesti ja teiste riikide ning rahvusvahelised õigusaktid, juhendmaterjalid ja standardid, kus olid sätestatud või kajastusid hädaolukorra riskianalüüsialased nõudmised, metodoloogiad, riskianalüüside väljundid ning muud asjakohased teabeallikad. Võrdlevuuringutes kasutati Eesti ja Ühendkuningriigi riiklike riskianalüüside ning samuti valitud suuremate linnade ja linnastute riskianalüüside avalikke väljunddokumente. Uurimistulemused näitasid, et hädaolukorra riskianalüüsi arengu Eestis saab jaotada kolmeks selgelt eristatavaks perioodiks, kus lisaks siseriikliku õigusruumi arengule oli võtmetähtsusega ka välisriikide süsteemide mõju. Rootsi riskianalüüsi metoodika eeskuju lõi eeldused hädaolukorra riskianalüüsi rakendamiseks kohalikul, piirkondlikul ja riiklikul tasandil. Ühendkuningriigi metoodika eeskuju võimaldas riskide tasemehindamise olulist korrastamist ja ühtlustamist võrreldes varasemaga. Nii Eestis kui ka Ühendkuningriigis hinnati väga kõrgeks või kõrgeks epideemiate või pandeemiate, tõsiste ilmastikutingimuste ja üleujutuste riskid. Ühendkuningriigi riikliku riskianalüüsi avalik väljunddokument täitis võrreldes Eesti analoogiga laialdasemaid riskikommunikatsiooni eesmärke. Uuringud Eesti ISO 14001 sertifitseeritud organisatsioonides näitasid, et õnnetuste ja hädaolukordade võimaluste väljaselgitamist teostatakse enamikul juhtudest koos keskkonnaaspektide väljaselgitamise ja nende olulisuse hindamisega, kusjuures võetaks arvesse ka väliseid tegureid. Dissertatsioonis on uudseteks lähenemisteks kahe riigi riiklike hädaolukorra riskianalüüside võrdlevuuring ja samuti uuring, mis on spetsiaalselt suunatud hädaolukorraks valmisolekule ja tegutsemisele nende puhul organisatsioonides, mis on sertifitseeritud ISO 14001 standardi nõuetele vastavuse osas

A concern-oriented approach to software architecture

A major cause of many complications in the field of software architectures is the lack of appropriate abstractions for separating, combining and encapsulating concerns of various kinds in architectural descriptions. Architectures of most complex software-intensive systems involve concerns that inherently crosscut the natural boundaries of the elements composing the architecture descriptions. Crosscutting concerns intersect the common modularity of systems as prescribed by their architecture descriptions, by traversing both the components and connectors, i.e., the relationships among the components. Crosscutting concerns are critical aspects of many architectural problems. However, architectural descriptions written in special-purpose languages (ADLs) like Wright, Darwin, Rapide and Acme should support descriptions of multiple structures, which include diagrams, models and views, that intentionally address different kinds of concerns. ADLs should show how various concerns affect each other in architectural designs; they should also allow one to identify, analyze and elaborate architectural concerns that cut across several software components, such as transactions, security, load balancing, synchronization, reuse, customization, scalability, etc.; they should, but they do not. This dissertation presents a new approach to software architecture that is suitable for supporting concern-oriented development and documentation of architectures for software-intensive systems. This approach allows for creating and documenting a multidimensional software structure that is referred to as concern-oriented software architecture; it provides new mechanisms for encapsulating individual concerns into independent architectural constructs. The ultimate goal of this new approach is to provide support for achieving design by concerns all through the development and description of software architectures. Moving towards this goal, we present a particular concern-oriented architectural framework called Perspectival Concern-Spaces (PCS). The PCS Framework offers a flexible and extensible means a) for supporting advanced separation of concerns in architectural design, and in the construction and evolution of software-intensive systems; and b) for filling the gap between architectural descriptions and modern software development artifacts. To show the feasibility of the proposed approach, we provide new modeling techniques that are used to describe and apply an aspect-oriented architectural pattern, called the On-demand Remodularization pattern. We give several examples of how the PCS Framework can be used to integrate concern-oriented architectural documentations with mainstream software development artifacts

Reducing Ambulance Dispatch Time

An important measure of the quality of emergency medical care is the ambulance dispatch time. The goal of our project is to understand and identify the critical time delays in the EMS dispatch process and to propose a feasible solution that monitors and optimizes these delays. Mathematical models are constructed to predict and evaluate the response time of ambulances and computer simulations are performed. Two emergency texting apps are developed, featuring texting 911, GPS, scripted questions, and user medical history