COMPREHENSIVE DISASTER MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT: THE ROLE OF GEOINFORMATICS AND GEO-COLLABORATION IN LINKING MITIGATION AND DISASTER RECOVERY IN THE EASTERN CARIBBEAN

The recurring failure of communities at risk to build mitigation into disaster recovery activities to reduce risks against future disaster events remains unresolved. In fact, some communities seem to learn so little from the disastrous experience of other communities; they either commit the same calamitous mistakes or do nothing to improve their circumstances before disaster actually strikes them. Policies exist, yet resilience building systems are lacking from the pragmatic stages of disaster recovery. Beyond sustained preparedness and relief operations, communities must also concentrate on effective rehabilitation and efficient disaster recovery if they are to become resilient against future hazards. The Eastern Caribbean islands, like many other developing countries, typify this failure of integrating mitigation into disaster recovery despite numerous incidents of hurricanes and tropical storms over the past decades. It is a socio-technical issue that needs to engage reliable information exchange mechanisms and efficient social networks to initiate and create solutions.The overall objective of this study is to explore how countries can improve mitigation through disaster recovery activities. It documents the results of an analysis of experiences in disaster recovery and mitigation in the Eastern Caribbean following Hurricane Lenny in November 1999 and Hurricane Ivan in September 2004. Through nested case design, the study constructs a framework for integrating mitigation into disaster recovery and comprehensive disaster management. It highlights relationships and interactions among households, builders, building designers, post-disaster rehabilitation agencies and disaster management organizations that can facilitate mitigation. It identifies factors that facilitate geospatial support in disaster management in the Eastern Caribbean and how geocollaboration enhances performance and effectiveness in comprehensive disaster management. Finally, the study modifies existing mechanisms for disaster mitigation and develops a scalable DHaRMS synchronization tool for mitigation implementation at multiple levels of society.This study is deemed important from an empirical perspective because it could yield valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of mitigation implementation as well as provide policy recommendations for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of mitigation and comprehensive disaster management. From a theoretical perspective, this research is oriented toward contributing to the theories of comprehensive disaster management and complexity

Role of built environment education curricula in post- disaster recovery management

This paper explains the rationale behind the European Commission funded EURASIA research project, emphasising the importance of the role of built and human education curricular in post-disaster recovery management. The project is an international collaboration between five European and Asian higher education institutions. This research specifically uses the post-tsunami recovery of Sri Lanka as a case study to identify the current gaps in built and human environment education, specifically related to post-disaster recovery management. The objective of this paper is to improve the academic rigour of the EURASIA research through presenting the justification of this research to a wider research community along with its proposed methodology and the expected outcomes

Vascular challenges from pancreatoduodenectomy in the setting of coeliac artery stenosis

Coeliac artery stenosis due to median arcuate ligament compression or atherosclerotic disease is a frequently unrecognised challenge to recovery after pancreatoduodenectomy. The described case illustrates management with intraoperative superior mesenteric artery to hepatic artery bypass graft that led to haemorrhagic challenges postoperatively but ultimately a good recovery. Aspects of preoperative diagnosis, preoperative intervention and intraoperative management options are reviewed. Surgeons need to possess these tools to prevent complications from coeliac artery stenosis when pancreatoduodenectomy is required

A MODEL FOR MEASURING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SERVICE RECOVERY AND SERVICE QUALITY: A CASE STUDY AT THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

The study aimed to investigate the critical success factors of service recovery towards service quality at the National University of Malaysia (UKM) library. The study also proposes a model of systematic complaint management which applied to academic library as a tool of service recovery. The variables included in this research are empowerment, culture and psychology, management system, compensation and speed of recovery as the independent variables and service quality as the dependent variable. A questionnaire was designed and used as the data gathering instrument based on past research. A total of 315 samples were successfully gathered from 377 questionnaires distributed among the regular users of Tun Seri Lanang Library (UKM). Based on the generated results, it’s proven that there is a positive significant relationship between service recovery and service quality (r = 0.632**, p = 0.000) at the 1 per cent significance levelService recovery, Complaint management, Service quality, Library

Implementing Performance Competitive Logical Recovery

New hardware platforms, e.g. cloud, multi-core, etc., have led to a reconsideration of database system architecture. Our Deuteronomy project separates transactional functionality from data management functionality, enabling a flexible response to exploiting new platforms. This separation requires, however, that recovery is described logically. In this paper, we extend current recovery methods to work in this logical setting. While this is straightforward in principle, performance is an issue. We show how ARIES style recovery optimizations can work for logical recovery where page information is not captured on the log. In side-by-side performance experiments using a common log, we compare logical recovery with a state-of-the art ARIES style recovery implementation and show that logical redo performance can be competitive.Comment: VLDB201

An information-theoretic view of network management

We present an information-theoretic framework for network management for recovery from nonergodic link failures. Building on recent work in the field of network coding, we describe the input-output relations of network nodes in terms of network codes. This very general concept of network behavior as a code provides a way to quantify essential management information as that needed to switch among different codes (behaviors) for different failure scenarios. We compare two types of recovery schemes, receiver-based and network-wide, and consider two formulations for quantifying network management. The first is a centralized formulation where network behavior is described by an overall code determining the behavior of every node, and the management requirement is taken as the logarithm of the number of such codes that the network may switch among. For this formulation, we give bounds, many of which are tight, on management requirements for various network connection problems in terms of basic parameters such as the number of source processes and the number of links in a minimum source-receiver cut. Our results include a lower bound for arbitrary connections and an upper bound for multitransmitter multicast connections, for linear receiver-based and network-wide recovery from all single link failures. The second is a node-based formulation where the management requirement is taken as the sum over all nodes of the logarithm of the number of different behaviors for each node. We show that the minimum node-based requirement for failures of links adjacent to a single receiver is achieved with receiver-based schemes