Internet of things for disaster management: state-of-the-art and prospects

Disastrous events are cordially involved with the momentum of nature. As such mishaps have been showing off own mastery, situations have gone beyond the control of human resistive mechanisms far ago. Fortunately, several technologies are in service to gain affirmative knowledge and analysis of a disaster's occurrence. Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has opened a promising door toward catering of multitude problems related to agriculture, industry, security, and medicine due to its attractive features, such as heterogeneity, interoperability, light-weight, and flexibility. This paper surveys existing approaches to encounter the relevant issues with disasters, such as early warning, notification, data analytics, knowledge aggregation, remote monitoring, real-time analytics, and victim localization. Simultaneous interventions with IoT are also given utmost importance while presenting these facts. A comprehensive discussion on the state-of-the-art scenarios to handle disastrous events is presented. Furthermore, IoT-supported protocols and market-ready deployable products are summarized to address these issues. Finally, this survey highlights open challenges and research trends in IoT-enabled disaster management systems. © 2013 IEEE

The governance of commons in national parks :plurality and purpose

PhD ThesisEffective governance is key to the successful management of national parks and is particularly critical for commons in protected areas. This research explores how governance can be strengthened on commons in national parks to improve the delivery of multiple ecosystem services. Empirical data is presented from two case studies; Danau Sentarum, Indonesia and The Lake District, England. Appreciative Inquiry is used to discover commoners’ stories, design future options and consider them in the context of the plural legal and other normative orders in force. These highlight the strong motivation of commoners to govern for the purpose of delivering provisioning services that provide them with financial benefits and for which they have a cultural connection. The cases studies both reveal the difficult task of delivering conservation outcomes when no beneficial interest accrues to the provider, when property rights are uncertain or when there is no positive correlation between the provisioning service and biodiversity. The analysis uses three frameworks; Tamanaha’s typology of Legal Pluralism, Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis of Common Property Resources and Armitage et al’s Criteria for Adaptive Co-management. This tri-faceted process assesses these complex socio-ecological systems demonstrating that in neither case study will current governance structures deliver the full breadth of public and private ecosystem services society seeks. Three opportunities for strengthening governance are identified; 1) enhance linkages between the plural normative orders for the effective enforcement of rules, 2) manage access to common property resources to provide legal certainty regarding rights and responsibilities and 3) ensure the Ecosystem Approach incorporates property rights to harness the motivation of commoners as primary managers.Natural England: H&H Bowe Limited: The Royal Geographical Society Slawson Award

Conference of Remote Sensing Educators (CORSE-78)

Ways of improving the teaching of remote sensing students at colleges and universities are discussed. Formal papers and workshops on various Earth resources disciplines, image interpretation, and data processing concepts are presented. An inventory of existing remote sensing and related subject courses being given in western regional universities is included

Infraestrutura segura e descentralizada para a internet das coisas

Mestrado em Engenharia Eletrónica e TelecomunicaçõesDespite many IoT Infrastructures having been implemented in recent years, none of them is truly prepared for a global deployment, where failure tolerance and scalability are an essential requirement. This dissertation presents an alternative concept for IoT Infrastructures, which focuses on enhancing the traditional centralized architecture, usually operated by a single entity, into a decentralized architecture featuring multiple entities and use cases. We propose a dynamic, community driven and self-configurable infrastructure on top of a structured Peer-to-Peer network, based on a Distributed Hash Table. Moreover, the proposed infrastructure is flexible enough to allow each peer of the overlay to enable a set of different services, according to its capabilities. In addition, a set of communication protocols is provided in order to support heterogeneous devices, as well as data access, streaming and persistence. It is also an important focus of our proposal to have mechanisms that guarantee the privacy and security of the information flow and storage.Apesar de várias infraestruturas para IoT terem sido implementadas nos últimos anos, nenhuma delas está realmente preparada para ser utilizada a uma escala global, onde a escalabilidade e a tolerância a falhas são um requisito essencial. Esta dissertação apresenta um conceito alternativo de infraestruturas para a IoT, cujo foco consiste em evoluir a tradicional arquitetura centralizada, normalmente utilizada por uma entidade única, para uma arquitetura descentralizada, compatível com múltiplas entidades e casos de uso. Propomos uma infraestrutura auto-configurável, dinâmica e orientada à comunidade, construída em cima de uma rede Peer-to-Peer estruturada, baseada numa Distributed Hash Table. Além disso, a infraestrutura proposta é suficientemente flexível para permitir que cada peer da rede possa ativar diferentes serviços, mediante as suas capacidades. Por outro lado, um conjunto de protocolos de comunicação é providenciado, de modo a suportar dispositivos heterogéneos, bem como o acesso aos dados e a sua transmissão e persistência. Também é um foco importante desta proposta a disponibilização de mecanismos que garantam a privacidade e segurança da informação durante a sua transmissão e o seu armazenamento

Building Livelihoods: A Field Manual for Practitioners in Humanitarian Settings

This publication by the Women's Refugee Commission is based on two-and-a-half years of research and 10 field assessments covering all contexts of displacement: refugee, IDP and returnee situations, in camp settings, as well as in rural and urban areas. It is informed by several pilot projects that were funded from one to three years in places such as the refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border; with women at-risk of gender-based violence who have returned to Burundi; and in the slums of Bogota, Colombia, home to a large displaced population.The field manual has been reviewed and contributed to by experts from the NGO practitioner, UN and academic communities, including those who participated in a three-day intensive workshop at the Rockefeller Foundation's conference center in Bellagio, Italy. This field manual does not provide all the answers, nor does it provide models that can be simply replicated from one context to another. Instead, it provides guidance, ideas, tools and suggestions to assist practitioners and program managers in making strategic choices about their livelihood interventions so that programs can be appropriately designed and have greater impact.This field manual was produced to assist practitioners who desire to strengthen their skills and enhance their knowledge in order to do better livelihoods and economic recovery programming. The Women's Refugee Commission hopes that the manual helps members of the humanitarian community succeed in our endeavor to do better -- the displaced deserve no less

Price - San Rafael Rivers Unit, Utah, Planning Report / Final Environmental Impact Statement, Colorado River Water Quality Improvement Program / Colorado River Salinity Control Program

This integrated Planning Report/Final Environmental Impact Statement (PR/FEIS) presents an analysis of the planning process and the environmental impacts of the proposed Price-San Rafael Rivers Unit (Unit) of the Colorado River Water Quality Improvement Program (CRWQIP) and the Colorado River Salinity Control Program (CRSC). The document has been jointly prepared by the Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) and the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) to address the full range of potential environmental impacts, in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The CRWQIP/CRSC programs provide for projects upstream of Imperial Dam (near Yuma, Arizona, on the Arizona-California border) that are necessary to maintain or reduce salinity in the Colorado River. A final environmental statement on the CRWQIP was prepared by Reclamation and SCS (May 19, 1977). This PR/FEIS will be used to meet NEPA compliance requirements and to obtain construction authorization for off-farm features. Onfarm features are authorized for construction under Public Law 93-320, as amended by public Law 98-569

Cost benefit analysis of space communications technology. Volume 2: Final report

For abstract, see preceding accession

Evaluation of goods & services among white and black consumers

Thesis(M.B.A.)--University of the Witwatersrand, 1991The research investigated the evaluation of common goods and services by white and black consumers, and to determine where similarities and dissimilarities between these two segments existed. A review of the literature on consumer behaviour, with specific reference to decision making models, and a series of in depth interviews enabled the expansion of the Zeithaml (1981) set of constructs by a factor of two. A questionnaire was developed and administered to white and black employees of well known local firms in a variety of industries. Hypothesis testing enabled validation of the expanded set of constructs, and the comparison of white and black evaluative differences, while correspondence ;analysis determined the key evaluative dimensions. Important new dimensions discovered included Convenience, Loyalty and Reception. An invaluable method of clustering was found in the /chi squared trees technique. The results indicated that black consumers are significantly less experienced in the use and evaluation of common services compared to their white counterparts. As a result of this inexperience, a much less sophisticated set of key evaluative constructs are relied upon in the decision process. Both segments appear to be /ciware of generally higher risks associated with services, but are less prone to invest effort in information gathering prior to purchase. The white segment purchases services based on their convenience, whilst the black segment faces equal inconvenience for any purchase. The most significant marketing implications drawn were firstly, the need to appreciate consumer perceptual similarities across, and differences within, goods and services categories. Secondly, marketers need very different strategies for the black segment