184 research outputs found
Community-based disaster response teams for vulnerable groups and developing nations : implementation, training, and sustainability : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Emergency Management at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
Bystanders are often the first to respond to disasters and, for this reason,
Community-Based Disaster Response Teams (CBDRTs) should be established
in vulnerable communities. The literature review examines Disaster Risk
Reduction initiatives and identifies that there is little information available
regarding strategies and training curriculum that could be used to establish and
maintain CBDRTs in developing nations and with vulnerable groups. The three
research questions for this investigation ask how CBDRT courses could be
adapted for these communities, what topics and activities would be most useful
for such training, and how the teams could be established and maintained. The
research objectives are to identify strategies that could be used to train CBDRT
groups in these contexts, to propose an outline for a basic training course, and
to describe techniques that could contribute to the sustainability of these teams.
Research was conducted with CBDRTs in developing nations using a mixed
methods methodology with the United States Federal Emergency Management
Agency’s (FEMA) Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) programme
being employed as a case study. Quantitative data was obtained from a
questionnaire completed by CERT course graduates, and qualitative
information was acquired from key informant interviews. After a review of the
CERT programme that discusses its history, curriculum, success stories, and
potential pitfalls, the data collected is presented through statistical analysis of
the questionnaire replies and thematic analysis of the interview transcripts.
Suggested CBDRT training strategies are creating courses for adolescents,
modifying the material for non-literate learners, and providing additional
practical activities. Recommendations for establishing programmes include
developing teams for young people, cooperating with Community-Based
Organisations to solve existing problems, and offering CBDRT training in the
post-disaster environment. Techniques for maintaining the teams involve
developing leadership, creating support networks, and cultivating partnerships
with local authorities. The final conclusion is that the CERT model could be
used as the basis for an international CBDRT training programme, although it
would require adaption of the course content and presentation style
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Dynamics of neural nets
In this short paper, I plan to review the work I have done on neural nets over the course of the last 20 years. As one might reasonably expect the questions being asked and the approaches to solving them have evolved, but there are still fundamental questions which remain unanswered and are perhaps unanswerable with present techniques.
I have used the word "dynamics" in the title to indicate that the major emphasis of the paper will be how the state of a neural net changes in the course of time either autonomously, that is without input, or in response to input. The problems of learning in neural nets will not be directly addressed, although I will argue that many questions about learning can be recast as questions about dynamics
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Two notes on population biology
Local stability seems to imply global stability for population models. To investigate this claim, we formally define a population model. This definition seems to include the one-dimensional discrete models now in use. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the global stability of our defined class of models. We derive an easily testable sufficient condition for local stability to imply global stability. We also show that if a discrete model is majorized by one of these stable population models, then the discrete model is globally stable. We demonstrate the utility of these theorems by using them to prove that the regions of local and global stability coincide for six models from the literature. We close by arguing that these theorems give a method for demonstrating global stability that is simpler and easier to apply than the usual method of Liapunov functions
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Tours of graphs, digraphs and sequential machines
A tour of a graph (digraph, or sequential machine) is a sequence of nodes from the graph such that each node appears at least once and two nodes are adjacent in the sequence only if they are adjacent in the graph. Finding the shortest tour. of a graph is known to be an NP-complete problem. Several theorems are given that show that there are classes of graphs in which the shortest tour can be found easily. For more general graphs, we present approximating algorithms for finding short tours. For undirected graphs, the approximating algorithms give tours at worst a constant times the length of the shortest tour. For directed graphs, the size of the calculated tour is bounded by the size of the digraph times the shortest tour. Not only are the bounds worse for the directed case, but the running times of the approximating algorithms are also larger than those for the undirected case.INDEX TERMS--short tours, Hamiltonian circuits, sequential machines, knight's tour traveling salesman, approximating algorithms, NP-problem
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Algorithms for constructing a consensus sequence
Biological and physical limitations require that DNA be sequenced in fragments. There are several approaches to obtain the appropriate sized fragments of DNA to sequence. The method of sequencing that we are interested in is loosely referred to as shotgun sequencing. Many copies of the genomic DNA to be sequenced are cleaved by one or more restriction endonucleases resulting in a multiset, S, of DNA fragments that are not ordered. DNA fragments are essentially selected at random from this multset and sequenced. A consensus sequence is constructed by joining together fragments which overlap. (One hopes that the consensus sequence is very close to the original sequence.) Since errors occur reading the sequences, the overlaps must be approximate, not exact.
This process of reassembly is similar to the NP-complete shortest common superstring problem [GMS80]. To simplify the problem we make the following assumptions.
• An integer k can be supplied that defines the minimum acceptable overlap between two sequences.
• There is a unique alignment of the sequence fragments such that all suf- fix/prefix overlaps are of length k or greater.
• All suffix/prefix overlaps are exact (log inexact) matches.
We define the string consensus problem and give three algorithms to solve it. We then define the log inexact string consensus problem and give three algorithms to solve it. We believe that the log inexact string consensus problem is closer to the problem of constructing a consensus sequence from shotgun data that biochemists are trying to solve than the problems previous approximation algorithms for the shortest common superstring problem
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Flaws of form
G. Spencer Brown's book Laws of Form has been enjoying a vogue among social and biological scientists. Proponents claim that the book introduces a new logic ideally suited to their fields of study, and that the new logic solves the problems of self-reference. These claims are false. We show that Brown's system is Boolean algebra in an obscure notation, and that his "solutions" to the problems
of self-reference are based on a misunderstanding of Russell's paradox
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Towers of Hanoi and generalized Towers of Hanoi
We investigate the time and space used by algorithms which solve the Towers of Hanoi problem
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Numerical considerations on Fibonacci numbers of order r
Recently generalized Fibonacci numbers have received increasing attention. Some properties that are well known for traditional Fibonacci numbers do not generalize easily, some others do not generalize at all. In this paper we report some properties that we have generalized. Section 1 introduces the notation and a theorem due to Miller ([14]). Section 2 shows how generalized Fibonacci numbers can be expressed as rounded power of the dominant root of the characteristic equation. This generalizes a known result on Fibonacci numbers. Section 3 lists some properties of the roots of the characteristic equation. Some of these properties are, to our knowledge, new. Section 4 introduces the Zeckendorf representation of integers and lists some of its most relevant properties. Finally, in Section 5 the asymptotic proportion of ones in the Zeckendorf representation is computed and an easy to compute closed formula is given
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