Operationalizing Resilience Against Natural Disaster Risk: Opportunities, Barriers, and a Way Forward

The risks from floods have been rising globally due to increasing population, urbanization and economic development in hazard prone areas. The number of flood disasters throughout the world nearly doubled in the decade from 2000-2009 compared to the previous decade. There have been more flood disasters in the last four years (2010-2013) than in the whole decade of the 1980's. Evidence indicates that climate change-induced sea level rise, storm surge and more intense flooding will reinforce this trend unless risk management measures are undertaken immediately to well manage future losses and make communities more resilient to flooding. It is widely recognized that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between disaster risk and development: disasters impact development and development impacts disasters. Evidence shows that repeated disasters undermine long-term socio-economic objectives. This is particularly evident in low income countries where disasters can impede the development process. The extensive time required to recover from damage, loss of capacity with which to rebuild and systemic risk negatively affect livelihoods in these countries, in the extreme case trapping people in poverty. In developed countries, recent floods triggered massive economic losses and undermined long-term competitiveness. The impact of disasters is felt most acutely by households and communities. In both developing and developed countries alike, local level studies strongly indicate that the poor suffer disproportionately due to the lack of financial and social safety nets, and institutional representation. Development can affect disaster risk via three main channels: by (1) increasing the physical assets and people exposed to the risk, (2) increasing the capacity to reduce the risk, respond to the risk and recover from the risk and (3) increasing or decreasing the vulnerability based on specific development strategies chosen. We identify this interaction as a key research gap; taking account of and balancing development opportunities with disaster risk will require a paradigm shift in the way we think about and do both development and disaster risk management

The Effects of Multitasking on Quality Inspection in Advanced Manufacturing Systems

Although the industrial quality inspection task has been extensively studied, the effect of multitasking on the performance of the operator in a hybrid inspection system is still unknown. The experiment described in this article compared the quality inspection performance for participants performing a single task, 3 multiple tasks, and 5 multiple tasks. The results of this research indicate that the performance of the operator in the quality inspection task while multitasking in an advanced manufacturing system will be determined by the interaction between the number of different types of defects that can be presented at the same time in the inspected parts and multitasking. The best performance will be obtained when the load created by additional tasks minimizes the monotony of the quality inspection task without interfering with the processing resources needed for the memorized quality criteria

Increasing the order parameter of quasi-hexagonal micellar nanostructures by ultrasound annealing

Nanopatterning with block copolymers finds many applications ranging from optics to bioscience. Many of these uses demand highly ordered patterns that are difficult to obtain because of environmental influences during fabrication. Here we demonstrate that ultrasonication improves the hexagonal order of artificially disturbed micellar nanopatterns