Early warning: a people-centred approach to early warning systems and the 'last mile'

The people-centred approach to early warning focuses on how communities can understand threats and avoid them. Disasters are partly caused by external hazards, but they also stem simply from vulnerability: people being in the wrong place without adequate protection. Perhaps the most well-known risk assessment method of recent years is the “vulnerability and capacity assessment”, developed by the Red Cross Red Crescent. There is a consensus that information must extend to communities so as to facilitate their adoption of protective actions. The linking of early warning and early action with development aspirations is what motivates people to engage. Factors as diverse as knowledge, power, culture, environment, lifestyle and personality often determine whether people heed warnings. Engaging people outside any warning system is called the “last mile” – a term that expresses the sentiment that warnings often do not reach those who need them most. Addressing vulnerability in disaster reduction is often similar to promoting development, but in the developed world “top-down” approaches to risk assessment and early warning dominate

Climate change and infectious disease risk management: a localised health security perspective

Pathogenic risks in relation to climate change are not fully understood and to a large extent have to be regarded as unpredictable. It is therefore important to focus attention on human vulnerability and coping for which more certain influences on disease risk can be assessed. Despite commonplace environmental conditions for infectious diseases around the world, only some people are affected. This is because the larger proportions of disease risks are regularly a function of human socio-economic and consequent biological susceptibility to infection rather than significant changes in environmental hazards. As poverty and environmental degradation exacerbate disease risks for billions, poverty reduction is the core issue in mitigating climate related infectious disease risks, but human impoverishment and climate change can be complexly interrelated. Studies in Mozambique and Bangladesh are used here to examine key issues in the complex association between climate change and health. Some evidence suggests that individual and community based health risk reduction can build community resilience and health security and overall wellbeing in the face of epidemics in locations prone to the effects of climate change. Success in this respect would offset health impacts of changes in climate. However, the association between climate and health will continue to demand pro-poor precautionary risk reduction investments and proactive national and global governance contexts within which this can succee

Theatre and performance design: a reader in scenography

This volume, the first of its kind in this field, brings together over fifty key texts and newly commissioned works that provide a critical and contextual framework for the analysis of theatre and performance design. The collection and analysis of material for the volume was undertaken with Andrew Nisbet, but Jane Collins was responsible for all of the additional writing, including the essays that frame each section. The volume was nominated for the TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) David Bradby Award for Research in International Theatre and Performance in 2011. Collins was invited to talk about the book at the opening of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space in June 2011 and as guest speaker at the 15th Bharat Rang Mahotsav, International Theatre Festival in Delhi in January 2013. It has been reviewed in international journals including New Theatre Quarterly and Australasian Drama Studies. Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography is an essential resource for those interested in the visual composition of performance and related scenographic practices. Theatre and performance studies, cultural theory, fine art, philosophy and the social sciences are brought together in one volume to examine the principle forces that inform understanding of theatre and performance design. The volume is organised thematically in five sections: Looking, the experience of seeing; Space and place; The designer: the scenographic; Bodies in space; and, Making meaning. This major collection of key writings provides a much needed critical and contextual framework for the analysis of theatre and performance design. By locating this study within the broader field of scenography - the term increasingly used to describe a more integrated reading of performance - this unique anthology recognises the role played by all the elements of production in the creation of meaning. Edited and with an introduction by Jane Collins and Andrew Nesbit, contributors include Josef Svoboda, Richard Foreman, Roland Barthes, Oscar Schlemmer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Schechner, Jonathan Crary, Elizabeth Wilson, Henri Lefebvre, Adolph Appia, and Herbert Blau

Disaster resilience and children: managing food security in Zimbabwe's Binga District

The growing recognition of the vulnerability of children to disasters has added a new impetus to the concept of their involvement in disaster risk reduction programs. Involving children in disaster risk reduction is among those aspects promoted in the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015 to enhance the resilience of disaster-affected communities. This article presents the results from a research study which investigated the involvement of children in disaster risk reduction programs in Binga District, Zimbabwe, focusing on food security. The results suggest that children are an invaluable part of human agency in disaster contexts, especially in view of increasing numbers of children orphaned by HIV and AIDS. Yet their involvement is still contested. Unless family and cultural pressures imposed on children are recognized and managed in disaster risk programming, the potential of children’s involvement is likely to be missed in building disaster-resilient communities

New results on word-representable graphs

A graph $G=(V,E)$ is word-representable if there exists a word $w$ over the alphabet $V$ such that letters $x$ and $y$ alternate in $w$ if and only if $(x,y)\in E$ for each $x\neq y$. The set of word-representable graphs generalizes several important and well-studied graph families, such as circle graphs, comparability graphs, 3-colorable graphs, graphs of vertex degree at most 3, etc. By answering an open question from [M. Halldorsson, S. Kitaev and A. Pyatkin, Alternation graphs, Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 6986 (2011) 191--202. Proceedings of the 37th International Workshop on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science, WG 2011, Tepla Monastery, Czech Republic, June 21-24, 2011.], in the present paper we show that not all graphs of vertex degree at most 4 are word-representable. Combining this result with some previously known facts, we derive that the number of $n$-vertex word-representable graphs is $2^{\frac{n^2}{3}+o(n^2)}$