The Use of Social Media in Emergency Management by Public Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations: Lessons Learned From Areas Affected by Hurricanes Isaac, Sandy, and Harvey

Natural disasters are increasingly costly for the United States. The literature suggests emergency managers may improve disaster outcomes and enhance disaster resilience by supplementing their official public-communications methods with more bi-directional communication tactics using social media. This study aims to understand how social media is used within the “whole community” of emergency management in areas affected by recent hurricanes. The first research objective examines how social media is used by governmental and non-governmental organizations across the four phases of emergency management (preparedness, response, recovery, mitigation). The second objective is to identify challenges governmental and non-governmental groups have encountered and strategies they recommend addressing these problems. The third objective is to examine how social media was used by disaster responders specifically during the response phase of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. We conducted a survey of 269 organizations in areas affected by Hurricanes Isaac and Sandy in 2012 to address research objectives one and two, and for the third objective, surveyed 64 organizations who contributed to the rescue and response efforts during Hurricane Harvey. The first survey found respondents representing government-related organizations use social media more during the response and the preparedness phases, while non-governmental groups report more social media activity during the recovery phase. This finding suggests that organizations performing primary and secondary roles in emergency management play complementary roles in risk and crisis communication with the public. The results also suggest that the emergency management community primarily uses social media to “push” information to the public through established communication networks and could benefit from additional efforts to “pull” information from their networks. Survey respondents report greatest concern about challenges external to their organizations, with the accuracy of information found on social media to be most concerning. The third research objective finds generally high levels of social media use among Hurricane Harvey responders, but also evidence of technical challenges including an inability to convert web-based communications to dispatchable missions due to limited functionality of their 911 systems. The results of the study provide insights regarding uses, challenges, and strategies to improve social media for the whole community of emergency management

Measuring Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards in the Dutch Province of Zeeland

The Netherlands is a kingdom known for resisting the perils of natural disaster and keeping records of how these great feats were accomplished. The Dutch have measured physical risk through methods such as the intricate VNK models to predict flood scenarios, but little research has been conducted to examine how the people living in affected areas could be impacted from a natural disaster event. This study employs fine-scale data to construct a social vulnerability index for the 164 districts of the low-lying delta province of Zeeland. The methodology used to measure social vulnerability is built on recent social vulnerability and resilience research that has been conducted in North America, Asia, and Europe. Specific attention is paid to methods used previously and how they can be improved from a statistical standpoint. Factor Analysis of 35 variables selected from the resilience and social vulnerability literature results in nine factors explaining about 72% of the total variance. The factors of vulnerability in Zeeland include Density of the Built Environment and Public Support, Reduced Wealth and Single Households, Infrastructure Accessibility and Career Qualifications, Recovery Capacity and Female Gender, Personal Wealth, Occupation, Residential Quality, Access to Healthcare, and Evacuation Potential. The index is constructed using data for all 35 variables with weight decided by the variance explained by each factor. Relative index scores range from a low social vulnerability score of 0.248 in the district Kattendijk, Goes, to the highest social vulnerability score of 0.458 found in Oudelandse Hoeve, Ternuezen. The highest-scoring districts are located towards the South of Zeeland. Eight of the ten most vulnerable districts located in Terneuzen. The Municipality of Goes contains more low-scoring districts than any other municipality. The majority of low scoring, less vulnerable districts are located on the Central lobe of Zeeland. The results of the social vulnerability analysis provide new insights for policy makers, researchers, and community stakeholders that could be combined with Dutch flood-scenario models to guide planning efforts in the Netherlands to mitigate the damaging impacts of future floods. The study provides an example for adaptation of a social vulnerability index for a fine level of analysis

Rapid Detection of Nicotine in E-Liquids

Electronic cigarettes have gained popularity in recent years. Electronic cigarettes operate by vaporizing flavored solutions, called e-liquids, for inhalation by the user. No method is currently available for analysis of e-liquids in the field, making regulation of electronic cigarettes difficult and inefficient. Some regulatory issues related to e-liquids include mislabeling of e-liquids by providers to avoid taxes on nicotine, the sale of nicotine-containing e-liquids to minors, and the mixing of drugs of abuse into e-liquids. Regulatory and law enforcement agencies have a need for an accurate field test capable of analyzing e-liquids for nicotine. Proposed are two devices for the rapid detection of nicotine in e-liquids in a safe and straightforward manner. The first device is a cheap, disposable test strip which detects the pH shift caused when nicotine is present in an e-liquid. The strip uses the reagent bromocresol purple, which changes color from yellow to purple over the pH shift caused by nicotine. This approach is an indirect test for nicotine and has the possibility of false-positive results. The second device is a portable ultraviolet-visible light spectrophotometer programmed to detect the presence of nicotine in small samples of e-liquids. The device is designed and programmed for simple operation and straightforward results that do not require advanced training or interpretation. The device detects nicotine in e-liquids by analyzing an absorbance spectra for the wavelengths specific to nicotine. The device is also able to be reprogrammed for detection of other drugs of abuse in e-liquids.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1150/thumbnail.jp

Space Debris Mitigation: Understanding the Business Case and Proposing Solutions

The overall mission of the Space Debris Mitigation: Understanding the Business Case and Proposing Solutions project is to investigate the pressing issue of space debris mitigation from a business perspective and how it will affect the U.S. commercial sector in the growing Low Earth Orbit (LEO) economy. Investigating and creating possible business cases for companies to reduce space debris of their own making; to find potential national solutions that support the business case; and to add to the growing conversation on space sustainability are a huge focus to the project. The U.S. Department of Defense is tracking over 20,000 artificial satellites — payloads, rocket bodies, and debris, where approximately 90 percent of these satellites are non- operational. With no mandates and the recent boom of the commercial sector, the amount of space debris in LEO is consistently rising. Our proposals for space debris mitigation can be broken down into the short and long term. In the short term, we propose a tax plan, similar to the carbon tax, where companies\u27 satellites will be taxed according to the volume of their debris until it is no longer in orbit. In the long term, we propose collision coverage in insurance utilizing the space sustainability rating where it will incentivize good behavior and can be used to determine premiums, offer discounts, and even refuse insurance for underperformers. Moving forward, we will have to incorporate foreseeable issues with our tax plan such as loopholes, tax avoidance, and NASA, as it is federally funded

A Comprehensive Measure of Attitudes and Behaviour: Development of the Support for Gender Equality among Men Scale (article)

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordThe datasets associated with this article are located in ORE at: https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.1805, https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.1806, https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.1807, https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.1808, and https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.1809In this paper, we develop and validate the 16-item Support for Gender Equality among Men Scale (SGEMS) across four studies. Drawing on exploratory (Study 1, n = 322) and confirmatory (Study 2, n = 358; Study 4, n = 192) factor analysis, we determine a two-factor structure: public and domestic support for gender equality. In Study 3 (n = 146) and Study 4, we validate the scale by establishing its relationship with, among others, several prominent measures of sexism, a behavioural measure, and social desirability. The scale fills a psychometric gap in the literature: To date, no validated measure of support for gender equality, measuring both attitudes and behavioural intentions and focusing specifically on men, exists. Considering the recent increase in interest in men as allies of the feminist movement the scale functions as a useful tool to explore the topic in depth in future research.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

One-sided smoothness-increasing accuracy-conserving filtering for enhanced streamline integration through discontinuous fields

The discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method continues to maintain heightened levels of interest within the simulation community because of the discretization flexibility it provides. One of the fundamental properties of the DG methodology and arguably its most powerful property is the ability to combine high-order discretizations on an inter-element level while allowing discontinuities between elements. This flexibility, however, generates a plethora of difficulties when one attempts to use DG fields for feature extraction and visualization, as most post-processing schemes are not designed for handling explicitly discontinuous fields. This work introduces a new method of applying smoothness-increasing, accuracy-conserving filtering on discontinuous Galerkin vector fields for the purpose of enhancing streamline integration. The filtering discussed in this paper enhances the smoothness of the field and eliminates the discontinuity between elements, thus resulting in more accurate streamlines. Furthermore, as a means of minimizing the computational cost of the method, the filtering is done in a one-dimensional manner along the streamline.United States. Army Research Office (Grant no. W911NF-05-1-0395)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Career Award NSF-CCF0347791

Smoothness-Increasing Accuracy-Conserving (SIAC) filters for derivative approximations of discontinuous Galerkin (DG) solutions over nonuniform meshes and near boundaries

Accurate approximations for the derivatives are usually required in many application areas such as biomechanics, chemistry and visualization applications. With the help of Smoothness-Increasing Accuracy-Conserving (SIAC) filtering, one can enhance the derivatives of a discontinuous Galerkin solution. However, current investigations of derivative filtering are limited to uniform meshes and periodic boundary conditions, which do not meet practical requirements. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to extend derivative filtering to nonuniform meshes and propose position-dependent derivative filters to handle filtering near the boundaries. Through analyzing the error estimates for SIAC filtering, we extend derivative filtering to nonuniform meshes by changing the scaling of the filter. For filtering near boundaries, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of two existing position-dependent filters and then extend them to position-dependent derivative filters, respectively. Further, we prove that with the position-dependent derivative filters, the filtered solutions can obtain a better accuracy rate compared to the original discontinuous Galerkin approximation with arbitrary derivative orders over nonuniform meshes. One- and two-dimensional numerical results are provided to support the theoretical results and demonstrate that the position-dependent derivative filters, in general, enhance the accuracy of the solution for both uniform and nonuniform meshes

Multi-dimensional filtering: Reducing the dimension through rotation

Over the past few decades there has been a strong effort towards the development of Smoothness-Increasing Accuracy-Conserving (SIAC) filters for Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods, designed to increase the smoothness and improve the convergence rate of the DG solution through this post-processor. These advantages can be exploited during flow visualization, for example by applying the SIAC filter to the DG data before streamline computations [Steffan et al., IEEE-TVCG 14(3): 680-692]. However, introducing these filters in engineering applications can be challenging since a tensor product filter grows in support size as the field dimension increases, becoming computationally expensive. As an alternative, [Walfisch et al., JOMP 38(2);164-184] proposed a univariate filter implemented along the streamline curves. Until now, this technique remained a numerical experiment. In this paper we introduce the line SIAC filter and explore how the orientation, structure and filter size affect the order of accuracy and global errors. We present theoretical error estimates showing how line filtering preserves the properties of traditional tensor product filtering, including smoothness and improvement in the convergence rate. Furthermore, numerical experiments are included, exhibiting how these filters achieve the same accuracy at significantly lower computational costs, becoming an attractive tool for the scientific visualization community