Due to the fact that emergency situations can lead to substantial losses, both financial and in terms of human lives, it is essential that texts used in a crisis situation be clearly understandable. This thesis is concerned with the study of the complexity of the crisis management sub-language and with methods to produce new, clear texts and to rewrite pre-existing crisis management documents which are too complex to be understood. By doing this, this interdisciplinary study makes several contributions to the crisis management field. First, it contributes to the knowledge of the complexity of the texts used in the domain, by analysing the presence of a set of written language complexity issues derived from the psycholinguistic literature in a novel corpus of crisis management documents. Second, since the text complexity analysis shows that crisis management documents indeed exhibit high numbers of text complexity issues, the thesis adapts to the English language controlled language writing guidelines which, when applied to the crisis management language, reduce its complexity and ambiguity, leading to clear text documents. Third, since low quality of communication can have fatal consequences in emergency situations, the proposed controlled language guidelines and a set of texts which were re-written according to them are evaluated from multiple points of view. In order to achieve that, the thesis both applies existing evaluation approaches and develops new methods which are more appropriate for the task. These are used in two evaluation experiments – evaluation on extrinsic tasks and evaluation of users’ acceptability. The evaluations on extrinsic tasks (evaluating the impact of the controlled language on text complexity, reading comprehension under stress, manual translation, and machine translation tasks) Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management domain 4 show a positive impact of the controlled language on simplified documents and thus ensure the quality of the resource. The evaluation of users’ acceptability contributes additional findings about manual simplification and helps to determine directions for future implementation. The thesis also gives insight into reading comprehension, machine translation, and cross-language adaptability, and provides original contributions to machine translation, controlled languages, and natural language generation evaluation techniques, which make it valuable for several scientific fields, including Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and a number of different sub-fields of NLP.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Robert Warren, School of Urban Affairs & Public Policy. Includes bibliographical references.

Abstract This thesis focuses on the SARS epidemic situation in 2003, conducting the comparison research. The compared objects are Singapore and Taiwan government¡¦s strategies. When Singapore and Taiwan have been through repeatedly the same crisis, which policies and measures have both countries separately made? Why the Singapore government's strategies were more successful? But Taiwan's strategies were actually thought awaits improvements. This article first introduces SARS epidemic situation development in 2003, after understanding event background, gradually will discuss the focal point to gather in Singapore and Taiwan. Then, the writer will make the analysis to the Singapore government as well as the Taiwan government SARS epidemic situation crisis management. The crisis management can be separated to three phases: crisis prevent phase, crisis handle phase and crisis restore phase, and the writer will discuss each phase. Finally, proposes regarding the government whole related SARS epidemic situation crisis management view and the suggestion.

All over the world, corporate scandals, big and small, affect our daily life. Since the beginning of the 21st century, major American corporations including WorldCom, Enron, Dynegy, Merk, Tyco, Lucent Technologies, Merrill Lynch, Global Crossing, and Health South were involved in corporate scandals. In Europe, accounting fraud and other criminal activities were uncovered at Switzerland¡¦s Adecco, the Netherlands¡¦ Ahold, and Parmalat, the Italian dairy concern whose owners defrauded investors of billions of dollars, including more than 1.5 billion US dollars from American investors. Crisis management is often portrayed as reactive activity directed at problems, usually arising from human error, and already escalating. The development of a crisis is often indeterminate rather than fixed. Crisis management can mean quick actions that prevent a triggering event as it unfolds or delayed action that mops up after the triggering event has run it course. In this paper, the proposed crisis management model is the M3 theory for managing multiple mistakes derived from Robert E. Mittelstaedt, Jr.¡¦s book, ¡§Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal? Avoiding the Chain of Mistakes That Can Destroy Your Organization.¡¨ In this book, Mittelstaedt addresses errors in preparation, execution, strategy, and culture. He emphasizes that firms need to build internal control systems that will trigger clear and actionable alarms before ¡§failure chains¡¨ accelerate beyond control. The process of Managing Multiple Mistakes (M3) can determine whether an organization ends up in a negative or positive light on the front page of a national newspaper. ¡§The concept of Managing Multiple mistakes," Mittelstaedt writes, ¡§is based on the observation that nearly all serious accidents, whether physical or business, are the result of more than one mistake. If we do not ¡¥break the chain¡¦ of mistakes early, the damage that is done, and its cost, will go up exponentially¡K until the situation is irreparable.¡¨

Outline As crises - ranging from mildly disruptive to disastrous - (1) become more frequent, corporate managers have no choice but to accept them as an inescapable reality to be factored into their planning and decision-making. When a crisis occurs, the performance of its crisis managers will determine the future of an organization. This thesis discusses four public crises that occurred in Taiwan in the 1990¡¦s which illustrate the key importance of a corporation¡¦s crisis management. After a thorough analysis of the four cases, we reached the following conclusions: Corporate culture is an important factor in crisis management. It determines how crises are perceived by people within the company, and the way in which they deal with the crises. Hence the corporate structure and reward system should be designed to encourage positive behavior. The management of stakeholder relationships is an integral part of crisis management. The concerns, views, and ideas of a wide variety of people ¡V employees, managers, customers, suppliers, the public and foreign trading partners ¡V need to be considered. (2) And the company must be willing to discuss all matters with the aim of achieving mutual trust and understanding. A carefully considered contingency plan is always the best solution. Careful attention paid to these processes will, without doubt, help to anticipate and avert crises.

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The aim of this thesis was to examine the cognitive processes through which experienced Offshore Installation Managers (OIMs) make decisions during emergencies, and to determine whether they use a naturalistic or normative decision making strategy. That is, do they recognise the emergency as familiar and base decisions on condition-action rules serially generated (naturalistic), or do they need to concurrently compare and contrast options before selecting the best possible (normative). Emphasis was on the individual OIM's understanding of an emergency and the meaning he attached to the information or events taking place. The method employed to achieve this objective, was a Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) based on triangulation principles, i.e. using multiple methods to examine the same research question and so enhance reliability and validity. The main findings of this thesis were: • Decision making in Safety Case (1992) identified offshore installation emergencies is primarily based on condition-action rules, or rule-based according to Rasmussen's (1983) model, not Standard Operating Procedures. • Decisions are serially generated. There is no evidence of option comparison. • The environment severely limits the number of options available to the OIM. • Decisions are predominantly made when one element of the present status of the incident changes. • Tactical decisions account for approximately 54% and operational decisions for 46% of the decisions made. • Nearly 50% of the decisions taken are instigated by other team members. • The majority of the time (86.8%) is spent on situation assessment. • The OIMs' situation awareness is limited to a maximum of eight interdependent problem categories. • Situation awareness comprises approximately four categories at any one point. • Risk and time pressure are the two major factors contributing to incident assessment. • There are individual differences in decision making style and situation awareness.

"Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration from the Naval Postgraduate School, September 2008." / Advisor(s): Powley, Edward H. ; King, Cynthia L. "September 2008." "MBA professional report"--Cover. Description based on title screen as viewed on November 4, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-54). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2005. / Thesis research directed by: Counseling and Personnel Services. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the World Wide Web as a PDF file.

Thesis (M.P.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-86).