This dissertation explores how local government policies affect pre-and postdisaster business resilience, in the context of institutional and neo-institutional frameworks. The study builds on past research on business vulnerability and resilience to examine government policies in the pre-disaster and response and recovery periods, and explore how government responses of varying types can contribute to different outcomes for local small businesses in the recovery period following hurricane disasters. The project examines two cases surrounding events in 2005 and their impact on business resilience: Hurricane Katrina and its effects on the New Orleans metropolitan area; and Palm Beach County's experience with Hurricane Wilma. The dissertation involves a mixed-method approach to the subject matter. The statistical analysis portion uses multiple regression analysis of surveys of government-registered business owners in the affected areas. Business resilience is examined in light of the p redictive power of the size of the disaster; the influence of the institutional policies in public procurement, and vii economic development through small business programs; the role of institutional culture; and finally business vulnerability. The interview portion involves interviews with public officials, and coding and analysis of the field texts of these discussions, for additional information about the role that institutions play in the resilience of businesses before and after disaster. The statistical results suggest that institutional culture; size of disaster, institutional policies (particularly in procurement practices), and vulnerability can play a role in determining the resilience of a local business community. / The statistical analysis is supported by interview data, which suggest that public institutions can create a culture of resilience in the business communities they serve, through support of proactive measures that make businesses less vulnerable, and creation and maintenance of supportive networks in the business community through public-private channels. Such approaches, combined with forward-thinking policy toward economic development as a general imperative, can create business communities that are more resilient in the face of disaster. / by Christopher L. Atkinson. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This is the first longitudinal, retrospective, qualitative, descriptive and multi-case study of hurricanes in Puerto Rico, from 1899 to 1956, researching for planning purposes the key lessons from the disaster management changes that happened during the transition of Puerto Rico from a Spanish colony to a Commonwealth of the United States. The selected time period is crucial to grasp the foundations of modern disaster management, development and planning processes. Disasters are potent lenses through which inspect realpolitik in historical and current times, and grasp legacies that persist today, germane planning tasks. Moreover, Puerto Rico is an exemplary case; it has been an experimental laboratory for policies later promoted by the US abroad, and it embodies key common conditions to develop my research interface between urban planning and design, meteorology, hydrology, sociology, political science, culture and social history. After introducing the dissertation, I present a literature review of the emergence of the secular characterization of disasters and a recent paradigm shift for understanding what a disaster is, its causes and how to respond. Next, I summarize the multidisciplinary research and policy knowledge concerning Puerto Rican hurricanes. Subsequently, I explain my methodological sequential data analysis, beginning with three case studies, followed by cross-case comparisons and assessments, ending in answer, recommendations and conclusions. I implemented a version of Grounded Theory, combining deductive and inductive thinking, with a phenomenologist standpoint that valued people's experiences and interpretations of the world. I aimed to denaturalize so-called ‘natural disasters’, exposing with a political economy lens the political character of public decision-making before, during and after a disaster; and grasp how politics impacted the society under study. My research methods were archival research in the field and online, visual sociology and case study. Based on information-oriented sampling, I chose the destructive hurricanes San Ciriaco (1899), San Felipe (1928) and Santa Clara (1956), which occurred at critical historical junctures. I examined three themes: characterization, causation, and relief. Those themes divided into six sub-questions and thirty-eight variables, summarized later. Answer: Disaster management vastly improved mirroring shifting ideas of God, nature, knowledge and humanity; always influenced by the dependent position of the island. Historically, citizens tried to handle hurricanes through mythological beliefs, empirical observations, rituals and material practices; some of which endured colonization and modernization into the mid 20th century. Disaster management emerged haphazardly; at first it was ineffective and improvised relief, without much preventive or reconstructive policy-making. The official perception of hurricanes changed from being essentially uncontrollable religious or natural events, to natural events that could be tamed with technology, physical changes and policies. Yet, it was a more nuanced confluence of environmental, economic, social, cultural, and political factors that enabled storms to become destructive disasters affecting the Puerto Rican economy, environment and society. The social groups that experienced higher resilience or vulnerability during a disaster respectively corresponded to the groups that were best and least served during relief and who could or could not produce public transcripts and policies. Such division resulted from entrenched social and political arrangements, including citizens’ rights, colonial administrative policies, social hierarchy that merged local and external power dynamics, and notions of habitus . Eventually, the growing understanding of citizens’ rights was critical to reduce hurricane casualties and the worst forms of vulnerability through New Deal and Commonwealth developmental projects. By also including contentious aims though, they created other forms of underdevelopment and dependency from the US; whilst technology and modernity paradigms bolstered new risks that would become rather costly. Simultaneously, disaster management became a federal responsibility, which reached Puerto Rico; but it was the unplanned intersection of a hodge-podge of disciplines, approaches and institutions, centered on physical interventions and neglecting the role of culture and the political economy of disasters with negative lasting impacts. Although improvised, contradictory and controversial; the main factors enabling the rise of disaster management were increased governmental leadership, knowledge construction, public awareness, planning and investment in hard and soft infrastructure, and relief provision. My dissertation contributes to Puerto Rican Studies and to emerging planning discussions about the Circum-Caribbean. Also, it contributes to disaster management, an area of academic and practice-oriented literature relevant for planning, fastly growing given the rising frequency and intensity of multiple disasters; and which is usually focused on contemporary events, prospective forecasting and proposal-making. Contrastingly, my dissertation’s strengths reside in being a critical and exhaustive historical study of hurricanes that proposes an option to the customary deleterious disciplinary fragmentation of disaster studies and management, and to the emphasis on physical change that remain standards in most countries.

With the increase in the occurrence of disasters (natural and man-made) that leave people injured, handicapped or dead, the disaster management theory is gaining more importance. As a consequence, human assistance and disaster relief organizations are managing increasingly more inventories anticipated to help people in need. Donations are the common means used by humanitarian relief organizations for procuring commodities to support some of their programs. Previous experiences have indicated that donations become a burden instead of offering relief when they do not match actual victims' needs. Accepting or rejecting donations is a key issue that can produce not only economic losses but loss of lives as well. The objective of this thesis is to provide a means of assessing acceptance or rejection decisions using decision tree analysis theory and utility theory. The proposed model considers the inputs that a decision-maker may face when accepting or rejecting a donation. Such inputs include these categories: the probability of the occurrence of disaster, the need for and further use of a commodity, the unit price and holding cost of the item, the benefit provided by the donation, and the probability of having subsequent donations when the initial donation is initially rejected. Various scenarios are simulated in Excel® environment through the Monte Carlo process. This will assess the varied impacts from the alternative inputs in the decision making process; a sensitivity analysis will evaluate the effects of various decisions. The results obtained from the simulation of the diverse scenarios indicate that the decision of accepting or rejecting donations is driven more by the possibility of the use of the commodity than by the probability of occurrence of the disaster. The findings from the model also indicate that the decision of accepting or rejecting is more sensitive to the relationship of sale price to benefit deployment of the commodity than to sale price alone. The simulation of the expected monetary benefit of the relief provided results in the development of graphs that can affect the decision making process when accepting or rejecting donations.

Identifying sentiment in a low-resource language is essential for understanding opinions internationally and for responding to the urgent needs of locals affected by disaster incidents in different world regions. While tools and resources for recognizing sentiment in high-resource languages are plentiful, determining the most effective methods for achieving this task in a low-resource language which lacks annotated data is still an open research question. Most existing approaches for cross-lingual sentiment analysis to date have relied on high-resource machine translation systems, large amounts of parallel data, or resources only available for Indo-European languages. This work presents methods, resources, and strategies for identifying sentiment cross-lingually in a low-resource language. We introduce a cross-lingual sentiment model which can be trained on a high-resource language and applied directly to a low-resource language. The model offers the feature of lexicalizing the training data using a bilingual dictionary, but can perform well without any translation into the target language. Through an extensive experimental analysis, evaluated on 17 target languages, we show that the model performs well with bilingual word vectors pre-trained on an appropriate translation corpus. We compare in-genre and in-domain parallel corpora, out-of-domain parallel corpora, in-domain comparable corpora, and monolingual corpora, and show that a relatively small, in-domain parallel corpus works best as a transfer medium if it is available. We describe the conditions under which other resources and embedding generation methods are successful, and these include our strategies for leveraging in-domain comparable corpora for cross-lingual sentiment analysis. To enhance the ability of the cross-lingual model to identify sentiment in the target language, we present new feature representations for sentiment analysis that are incorporated in the cross-lingual model: bilingual sentiment embeddings that are used to create bilingual sentiment scores, and a method for updating the sentiment embeddings during training by lexicalization of the target language. This feature configuration works best for the largest number of target languages in both untargeted and targeted cross-lingual sentiment experiments. The cross-lingual model is studied further by evaluating the role of the source language, which has traditionally been assumed to be English. We build cross-lingual models using 15 source languages, including two non-European and non-Indo-European source languages: Arabic and Chinese. We show that language families play an important role in the performance of the model, as does the morphological complexity of the source language. In the last part of the work, we focus on sentiment analysis towards targets. We study Arabic as a representative morphologically complex language and develop models and morphological representation features for identifying entity targets and sentiment expressed towards them in Arabic open-domain text. Finally, we adapt our cross-lingual sentiment models for the detection of sentiment towards targets. Through cross-lingual experiments on Arabic and English, we demonstrate that our findings regarding resources, features, and language also hold true for the transfer of targeted sentiment.

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Disasters, emergencies, incidents, and major incidents - they all come back to the same thing regardless of what they are called. The common denominator is that there is loss of life, injury to people and animals and damage and destruction of property. The management of such events relies on four phases: 1. Prevention 2. Preparation 3. Response 4. Recovery Each of these phases is managed in a different way and often by different teams. Here, concentration has been given to phases 2 and 3, with particular emphasis on phase 3, Response. The words used to describe such events are often related to legislation. The terminology is detailed later. However, whatever the description, whenever prevention is not possible, or fails, then the need is to respond. Response is always better when the responders are prepared. Training is a major part of response preparation and this book is designed to assist those in the health industry who need to be ready when something happens. One of the training packages for responders is the Major Incident Medical Management and Support (MIMMS) Course and this work was designed to supplement the manual prepared by Hodgetts and Macway-Jones(87) in the UK. Included is what the health services responder, who may be sent to an event in which the main concern is trauma, should know. Concentration is on the initial response and does not deal in any detail with hospital reaction, the public health aspects, or the mental health support that provides psychological help to victims and responders, and which are also essential parts of disaster management. People, in times of disaster, have always been quick to offer assistance. It is now well recognised however, that the 'enthusiastic amateur', whilst being a well meaning volunteer, isn't always what is needed. All too often such people have made things worse and have sometimes ended up as victims themselves. There is a place now for volunteers and there probably always will be. The big difference is that these people must be well informed, well trained and well practiced if they are to be effective. Fortunately such people and organisations do exist. Without the work of the St John Ambulance, the State Emergency Service, the Rural Fire Service the Red Cross and the Volunteer Rescue Association, to mention only a few, our response to disasters would be far less effective. There is a strong history of individuals being available to help the community in times of crisis. Mostly these people were volunteers but there has also always been the need for a core of professional support. In the recent past, professional support mechanisms have been developed from lessons learned, particularly to situations that need a rapid and well organised response. As lessons are learned from an analysis of events, philosophy and methods have changed. Our present system is not perfect and perhaps never will be. The need for an 'all-hazards approach' makes detailed planning very difficult and so there will probably always be criticisms about the way an event was handled. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, provided we learn from it. That means that this text is certainly not the 'last word' and revisions as we learn from experience will be inevitable. Because the author works primarily in New South Wales, many of the explanations and examples are specific to that state. In Australia disaster response is a State, rather than a Commonwealth, responsibility and consequently, and inevitably, there are differences in management between the states and territories within Australia. With the influence of Emergency Management Australia, these differences are being reduced. This means that across state and territory boundaries, assistance is common and interstate teams can be deployed and assimilated into the response rapidly, safely, effectively and with minimum explanation. This text sets out to increase the understanding of what is required, what is in place and how the processes of response are managed. By way of introduction and background, examples are given of those situations that have occurred, or could happen. Man Made Disasters has been divided into two distinct sections. Those which are related to structures or transport and those related directly to people. The first section, Chapter 3, includes: • Transport accidents involving land, rail, sea or air vehicles. • Collapse of buildings for reasons other than earthquakes or storms. • Industrial accidents, including the release of hazardous substances and nuclear events. A second section dealing with the consequences of the direct actions of people is separated as Chapter 4, entitled 'People Disasters'. Included are: • Crowd incidents involving sports and entertainment venues. • Terrorism From Chapter 4 on, the emphasis is on the Response phase and deals with organisation and response techniques in detail. Finally there is a section on terminology and abbreviations. An appendix details a typical disaster pack content. War, the greatest of all man made disasters is not considered in this text.

台灣因所在地理位置特殊，長期以來一直遭受天然災害的威脅，我國自災害防救法頒佈後，明文規定當中央及各級政府無法因應災害處理時可以申請軍隊支援。在幾次重大天然災害中，國軍與政府及民間救難團隊已有豐富合作的經驗，自八八水災後國軍救災角色及責任更為重要，馬總統在出席99年國軍重要幹部研習會指示：「災害防救」是國軍中心任務，國軍要超前部署、預置兵力，隨時防救，防災重於救災，離災優於救災。故在梅姬颱風期間，超前預置兵力更凸顯國軍救災的重要性。 國防部也於2009 年國防報告書中提出周延防災整備的作法，國軍對於災害防救的角色由「接受申請、支援」轉換為「主動、協調執行」。然國家建立軍隊的目的，主要還是應付外在敵對勢力的威脅，建立堅實的國防武力，達成防衛固守、有效嚇阻的國防戰略。國軍救災從以往應援改為中心任務，此一重大變革勢必對國軍未來的角色、功能及戰力有十分深遠的影響，因此國軍應如何投入災害救援，平衡戰備整備與救災工作，則必須對於現階段軍隊參與災害救援的相關作法進行探討，重新思考與規劃並進行政策之可行性做分析。 本篇論文採用文獻回顧和分析歸納的方法，綜觀國軍歷經幾次天然災害救援經驗，以八八水災及梅姬風災救災案例探討國軍現行參與災害救援問題並針對下列問題做分析：第一，政府已明確將救災列為國軍中心任務，但對於民間救難團隊、政府機關救難機制主從、整合及角色定位與指揮權責模糊不清。第二，國軍救災法源依據仍顯不足尚待立法及救災期間所需經費支出及來源問題。第三，天然災害發生時國軍投入救災執行效能仍有進步空間主要因素在於救災專業人力及裝(設)備不足。第四，國軍面臨救災前夕與另一非軍事行動時，兵力超前部屬必要性及孰輕孰重？或面對複合式災害時超前預置兵力是否可行？對上述的種種問題，將影響未來面對重大災害時國軍參與救災工作，因此重新檢討我國軍隊參與救災之適切性和可行性後，進一步對現行國軍參與災害防救之行動方案，提出檢討與建議。 / Taiwan has suffered in the threats of natural disasters for years, as its unique location. After the promulgation of Disaster Prevention and Response Act., a rule was written that military support can be applied for activation once the Government is no longer able to handle the disaster. Through some severe catastrophes, the military, the Government, as well as nongovernmental rescue teams, had gained profound experience in collaboration. Since the 88 Taiwan Flood, the importance of the military has increased. President Ma pointed out that “Prevent and rescue” is the main mission of the military – setting forces in advance, call-on relief duties, and emphasis on prevention instead of rescue. As a result, in the period of Maggie Typhoon, setting forces in advance had taken its advantage and importance. Department of Defense had issued a robust approach in its report in 2009. The report claims that the role of military in disasters is in a stage of transformation from “Accept appliance & support” to “Initiative & cooperative execution”. The classic aim of establish the army was to construct substantial defense force and to protect the country from invaders and enemies. As the main mission changed, it affects not only the role of the military, but also the function of the army and the strength of force. The policy of the military participating in rescuing needs to be analyzed in the balance of military operations, the plausibility of plans, and further improvements in the future. This thesis employs research in studies and induction, using the 88 Taiwan Flood and Maggie Typhoon as examples to review the problems occurred when the military attending in rescue. And the thesis will discuss and analyze the following issues: Firstly, the Government had classified disaster relief as the main mission of the military, however, the position and the role of the government and nongovernmental rescue teams are yet not clear enough. Secondly, the source of Disaster Prevention and Response Act. is still insufficient; the source of finance supports during rescue is vague, either. Thirdly, the shortage of equipments and human resource can be the main direction for improvement. Lastly, when facing both the need of rescue and another non-military action, should the military set in advance with flexibility? Or can it be feasible when facing compound catastrophe? Questions listed above are the main issues discussed in the thesis. Reviews and suggestions will be put forward after further investigation on the plausibility of the military participating in rescue.

Thesis (All-College Honors) - - State University of New York College at Cortland, 2008 - - Department of History. / Includes bibliographical references (p.42-4).

Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.