Search results for " Other"

The impact on disaster governance of the intersection of environmental hazards, border conflict and disaster responses in Ladakh, India

2018

Abstract The Indian border region of Ladakh, in Jammu and Kashmir State, has a sensitive Himalayan ecosystem and has experienced natural hazards and disasters of varying scales over the decades. Ladakh is also situated on a fault-line of multiple tensions, including ongoing border disagreements and intermittent conflict with China and Pakistan. The Indian army has thus become a permanent fixture in the region. This paper examines the implications of the intersection of these environmental and security factors for disaster governance in the region. Using Social Domains theory, the paper argues first, that a hazard-centred paradigm of ‘universal’ disaster science emerges from the colonial per…

The Challenge of Coexistence in Socially Vulnerable Schools

2017

Abstract Society in general and schools in particular continue to express their concerns with regard to the many challenges posed nowadays by living in a globalized world, where learning to coexist involves knowing oneself and those around us. Therefore, the professionals from the education sector and specially from the most vulnerable contexts demand the necessity to know strategies and initiatives which enable them to build a democratic school, where learning to coexist is the key to educate engaged citizens living in an increasingly intercultural, changing world. The study presented here has been conducted in two differentiated, but complementary, phases. During the first phase a documen…

Secure and efficient verification for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

2017

Summary The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is, and will be, one of the most interesting topics in the field of Information and Communications Technology. Covering a wide range of applications, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can play an important role in IoT by seamless integration among thousands of sensors. The benefits of using WSN in IoT include the integrity, scalability, robustness, and easiness in deployment. In WSNs, data aggregation is a famous technique, which, on one hand, plays an essential role in energy preservation and, on the other hand, makes the network prone to different kinds of attacks. The detection of false data injection and impersonation attacks is one of the majo…

Subjective Logic-Based In-Network Data Processing for Trust Management in Collocated and Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

2018

While analyzing an explosive amount of data collected in today’s wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the redundant information in the sensed data needs to be handled. In-network data processing is a technique which can eliminate or reduce such redundancy, leading to minimized resource consumption. On the other hand, trust management techniques establish trust relationships among nodes and detect unreliable nodes. In this paper, we propose two novel in-network data processing schemes for trust management in static WSNs. The first scheme targets at networks, where sensor nodes are closely collocated to report the same event. Considering both spatial and temporal correlations, this scheme generat…

Strategies of Identification of a Base-Isolated Hospital Building by Coupled Quasi-Static and Snap-Back Tests

2020

In this paper, the description of a series of quasi-static pushing tests and dynamic snap-back tests is proposed, involving the base-isolated emergency building of the Palermo university hospital. The base isolation system is characterized by a set of double-curved friction pendulum isolators placed on the top of the columns of the underground level, characteristics that cannot be found in the experimental studies available in the literature. The aim of the work was to investigate the static and dynamic properties of the building in question and comparing the in-situ results with the characteristics assigned during the design process and to assess the level of agreement. Static lateral push…

A Mechanical Approach for Evaluating the Distribution of Confinement Pressure in FRP-Wrapped Rectangular Columns

2019

In recent decades, fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) wrapping has become a common technique to retrofit reinforced concrete (RC) columns. Numerous research works have sought to verify analytically and experimentally its effectiveness in terms of enhancement of axial load bearing capacity and ductility. These studies highlighted that in the case of sharp-cornered sections, the maximum allowable confinement pressure is limited by premature failure at corners and, consequently, stress in the FRP, as well as the distribution of the confinement pressure, is not uniform. The prediction of this phenomenon is not straightforward, and existing theoretical studies propose complex numerical simulations, …

State effects and the effects of state building: institution building and the formation of state-centred societies

2016

AbstractThis article discusses the assumptions underlying state-building efforts and the effects of these efforts. It addresses two main questions: why has state building not led to the establishment of effective states? And what are the effects of statebuilding? It is argued that these efforts have been based on an institutionalist model of the state derived from a Weberian framework, and that the basic reason why state building has failed is that the creation of effective states requires the creation of state-centred societies, where both material and symbolic resources are concentrated in the state. This is very difficult to achieve for external actors. But, although state building has n…

The Impact of Regionalism on Democracy Building: An Examination of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

2017

Since the early 1990s, the world has witnessed a new wave of regionalism and a mushrooming of regional integration organizations, particularly in the global South. Focusing on Africa, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) ranks among the most promising examples of regionalism on the continent. The SADC explicitly aims at building and advancing democracy in the region and its member states as part of its broader agenda on regional development. From a political science perspective, there is general agreement that regional integration and parallel institution building can be useful measures to promote and strengthen democratic rule, since an appropriate institutional “lock-in” impl…

2020

A soldier’s occupational physical task requirements are diverse and varied. However, the type of physical training that most effectively improves soldiers’ occupational task requirements has not been studied previously. The purpose of this study was to determine the important strength characteristics for soldiers during a repeated simulated military task course, and the type of training that may be effective to improve these abilities during a specialized military training period. Forty-two (n = 42) soldiers participated in the study. They were divided into three training groups; a soldier task-specific training group (TSG, n = 17), a strength training group (STG, n = 15), and a control gro…

Two novel subjective logic-based in-network data processing schemes in wireless sensor networks

2016

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of connected low-cost and small-size sensor nodes. The sensor nodes are characterized by various limitations, such as energy availability, processing power, and storage capacity. Typically, nodes collect data from an environment and transmit the raw or processed data to a sink. However, the collected data contains often redundant information. An in-network processing scheme attempts to eliminate or reduce such redundancy in sensed data. In this paper, we propose two in-network data processing schemes for WSNs, which are built based on a lightweight algebra for data processing. The schemes bring also benefits like decreased network traffic load and inc…