BACKGROUND The impending landfall of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast resulted in large numbers of evacuees into the Jackson, Mississippi area. Many evacuees with chronic medical problems had been directed to the Mississippi Coliseum in the downtown area near the University of Mississippi Medical Center. As the storm passed through Jackson, serious damage occurred to the municipa...

Unlike unpredictable disasters such as earthquakes and terrorist attacks, hurricanes can be detected a few days prior to their occurrence. In the United States, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) issues a forecast advisory approximately five days prior to a hurricane’s landfall (from www.nhc.noaa.gov). This information can be used by humanitarian and governmental agencies to strategically depl...

Predominantly in the faltering atmosphere, the precise value of some factors is difficult to measure. Though, it can be easily approximated by intuitionistic fuzzy linguistic term in the real-life world problem. To deal with such situations, in this paper two information measures based on trigonometric function for intuitionistic fuzzy sets, which are a generalized version of the fuzzy informat...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this qualitative, retrospective review is to identify and analyze the occurrence of recurrent problems in 20 processes that cover all relevant aspects of disaster health during the response phase. Consequently, an attempt is made to determine if there are generic themes of coherences in these problems. METHODS Eight after-action reports of five consecutive disasters in t...

I-Fang Su, Chang-Ming Tsai, Yuan-Ko Huang, Chieh-Ling Huang, Jwu-Jenq Chen, and Yu-Chi Chung a Department of Information Management ,Fortune Institute of Technology, No.1-10, Nongchang Rd., Daliao Township, Kaohsiung County 831, Taiwan (R.O.C.) 2 Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Chang Jung Christian University, 396 Chang Jung Rd., Sec.1, Kway JenTainan 71101, Taiwan (...

This teaching case features a situation at Belgacom, the leading telecommunications company in Belgium, end of April 2005. Wim Bouckenooghe, newly appointed finance director of Belgacom’s Network and IT division within the Fixed Line Services (FLS) segment, is troubled by the effectiveness of the selection of the discretionary IT projects, particularly the larger ones. He is especially concerne...

Langa Township, located in Cape Town, South Africa is home to many internal South African migrants and external African immigrants. As a mobile population, many Langa residents have embraced the mobile phone as a means of securing relationships with family members living elsewhere, while also maintaining relationships forged within the township and South Africa in general. Addressing the role o...