Ready for anything. Both natural and man-made disasters seem to occur with greater frequency. While these disasters can be devastating, the vast majority of casualties are caused by a lack of preparation. The Complete Idiot's Guide(r) to Disaster Preparedness teaches readers the right steps to prepare the home or office for a disaster, and about issues relating to insurance, evacuation plans, and building an emergency to-go pack. By an internationally acknowledged expert author Practical, comprehensive, hands-on advice applicable to most disasters Meets the demands of a vast and expanding market for this genre

Social Media in Disaster Response focuses on how emerging social web tools provide researchers and practitioners with new opportunities to address disaster communication and information design for participatory cultures. Both groups, however, currently lack research toolkits for tracing participant networks across systems; there is little understanding of how to design not just for individual social web sites, but how to design across multiple systems. Given the volatile political and ecological climate we are currently living in, the practicality of understanding how people communicate during disasters is important both for those researching solutions and for those putting that research into practice. Social Media in Disaster Response addresses this situation by presenting the results of a large-scale sociotechnical usability study on crisis communication in the vernacular related to recent natural and human-made crisis; this is an analysis of the way social web applications are transformed, by participants, into a critical information infrastructure in moments of crisis. This book provides researchers with methods, tools, and examples for researching and analyzing these communication systems while providing practitioners with design methods and information about these participatory communities to assist them in influencing the design and structure of these communication systems.

What is the state's responsibility to its people in the aftermath of a natural hazard based disaster? The book sets out to address this seemingly simple question, after large scale floods devastated Pakistan in 2010 and then again in 2011. Along the way it delves into rich detail about people's everday encounters with the state in Pakistan, uncovers postcolonial discourses on rights of citizenship and dispels mainstream understanding of Islamist groups as presenting an alternative development paradigm to the state. Based on detailed ethnographic fieldwork, In the Wake of the Disaster forces the reader to look beyond narratives of Pakistan as the perennial 'failing state' falling victim to an imminent 'Islamist takeover'. The book shifts the conversation from hysteria and sensationalism surrounding Pakistan to the everyday. In doing so it transforms our understanding of contemporary disasters.

A third-generation disaster researcher challenges what he sees as a myth perpetrated since the genesis of the field in the 1950s that faced with an emergency, most people will panic and flee, become helplessly impassive, or loot. He sets out the empirical evidence in statistics and case studies. He agrees with colleagues that the mass media are a primary factor in spreading the myth, but goes beyond them to address what emergency agencies can do despite it. Graduate and undergraduate students interested in social response to disasters, the disaster research community, and people responsible for responding to disaster might find the treatment interesting. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This analysis of catastrophes provides a pathway for those who want to foster truthtelling in their organization and head off disasters in the making. We tend to think of disasters as uncontrollable acts of nature or inevitable accidents. But are such incidents unavoidable or ever truly accidental? The authors of this remarkable book say we actually do have the power to prevent tragedies such as the flooding from Hurricane Katrina, the death toll from dangerous medicines like Vioxx, and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Marc Gerstein and Michael Ellsberg insist that disasters need not be inevitable if we learn from history, prepare carefully for the worst case, and speak out when we see danger looming. This revelation makes their compelling study extremely valuable for readers in business, government, medicine, academia—indeed all walks of life. Flirting with Disaster will do for catastrophe what Blink did for intuition, and The Black Swan did for probability: provide a popular audience with an engaging, in-depth view of a complex and important topic. Gerstein and Ellsberg examine the culture of institutions: why even people of good will and inside knowledge underestimate risk; feel psychologically incapable of averting tragedy and unable to pick up the pieces afterward; and don’t come forward forcefully enough to head off catastrophe. They also celebrate those who go beyond the call of duty to save others, including Dr. David Graham of the FDA who courageously stood up to reveal Vioxx’s deadly effects. One such whistleblower contributes both a foreword and an afterword: Daniel Ellsberg, renowned for releasing the Pentagon Papers.

Essays and reviews published during the Nazi occupation of France.

Debunks the sentiment that the creation of green jobs can save the American economy, claiming, for instance, that pursuing solar and wind technologies actually creates manufacturing jobs in China and South Korea rather than at home.