While pure rain is naturally slightly acidic, the higher level of acidity in acid rain makes it a threat to plant and aquatic life and to some manmade materials and structures. The slight natural acidity of pure rain is the result of carbon dioxide in the air dissolving in water to produce a weak carbonic acid solution. This natural acid in rainfall and snowmelt is partly responsible for the lo...

Effective disaster recovery planning, execution, and testing are essential to manage the risk of business interruption that arises from a myriad of sources such as fire, natural or manmade disasters, sabotage, or technical or human operational failures. The Municipal Software Services, Inc (MSS) case describes a company that was faced with a catastrophic fire. The MSS case provides a realistic ...

The World Trade Center attack and collapse is the first time an aircraft has been used as a weapon of mass effect. The scale and magnitude of this manmade disaster can only be compared with a natural catastrophe such as the Armenian earthquake of December 1988. The importance of an incident command system and the Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment, and the need for fixed Casualty Collection Poin...

Ordinary images, as well as most natural and manmade signals, are compressible and can, therefore, be well represented in a domain in which the signal is sparse. Sparse signal representations have found use in a large number of applications including image compression. Inspired by recent theoretical advances in sparse representation, we propose an image compression using wavelet, sparse represe...

Semantic knowledge is supported by a widely distributed neuronal network, with differential patterns of activation depending upon experimental stimulus or task demands. Despite a wide body of knowledge on semantic object processing from the visual modality, the response of this semantic network to environmental sounds remains relatively unknown. Here, we used fMRI to investigate how access to d...

S S S Chapter One INTRODUCTION ABSTRACT Disasters continue to increase in frequency and affect more and more citizens of the world community. Economic costs are increasing at an alarming rate. The death toll in the last 50 years has been in excess of 12 million persons, billions of people have been “affected”, and economic costs are estimated as high as US$4 trillion. Human and economic costs h...

Motivated by biologically-inspired architectures for video analysis and object recognition, a new single band electro-optical (EO) object detector is described for aerial reconnaissance and surveillance applications. Our bio-inspired target screener (BiTS) uses a bank of Gabor filters to compute a vector of texture features over a range of scales and orientations. The filters are designed to ex...

The importance of emergency response system has grown significantly in recent times due to the frequent manmade and natural disasters such as September 2001 and Hurricane Sandy 2012. Disaster, manmade and natural, causes great economic and human losses each year throughout the world. Transportation and Telecommunication play a crucial role in disaster response and management. Our previous work ...

Today’s digital subscriber line deployments are often conservatively engineered to function in a statistically worst case environment. Crosstalk is treated as unknown and uncontrollable random noise, even though it is manmade. Other impairments are often treated by simply adding margin to crosstalk. While this simplistic practice currently suffices, it often provisions unnecessarily low bit rat...