INTRODUCTION Some people living in the environs of industrial wind turbines (IWTs) report experiencing adverse health and socioeconomic effects. This review considers the hypothesis that annoyance from audible IWTs is the cause of these adverse health effects. METHODS We searched PubMed and Google Scholar for articles published since 2000 that included the terms "wind turbine health," "wind t...

Noroviruses are an important cause of acute gastroenteritis in humans. We incorporated new insights gained over the past decade in an updated estimate of the disease burden of (foodborne) norovirus illness in The Netherlands in 2009. The disease outcomes - non-consulting cases, visiting a general practitioner, hospitalization and mortality - and the foodborne proportion were derived from cohort...

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory presented an investigation of various wind turbine drivetrain condition monitoring (CM) techniques at the 7 International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring held in 2009. The study contained in this report is a continuation of the 2009 paper and focuses on results obtained by various CM techniques from a damaged Gearbox Reliability Collaborative te...

An increase in the occurrence of sudden local flooding of great volume and short duration has caused significant danger and loss of life and property in Korea as well as many other parts of the World. Since such floods usually accompanied by rapid runoff and debris flow rise quite quickly with little or no advance warning to prevent flood damage, this study presents a new flash flood indexing m...

Floods are the most common natural disaster in both developed and developing countries, and they are occasionally of devastating impact, as the floods in China in 1959 and Bangladesh in 1974 and the tsunami in Southeast Asia in December 2004 show (1). Their impacts on health vary between populations for reasons relating to population vulnerability and type of flood event (2–5). Under future cli...

This research provides an in-depth analysis of economic resilience to earthquakes. It fi ne-tunes the defi nition to distinguish inherent and adaptive considerations, and it distinguishes the various levels at which resilience is operative. It explicitly links resilience to the behavior of individuals, markets, and the regional macroeconomy, including disequilibrium aspects of each. Finally, it...

This article analyzes the consequences for risk distribution of the French Flood Prevention Action Programme (PAPI). By redirecting floods from the most vulnerable to the least vulnerable areas, PAPIs expose farmers to greater flood risks. This has led local water management institutions to introduce compensation payments. The article outlines the results of an exhaustive survey of all PAPIs in...

There has been a surprisingly large number of major floods in the last years around the world, which suggests that floods may have increased and will continue to increase in the next decades. However, the realism of such changes is still hotly discussed in the literature. This overview article examines whether floods have changed in the past and explores the driving processes of such changes in...

The historical floods that have occurred since the seventeenth century were collected for a study area in southern Italy. Damages caused by floods, rainfall and the main anthropogenic modifications are discussed all together. The aim was to assess whether the frequency of floods is changing and, if so, whether these changes can be attributed to either rainfall and/or anthropogenic modifications...