Abstract: Keiko Ikeda is a Ph. D. student at the Department of Sociology, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan. On the night of 29 April 1991, the south-eastern coastal areas on the Bay of Bengal were hit by a severe cyclone with a tidal surge.1 With a maximum height of 6 to 7.5 metres, the tidal surge submerged about 160 km of the south-eastern coastline and coastal islands on the Bay of Bengal (see Figure 1) (Haider et al.1991: 21; Haque and Blair 1992: 221). The zilas2 of Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar were most severely affected. Between 68,000 to 1,38,000 people are estimated to have been killed. Most of them drowned in the tidal surge. Reports indicate that children, old people and women died at a higher rate than others.. This paper investigates the gender aspects in human loss and vul-

Abstract: Reflecting a series of converging international trends, the tourist industry represents a vulnerability of catastrophic potential. Interview and questionnaire data obtained from 185 owners or managers in nine U.S. communities provide answers to five questions: (1) what is the extent of disaster evacuation planning?; (2) what factors account for the variations in this planning?; (3) what behavioral patterns occur during actual evacuations?; (4) what factors account for these pattern variations?; and (5) what are the policy implications of these behavioral assessments? While many larger firms managed by more professional staff have completed extensive disaster evacuation planning, the overall record is very spotty. Hence, major initiatives both within the industry, and by emergency managers at all levels of government, are needed to reduce this rapidly expanding vulnerability.

Abstract: Growing industrial development in the Mexico/U.S. border region is creating potential health risks for citizens of both nations. Planners and policy makers working in this region must prepare for hazardous material accidents in a situation of limited information. This research develops a geographic information system-based approach for estimating and determining community vulnerability to hazardous material releases in Nogales, Sonora/Arizona. A composite mapping analysis of human-related and hazard-related variables determines high vulnerability locations. In addition, a sensitivity analysis explores a full range of vulnerability scenarios based on different weighted combinations of the human-related and hazard-related factors. Results demonstrate that a GIS-based approach can effectively compensate for much of the inherent subjectivity in a composite mapping analysis.

Abstract: The geographical and temporal patterns of disasters are first described and then considered in terms of the underpinnings and causes of human vulnerability. These include population increase, marginalization, the militarization of vulnerable societies, the politicization of aid, the accumulation of capital goods, and the dual role of technology as a source of both vulnerability and mitigation. Some of the bases of theory in hazards studies are reviewed and considered in the light of the development gap in mitigation — the wide gulf between the vulnerability of industrialized and least developed countries. The phenomenon of disaster is considered theoretically in terms of its fundamental dimensions: time, space, magnitude and intensity. Finally, the various disciplinary contributions to disaster studies are assessed and compared. Reasons are given for practitioners’ reluctance to undertake interdisciplinary work.

Abstract: This study used a self-regulation model of health behavior to explore the impact of risk perceptions and disease-risk symptoms on responses to health messages. Undergraduates with beliefs of high or low vulnerability to heart disease participated in a task that either did or did not induce disease-risk symptoms. Participants were then given a threatening or reassuring message about heart disease prevention, or no message. Participants with high-vulnerability beliefs reported higher exercise intentions only after the reassuring message, and then only in the absence of risk symptoms. However, their exercise rates were increased by both messages and by the symptoms. Participants with preexisting beliefs of low vulnerability reported higher risk perceptions after experiencing the symptoms; only the threat message enhanced their exercise rates.

Abstract: The author reviews the evidence mainly from sub-Saharan Africa related to the current incidence and rate of spread of HIV/AIDS. Building upon previous work she calls attention to some of the discussions and hypotheses which link more rapid sexual transmission of HIV to the degree of prevalence of changing gender roles. Attributes of these roles are involved in the economic military political and social crises currently changing familial and non-familial institutions. They are associated with the social and spatial dislocation of populations growing poverty and widening differences among groups in terms of wealth and power. Sections consider the HIV/AIDS epidemic vulnerability to infection female vulnerability and risky relationships escalating jeopardy high-risk strategies female sexual vulnerability at work and school International Labor Organization constituents responses poverty and prostitution violence and coercion and research on sex and gender.

Abstract: The lack of a standard gauge for quantifying computer system vulnerability is a hindrance to communicating information about vulnerabilities, and is thus a hindrance to reducing those vulnerabilities. The inability to address this issue through uniform semantics often leads to uncoordinated efforts at combating exposure to common avenues of exploitation. The de-facto standard for evaluating computer security is the government's Trusted Computer Evaluation Criteria, also known as the Orange Book. However, it is a generally accepted fact that the majority of non-government multi-user computer systems are classified into one of its two lower classes. The link between the higher classes and government classified data, makes the measure unsuitable for commercial use.This project presents a feasible approach for resolving this problem by introducing a standardized assessment. It introduces a method, termed the System Vulnerability Index (SVI), that analyzes a number of factors that affect security. These factors are evaluated and combined, through the use of special rules, to provide a measure of vulnerability. The strength of this method is in its abstraction of the problem, which makes it applicable to various operating systems and hardware implementations. User and superuser actions, as well as clues to a potentially breached state of security, serve as the basis for the security relevant factors. Facts for assessment are presented in a form suitable for implementation in a rule-based expert system.

Abstract: This study compared AIDS knowledge and attitudes in public high school students (N=167), incarcerated delinquents (N=166), and emotionally disturbed (SED) adolescents (N=151). The response measure was a 50-item Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) questionnaire that was previously used by Bell et al., in their 1991 study of learning disabled adolescents. Although AIDS knowledge was moderately high in all three groups, widespread misunderstandings about disease transmission and awareness of high-risk groups and practices were noted. Knowledge scores were significantly higher in the public school sample than in the SED adolescents; moreover, they tended to be slightly higher (p<0.10) than the delinquent group as well. Teenagers with the severest emotional problems were by far the least informed. Age and race were also predictive of AIDS knowledge. Other results showed that delinquents were more permissive in their attitudes about sex, more inclined to disdain safe sex practices, and more likely to feel threatened by high-risk groups as well as powerless to protect themselves against AIDS. Generally speaking, the findings extend the work of other investigators on the needs for AIDS education in adolescents. The need is especially urgent in delinquent and emotionally disturbed youth who may require a more comprehensive intervention because of their greater knowledge deficits, propensity for high-risk practices, and tendency to deny or underestimate their own vulnerability.

Abstract: HIV/AIDS is a health problem that is inseparable from individual and collective behavior and social forces particularly linked with societal respect for human rights and dignity. In its second decade the HIV/AIDS pandemic continues to thrive. Where organized communities have access to adequate information education and services the incidence of infection has begun to decline. Elsewhere HIV continues to reach new populations and new geographic areas. Lessons learned in more than a decade of prevention work point to new directions for expanding national responses at a time when the UNAIDS program to be launched in January 1996 offers opportunities for innovative broad-based coordinated and expanded global action. Prevention activities have shown that the spread of HIV can be effectively reduced. Public health interventions including providing information and applying prevention methods reduce the probability of infection the risk of transmission and the chances of not accessing appropriate care or support once infection has set in. These are proximal interventions that yield the short-term benefits of the decline of incidence and improved quality and duration of life for those infected. Societal vulnerability translates today into the focus the pandemic has on individuals communities and nations that are disadvantaged marginalized or discriminated against for reasons of gender age race sexual orientation economic status or cultural religious or political affiliation. A fully expanded response to HIV/AIDS requires a combination of risk-reduction (proximal) and contextual interventions--those directed at reducing vulnerability through social change to enable people to exert control over their own health. Contextual actions can be implemented in the short term (changing laws policies practices that discriminate promoting human rights developing the most vulnerable communities) and in the long term (cultural changes gender equality in power education and employment and bridging the poverty gap).

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Abstract: This research seeks to explain the creation and perpetuation of flood hazards in Peninsular Malaysia in terms of a 'hazard response-in-context' model. Socio-political (socio-cultural and political economy) and institutional contexts are found to be central to understanding hazards as essentially socially-created phenomena superimposed onto a physical process system through which hazards are transmitted. Malaysia is an ex-colonial, newly-industrialising country. The pace of social, economic and political change is fast, as is the pace of technological change. Other things being equal, these are the contexts in which flood hazards are magnified. Contexts are changing, and changing physical systems have given rise to increased flood risk, exposure and vulnerability. Other contexts, largely structural, such as persistent poverty, low residential and occupational mobility, landlessness, and ethnic culture have also contributed to increased vulnerability to flood hazards. The situation, behaviour and response of individual floodplain occupants in Peninsular Malaysia are found to be heavily influenced by macro socio-political contexts. These are also termed contextual forces and they are fundamentally 'structural'. Macro contexts also 'condition' institutions (meso context) and influence their approach to hazard management including their effectiveness. Institutions (including organisations) were found to be largely inadequate in their management and reduction of flood hazards, and can be improved to create positive influences on flood hazard reduction as well as help individuals (micro context) cope more effectively. Both socio-political and institutional contexts were found to be important as they amplify hazards or fail to adequately address and reduce them. The pioneering of what is termed 'segment analysis' to analyse links between contexts at various levels is an important contribution in this research. The research concludes that the hazard response-in-context model is appropriately applied to Peninsular Malaysia as it handles both structural and institutional contexts and individual management of flood hazards effectively.

Abstract: Sydney is the largest city in Oceania (the Australia — south Pacific region). During its existence of more than 200 years the city has suffered many emergencies and many psycho-social and media crises — but has escaped major disaster in the sense of deaths or economic loss. Does this indicate that disaster vulnerability has been managed well, or simply that Sydney has been fortunate?

Abstract: Publisher Summary The economic impacts of natural disasters are becoming greater for events of the same severity because of increasing urbanization and increasing investment levels in the built physical environment. Interest in the topic has grown in the recent years, and contributions to our understanding are widely scattered over a variety of sources. This chapter develops a conceptual framework for research on this subject, and briefly reviews the literature. The chapter also provides an overview of the current state of the field implicitly indicating areas that have received greater and lesser attention. While the material covered is extensive, it does not claim to be complete, and the emphasis is on the use of methods of regional economic analysis. Research can enable more accurate modeling of regional economic impacts; in addition, it can provide a crucial link to public policy analysis by identifying specific sources of economic vulnerability to disasters. Although, progress has been made in the microeconomic study of risk and mitigation behavior, a very important gap remains in the knowledge of risk perception and acceptable risk at the societal level.

Abstract: Combining historical and theoretical sophistication with close readings of major Renaissance texts, this book argues that late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth- century writers were far more vulnerable to the secular and ecclesiastical authorities on whom they depended for their livelihoods than were writers of an earlier era. The book also explores the creative strategies that the vulnerable authors developed to protect themselves from those authorities. Particularly striking is the fact that writers increasingly turned in the course of their careers to alternate sources of legitimation and protection in the form of various peripheral communities such as the convent, the artisanal society, the acting company, the theater-going public, and circles surrounding but not synonymous with the Renaissance court. In fact, this book shows that these protective communities ultimately enabled writers to produce a disturbing and distinctive literature in an era when authorship conceived in terms of literary property or individual genius was as of yet nonexistent.

Abstract: This paper outlines the extent of absolute poverty and the vulnerability of various dependent groups that are found in the population in Botswana. The paper argues that the seven-year drought, 1981-1987, increased the proportion of households that have little or no household food security. These households increasingly became dependent on state hand-outs and assistance programmes which have had the effict of reducing household and individual selfreliance. Paradoxically, the increasingly disadvantageous socioeconomic and environmental conditions that prevailed during the drought years were associated with improvement in nutrition, positive national health statistics, and the general upliftment of the welfare of many communities .. This unnatural situation, however, is likely to mask rates of absolute poverty and potential future misery.