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I'm interested in better understanding the ongoing geological processes that shape St. Louis and the Mississippi Valley region. So far, I've been looking into the history of seismicity in the region, focusing on the fascinating but little known history of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 -- the most devastating earthquakes to have hit the US east of the Rockies. I've also been exploring how St. Louis and surrounding areas are dealing with the possibility of another earthquake occurring in the future. According to one article I read, one of the biggest uncertainties is what would happen to the heavily engineered Mississippi River in the case of another major tremblor. The shaking could break the levees, flooding wide areas along the river and creating cascading effects. The flow of the river might also reverse completely, as occurred during the New Madrid earthquakes.

On these possibilities and the lack of scientific consensus surrounding intraplate seismicity in this zone, see this article in The Atlantic.

On current efforts to create earthquake hazard maps in St. Louis, see this overview on the US Geological Survey site.

For a deeper dive into the history of the New Madrid earthquakes, see this book by historian of science Conevery Bolton Valencius. 

The American Red Cross uses the gold-standard products for most of its research and service. For disaster response, the ARC utilizes the good-will of its volunteers to address needs such as shelter, food, and health services. On the local level, chapters of the ARC have disaster action teams that respond to smaller emergencies and provide transition services to the victims of such emergencies. They also have a larger wokforce of volunteers to pull from and use for support services. 

The authors are Stephen Collier, PhD and Andrew Lakoff, PhD. Dr, Collier is an associate professor of international affairs at UC Berkeley. He is an anthropologist by training, and focuses his research on a variety of political schools of thought and their applications. Dr, Lakoff is an associate professor of sociology and focuses his research globalization, biomedical innovation and the history of human sciences.

The stakeholders in the film would be the doctors, the local health ministry, and the patients themselves. The doctors were the most focused on, and they were put into a lot of situations in which they were the sole decision makers. However, many times the decisions weren't life or death, but death or comfort. For instance, Davinder was in a situation where a child was inexplicably swelling all over his body. The doctors weren't well equipped for diagnosing his illness, and thus the child was doomed to worsen and die. A nurse informed him that the mother had taken the child and left, to which Davinder remarked that he couldn't blame them. He believed the comfort of the child in somewhere without his care was worth just as much as, if not more than, his care in the hospital. This was quite different than Kiara's opinion that they needed to stay in the hospital. She blamed it on a lack of confidence in medical ability, while he saw it as being human.

Following the time on the mission, the doctors all had to decide what was next. Dr. Brasher left MSF to practice medicine in Paris, while Dr. Gill went to Australia to become a pediatrician, with no plans of returning to MSF. Dr. Lapora was promoted to Emergency Coordinator, and established three more missions in other parts of the world. Dr. Krueger still works with MSF and has been on a number of other missions. All of the doctors continued medicine, but their experiences in Liberia dictated their plans on whether to continue this service.  

The author references this article in a number of his other works. 

THe bibilography is made up mostly of other research articles and studies, suggesting this paper is more technical in nature than discussive. There is little to no opinion given, rather hard facts and statistics.

Users for I've-Been-Violated just put in name, phone number, and email. It also documents location, sound, and video when you activate the service. 

The other two apps require registration with the system, though if you register for one, you aren't able to just use the same login for the other. The registration just asks for email and password. Not sure if it asks for more later, as the app was really glitchy when I tried.

The author is making the point that we are too caught up in the numbers and facts of medicine, and we need to go back to the narrative. The details that come with a patient's history and social actions contribute a great deal to outcome and treatment. The author supports this with several examples of cases he has had or heard of and how they changed his view of a treatment. 

The program is divided into three sub-programs: Radiation Disaster Medicine, Radioactivity Environmental Protection, and Radioactivity Social Recovery. The Radiation Disaster Medicine course is a four year PhD program, for those who already have professional degrees (medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, etc.) and master’s degrees (medical physics). The Radioactivity Environmental Protection course is a five year program for students who have completed a bachelors or masters in a related field. The Radioactivity Social Recovery course is a five year program for students with a bachelors or master’s. The curriculum is broken down into common subjects, specialized subjects, fieldwork, and internships. 

“More than 20 years ago, social scientists Harry Otway and Brian Wayne cautioned that accident prevention (safer designs, better operator training, etc. , but even more so emergency planning, faced significant economic and managerial hurdles.”(p199)

“Nuclear accidents have tended to trigger organizational reform with regard to nuclear emergency response, but not on an international level. In considering this problematic ground, where might we start to develop a global approach to nuclear disaster mitigation?”(p200)

“The specific kinds of highly specialized knowledge involved with operation nuclear reactors however may not be accessible to broad public debate to the same degree as, for example, evacuation policies. But in the interest of sustainable, socially legitimate solutions, arguably decisions about even the technical responses to disasters should not be left to scientists and engineers alone, whether they are based within the nuclear industry, a regulatory bod, or a nongovernmental organization.”(p196)

“For all its undeniable flaws, the nuclear industry worked for several decades- in Japan and elsewhere. That is also the truly frightening realization after Fukushima: this disaster was not ‘waiting to happen’, but occurred in a system that had been functioning reasonable well for quite some time.”(p198)

“…The Way Forward is embedded in a technocratic rationality that seeks an effective ‘technical fix’ for reducing the risk of a nuclear disaster to manageable proportions. That misses the less tangible social expertise and improvisational skills inevitable involved in any successful disaster response.” (p206)