Life-saving Aid Research Articles

Migrant necropolitics in No Man’s Land camps

Abstract Through genealogical explorations of the understudied No Man’s Land camps at Rukban and Zero Point, this paper aims to contribute a decolonial, South-centric perspective to critical refugee politics literature. The two No Man’s Land camps are conceptualized here as necropolitical spaces of migrant abandonment and containment, where States effectively determine ‘who may live and who must die’ through their violent expulsion of unwanted populations, securitized border policies and restrictions on life-saving aid. Despite their immobilization, the paper highlights how the displaced migrants formed self-government and engaged in claim-making for aid, rights, and homeland political change, thus transforming the death worlds of the No Man’s Land camps into spaces of vibrant political contention. This necropolitical resistance comes with the risk of death or redisplacement, but it provides tantalizing clues of the possibilities of living, even if only momentarily, beyond the law and the State.

Mathematical enhancement of unsupervised machine learning algorithms for optimal lifeline donor knowledge extraction

Lifeline Donor groups are crucial in the field of humanitarian aid because they provide lifesaving aid in times of crisis. For effective resource management and aid coordination, it is crucial to draw relevant insights from donor data in a timely manner. Scalability, precision, and flexibility in responding to changing donor dynamics are all areas where traditional techniques of knowledge extraction fall short. This study offers a fresh method for optimizing knowledge extraction from Lifeline Donor databases by utilizing improved unsupervised machine learning methods. In order to extract, categorize, and prioritize donor knowledge from disparate data sources, this research presents a multi-faceted framework that includes cutting-edge machine learning algorithms. By merging cutting-edge developments in NLP and data mining, the proposed framework improves upon classic clustering and topic modelling methods. The program is able to capture subtle semantic links and underlying patterns in donor communication data by using methods like word embedding models and graph-based clustering.

Bringing underserved communities life-saving aid through aerial logistics.

Autonomous drone delivery of medical supplies has improved access to health care for local communities in Africa.

How Not to Defend the Unborn.

It is sometimes proposed that killing or harming abortion providers is the only logically consistent position available to opponents of abortion. Since lethal violence against morally responsible attackers is normally viewed as justified in order to defend innocent parties, pro-lifers should also think so in the case of the abortion doctor and so they should act to defend the unborn. In our paper, we defend the mainstream pro-life view against killing abortion doctors. We argue that the pro-life view can, in various ways, reject the assumption that defensive violence to save innocent individuals is always permissible. Now even if that assumption is accepted, we contend that defensive violence against abortion doctors still is not justified. Drawing on Frances Kamm's work, we contend that there are structural similarities between abortion and letting someone die who needs your help to stay alive; and we argue that it is impermissible to kill those who kill in order to avoid giving life-saving aid.

Humanitarian access, interrupted: dynamic near real-time network analytics and mapping for reaching communities in disaster-affected countries

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, local and international aid organisations deploy to deliver life-saving aid to the affected population. Yet pre-disaster road maps and road transportation models do not capture disruptions to the transportation network caused by the disaster or the dynamic changes of the situation, resulting in uncertainty and inefficiency in planning and decision-making. The integration of data in near real time on the status of the road infrastructure in the affected region can help aid organisations to keep track of the rapidly shifting conditions on the ground and to assess the implications for their logistics planning and operations. In this paper, we present a rapid graph-theoretical reachability information system based on a combination of OpenStreetMap and open humanitarian data. The system supports logistics planning in determining road access to affected communities. We demonstrate the results of our approach in a case study on the 2018 earthquake in Papua New Guinea. Our findings show the reachability of affected communities depending on the actual status of the road network, allowing for the prioritization of targeted locations and the identification of alternative routes to get there.

Humanitarian Disaster Response

Communities the world over continue to be alarmingly vulnerable to natural hazards, leading to no shortage of devastating consequences. Whether or not climate change brings forth an increasingly ferocious variety of hazards, actors involved in disaster response will still face a multiplicity of challenges to delivering lifesaving aid. For instance, humanitarian organizations sometimes face the challenge of overcoming the reluctance of disaster affected states to accept their assistance. When disasters extensively overwhelm state capacity the refusal of external assistance can have serious ramifications for those affected. Despite the stakes, research surrounding aid rejection in these contexts is limited. This analysis sheds more light on why aid rejection occurs and highlights to humanitarian organizations and other researchers the fundamental considerations to develop an understanding on this subject.
 A synthesis of existing research on disaster response reveals the very tangible political risk that disaster affected states face when engaging with international offers of assistance. It is in the effort to mitigate this political risk to their legitimacy that states may ultimately decide to reject aid. A few key state characteristics such as response capacity, level of external intervention and domestic politics may also amplify this risk, resulting in a higher likelihood that external aid is rejected. This analysis engages with these factors to determine their validity and relevancy to humanitarian practitioners seeking to develop the appropriateorganizational strategies.
 In an effort to better understand aid rejection a disaster dataset was developed based on the concept that disasters with higher visibility on the international scene present a higher level of political risk for an affected state, and therefore have the highest likelihood of resulting in cases of aid rejection. However, in analysing disasters that met this criterion over a 10 year period the research found no instances whereexternal aid was universally and indiscriminately rejected. This is not to say that there were no cases where an affected state rejected assistance from a particular party but that even in these instances those states did accept aid from some other source.
 The implication of these findings is that states affected by natural borne disasters are likely to accept external offers of assistance so long as those offers carry a manageable level of political risk. Humanitarian organizations should therefore consider how they can mitigate the political risk they might present to an affected state as part of their disaster response strategy.

Making every life count: Ensuring equality and protection for persons with disabilities in armed conflicts

Armed conflicts and natural disasters both cause impairments and pose acute challenges for persons with disabilities. On 26 December 2004 the so-called Boxing Day Tsunami in the Indian Ocean took the lives of 200,000 people. Of these, four times more women than men were killed, while children constituted up to one third of the fatalities. Persons with disabilities were among those who fared worst, unable to flee or resist the wall of water. They were less able to access life-saving aid in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. They were also the most vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and exclusion. In more recent years the conflict in Syria - which had caused the displacement of more than two million people by November 2013 - has had a devastating impact upon persons with disabilities. At its 10th session in September 2013, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD Committee) issued a statement imploring all concerned in this conflict to safeguard persons with disabilities.

BreathEZ: Using smartwatches to improve choking first aid

Choking first aid is an important tool for all individuals as choking is the cause of nearly 5000 deaths per year in the US. Normally for incidents like this, the local emergency medical services (EMS) could be relied up on to respond and provide necessary lifesaving aid. The average EMS response time is almost eight minutes and someone choking only has four to six minutes before permanent brain damage occurs. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) trained individuals are often also trained in choking first aid for this very reason, though relying on bystanders presents its own problem. Many individuals assume others will be more qualified to help and therefore will not involve themselves, a psychological phenomenon known as the bystander effect. In order to combat this problem, we present BreathEZ, a smartwatch application that provides both choking first aid instruction and real-time tactile and visual feedback on the quality of the abdominal thrust compressions. To the best of our knowledge, prior to this there has been no feedback device developed that targets choking first aid. BreathEZ uses the onboard accelerometer on an Android smartwatch to identify an abdominal thrust and measure the peak acceleration. It then analyzes the data collected and provides feedback on the quality of the thrust to the user.

Dynamics analysis and time-optimal motion planning for unmanned quadrotor transportation systems

Aerial transportation is enjoying more and more popularity among disaster-oriented tasks, such as fire fighting, delivery of relief supplies, life-saving aid, and so on, which are infeasible for ground robots especially in complex terrains. However, the contradictory between transportation efficiency and payload swing suppression is an annoying problem, which badly limits the application of aerial transportation. In this paper, a time-optimal motion planning (TOMP) scheme is proposed with effective payload antiswing performance. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first minimum-time trajectory planning method designed for unmanned quadrotor transportation systems. Compared with existing methods, the proposed approach presents significant superiority in the sense that both nonlinear dynamics of the system and various constraints are taken into full consideration simultaneously. Specifically, the nonlinear system model is established using Lagrangian mechanics, based on which the augmented system is transformed into a nonlinear affine system regarding the acceleration/jerk as the control input without the need of the linearized system model. After discretization and approximation process, the time-optimal motion planning problem is converted into a standard nonlinear programming problem, wherein various practical constraints are considered, including the bounds of the payload swing, the quadrotor velocity, acceleration, and even jerk. Finally, the nonlinear programming problem is solved by the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. Experimental results are exhibited to illustrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach.

Design and research on the two-joint mating system of underwater vehicle

In the 21st century, people have come to the era of ocean science and ocean economy. With the development of ocean science and technology and the thorough research on the ocean, underwater mating technique has been widely used in such fields as sunk ship salvage, deep ocean workstation, submarine lifesaving aid and military affairs. In this paper, researches are made home and abroad on mating technology. Two-joint mating system of underwater vehicle is designed including plane system, three-dimensional assembly system and control system in order to increase the capacity of adapting platform obliquity and adopting rotational skirt scheme. It is clear that the system fits the working space of underwater vehicle passageway and there is no interference phenomenon in assembly design. The finite element model of the system shell and the pressurization of the joint are established. The results of the finite element computing and the pressing test are accordant, and thus it can testify that the shell material meet the need of intension and joint pressurization is reliable. Modeling of the control system is accomplished, and simulation and analysis are made, which can provide directions for the controller design of mating system of underwater vehicles.

Internal organs, integral selves, and good communities: opt-out organ procurement policies and the ‘separateness of persons’

Most people accept that if they can save someone from death at very little cost to themselves, they must do so; call this the 'duty of easy rescue.' At least for many such people, an instance of this duty is to allow their vital organs to be used for transplantation. Accordingly, 'opt-out' organ procurement policies, based on a powerfully motivated responsibility to render costless or very low-cost lifesaving aid, would seem presumptively permissible. Counterarguments abound. Here I consider, in particular, objections that assign a moral distinctiveness to the physical boundaries of our bodies and that concern autonomy and trust. These objections are singled out as they seem particularly pertinent to the stress I place on a distinctive benefit of the particular policy I defend. An opt-out system, resting not on the authority of 'presumed consent' but on the recognition of a duty to one another, has the prospect of prompting people to understand more richly the ways in which they are both physically embodied and communally embedded.

Interfering with aid

It is sometimes argued that cases of withdrawing, interrupting, or otherwise interfering with life-saving aid provide grounds for rejecting the thesis that there is a morally significant difference between killing and letting die. Consider the following series of examples, invented by Shelly Kagan (1989: 106-8). In each example an agent actively prevents the starving inhabitants of a remote village from receiving the life-saving aid they would otherwise receive; as a result, the villagers die.

Effects of Launching Parameters on the Performance of a Free‐Fall Lifeboat

ABSTRACT The use of free‐fall lifeboats as a lifesaving aid is increasing rapidly in the ocean environment. However, knowledge and information regarding the performance of these lifeboats during water entry and surfacing are yet very much limited. A study has been carried out to investigate the motion and attitude of the lifeboat after water entry and surfacing with respect to various launching parameters. The motion has been categorized on the basis of the advance speed and headway at the first phase of surfacing of the lifeboat. Numerical study has also been carried out to evaluate the effects of launching parameters on the motion characteristics and horizontal velocity at surfacing. Moreover, a suitable falling angle range has been established for the lifeboat model based on zero horizontal velocity at surfacing corresponding to different skid lengths and falling heights. Finally, safe water travel conditions based on launching parameters have been evaluated considering the motion characteristics and the effects of accelerations on the occupants of free‐fall lifeboats.