Experiencing Event Management During the Coronavirus Pandemic: A Public Sector Perspective

Events have played a significant role in the way in which the Coronavirus pandemic has been experienced and known around the world. Little is known though about how the pandemic has impacted on supporting, managing and governing events in municipal (i.e., local) authorities as key stakeholders, nor how events have featured in the opening-up of localities. This paper reports on empirical research with senior events officers for local authorities in the UK on these key knowledge gaps. Specifically, it examines events officers' unfolding experiences of the pandemic. The paper points to unpreparedness for a crisis of this scale and magnitude, and the roles of innovation, adaptation and co-production in the emergent response. It highlights the transformative nature of the pandemic through reconsiderations of the purpose of public sector involvement in events and, from a policy perspective, how relatively smaller-scale, more agile and lower-risk arts events and performances can figure in local recovery. Finally, while the effects on, and response of, the body corporate (the local authority) to crises is an obvious focus, it is important to recognise those of the individuals who manage the response and drive change.

Dynamic hypergraphs of renewal processes in mobile networks.

The characteristics of random geometric hypergraphs are studied as mathematical models of scalable wireless computer networks. An efficient algorithm for finding cliques in geometric graphs, constructing hypergraphs from geometric configurations has been developed. The types of hyper-edges in hypergraphs generated by a scalable configuration have been identified. The influence of random failures of nodes of computer networks and their restorations on the dynamics of hypergraphs of networks is considered. The analysis of the dynamics of the number of active nodes depending on the type of probability distributions of uptime and recovery time is carried out. The dependences of the mathematical expectation of the number of hyper-edges of certain types in the geometric hypergraph of a wireless computer network on the network operation time, on the radii of zones of reliable reception / transmission of a signal, on the ratio of the parameters of local recovery processes are obtained. The presentation of the results is accompanied by charts.

Failure Recovery In SDN: A Segment Routing Based Link Protection Approach

The present computer network has been evolved into a complex structure with a growing challenge to manage and scale modern day’s requirements. A new approach to tackle these difficulties is SDN, which empowers network with programmability and is designed to perform fine grained traffic forwarding decisions. However, similar to the need of traditional networks, fault tolerance is necessary to achieve high availability. In this thesis, we propose a link protection method based on the Segment Routing (SR) for rapid failure recovery in OpenFlow based SDN. Our proposed scheme performs local recovery at the switch level without the controller intervention, thus significantly reducing the total recovery time. Additionally, it reduces initial load on the controller while proactively computing the backup paths by minimizing the algorithm complexity. Moreover, memory efficiency is achieved by using a per-link protection with aggregated flow rules instead of traditional per-flow based protection mechanism. In Segment Routing, we may encounter the limitation on the size of the label stack, known as Segment List Depth (SLD). Therefore, we also propose an efficient label encoding algorithm to mitigate the SLD impact.

Failure Recovery In SDN: A Segment Routing Based Link Protection Approach

The present computer network has been evolved into a complex structure with a growing challenge to manage and scale modern day’s requirements. A new approach to tackle these difficulties is SDN, which empowers network with programmability and is designed to perform fine grained traffic forwarding decisions. However, similar to the need of traditional networks, fault tolerance is necessary to achieve high availability. In this thesis, we propose a link protection method based on the Segment Routing (SR) for rapid failure recovery in OpenFlow based SDN. Our proposed scheme performs local recovery at the switch level without the controller intervention, thus significantly reducing the total recovery time. Additionally, it reduces initial load on the controller while proactively computing the backup paths by minimizing the algorithm complexity. Moreover, memory efficiency is achieved by using a per-link protection with aggregated flow rules instead of traditional per-flow based protection mechanism. In Segment Routing, we may encounter the limitation on the size of the label stack, known as Segment List Depth (SLD). Therefore, we also propose an efficient label encoding algorithm to mitigate the SLD impact.

The role of acknowledgment in the psychosocial recovery of young adults in disaster events

In 2009, 4 major bushfires destroyed vast areas of Gippsland in eastern Victoria including the areas around Delburn, Bunyip, Churchill and Wilsons Promontory. These are collectively known as the 2009 Gippsland bushfires. Research was conducted to investigate the psychosocial recovery of young adults in these areas. Twenty young adults participated in the study and, while these young adults are not an homogenous group, commonalities were identified across their stories. Asked what would have helped their recovery, the participants all said that acknowledgment of their personal and age-specific needs was the single most important factor that enabled or impeded recovery. This paper describes some of their stories. The paper looks at how participants viewed acknowledgment and the effects of its absence on their psychosocial recovery and how they felt unacknowledged in local recovery supports. The paper reports on the findings of this research and suggests an approach for management and longer-term recovery support that is inclusive of the specific needs of young adults.

Disturbance, patches and mosaics

This chapter introduces the range of biological and physical processes that disturb soft sediment. It introduces the concept of disturbance regimes that connect the extent, frequency and magnitude of disturbance. Post-disturbance recovery processes are described in terms of processes that occur within the disturbed patch and processes that influence recovery from outside the patch. Moving on from the patch scale, the chapter introduces the concept of patch dynamics and the concept of the seafloor as a mosaic of patches at different stages of recovery from disturbance. Connectivity between patches is a critical factor linking local recovery processes to landscape-scale processes. This mosaic perspective leads to the introduction of metacommunity dynamics and the potential for heterogeneous landscapes to fragment and eventually homogenise seafloor communities as a consequence of the loss of large habitat-defining species.

Instantaneous Networking Service Availability for Disaster Recovery

Networking services may be broken down in a disaster situation while people in the disaster area(s) strongly demand networking services for both communication and information sharing among users. This requires the fast restoration of networking services to fulfil the demand–supply gap. Although there are a number of studies on restoring communication and networking in disasters, few studies have explicitly examined the service availability during the temporary and partial recovery process of network restoration. From the perspective of users in the disaster area, it is important to be able to communicate or share information with people whenever they want/need to do so. Therefore, partial and local recovery of the networking services also plays an important role for improving service availability in the disaster situations. To assess the restoration effectiveness of networking services with a measure of user satisfaction level, we propose to use instant networking service availability (I-NSA), a novel metric, and we examine the effectiveness of networking service restoration solutions using the metric. I-NSA allows us to clearly express the instant availability of networking services that drastically changes with the elapsed time from the disaster occurrence in disaster areas. This paper examines the effective improvement of I-NSA when Local-and-Instant Clouds (LI-Clouds) are applied to the disaster situation. LI-Cloud has been designed and practically developed to provide deployable networking services to users. We verify that LI-Cloud enables significant improvement on the I-NSA performance in the fast restoration of networking services.