Curricular innovation and emergency management in higher education: Making the general education connection.

Objective: As a distributed function, emergency management in higher education must involve students from outside the field. An introductory emergency management course was redesigned to be attractive and visible to nonmajors via approval for inclusion in the university's core general education curriculum.

Design: Pre-/post comparisons were made of enrollment data for two interventions intended to broaden the course's audience.

Explaining implementation behaviour of the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

This paper explains the perceived implementation behaviour of counties in the United States with respect to the National Incident Management System (NIMS). The system represents a massive and historic policy mandate designed to restructure, standardise and thereby unify the efforts of a wide variety of emergency management entities. Specifically, this study examined variables identified in the NIMS and policy literature that might influence the behavioural intentions and actual behaviour of counties.

Mitigating flood exposure: Reducing disaster risk and trauma signature.

In 2011, following heavy winter snowfall, two cities bordering two rivers in North Dakota, USA faced major flood threats. Flooding was foreseeable and predictable although the extent of risk was uncertain. One community, Fargo, situated in a shallow river basin, successfully mitigated and prevented flooding.

Practical moral codes in the transgenic organism debate.

In one study funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, people from North Dakota were interviewed to discover which moral principles they use in evaluating the morality of transgenic organisms and their introduction into markets. It was found that although the moral codes the human subjects employed were very similar, their views on transgenics were vastly different. In this paper, the codes that were used by the respondents are developed, compared to that of the academically composed Belmont Report, and then modified to create the more practical Common Moral Code.

Hepatic sarcoidosis complicated by hepatocellular carcinoma.

A case of a 63-year-old man with a long-standing history of portal hypertension secondary to hepatic sarcoidosis who developed hepatocellular carcinoma is reported.