Science and Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia: Potentials and Challenges provides both a local and global perspective on how to implement the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Topics demonstrate the advancement of scientific research as it applies to early warning systems, including identifying risk and the strengthening of infrastructure for different types of hazards. Through different major disasters, it has become evident that there must be a balance between hard and soft technology and physical, process and social solutions. This book demonstrates how this has been successfully implemented in Asia, and how these applications can apply on a global basis.

Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler frames the intertwined relationship between artistic endeavours and scientific fields and their sociopolitical implications. Each chapter is either an explication of, or a critique of, some aspect of Bernard Stiegler's technological philosophy; as it is his technological-political-aesthetical-ethical theorisations which form the philosophical foundation of the volume. Emerging scholars bring critical new reflections to the subject area, while more established academics, researchers and practitioners outline the mutating nature of aesthetics within historical and theoretical frameworks. Not only is interdisciplinarity a prevailing topic at work within this collection, but so too is there a delineation of the mutating, hybrid role inhabited by the arts practitioner - at once engineer, scientist and artist - in the changing landscape of digital cultural production.

This manual is based on field work undertaken in the project countries (Ghana and Sierra Leone), and benefited additionally from the results of a field visit to Senegal. Its special features are: (a) the target audience consists of government institutions, rural extension services, financial institutions, women's small-scale processing enterprises and manufacturing firms; (b) it focuses on four important processing activities - of cassava, vegetable oil, coconut and fish - undertaken by rural women in West Africa; (c) it covers the range of technologies available in the subregion; (d) it makes a quantitative comparison of the performance of both traditional and improved technologies and provides information on the advantages and disadvantages of each; (e) it describes the basic design features of improved and traditional tools and equipment, materials and parts required for their fabrication; and (f) it provides a list of suppliers of such equipment. The practical value of the manual is enhanced by the inclusion of information on practical possibilities for the utilization of agricultural wastes and the by-products of women's processing activities.

Constructing a theory of intimacy describing processes occurring between a ‘human’ subject and information creations, Jan Stasienko shows in what way and in what phases that relationship is built and what its nature is. He discusses technologies and genres related to the construction of a new television message (teleprompter, interactive television forms appearing both in the analogue and digital eras), composition of the film image and specificity of cinematic technologies (peep show, hybrid animation, digital visual effects). Also new-media technologies and genres will be discussed (for example, aspects relating to computer games and Web portals making video materials available). This diversity is prompted by the desire to show that the building of intimacy protocols is not the domain of the digital era, and on the other hand, that the posthumanism of media apparatus is a wide-ranging problem, i.e. the area encompasses various vehicles findable throughout various historical periods.

This volume traces the evolution of the concept of Public Health and reveals the importance of political will and public spending in this field of civil engineering. Design, construction, operation and maintenance of water-supply and main drainage works are discussed. The period covered extends from Roman engineering through to the early 20th century, with examples from Europe, America and Japan.

An account of technology in Africa from an African perspective, examining hunting in Zimbabwe as an example of an innovative mobile workspace. In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities-including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always originate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in the society in the forest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into practical outcomes. African creativities are found in African mobilities. Mavhunga shows the movement of people as not merely conveyances across space but transient workspaces. Taking indigenous hunting in Zimbabwe as one example, he explores African philosophies of mobilities as spiritually guided and of the forest as a sacred space. Viewing the hunt as guided mobility, Mavhunga considers interesting questions of what constitutes technology under regimes of spirituality. He describes how African hunters extended their knowledge traditions to domesticate the gun, how European colonizers, with no remedy of their own, turned to indigenous hunters for help in combating the deadly tsetse fly, and examines how wildlife conservation regimes have criminalized African hunting rather than enlisting hunters (and their knowledge) as allies in wildlife sustainability. The hunt, Mavhunga writes, is one of many criminalized knowledges and practices to which African people turn in times of economic or political crisis. He argues that these practices need to be decriminalized and examined as technologies of everyday innovation with a view toward constructive engagement, innovating with Africans rather than for them.