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Practical skill and medical expertise are fundamental requirements for first responders. Now, emergency experts are realizing the impact cultural competency can have on saving lives in a community. First responders are the cornerstone of the areas they serve. In the event of an emergency, firefighters, EMTs, law enforcement officers and other key players share the duty of not only saving lives, but working directly with local residents to create an overall safer environment. Cultural competency represents the idea that understanding the nuances of the different cultures and the backgrounds that make up a particular population better equips first responders to provide effective care.

In addition to learning to deal with emergencies, police officers undergo training to improve daily interactions with diverse people from their communities. To accomplish this, many departments are adopting new strategies for communicating with marginalized individuals, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Allan Friedman, Austen Mack-Crane and Ross Hammond say they developed a preliminary model to look at the long-term consequences of data theft on diverse economic sectors. Their approach depends on treating cyber theft not as a problem of stolen assets worth an intrinsic value, but as one of diminished future growth. When so framed, the effect that stolen data has on companies within a sector--the ones the preliminary model investigates are the chemical, pharmaceutical, financial, consumer mobile phone and semi-conductor industry--depends on what type of data is stolen and the competitive nature of those sectors.