EVALUATION OF PLC PROGRAMME PROVISION. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 61 JANUARY 2018

Post-Leaving Certificate (PLC) courses represent the largest component of full-time further education and training (FET) provision in Ireland, with over 32,000 learners enrolled in such courses in 2015–2016. Recent research on the FET sector as a whole highlighted concerns around its structures and responsiveness to labour market conditions, among other issues (McGuinness et al., 2014). The SOLAS FET Strategy (2014) subsequently pointed to the need for a stronger evidence base in order to inform future policy development in the sector. This study, commissioned by SOLAS, provides a more detailed evaluation of PLC provision. In order to undertake a comprehensive evaluation, our approach has been to combine a variety of research modes in order to examine the underlying processes, experiences and outcomes of PLC provision. This involved three complementary research strands. Firstly, a desk-based analysis of administrative data was used to document the type of provision in terms of field of study and the distribution of PLC places across the country. Secondly, a survey of PLC principals was carried out in order to explore their perceptions of goals, adequacy of existing facilities and the benefits and challenges of PLC provision. Thirdly, a survey of PLC and Leaving Certificate leavers was conducted to assess their labour market outcomes as well as their experiences while taking PLC and higher education courses. Together, these strands provide comprehensive evidence to inform the future development of the sector

An architecture for certification-aware service discovery

Service-orientation is an emerging paradigm for building complex systems based on loosely coupled components, deployed and consumed over the network. Despite the original intent of the paradigm, its current instantiations are limited to a single trust domain (e.g., a single organization). Also, some of the key promises of service-orientation - such as the dynamic orchestration of externally provided software services, using runtime service discovery and deployment - are still unachieved. One of the main reasons for this is the trust gap that normally arises when software services, offered by previously unknown providers, are to be selected at run-time, without any human intervention. To close this gap, the concept of machine-readable security certificates (called asserts) has been recently introduced, which paves the way to automated processing about security properties of services. Similarly to current security certification schemes, the assessment of the security properties of a service is delegated to an independent third party (certification authority), who issues a corresponding assert, bound to the service. In this paper, we propose an architecture, which exploits the assert concept to realise a certification-aware service discovery framework. The architecture supports the discovery of single services based on certified security properties (in additional to the usual functional properties), as well as the dynamic synthesis of service compositions, that satisfy the given security properties. The architecture is extensible, thus allowing for a range of domain specific matchmaking components, to cover dimensions related to, e.g., performance, cost and other non-functional characteristics

Combining behavioural types with security analysis

Today's software systems are highly distributed and interconnected, and they increasingly rely on communication to achieve their goals; due to their societal importance, security and trustworthiness are crucial aspects for the correctness of these systems. Behavioural types, which extend data types by describing also the structured behaviour of programs, are a widely studied approach to the enforcement of correctness properties in communicating systems. This paper offers a unified overview of proposals based on behavioural types which are aimed at the analysis of security properties

Serbia - public sector accounting review : report on the enhancement of public sector financial reporting

The government’s public financial management (PFM) Reform Program 2016-2020 foresees the gradual transition of public sector financial reporting from a cash basis to an accrual basis of accounting and the application of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS). This will significantly improve the quality of financial information and should enable better informed decision-making, more efficient use of public funds and resources and improved fiscal performance. This Report on the Enhancement of Public Sector Financial Reporting is one output of the Serbia Public Sector Accounting Reform Technical Assistance project funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) through the Strengthening Accountability and Fiduciary Environment (SAFE) Trust Fund under the Public Sector Accounting and Reporting Program (PULSAR) which provides support for the development and implementation of public sector accounting standards. This report supports the development of a plan towards that goal by assessing the institutional framework for public sector accounting as well as the gap between Serbian public sector generally accepted accounting principles (PS GAAP) and IPSAS

Third-Level Education, Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Boom in Ireland

Ireland’s dramatic economic boom of the 1990s has been referred to as “the era of the Celtic Tiger”. In a little over a decade, real national income per head jumped from 65 percent of the Western European average to above parity, unemployment tumbled from double to less than half the European Union average and numbers at work increased by over 50 percent. Much research has been carried out on the impact of each of the separate elements agreed to have been important in stimulating or sustaining the boom. The present paper focuses on one key under-researched synergy – the nexus between the country’s industrial strategy, which focused on attracting foreign direct investment in certain high-tech sectors, and the orientation of the third- level educational system that had been developed in Ireland over recent decades.Science and Technology Manpower Policy, Education, Foreign Direct Investment, Ireland, Celtic Tiger

A multi-agent architecture for electronic payment

The Internet has brought about innumerable changes to the way enterprises do business. An essential problem to be solved before the widespread commercial use of the Internet is to provide a trustworthy solution for electronic payment. We propose a multi-agent mediated electronic payment architecture in this paper. It is aimed at providing an agent-based approach to accommodate multiple e-payment schemes. Through a layered design of the payment structure and a well-defined uniform payment interface, the architecture shows good scalability. When a new e-payment scheme or implementation is available, it can be plugged into the framework easily. In addition, we construct a framework allowing multiple agents to work cooperatively to realize automation of electronic payment. A prototype has been built to illustrate the functionality of this design. Finally we discuss the security issues

ViotSOC: Controlling Access to Dynamically Virtualized IoT Services using Service Object Capability

Virtualization of Internet of Things(IoT) is a concept of dynamically building customized high-level IoT services which rely on the real time data streams from low-level physical IoT sensors. Security in IoT virtualization is challenging, because with the growing number of available (building block) services, the number of personalizable virtual services grows exponentially. This paper proposes Service Object Capability(SOC) ticket system, a decentralized access control mechanism between servers and clients to effi- ciently authenticate and authorize each other without using public key cryptography. SOC supports decentralized partial delegation of capabilities specified in each server/- client ticket. Unlike PKI certificates, SOC’s authentication time and handshake packet overhead stays constant regardless of each capability’s delegation hop distance from the root delegator. The paper compares SOC’s security bene- fits with Kerberos and the experimental results show SOC’s authentication incurs significantly less time packet overhead compared against those from other mechanisms based on RSA-PKI and ECC-PKI algorithms. SOC is as secure as, and more efficient and suitable for IoT environments, than existing PKIs and Kerberos

Beyond Financial Aid: How Colleges Can Strengthen the Financial Stability of Low-income Students and Improve Student Outcomes

Completing education beyond high school is essential to Americans' well-being and economic success. But rising costs and inadequate financial resources hinder too many students from earning postsecondary credentials. This guidebook identifies six key strategies for improving services for low-income students. The report showcases promising approaches that colleges and universities are already employing, and offers these ideas as guides for all institutions. It also features an institutional self-assessment designed to help postsecondary institutions determine their effectiveness in serving low-income students and take steps toward improving their practices