Gender Equity and Renewable Energies : Thematic Background Paper

The aim of this paper is to review existing evidence on the role of renewable energies in bringing gender equity. The paper first explores the evolution of thinking on gender and energy, in particular that practitioners no longer specifically focus on women and stoves (often referred to as “household energy”). Next, the reasons why gender analysis can help those people trying to increase the dissemination of renewable energy technologies are presented. There is a brief description of the gender aspects of household energy, and how different renewable energy technologies can contribute to drudgery reduction and time saving, particularly for women. The role of women in renewable energy is analysed. The paper concludes with an analysis of lessons learnt and recommendations. However, the point has to be stressed that there is now only beginning to emerge information about gender and energy in the South, and there is very little information about the situation in the North. The data that are available are primarily in the form of case studies, mainly related to stoves programmes and rural electricity grid extension. The systematic collection of gender-disaggregated statistical data by energy ministries does not occur and it is very rare to find energy project evaluations that use gender analysis. This means that much of the analysis should be seen as only as indicative, although this does not invalidate the recommendations since many of these are linked to the general situation of women having fewer assets than men

CamFlow: Managed Data-sharing for Cloud Services

A model of cloud services is emerging whereby a few trusted providers manage the underlying hardware and communications whereas many companies build on this infrastructure to offer higher level, cloud-hosted PaaS services and/or SaaS applications. From the start, strong isolation between cloud tenants was seen to be of paramount importance, provided first by virtual machines (VM) and later by containers, which share the operating system (OS) kernel. Increasingly it is the case that applications also require facilities to effect isolation and protection of data managed by those applications. They also require flexible data sharing with other applications, often across the traditional cloud-isolation boundaries; for example, when government provides many related services for its citizens on a common platform. Similar considerations apply to the end-users of applications. But in particular, the incorporation of cloud services within `Internet of Things' architectures is driving the requirements for both protection and cross-application data sharing. These concerns relate to the management of data. Traditional access control is application and principal/role specific, applied at policy enforcement points, after which there is no subsequent control over where data flows; a crucial issue once data has left its owner's control by cloud-hosted applications and within cloud-services. Information Flow Control (IFC), in addition, offers system-wide, end-to-end, flow control based on the properties of the data. We discuss the potential of cloud-deployed IFC for enforcing owners' dataflow policy with regard to protection and sharing, as well as safeguarding against malicious or buggy software. In addition, the audit log associated with IFC provides transparency, giving configurable system-wide visibility over data flows. [...]Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Autonomic computing architecture for SCADA cyber security

Cognitive computing relates to intelligent computing platforms that are based on the disciplines of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies. These technologies can be used to design systems that mimic the human brain to learn about their environment and can autonomously predict an impending anomalous situation. IBM first used the term ‘Autonomic Computing’ in 2001 to combat the looming complexity crisis (Ganek and Corbi, 2003). The concept has been inspired by the human biological autonomic system. An autonomic system is self-healing, self-regulating, self-optimising and self-protecting (Ganek and Corbi, 2003). Therefore, the system should be able to protect itself against both malicious attacks and unintended mistakes by the operator

A review of factors which influence pedestrian use of the streets: Task 1 report for an EPSRC funded project on measuring pedestrian accessibility

INTRODUCTION This document was written to report the results from Task 1 of the Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility project funded through the EPSRC Future Integrated Transport programme. The project is being carried out by staff at the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds in collaboration with the Pedestrians Association and City of York Council. The overall aim of this project is to identify ways to encourage and enable more people to make more journeys on foot. The specific objectives are to: • quantify attitudes and perceptions held towards walking and the barriers to walking; • study the feasibility of developing a tool that can be used to evaluate pedestrian routes; • undertake validation of the tool. The achievement of these objectives will represent a thorough investigation into the two sides of providing for walking - the physical environment for pedestrians and people's attitudes to walking. Task 1 of the project is an extended literature review and survey of experts to identify an initial list of features that are thought to influence pedestrian use of the streets. The paper that follows is split into a number of sections which look at the different characteristics of pedestrians, factors which affect route choice, factors which affect mode choice, problems faced by pedestrians on our streets and a short review of recent Government (local and national) policy which has influenced pedestrian provision

Mobile Broadband Possibilities considering the Arrival of IEEE 802.16m & LTE with an Emphasis on South Asia

This paper intends to look deeper into finding an ideal mobile broadband solution. Special stress has been put in the South Asian region through some comparative analysis. Proving their competency in numerous aspects, WiMAX and LTE already have already made a strong position in telecommunication industry. Both WiMAX and LTE are 4G technologies designed to move data rather than voice having IP networks based on OFDM technology. So, they aren't like typical technological rivals as of GSM and CDMA. But still a gesture of hostility seems to outburst long before the stable commercial launch of LTE. In this paper various aspects of WiMAX and LTE for deployment have been analyzed. Again, we tried to make every possible consideration with respect to south Asia i.e. how mass people of this region may be benefited. As a result, it might be regarded as a good source in case of making major BWA deployment decisions in this region. Besides these, it also opens the path for further research and in depth thinking in this issue.Comment: IEEE Publication format, ISSN 1947 5500, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis

Union Mediation and Adaptation to Reciprocal Loyalty Arrangements

This study assesses the industrial relations application of the “loyalty-exit-voice” proposition. The loyalty concept is linked to reciprocal employer-employee arrangements and examined as a job attribute in a vignette questionnaire distributed to low and medium-skilled employees. The responses provided by employees in three European countries indicate that reciprocal loyalty arrangements, which involve the exchange of higher effort for job security, are one of the most desirable job attributes. This attribute exerts a higher impact on the job evaluations provided by unionised workers, compared to their non-union counterparts. This pattern is robust to a number of methodological considerations. It appears to be an outcome of adaptation to union mediated cooperation. Overall the evidence suggests that the loyalty-job evaluation profiles of unionised workers are receptive to repeated interaction and negative shocks, such as unemployment experience. This is not the case for the non-union workers. Finally, unionised workers appear to “voice” a lower job satisfaction, but exhibit low “exit” intentions, compared to the non-unionised labour.EPICURUS, a project supported by the European Commission through the 5th Framework Programme “Improving Human Potential” (contract number: HPSE-CT-2002-00143

EVEREST IST - 2002 - 00185 : D23 : final report

Deliverable públic del projecte europeu EVERESTThis deliverable constitutes the final report of the project IST-2002-001858 EVEREST. After its successful completion, the project presents this document that firstly summarizes the context, goal and the approach objective of the project. Then it presents a concise summary of the major goals and results, as well as highlights the most valuable lessons derived form the project work. A list of deliverables and publications is included in the annex.Postprint (published version

Unconventional gas: potential energy market impacts in the European Union

In the interest of effective policymaking, this report seeks to clarify certain controversies and identify key gaps in the evidence-base relating to unconventional gas. The scope of this report is restricted to the economic impact of unconventional gas on energy markets. As such, it principally addresses such issues as the energy mix, energy prices, supplies, consumption, and trade flows. Whilst this study touches on coal bed methane and tight gas, its predominant focus is on shale gas, which the evidence at this time suggests will be the form of unconventional gas with the most growth potential in the short- to medium-term. This report considers the prospects for the indigenous production of shale gas within the EU-27 Member States. It evaluates the available evidence on resource size, extractive technology, resource access and market access. This report also considers the implications for the EU of large-scale unconventional gas production in other parts of the world. This acknowledges the fact that many changes in the dynamics of energy supply can only be understood in the broader global context. It also acknowledges that the EU is a major importer of energy, and that it is therefore heavily affected by developments in global energy markets that are largely out of its control.JRC.F.3-Energy securit