A Primer for Monitoring Water Funds

This document is intended to assist people working on Water Funds to understand their information needs and become familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of various monitoring approaches. This primer is not intended to make people monitoring experts, but rather to help them become familiar with and conversant in the major issues so they can communicate effectively with experts to design a scientifically defensible monitoring program.The document highlights the critical information needs common to Water Fund projects and summarizes issues and steps to address in developing a Water Fund monitoring program. It explains key concepts and challenges; suggests monitoring parameters and an array of sampling designs to consider as a starting-point; and provides suggestions for further reading, links to helpful resources,and an annotated bibliography of studies on the impacts that result from activities commonly implemented in Water Fund projects

A comparative study of cloud services use by prospective IT professionals in five countries

Individuals and organizations utilise the cloud technology and its services in various ways. Cloud-based services are becoming increasingly popular, while there is no adequate knowledge offered for their secure use in the education for future IT professionals. It is important to understand how security and privacy issues are perceived and handled by male/female users and IT professionals of different cultures. The authors aim at presenting and scrutinizing information about cloud services’ use by prospective IT professionals in five countries, namely China, Finland, Greece, Nepal, and the UK. In particular the authors, wanting to find out what are the future IT professionals’ conceptualisations and awareness, collected data from male and female IT students in higher education, who use (or not) cloud services. The authors further illustrate the research findings by proceeding to a comparative analysis considering different perspectives such as: gender, education background, national culture (values and culture), and IT-related knowledge. The final research outcomes reveal attention-grabbing information for future IT professionals’ skills, knowledge, and digital competencies. For the IT professionals and software quality engineering communities the latter comprise a body of realistic knowledge, worthy of note when designing curricula for security technology by accommodating practical and accessible solutions (e.g., cryptography-based cloud security) for developing and enhancing the IT professionals’ role

Reliability Testing of the PABS (Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey) Method

The Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey (PABS) is a questionnaire designed to be economical and straightforward to administer so that it can be used by local governments interested in measuring the amount and purposes of walking and cycling in their communities. In addition, it captures key sociodemographic characteristics of those participating in these activities. Methods: In 2009 and 2010 results from the 4-page mail-out/mail-back PABS were tested for reliability across 2 administrations (test-retest reliability). Two versions--early and refined--were tested separately with 2 independent groups of university students from 4 universities (N = 100 in group 1; N = 87 in group 2). Administrations were 7 to 9 days apart. Results: Almost all survey questions achieved adequate to excellent reliability. Conclusions: Transportation surveys have not typically been tested for reliability making the PABS questionnaire an important new option for improving information collection about travel behavior, particularly walking and cycling