3,129 research outputs found

    A Nonprofit Organization’s Strategies to Align Its Systems Services with the Needs of Families

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    In the nonprofit sector, leaders are swiftly recognizing the necessity of aligning community food systems with the dynamic needs of families. This alignment is not only crucial for addressing immediate nutritional needs but also plays a pivotal role in bolstering long-term community resilience and well-being. Grounded in the balanced scorecard and Baldridge Excellence frameworks, the purpose of this qualitative single-case study was to explore strategies some leaders in nonprofit organizations deploy to align community food systems with the food service needs of families. The participants were three leaders with over five years of experience at a nonprofit organization in the southern United States. Data were gathered through interviews and a review of organizational documents. Through thematic analysis, five themes were identified: leadership, governance, strategic planning, customer engagement, and societal responsibility. A key recommendation is for nonprofit leaders to evaluate and adapt services to meet changing family needs routinely. The implications for positive social change include the potential to reinforce community values and enhance citizen safety through personalized services and increased confidence in community support systems

    Investigating the Security of EV Charging Mobile Applications As an Attack Surface

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    The adoption rate of EVs has witnessed a significant increase in recent years driven by multiple factors, chief among which is the increased flexibility and ease of access to charging infrastructure. To improve user experience, increase system flexibility and commercialize the charging process, mobile applications have been incorporated into the EV charging ecosystem. EV charging mobile applications allow consumers to remotely trigger actions on charging stations and use functionalities such as start/stop charging sessions, pay for usage, and locate charging stations, to name a few. In this paper, we study the security posture of the EV charging ecosystem against remote attacks, which exploit the insecurity of the EV charging mobile applications as an attack surface. We leverage a combination of static and dynamic analysis techniques to analyze the security of widely used EV charging mobile applications. Our analysis of 31 widely used mobile applications and their interactions with various components such as the cloud management systems indicate the lack of user/vehicle verification and improper authorization for critical functions, which lead to remote (dis)charging session hijacking and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against the EV charging station. Indeed, we discuss specific remote attack scenarios and their impact on the EV users. More importantly, our analysis results demonstrate the feasibility of leveraging existing vulnerabilities across various EV charging mobile applications to perform wide-scale coordinated remote charging/discharging attacks against the connected critical infrastructure (e.g., power grid), with significant undesired economical and operational implications. Finally, we propose counter measures to secure the infrastructure and impede adversaries from performing reconnaissance and launching remote attacks using compromised accounts

    Can i take your subdomain? Exploring same-site attacks in the modern web

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    Related-domain attackers control a sibling domain of their target web application, e.g., as the result of a subdomain takeover. Despite their additional power over traditional web attackers, related-domain attackers received only limited attention from the research community. In this paper we define and quantify for the first time the threats that related-domain attackers pose to web application security. In particular, we first clarify the capabilities that related-domain attackers can acquire through different attack vectors, showing that different instances of the related-domain attacker concept are worth attention. We then study how these capabilities can be abused to compromise web application security by focusing on different angles, including cookies, CSP, CORS, postMessage, and domain relaxation. By building on this framework, we report on a large-scale security measurement on the top 50k domains from the Tranco list that led to the discovery of vulnerabilities in 887 sites, where we quantified the threats posed by related-domain attackers to popular web applications

    An Evaluation of Undergraduate Advisors Experience Using Learning Analytics to Support First-year Students

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    Higher education institutions are now serving post-traditional students. With the ever-increasing diversity and complex needs of these post-traditionals, institutions are striving to design policies, programs, and institutional supports to best support their diverse needs. Many are venturing into the world of learning analytics to gain deeper insights into the student academic experience and leveraging data to improve student success and retention. Previous research has centered on the institutional level impact of learning analytics on student success and rarely gives representation to the experience of specific individual sub-groups of organizational stakeholders. This summative evaluation sought to capture the experiences of 5 undergraduate advisors who participated in a three-year pilot of Civitas Inspire, a learning analytics system, to support first- year students. The Comprehensive Mixed Methods Participatory Evaluation model served as a conceptual framework allowing for an in-depth exploration of advisors’ perspectives on six evaluation components: acceptability, social validity, program integrity, program outcomes, implementer competence, sustainability, and institutionalization. An examination of previous research identified capacity building, data integrity, messaging, and privacy/ethics as common challenges faced by institutions who have adopted learning analytics systems. Evaluation results found advisors encountered similar challenges. Prominent throughout the advisors narrative was the effects of shadow-culture on technology adoption efforts. Advisors expressed the need for greater stakeholder inclusivity; for institutions to acknowledge and understand stakeholder workflow, and the necessity for a connect the dots approach towards institutionalization efforts

    MonitR: A mobile application for monitoring online accounts’ security

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    Applied project submitted to the Department of Computer Science, Ashesi University, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Systems, April 2018The 21st century has seen a world where almost everything is carried out by digital or electronic means—signalling an end to the traditional approaches. People nowadays transact businesses over the internet due to convenience and accessibility. Taking full advantage of the internet, most institutions especially the financial institutions have also digitalized their services. For this reason, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of online banking and shopping customers. This development has given rise to corresponding increase in cybercrimes, hacking and internet frauds. One of the greatest challenges, hence the cost of migrating an institution’s service online is to provide sufficient internet security mechanisms to secure online users’ accounts. However, most institutions lack the technology needed to support their online presence. Consequently, several cases of unauthorized login and stealing of customers’ information have become rampant. To address this issue, this project not only investigates the dangers of internet insecurity but develops a novel approach to monitoring a user’s online account from fraudsters. The aim of this project is it to monitor, detect and prevent unauthorized account usage using device identification and geofencing techniques.Ashesi Universit

    A Case Study: Increasing the Persistence and Graduation Rates of Undergraduate Black Female College Students at a Predominantly White Institution

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    Since 1954, Black females were presented with the opportunity to earn an education equivalent to non-Black females. Despite the challenges, Black females have made significant strides in their academic performance by attaining degrees at every level over the years. The purpose of the study is to explore factors that affected the retention and graduation rates of Black female undergraduate students enrolled at a Predominantly White Institution. The researcher will conduct an exploratory single-case study to explore Black female undergraduate students\u27 barriers to retention during their college experience. The sample included 10 Black female undergraduate students and three staff members from academic and non-academic student support services on the campus of SEU. The findings of the study indicate that the Black female undergraduate student participants have encountered at least one challenge that had a potential effect on their college persistence. Many student participants were not aware of the student support services available to them or did not feel comfortable using the services for assistance. Black female undergraduate students need to be engaged and build relationships to encourage them and develop a sense of belonging at a PWI. For some Black female undergraduate students, it may be necessary for PWIs to provide intentional support for student support services for the population to benefit from available services

    Opportunities and challenges of using secondary analysis for analysing social policy questions in Early Childhood Education and Care and children’s food and nutrition

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    Aims: This integrative summary aims to critically assess the opportunities and challenges of using secondary data analysis of large-scale UK data for addressing social policy questions within Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and children’s nutrition (two areas of my research and which both focus on aspects of childhood wellbeing and developmental health). A key and original contribution of the integrative summary is the proposal of identifying a core outcome set (COS) of indicators, underpinned using Bronfenbrenner’s ‘proximal’ and ‘distal’ factors (Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006), within studies of early childhood education and care (ECEC) and children’s food and nutrition. The development of these COS are recommended in order to support ongoing secondary analysis research in these areas e.g., to assess service or outcome quality. Research Questions: RQ1: What does the literature identify as important concepts, factors and indicators and what does this suggest for a scope of a COS in my two research areas? RQ2: What indicators have been operationalised and analysed within my work? RQ3: What are the ‘data gaps’ within current large-scale UK data collections regarding the operationalisation of indicators in ECEC and children’s food and nutrition? RQ4: What indicators could be included within a COS for ECEC or children’s food and nutrition? Methods: First, a critical review of seven of my candidate publications from the past 5 years and the literature on ECEC and children’s food and nutrition. Second, to follow the suggested steps within the Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials framework (COMET) for developing a COS by identifying suitable indicators using literature in my two subject areas. Findings: RQ1: In ECEC, literature suggests ‘good relationships’ are key for achieving ‘good quality outcomes’ for children and it is important to distinguish and measure both structural and process concepts (distal or process) of service quality, underpinned by what children need for their development. In children’s food and nutrition, the key concepts discussed are indicators of dietary quality in relation to key government targets (measured through consumption of single foods or analysis of the ‘whole diet’) and indicators of dietary intake that meet needs for health and social participation as part of wider living standards. RQ2: Relationships between adults and children in ECEC settings are not well measured within large-scale UK datasets. These so-called process or proximal concepts are difficult to identify and operationalise. Secondary data analysts instead have to rely on measuring and analysing structural/distal concepts available to them in datasets. Proxy indicators, such as staff qualifications, can be used but it is not clear if these are good for assessing service quality. In children’s food and nutrition, indicators developed in relation to nutritional benchmarking are often subjective indicators (because they are based on self-reported behaviour) and are mostly process/proximal indicators, centred on the child. RQ3: Indicators are often ‘fragmented’ (spread across datasets), which makes secondary analysis of large-scale data difficult for researchers who may have to combine datasets or carry out separate analysis using a range of datasets. In children’s food and nutrition, large-scale UK data have detailed nutritional information but may lack important contextual data and/or have issues with reliability in the data collected. RQ4: The beginnings of a COS has been identified for ECEC and children’s food and nutrition based on evidence from the earlier RQs (drawing on the literature) to identify indicators that are important to measure. However, each COS needs further refinement through consultation with a relevant group of experts in each subject area. Conclusions: Secondary analysis of existing data has enormous potential for monitoring outcomes for children and families, through for example, the identification of a core outcome set (COS) within ECEC and children’s food and nutrition. To overcome problems of data fragmentation (when indicators are spread across a number of datasets), a COS in my research areas is recommended to enhance efforts for data harmonisation (unifying measures across research studies). The success of implementing a COS in ECEC and children’s food and nutrition is reliant on three key things. First, common understandings and definitions of indicators (and here my work needs building to include consultation with expert groups). Second, development of outcome indicators that are sensitive to the context in which they are being developed and applied. Third, a clear understanding of the purpose or aims of the indicators being included through the inclusion of an agreed supporting theoretical framework to unite the indicators and guide their organisation within the COS. This last point is important for providing a sound evidence base for informing social policy and practice
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