Sharing Global Governance: The Role of Civil Society Organizations

This report explores the multiple roles and potential of CSOs in international policymaking and examines the strengths and weaknesses of CSOs and state-based organizations in global governance. It looks particularly closely at the resources, access, skills and experience that each group of actors brings to the table. It concludes that the infrastructure used to incorporate CSOs into the United Nations and other multilaterals must be strengthened and expanded if more integrated and effective forms of collaboration are to be developed and outlines policy recommendations how this goal can be accomplished

Measuring Tasks, Time, and Priorities: A Study of an Alternative School Leader in Action

This study explored whether conventional means to evaluate principal instructional leadership were appropriate in alternative school settings. The mixed methods research included shadowing an alternative school principal over two days during the fall semester, 2011. Data was collected using the Vanderbilt Assessment of Education in Leadership\u27s (VAL-ED) Time Task Analysis ToolTM checklist supplemented by naturalistic observations and ongoing explanations by the principal. Leader activities were categorized within three major categories: instructional, management, and personal. Additional activity descriptions were based on instrument subcategories, multiple cycles of coding, and analytic memoing. Conclusions indicated that the VAL-ED instrument failed to accurately define the range of entrepreneurial and outreach activities this alternative principal undertook. The checklist was insensitive to the degree to which the principal multitasked, combining management with instructional duties. The observations provided important clues to principal function, suggesting a more nuanced evaluation useful in nontraditional settings

Negotiating the 'Catch 22': Transitioning to Knowledge Work for University Graduates with Learning Disabilities

This paper examines the experiences of graduates with learning disabilities (GLD) transitioning into knowledge-based work in Ontario, Canada. The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the messiness in the university-to-work transition for GLD. To do so, this paper draws from interviews conducted with GLD in university and in the labour market. This paper first discusses the rise of the smart worker standard, a standard sensitive to socio-culture norms, in recruitment of knowledge workers. The analysis of this paper examines three key stages of transition, namely: interviewing, employment testing and probationary period. This study’s analysis demonstrates a ‘catch-22’ for GLD where they fear stigmatization through either disclosing their disability and non-disclosure where they risk being perceived as ‘lazy’ or ‘incompetent’. The conclusion provides recommendations to support the transition experiences of GLD

EMPLOYERS' USE OF WORKPLACE REASONABLE ACCOMMODATIONS FOR RETAINING EMPLOYEES WITH DISABILITIES.

Two decades since the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act, persons with disabilities still face employment challenges in the workplace. Reasonable accommodations (RA) have been associated with overall job satisfaction, enhanced job tenure, and, increased job performance for employees with disabilities. However, reasonable accommodation stakeholders still struggle with how best to effectively meet the needs of employees with disabilities in order to maximize their employability. Few studies have specifically examined the criteria that employers use to determine responses to reasonable accommodation requests by employees with disabilities. A sample of U.S. employers was asked to respond to a reasonable accommodation scenario, and rate the influences of a priori identified items on their response to the accommodation request. Exploratory factor analytic procedures and regression analyses are used to identify the factors correlated with employers' likelihood of approving or denying reasonable accommodation requests. Three factors were identified to underlie the criteria for employers' accommodation decisions - employer logistics and obligations in providing accommodations, relationships between employer and employee, and accommodation costs and resource. Employers' gender and having a centralized budget process for supporting accommodations were found to significantly predict with their response to accommodation requests among employer and organizational variables respectively. Our understanding of the rationale by which employers respond to reasonable accommodation requests is essential to seeking solutions for hiring and retaining persons with disabilities. The three criteria by which employers make accommodation decisions will assist employment service providers to better focus ADA knowledge and awareness training workshops for employers. Employees with disabilities will structure their accommodation requests to address or meet employers' criteria and maximize the potential for positive responses from their employers

Adapting Human Rights

Governmental leaders, scholars, and activists have advocated for human rights to food, water, education, health care, and energy. Such rights, also called positive rights, place an affirmative duty upon the state to provide a minimum quantity and quality of these goods and services to all citizens. But food, education, water, and health care are so different–in how they are produced, consumed, and financed–that the implementation of a positive right must be adapted to the distinctive characteristics of the good or service it guarantees. The primary aims of this adaptive implementation are transparency, enforceability and sustainability in the provision of positive rights. Only by adapting a positive right to its policy environment can such a right function as a viable means of protecting disadvantaged members of society. This article uses the example of positive rights to public utilities, such as water and energy, to illustrate adaptive implementation of positive rights. In doing so, this article explains why and how a positive right must be adapted to the unique policy environment of a given public utility

Elements of Employment Related Disclosure of Disability after Brain Injury

Few studies have examined the elements of disclosing a disability in the workplace. Those few studies had a primary focus on reasonable accommodations (RA) where the disclosure process was either secondary or tertiary to the study. Further, there have been no studies to date which have examined elements of disclosure for individuals with brain injury (BI). Disclosure of disability is a crucial first step in the request process for a reasonable accommodation in the workplace and is required by the ADA for individuals requesting job related accommodations. This study examined the (a) experiences of work-related disability disclosure for individuals with BI, (b) the injury, demographic and other factors associated with the decision to disclose a disability at work, and (c) employment-related outcomes associated with disclosure. The primary goal of the current study is to describe the population of people with brain injury who disclose their disability in the workplace and to make inferences about the contributing factors involved in the disclosure process. The study used a cross-sectional survey methods research design. The study consisted of 200 individuals recruited from an online survey hosted on the Brain Injury Association of America's website. Of these participants, 144 (74.6%) disclosed their disability on at least one job and 91 (45%) were currently working. Level of education (X2 =11.945, 3, p=.008), self-efficacy score (F=7.52; p=.007) and time between injury and current age (F=4.56; p=.034) were significantly related to disclosure. Logistic regression analyses were used to examine the combined effects of several predictor variables with disclosure. In this analysis, only time since injury and self-efficacy (SE) scores were significant, where higher SE scores increased the odds of disclosure, and time since injury decreases the odds of disclosure (the more recent the injury, the more likely the individual was to disclose)

Securing the in-vehicle network

Recent research into automotive security has shown that once a single electronic vehicle component is compromised, it is possible to take control of the vehicle. These components, called Electronic Control Units, are embedded systems which manage a significant part of the functionality of a modern car. They communicate with each other via the in-vehicle network, known as the Controller Area Network, which is the most widely used automotive bus. In this thesis, we introduce a series of novel proposals to improve the security of both the Controller Area Network bus and the Electronic Control Units. The Controller Area Network suffers from a number of shortfalls, one of which is the lack of source authentication. We propose a protocol that mitigates this fundamental shortcoming in the Controller Area Network bus design, and protects against a number of high profile media attacks that have been published. We derive a set of desirable security and compatibility properties which an authentication protocol for the Controller Area Network bus should possess. We evaluate our protocol, along with other proposed protocols in the literature, with respect to the defined properties. Our systematic analysis of the protocols allows the automotive industry to make an informed choice regarding the adoption suitability of these solutions. However, it is not only the communication of Electronic Control Units that needs to be secure, but the firmware running on them as well. The growing number of Electronic Control Units in a vehicle, together with their increasing complexity, prompts the need for automated tools to test their security. Part of the challenge in designing such a tool is the diversity of Electronic Control Unit architectures. To this end, this thesis presents a methodology for extracting the Control Flow Graph from the Electronic Control Unit firmware. The Control Flow Graph is a platform independent representation of the firmware control flow, allowing us to abstract from the underlying architecture. We present a fuzzer for Electronic Control Unit firmware fuzz-testing via Controller Area Network. The extracted Control Flow Graph is tagged with static data used in instructions which influence the control flow of the firmware. It is then used to create a set of input seeds for the fuzzer, and in altering the inputs during the fuzzing process. This approach represents a step towards an efficient fuzzing methodology for Electronic Control Units. To our knowledge, this is the first proposal that uses static analysis to guide the fuzzing of Electronic Control Units