31,594 research outputs found
Policy document and brief for engagement with government and private sector in Cocoa: A case of Ghana
There is a gap today in funding for investment in developing countries. A recent assessment of financing in the agriculture sector in Ghana based on existing financial sector laws showed that, there is currently no distinct policy to enable lending to the agricultural sector. However, with an ever increasing need to address the challenges of climate change, the need for such policies and resulting finance opportunities for smallholder farmers and other supply chain actor will only increase and become more urgent. Unchanged, most needed investments to address the growing challenges will be made by the private sector or by the farmers themselves. Therefore, public actors, including COCOBOD, need to play a key role in building an enabling environment, including the development of supportive policies, institutions and making matching-funds available. Reducing supply chain risk and improving resilience through such efforts that signal a more secure and favourable framework is key to enabling private actors, especially the more financially vulnerable, to invest. Existing policy initiatives and programs geared towards creating an enabling environment for finance to the sector are currently led by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) and other sector agencies and financial NGO’
Food insecurity and associated factors among HIV-infected individuals receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy in Jimma zone Southwest Ethiopia
Background: In resource limited settings, many People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) lack access to sufficient quantities of nutritious foods, which poses additional challenges to the success of antiretroviral therapy (ART). Maintaining adequate food consumption and nutrient intake levels and meeting the special nutritional needs to cope up with the disease and the ART are critical for PLWHA to achieve the full benefit of such a treatment.
Objective: To determine the prevalence and correlates of food insecurity among HIV-infected individuals receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy in resource-limited settings.
Methods: A cross sectional study was carried out from January 1, 2009 to March 3, 2009 at ART clinic at Jimma University specialized hospital (JUSH) in Ethiopia. We used multivariable logistic regression model to compare independent risk factors by food insecurity status among 319 adult PLWHA (>= 18 years) attending ART Clinic.
Results: A total of 319 adult PLWHA participated in the study giving a response rate of 100%. Out of 319 PLWHA the largest numbers of participants, 46.4% were in the age group of 25-34 years. The overall 201(63.0%) PLWHA were food insecure. Educational status of elementary or lower [OR = 3.10 (95%CI; (1.68-5.71)], average family monthly income < 100 USD [OR = 13.1 (95%CI; (4.29-40.0)] and lower food diversity [OR = 2.18 (95%CI; (1.21-3.99)] were significantly and independently associated with food insecurity.
Conclusion: Food insecurity is a significant problem among PLWHA on HAART. Lower educational status and low family income were the predictors of food insecurity. Food security interventions should be an integral component of HIV/AIDS care and support programs. Special attention need to be given to patients who have lower educational status and are members of households with low income
How to Work with Honest but Curious Judges? (Preliminary Report)
The three-judges protocol, recently advocated by Mclver and Morgan as an
example of stepwise refinement of security protocols, studies how to securely
compute the majority function to reach a final verdict without revealing each
individual judge's decision. We extend their protocol in two different ways for
an arbitrary number of 2n+1 judges. The first generalisation is inherently
centralised, in the sense that it requires a judge as a leader who collects
information from others, computes the majority function, and announces the
final result. A different approach can be obtained by slightly modifying the
well-known dining cryptographers protocol, however it reveals the number of
votes rather than the final verdict. We define a notion of conditional
anonymity in order to analyse these two solutions. Both of them have been
checked in the model checker MCMAS
Risk Factors for Severe Inter-Sibling Violence: A Preliminary Study of a Youth Forensic Sample
The perpetration of severe inter-sibling violence (SISV) remains a largely unexplored area of family violence. This article describes an investigation of risk factors for intentional SISV perpetration. A sample of 111 young people under the care of the Scottish criminal justice or welfare systems was studied. A SISV perpetration interview schedule was developed to measure the influence of 43 potential predictor variables. The Buss and Perry Aggression Questionnaire and Levenson's Self-Report Psychopathy Scale were also employed in this exploratory analysis
Globally reasoning about localised security policies in distributed systems
In this report, we aim at establishing proper ways for model checking the
global security of distributed systems, which are designed consisting of set of
localised security policies that enforce specific issues about the security
expected.
The systems are formally specified following a syntax, defined in detail in
this report, and their behaviour is clearly established by the Semantics, also
defined in detail in this report. The systems include the formal attachment of
security policies into their locations, whose intended interactions are trapped
by the policies, aiming at taking access control decisions of the system, and
the Semantics also takes care of this.
Using the Semantics, a Labelled Transition System (LTS) can be induced for
every particular system, and over this LTS some model checking tasks could be
done. We identify how this LTS is indeed obtained, and propose an alternative
way of model checking the not-yet-induced LTS, by using the system design
directly. This may lead to over-approximation thereby producing imprecise,
though safe, results. We restrict ourselves to finite systems, in the sake of
being certain about the decidability of the proposed method.
To illustrate the usefulness and validity of our proposal, we present 2 small
case-study-like examples, where we show how the system can be specified, which
policies could be added to it, and how to decide if the desired global security
property is met.
Finally, an Appendix is given for digging deeply into how a tool for
automatically performing this task is being built, including some
implementation issues. The tool takes advantage of the proposed method, and
given some system and some desired global security property, it safely (i.e.
without false positives) ensures satisfaction of it
Methodologies for Designing Power-Aware Smart Card Systems
Smart cards are some of the smallest
computing platforms in use today. They have
limited resources, but a huge number of
functional requirements. The requirement for
multi-application cards increases the demand
for high performance and security even more,
whereas the limits given by size and energy
consumption remain constant.
We describe new
methodologies for designing and implementing
entire systems with regard to power awareness
and required performance. To make use of this
power-saving potential, also the higher layers
of the system - the operating system layer and
the application domain layer - are required to
be designed together with the rest of the
system.
HW/SW co-design methodologies enable the gain of
system-level optimization. The first part presents the
abstraction of smart cards to optimize system architecture
and memory system. Both functional and transactional-level
models are presented and discussed. The proposed design
flow and preliminary results of the evaluation are depicted.
Another central part of this methodology is a cycle-accurate instruction-set
simulator for secure software development.
The underlaying energy model is designed
to decouple instruction and data dependent energy dissipation,
which leads to an independent characterization process and allows
stepwise model refinement to increase estimation accuracy. The
model has been evaluated for a high-performance smart card CPU and
an use-case for secure software is given
Security and computer forensics in web engineering education
The integration of security and forensics into Web Engineering curricula is imperative! Poor security in web-based applications is continuing to cost organizations millions and the losses are still increasing annually. Security is frequently taught as a stand-alone course, assuming that security can be 'bolted on' to a web application at some point. Security issues must be integrated into Web Engineering processes right from the beginning to create secure solutions and therefore security should be an integral part of a Web Engineering curriculum. One aspect of Computer forensics investigates failures in security. Hence, students should be aware of the issues in forensics and how to respond when security failures occur; collecting evidence is particularly difficult for Web-based applications
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Constructing secure service compositions with patterns
In service based applications, it is often necessary to construct compositions of services in order to provide required functionality in cases where this is not possible through the use of a single service. Whilst creating service compositions, it is necessary to ensure not only that the functionality required of the composition is achieved but also that certain security properties are preserved. In this paper, we describe an approach to constructing secure service compositions. Our approach is based on the use of composition patterns and rules that determine the security properties that should be preserved by the individual services that constitute a composition in order to ensure that security properties of the overall composition are also satisfied. Our approach extends a framework developed to support the runtime service discovery
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