Monitoring Climate Finance in Developing Countries: Challenges and Next Steps

At the 18th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the parties agreed to a standard format for developed countries to follow when reporting on the climate finance they provide to developing countries. Developed countries will use these formats for the first time when they submit their Biennial Reports to the UNFCCC in early 2014. Later in 2014, developing countries are expected to submit Biennial Update Reports showing the financial support that they have received. From initial attempts to measure and report climate finance by developed and developing countries, it is already apparent that information on finance provided is unlikely to match information on finance received.Aside from the reporting requirements of the UNFCCC, better financial data can help decision makers in developing countries identify gaps, improve coordination and management, and raise funds to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Better climate finance information can also enable countries to draw lessons from the use of different financial instruments and develop strategies and policies that aim to expand finance for climate change. Improved data will allow the information reported by developed countries to be cross-checked, thus promoting transparency, completeness, and accuracy. Finally, it can contribute to a more comprehensive picture of climate financial flows in relation to development assistance at the national and international levels. This working paper reports on three workshops in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in which participants discussed some of the steps that developing countries and their international partners can take toward monitoring and tracking climate finance more effectively. More than 40 representatives from 20 developing countries, regional development banks, and national organizations attended the three workshops. Participants shared information on the limits of existing legislation and mandates, national planning and approval processes, financial management systems, efforts to coordinate among ministries and development partners, and many other unique challenges faced by the participating countries. WRI obtained additional information via a questionnaire, follow-up correspondence, and interviews with representatives of the countries

A robust digital image watermarking using repetition codes against common attacks

Digital watermarking is hiding the information inside a digital media to protect for such documents against malicious intentions to change such documents or even claim the rights of such documents. Currently the capability of repetition codes on various attacks in not sufficiently studied. In this project, a robust frequency domain watermarking scheme has been implemented using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). The idea of this scheme is to embed an encoded watermark using repetition code (3, 1) inside the cover image pixels based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) embedding technique. The proposed methods have undergone several simulation attacks tests in order to check up and compare their robustness against various attacks, like salt and pepper, speckle, compress, Gaussian, image contrast, resizing and cropping attack. The robustness of the watermarking scheme has been calculated using Peak Signal-To-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Normalized Correlations (NC). In our experiments, the results show that the robustness of a watermark with repetition codes is much better than without repetition code

Decision Management Process Improvement Project

A Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE in Project ManagementIt has become all too common that questions are raised during the execution of a project pertaining to the decisions that were made early on. Without having maintained a concise, accessible record of project decisions, the project manager and team members would find it difficult to provide hard evidence as to how they got to this point and what impacts specific decisions had on the project’s trajectory. This paper introduces the Decision Management Process Improvement Project (DMPIP), which focuses on improving decision management process throughout the lifecycle of a project with the aim of adding value to project performance and helping obtain project success. This new tool was inspired due to a lack of appropriate methods involving complex projects at a local consulting firm. The process along with the tool is being added to the toolset of a local Consulting Firm. This Firm plans to introduce the tools and techniques to clients that will benefit from an increased Project Management maturity level with improvements to its decision-tracking processes and demonstration of downstream effects of important decisions. The final product is a contribution to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) in the form of creating a Project Decision Management knowledge area in the PMBOK format. A decision log that follows a decision throughout the whole process from problem identification and analysis to the eventual outcome is at the core of the created knowledge area.Title Page / Table of Contents / List of Exhibits / Abstract / Keywords / Introduction / Project Purpose / Project Benefits / Research Methodology / Research Results Analysis / Project Management Approach / Final Products / Conclusion and Recommendations / Opportunities for Future Development / Reference

Big data for monitoring educational systems

This report considers “how advances in big data are likely to transform the context and methodology of monitoring educational systems within a long-term perspective (10-30 years) and impact the evidence based policy development in the sector”, big data are “large amounts of different types of data produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.” Five independent experts were commissioned by Ecorys, responding to themes of: students' privacy, educational equity and efficiency, student tracking, assessment and skills. The experts were asked to consider the “macro perspective on governance on educational systems at all levels from primary, secondary education and tertiary – the latter covering all aspects of tertiary from further, to higher, and to VET”, prioritising primary and secondary levels of education

Tackling poverty and disadvantage in schools: working with the community and other services

The link between disadvantage and educational underachievement is still strong. Most schools still fail to target support specifically at disadvantaged learners and only a few analyse data effectively enough to identify disadvantaged learners. Most schools do not use their assessment and tracking systems well enough to monitor the progress of disadvantaged learners. The few schools that support their disadvantaged learners well implement systematic, whole-school approaches for teaching and learning that benefit all learners and support individual disadvantaged learners by providing mentoring or help with basic skills and homework. Nearly all schools see themselves as community-focused and work with a range of agencies. However, school leaders do not usually co-ordinate multi-agency working systematically enough to ensure that disadvantaged learners are supported in the most effective and timely way. Only a few schools plan explicitly to raise disadvantaged learners’ aspirations. Although many schools offer a range of out-of-hours learning, only in a few are these extra activities carefully planned to increase disadvantaged learners’ confidence, motivation and self-esteem. Where schools have had the greatest impact on raising learners’ achievement, staff plan out-of-hours learning to match the needs of learners and to complement the curriculum. School leaders generally have not received enough training on working with the community or services, or on using data to evaluate initiatives to tackle disadvantage. Schools do not share best practice or collaborate effectively with each other in this area. Most local authorities do not do enough to offer schools practical guidance on how to work with local communities and services, or how best to analyse outcome data for disadvantaged learners. Local authorities that work systematically with schools to tackle poverty and disadvantage have the greatest impact on learner achievement

Student-Centered Learning: Functional Requirements for Integrated Systems to Optimize Learning

The realities of the 21st-century learner require that schools and educators fundamentally change their practice. "Educators must produce college- and career-ready graduates that reflect the future these students will face. And, they must facilitate learning through means that align with the defining attributes of this generation of learners."Today, we know more than ever about how students learn, acknowledging that the process isn't the same for every student and doesn't remain the same for each individual, depending upon maturation and the content being learned. We know that students want to progress at a pace that allows them to master new concepts and skills, to access a variety of resources, to receive timely feedback on their progress, to demonstrate their knowledge in multiple ways and to get direction, support and feedback from—as well as collaborate with—experts, teachers, tutors and other students.The result is a growing demand for student-centered, transformative digital learning using competency education as an underpinning.iNACOL released this paper to illustrate the technical requirements and functionalities that learning management systems need to shift toward student-centered instructional models. This comprehensive framework will help districts and schools determine what systems to use and integrate as they being their journey toward student-centered learning, as well as how systems integration aligns with their organizational vision, educational goals and strategic plans.Educators can use this report to optimize student learning and promote innovation in their own student-centered learning environments. The report will help school leaders understand the complex technologies needed to optimize personalized learning and how to use data and analytics to improve practices, and can assist technology leaders in re-engineering systems to support the key nuances of student-centered learning

Are Delayed Issues Harder to Resolve? Revisiting Cost-to-Fix of Defects throughout the Lifecycle

Many practitioners and academics believe in a delayed issue effect (DIE); i.e. the longer an issue lingers in the system, the more effort it requires to resolve. This belief is often used to justify major investments in new development processes that promise to retire more issues sooner. This paper tests for the delayed issue effect in 171 software projects conducted around the world in the period from 2006--2014. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest study yet published on this effect. We found no evidence for the delayed issue effect; i.e. the effort to resolve issues in a later phase was not consistently or substantially greater than when issues were resolved soon after their introduction. This paper documents the above study and explores reasons for this mismatch between this common rule of thumb and empirical data. In summary, DIE is not some constant across all projects. Rather, DIE might be an historical relic that occurs intermittently only in certain kinds of projects. This is a significant result since it predicts that new development processes that promise to faster retire more issues will not have a guaranteed return on investment (depending on the context where applied), and that a long-held truth in software engineering should not be considered a global truism.Comment: 31 pages. Accepted with minor revisions to Journal of Empirical Software Engineering. Keywords: software economics, phase delay, cost to fi