Online Student Validation

A comprehensive evaluation of La Salle University’s online authentication systems and processes with recommendations for enhancement. With the Higher Education Opportunity Act, the U.S. Secretary of Education has instituted new requirements for recognition of students enrolled in online programs. This recognition requirement applies to validation that the enrolled student is the same person who completes online assignments, testing and coursework. In order to comply with this requirement, programs must prove that they adhere to their university guidelines for validating online course work or by creating their own policies. This paper first describes online education including its benefits, challenges and problems with cheating, especially in light of federal and accreditation requirements. This paper follows the process that a university technology director would use to evaluate an opportunity for change and the benefits that the change would provide. The paper then examines La Salle University’s online education, technologies and online class design and support resources. The implications regarding online policies, academic integrity and privacy are considered. Solutions to prevent online cheating are described through best practice strategies and technology solutions. The recommendations in this document consider the current accreditation requirements issued by the U.S Secretary of Education through the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA.) Several technological solutions are evaluated and compared, focusing on the features that the solutions provide, cost, and the ease of integration into LaSalle University’s current systems. Finally, this paper evaluates existing processes and provides recommendations for process optimization

The Correlation Between Poverty and Access to Essential Surgical Care in Ghana: A Geospatial Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Surgical disease burden falls disproportionately on individuals in low- and middle-income countries. These populations are also the least likely to have access to surgical care. Understanding the barriers to access in these populations is therefore necessary to meet the global surgical need. METHODS: Using geospatial methods, this study explores the district-level variation of two access barriers in Ghana: poverty and spatial access to care. National survey data were used to estimate the average total household expenditure (THE) in each district. Estimates of the spatial access to essential surgical care were generated from a cost-distance model based on a recent surgical capacity assessment. Correlations were analyzed using regression and displayed cartographically. RESULTS: Both THE and spatial access to surgical care were found to have statistically significant regional variation in Ghana (p < 0.001). An inverse relationship was identified between THE and spatial access to essential surgical care (β -5.15 USD, p < 0.001). Poverty and poor spatial access to surgical care were found to co-localize in the northwest of the country. CONCLUSIONS: Multiple barriers to accessing surgical care can coexist within populations. A careful understanding of all access barriers is necessary to identify and target strategies to address unmet surgical need within a given population

Fires in refugee and displaced persons settlements: The current situation and opportunities to improve fire prevention and control

We aimed to describe the burden of fires in displaced persons settlements and identify interventions/innovations that might address gaps in current humanitarian guidelines

No effect of 'watching eyes' : an attempted replication and extension investigating individual differences

Some evidence suggests that people behave more cooperatively and generously when observed or in the presence of images of eyes (termed the ‘watching eyes’ effect). Eye images are thought to trigger feelings of observation, which in turn motivate people to behave more cooperatively to earn a good reputation. However, several recent studies have failed to find evidence of the eyes effect. One possibility is that inconsistent evidence in support of the eyes effect is a product of individual differences in sensitivity or susceptibility to the cue. In fact, some evidence suggests that people who are generally more prosocial are less susceptible to situation-specific reputation-based cues of observation. In this paper, we sought to (1) replicate the eyes effect, (2) replicate the past finding that people who are dispositionally less prosocial are more responsive to observation than people who are more dispositionally more prosocial, and (3) determine if this effect extends to the watching eyes effect. Results from a pre-registered study showed that people did not give more money in a dictator game when decisions were made public or in the presence of eye images, even though participants felt more observed when decisions were public. That is, we failed to replicate the eyes effect and observation effect. An initial, but underpowered, interaction model suggests that egoists give less than prosocials in private, but not public, conditions. This suggests a direction for future research investigating if and how individual differences in prosociality influence observation effects

RATS-Kepler - a deep high-cadence survey of the Kepler field

We outline the purpose, strategy and first results of a deep, high-cadence, photometric survey of the Kepler field using the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma and the MDM 1.3 m Telescope on Kitt Peak. Our goal was to identify sources located in the Kepler field of view which are variable on a time-scale of a few minutes to 1 h. The astrophysically most-interesting sources would then have been candidates for observation using Kepler using 1 min sampling. Our survey covered &tilde;42 per cent of the Kepler field of view, and we have obtained light curves for 7.1 &times; 105 objects in the range 13 &lt; g &lt; 20. We have discovered more than 100 variable sources which have passed our two stage identification process. As a service to the wider community, we make our data products and cleaned CCD images available to download. We obtained Kepler data of 18 sources which we found to be variable using our survey, and we give an overview of the currently available data here. These sources include a pulsating DA white dwarf, 11 delta Sct stars which have dominant pulsation periods in the range 24 min to 2.35 h, three contact binaries, and a cataclysmic variable (V363 Lyr). One of the delta Sct stars is in a contact binary.</p

Development of a Mobile, Self-Sovereign Identity Approach for Facility Birth Registration in Kenya

Birth registration is a critical element of newborn care. Increasing the coverage of birth registration is an essential part of the strategy to improve newborn survival globally, and is central to achieving greater health, social, and economic equity as defined under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Parts of Eastern and Southern Africa have some of the lowest birth registration rates in the world. Mobile technologies have been used successfully with mothers and health workers in Africa to increase coverage of essential newborn care, including birth registration. However, mounting concerns about data ownership and data protection in the digital age are driving the search for scalable, user-centered, privacy protecting identity solutions. There is increasing interest in understanding if a self-sovereign identity (SSI) approach can help lower the barriers to birth registration by empowering families with a smartphone based process while providing high levels of data privacy and security in populations where birth registration rates are low. The process of birth registration and the barriers experienced by stakeholders are highly contextual. There is currently a gap in the literature with regard to modeling birth registration using SSI technology. This paper describes the development of a smartphone-based prototype system that allows interaction between families and health workers to carry out the initial steps of birth registration and linkage of mothers-baby pairs in an urban Kenyan setting using verifiable credentials, decentralized identifiers, and the emerging standards for their implementation in identity systems. The goal of the project was to develop a high fidelity prototype that could be used to obtain end-user feedback related to the feasibility and acceptability of an SSI approach in a particular Kenyan healthcare context. This paper will focus on how this technology was adapted for the specific context and implications for future research