Journal articles on the topic 'Information security toolkit'

The cyber security toolkit, CyberSecTK, is a simple Python library for preprocessing and feature extraction of cyber-security-related data. As the digital universe expands, more and more data need to be processed using automated approaches. In recent years, cyber security professionals have seen opportunities to use machine learning approaches to help process and analyze their data. The challenge is that cyber security experts do not have necessary trainings to apply machine learning to their problems. The goal of this library is to help bridge this gap. In particular, we propose the development of a toolkit in Python that can process the most common types of cyber security data. This will help cyber experts to implement a basic machine learning pipeline from beginning to end. This proposed research work is our first attempt to achieve this goal. The proposed toolkit is a suite of program modules, data sets, and tutorials supporting research and teaching in cyber security and defense. An example of use cases is presented and discussed. Survey results of students using some of the modules in the library are also presented.

The article represents research and work-out results in the field of applied agent-based decision support system development for regional security management. General problem statement of the regional security management information support is carried out. Modeling and automation tools of security manager activities within the region safeguarding process, interacting in the unified information environment, are proposed. A multi-agent technology for network-centric control information support of regional security has been developed. The technology is based on agent-oriented and system dynamics methodologies integration and use hybrid smart agents with integrated simulation toolkit.

The economic security system is a set of structures or services, the continuous activity of which is aimed at increasing security from external and internal threats and ensuring effective enterprise management. Each enterprise should develop its own system that ensures economic security and takes into account the specifics, organizational structure and scale of financial and economic activities of an economic entity. The purpose of the study is to develop recommendations for improving the methodological tools for ensuring economic security in the personnel management system. The proposed tests for assessing the heads of structural divisions and assessing the personnel management system of the enterprise allow us to evaluate each individual employee and the effectiveness of the personnel management system as a whole. In particular, when selecting heads of structural divisions, it is advisable to take into account such factors as advanced training, the presence of chronic diseases, convictions and administrative offenses, arrears on rent and loans, knowledge of foreign languages, the level of use of a personal computer, etc. On the effectiveness of the personnel management system as a whole the readiness of employees for additional vocational training or advanced training affects; provision of reliable, timely, confidential and accurate information by the internal control system; availability of control of automated information systems and program control of financial and business operations; observance of the official instructions by the personnel; the presence of internal regulatory documents on the protection of personal data and the procedure for managing information activities, as well as a separate economic security service, etc. By analyzing the answers to the questions contained in the tests, it is possible to give a generalized assessment of economic security in the personnel management system, as well as to develop further measures on its increase, including the selection of potential applicants for a certain position

For practical applications and problem-solving of regional security management information support on the basis of combined simulation-expert modeling a special-purpose software system «Network-centric managerial structures synthesizer» has been developed. Software system provides agent-based model automated synthesis and analysis of the networked virtual managerial structures for security support under crisis situations in socio-economic sphere of regional development. System simulation and software toolkit allows alternative modeling scenario spectrum formation, analysis and extension of regional crisis situations. That provides managerial decision-making information probability and validity in the field of regional security support.

Summary Objective: The goal of this research is to provide a framework to enable the model-based development, simulation, and deployment of clinical information system prototypes with mechanisms that enforce security and privacy policies. Methods: We developed the Model-Integrated Clinical Information System (MICIS), a software toolkit that is based on model-based design techniques and highlevel modeling abstractions to represent complex clinical workflows in a service-oriented architecture paradigm. MICIS translates models into executable constructs, such as web service descriptions, business process execution language procedures, and deployment instructions. MICIS models are enriched with formal security and privacy specifications, which are enforced within the execution environment. Results: We successfully validated our design platform by modeling multiple clinical workflows and deploying them onto the execution platform. Conclusions: The model-based approach shows great promise for developing, simulating, and evolving clinical information systems with formal properties and policy restrictions.

For the Ukrainian enterprises it is most expedient to use the Bayesian model because it is simple in implementation, allows for the individuality of each employee’s activity and does not have ethical and legal constraints. Recommendations for introducing comprehensive and integrated personnel security systems for domestic enterprises to improve the practice of psychological diagnostics and monitoring of employee’s actions are given, in particular, improvement of systems for collecting information about employees’ behavioral indicators in the corporate environment and beyond. The necessity of using modern toolkit for diagnosing risks and threats, for instance, OCEAN and CHAMPION systems, is proved, that significantly improves personnel security management in the systems of economic safety of enterprises. It has been determined that according to the criterion of the expenditure, an effective toolkit for identifying insider risks and threats can be a model based on data on social and interactive activities of enterprise employees.

Substantial advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) bring out novel concepts, solutions, trends, and challenges to integrate intelligent and autonomous systems in critical infrastructures. A new generation of ICT environments (such as smart cities, Internet of Things,edge-fog-social-cloudcomputing, and big data analytics) is emerging; it has different applications to critical domains (such as transportation, communication, finance, commerce, and healthcare) and different interconnections via multiple layers of public and private networks, forming a grid of critical cyberphysical infrastructures. Protecting sensitive and private data and services in critical infrastructures is, at the same time, a main objective and a great challenge for deploying secure systems. It essentially requires setting up trusted security policies. Unfortunately, security solutions should remain compliant and regularly updated to follow and track the evolution of security threats. To address this issue, we propose an advanced methodology for deploying and monitoring the compliance of trusted access control policies. Our proposal extends the traditional life cycle of access control policies with pertinent activities. It integrates formal and semiformal techniques allowing the specification, the verification, the implementation, the reverse-engineering, the validation, the risk assessment, and the optimization of access control policies. To automate and facilitate the practice of our methodology, we introduce our systemSVIRVROthat allows managing the extended life cycle of access control policies. We refer to an illustrative example to highlight the relevance of our contributions.

Addressing cyber and privacy risks has never been more critical for organisations. While a number of risk assessment methodologies and software tools are available, it is most often the case that one must, at least, integrate them into a holistic approach that combines several appropriate risk sources as input to risk mitigation tools. In addition, cyber risk assessment primarily investigates cyber risks as the consequence of vulnerabilities and threats that threaten assets of the investigated infrastructure. In fact, cyber risk assessment is decoupled from privacy impact assessment, which aims to detect privacy-specific threats and assess the degree of compliance with data protection legislation. Furthermore, a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) is conducted in a proactive manner during the design phase of a system, combining processing activities and their inter-dependencies with assets, vulnerabilities, real-time threats and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that may occur during the dynamic life-cycle of systems. In this paper, we propose a cyber and privacy risk management toolkit, called AMBIENT (Automated Cyber and Privacy Risk Management Toolkit) that addresses the above challenges by implementing and integrating three distinct software tools. AMBIENT not only assesses cyber and privacy risks in a thorough and automated manner but it also offers decision-support capabilities, to recommend optimal safeguards using the well-known repository of the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Controls. To the best of our knowledge, AMBIENT is the first toolkit in the academic literature that brings together the aforementioned capabilities. To demonstrate its use, we have created a case scenario based on information about cyber attacks we have received from a healthcare organisation, as a reference sector that faces critical cyber and privacy threats.

Background: The increase of healthcare digitalization comes along with potential information security risks. Thus, the EU H2020 KONFIDO project aimed to provide a toolkit supporting secure cross-border health data exchange. Methods: KONFIDO focused on the so-called “User Goals”, while also identifying barriers and facilitators regarding eHealth acceptance. Key user scenarios were elaborated both in terms of threat analysis and legal challenges. Moreover, KONFIDO developed a toolkit aiming to enhance the security of OpenNCP, the reference implementation framework. Results: The main project outcomes are highlighted and the “Lessons Learned,” the technical challenges and the EU context are detailed. Conclusions: The main “Lessons Learned” are summarized and a set of recommendations is provided, presenting the position of the KONFIDO consortium toward a robust EU-wide health data exchange infrastructure. To this end, the lack of infrastructure and technical capacity is highlighted, legal and policy challenges are identified and the need to focus on usability and semantic interoperability is emphasized. Regarding technical issues, an emphasis on transparent and standards-based development processes is recommended, especially for landmark software projects. Finally, promoting mentality change and knowledge dissemination is also identified as key step toward the development of secure cross-border health data exchange services.

Today the sumof technologies embodies the universal principle, which destroys the world of traditional representation sofhuman consciousness about the bound ariesof the necessary and possible assymbolic linesof division between good and evil, security and threat, anonymity and publicity. The relevance of the subject determines logosphere technologization of growing human existence that produces the negation of things existing and new information capabilities makes most people very vulnerable and dependent on them. Especially it is realized when technologies are resource policies and government to achieve common interests and the common good. The article is an attempt to analyze the key problems of latent practices of leading countries — the US, Russia and China’s control over «information man» life within national jurisdiction information space through information technology. It emphasizes that with increasing information leading power in world politics security becomes subject of plane rotations both in open and closed day agenda. It is a national information space monitoring and control screening function of the state to neutralize the negative factors of the internal opposition and the pressure of circumstances, which dictates a new global information reality. The main trend that reality consists of challenges and threats related to the use of information resources, which classified information and psychological operations, information aggression, cyber terrorism and cybercrime. It attempts to look at information technology and thinking that they formed as a tool which «transforms man into the system functions», cog of information society and the all-powerful state machine. Developing the idea of human space automation, the system gradually developed a habit of living «seamlessly», «comfortable» and «separately». However, entering into every house as «good» human rationality, technology has become a hostile force that has to control everything and everyone. Man is helpless, and his life is completely transparent. Separately it analyzes control policy of information space and Internet space of USA, Russia and China, which is within national strategies for information security. It underlines the common features and distinguishes features of this policy which are dictated by the level of the national sector of the information economy and the level of implementation of security projects of national and global level. Asitisconcluded in the condition sofin creasing the risks and challenges of the informationenvironmentandinorderto preservesocio-political stability of society, state sthatactas historically veri fiedguardians of social peace will seekto use information technologiesas a latent toolkit for monitoring private life of citizens. As a resource of information security policy, this toolkit all owstotrack negative social trends and respondin a timely way to the irmani festations from the point of view of national interests. First of all, it concerns the risks of making decisionsre latedto terrorist and extremist threats that have become a dangero usside of the life of a modern person.

The actual methods of labor market analysis are based on outdated technologies for collecting information and do not consider the competencies available in the CV and in demand by vacancies. In order to obtain reliable current information on the balance of the workforce quality, as the carrier of certain competencies, and market requirements, the method is proposed for determining the degree of their consistency through the ratio of competencies available to applicants and those requested by employers. The proposed methodology, based on big data technologies, uses artificial intelligence as the main toolkit which makes it possible to quickly and efficiently collect, process and visualize the obtained data, which makes it possible to conduct its further qualitative analysis in the context of the proposed / demanded competencies, professions, regions and types of economic activities. As a practical interpretation of the proposed methodology, the paper analyzes the degree of consistency of existing / demanded competencies in the context of the regions of Belarus.

The purpose of this article is to present the economic and mathematical toolkit for the analysis of information about the shadow activity of subjects of economic crimes and visualization of the structure of the information and analytical system for monitoring the shadow cash flow. The article presents a methodological review of the main provisions of the legal framework and scientific literature in the field of counteraction to legalization (laundering) of criminal proceeds and financing of terrorism. The characteristic of initial data has been given and the algorithm of their analysis has been described. The sequence of actions of users of the developed monitoring system has been revealed, which allows to calculate the minimum value of the shadow cashless cash flow, as well as quantitatively and qualitatively characterize the shadow economy, which is prospective in solving the problems of economic security of Russia.

Under the conditions of today’s megarisks, the general level of instability of the world economy is only rising, the number of unprofitable organizations with overdue debts increases, and this creates additional threats to financial security of the states. In this regard, the presented research results have scientific and applied importance for risk management of financial security of economic entities on the basis of the suggested control and analytical concept. The suggested concept includes; monitoring, diagnostics, prevention of crisis situations, including bankruptcy, corporate fraud or financial irregularities in the economy. Accounting for the specifics of economic entities in the analysis, diagnostics and control of their activities is aimed at developing an effective management system for corporate fraud and bankruptcy prevention. The conceptual principles of information and analytical support, improved methods used in analyzing, evaluating and monitoring financial security contribute to the development of this methodology for economic analysis and control, ensuring their effectiveness and transparency. The comprehensive toolkit offered here for diagnosing financial security allows identifying the areas of increased bankruptcy risks, fraudulent actions or ineffective business management; unify the control process, thereby reducing labor intensity and improving the quality of control measures.

Summary Background: In health applications, and elsewhere, 3D data sets are increasingly accessed through the Internet. To reduce the transfer time while maintaining an unaltered 3D model, adequate compression and decompression techniques are needed. Recently, Grid technologies have been integrated with Web Services technologies to provide a framework for interoperable application-to-application interaction. Objectives: The paper describes an implementation of the Edgebreaker compression technique exploiting web services technology and presents a novel approach for using such services in a Grid Portal. The Grid portal, developed at the CACT/ISUFI of the University of Lecce, allows the processing and delivery of biomedical images (CT – computerized tomography – and MRI – magnetic resonance images) in a distributed environment, using the power and security of computational Grids. Methods: The Edgebreaker Compression Web Service has been deployed on a Grid portal and allows compressing and decompressing 3D data sets using the Globus toolkit GSI (Globus Security Infrastructure) protocol. Moreover, the classical algorithm has been modified extending the compression to files containing more than one object. Results and Conclusions: An implementation of the Edgebreaker compression technique and related experimental results are presented. A novel approach for using the compression web service in a Grid portal allowing storing and preprocessing of huge 3D data sets, and subsequent efficient transmission of results for remote visualization is also described.

The desire for eHealth systems is ever-growing as public institutions, healthcare providers, and its users see the positive gains from having systems of patient health information held in a single place; a decentralized connected architecture called blockchain. This concept can solve the interoperability issues and integrate the fragmented way healthcare records are held and present a more transparent, secure method to share data and protect patient privacy. The aim of this article is to provide a supportive environment for the health and social care workplace with special reference in the Primary Care sector in England on the impact and changes to the information governance toolkit (IGTK) as a result of the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force from May 2018. These challenges will also include the implementation of the National Data Guardian (NDG) review of data security and opt-outs amongst others.

The rapid emergence of quantum computing threatens current Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) security standards, mainly, American Gas Association (AGA)-12. Therefore, researchers are developing various security schemes based on either quantum or post-quantum algorithms. However, the efficiency of quantum algorithms impacts the security of the post-quantum digital signature scheme. We propose an intrusion resistant algorithm exploiting and applying quantum principles in the post-quantum signature algorithm. We use the Bennett 1992 (B92) protocol, a quantum key distribution scheme, to obtain the cipher, and the practical Stateless Hash-based Signatures (SPHINCS)-256 protocol to obtain a post-quantum signature. However, instead of Chacha-12, a well-known cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator, we apply a quantum random number generator to obtain a truly random Hash to Obtain Random Subset (HORS) signature with Tree (HORST) secret key used in SPHINCS-256. We have implemented the design in Python with the Quantum Information Toolkit. We have validated the proposed algorithm using the Probabilistic Model Checking for Performance and Reliability Analysis (PRISM) and Scyther tools. Moreover, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) statistical tests show that the proposed algorithm key pairs have randomness of 98% and RSA and ECDSA are below 96%.

Purpose Criteria to determine in which level of security forensic patients should receive treatment are currently non-existent in Belgium. Research regarding the assessment of security level is minimal and few instruments are available. The DUNDRUM toolkit is a structured clinical judgement instrument that can be used to provide support when determining security level. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the applicability and validity of the DUNDRUM-1 in Flanders. Design/methodology/approach The DUNDRUM-1 was scored for 50 male patients admitted at the forensic units in the public psychiatric hospital Rekem. Some files were rated by three researchers who were blind to participants’ security status, resulting in 33 double measurements. Findings Almost all files (96 per cent) contained enough information to score the DUNDRUM-1. Average DUNDRUM-1 final judgement scores were concordant with a medium security profile. No difference was found between the current security levels and the DUNDRUM-1 final judgement scores. Inter-rater reliability was excellent for the DUNDRUM-1 final judgement scores. On item level, all items had excellent to good inter-rater reliability with the exception of one item institutional behaviour which had an average inter-rater reliability. Practical implications The DUNDRUM-1 can be a useful tool in Flemish forensic settings. It has good psychometric properties. More research is needed to investigate the relationship between DUNDRUM-1 scores and security level decisions by the courts. Originality/value This is the first study that investigated the applicability of the DUNDRUM-1 in a Belgian setting, also a relative large number of repeated measurements were available to investigate the inter-rater reliability of the DUNDRUM-1.

Urgency of the research. Functioning of the mechanism of ensuring financial economic security within the system of strategic management of a business entity is based on the use of information and analytical support along with economic mathematical modeling. Target setting. Economic mathematical modeling has a significant cognitive potential to describe the laws and patterns of the studied systems functioning. Its use leads to the formation of the main tasks for ensuring the financial economic security system and the creation of the concept of modeling such a system as a theoretical foundation to shape a model basis of its description. Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. The issues of the managerial mechanisms for the financial economic security formation and the modeling tools use are highlighted in the scientific publications by O. Zyhriy, T. Vasyltsiv, L. Menggang, D. Nanto, J. Jürjens, O. Illiashenko, V. Heiets, and many others. Uninvestigated parts of general matters defining. The issue of creating a holistic system of scientific and theoretical positions regarding the use of means of economic mathematical modeling is not sufficiently studied now. The research objective of this article is to identify the main tasks of modeling the composing parts of the financial economic security system and to shape conceptual provisions aimed at designing the appropriate modeling toolkit. The statement of basic materials. A description of the conceptual provisions regarding the modeling of the system of financial economic security in the context of the solution of the main tasks is presented. Conclusions. The presented conception allows identifying the structure of the model basis as a part of the mechanism of ensuring financial economic security. This contributes to the selection of models for solving the issues of forming managerial decisions to provide the required level of security.

Over the past several years, many healthcare applications have been developed to enhance the healthcare industry. Recent advancements in information technology and blockchain technology have revolutionized electronic healthcare research and industry. The innovation of miniaturized healthcare sensors for monitoring patient vital signs has improved and secured the human healthcare system. The increase in portable health devices has enhanced the quality of health-monitoring status both at an activity/fitness level for self-health tracking and at a medical level, providing more data to clinicians with potential for earlier diagnosis and guidance of treatment. When sharing personal medical information, data security and comfort are essential requirements for interaction with and collection of electronic medical records. However, it is hard for current systems to meet these requirements because they have inconsistent security policies and access control structures. The new solutions should be directed towards improving data access, and should be managed by the government in terms of privacy and security requirements to ensure the reliability of data for medical purposes. Blockchain paves the way for a revolution in the traditional pharmaceutical industry and benefits from unique features such as privacy and transparency of data. In this paper, we propose a novel platform for monitoring patient vital signs using smart contracts based on blockchain. The proposed system is designed and developed using hyperledger fabric, which is an enterprise-distributed ledger framework for developing blockchain-based applications. This approach provides several benefits to the patients, such as an extensive, immutable history log, and global access to medical information from anywhere at any time. The Libelium e-Health toolkit is used to acquire physiological data. The performance of the designed and developed system is evaluated in terms of transaction per second, transaction latency, and resource utilization using a standard benchmark tool known as Hyperledger Caliper. It is found that the proposed system outperforms the traditional health care system for monitoring patient data.

Remote rural areas are constrained by lack of reliable power supply, essential for setting up advanced IT infrastructure as servers or storage; therefore, cloud computing comprising an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is well suited to provide such IT infrastructure in remote rural areas. Additional cloud layers of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can be added above IaaS. Cluster-based IaaS cloud can be set up by using open-source middleware Eucalyptus in data centres of NIC. Data centres of the central and state governments can be integrated with State Wide Area Networks and NICNET together to form the e-governance grid of India. Web service repositories at centre, state, and district level can be built over the national e-governance grid of India. Using Globus Toolkit, we can achieve stateful web services with speed and security. Adding the cloud layer over the e-governance grid will make a grid-cloud environment possible through Globus Nimbus. Service delivery can be in terms of web services delivery through heterogeneous client devices. Data mining using Weka4WS and DataMiningGrid can produce meaningful knowledge discovery from data. In this paper, a plan of action is provided for the implementation of the above proposed architecture.

Abstract Education, in general, and environmental education, in special, is salvation and future of mankind, contributing by reorientation and interdisciplinarity of education to strengthening in values, behavior and lifestyles required for sustainable future development. The ecological and economic implications of better use of information on sustainable resource management lead to the development of perspectives, knowledge and skills that are so vital to environmental education (life skills education). Unfortunately, environmental criminality has reached fourth place in the category of illicit activities at the international level. Therefore, detailed knowledge of the relationship between economic fundaments, society and the environment is strictly necessary in order to understand the values that we want to reach, the effect on performance for identifying and promoting quality criteria. These criteria help the development of a toolkit and techniques needed to increase competences and creativity, in the context of opportunities, challenges and barriers imposed by environmental security. Public health, without an adequate living environment, cannot exist and for this reason, a global effort is mandatory to raise awareness and education of the population to fight against environmental crime on our planet.

The paper is devoted to the urgent problem of sustainable and economically secure development of enterprises in the Tver Region peat-extracting sector of the economy. Despite the fact that peat deposits are widespread in many regions of Russia, the efficiency of their industrial and economic use is extremely low. The purpose of the study was to determine the features of the assessment and analysis of the economic security of an enterprise that develops peat deposits. The paper examines the relationship between the concepts of “peat rent” and “economic security”, and also provides the author’s interpretation of their content and essence. An analysis of the existing approaches to assessing the economic security of peat extracting enterprises was carried out, and the use of the rent approach was substantiated based on the data on the peat industry enterprises used in this study. The indicators for assessing the economic security of a peat production were identified. The authors proposed a methodological approach, a feature of which was comprehensive accounting of technical, economic, and natural factors that objectively affected the level of economic security of peat extracting enterprises. The proposed methodological approach also makes it possible to develop recommendations for increasing the flexibility and adaptability of peat extracting enterprises, taking into account the individual conditions of their work. The methodological research toolkit included the fundamentals of economic theory, information methods for processing statistical data, and economic and mathematical modeling. The methodology approbation was carried out through the example of enterprises of the Tver Region peat-extracting industry, which had been at a low ebb (in protracted economic crisis) for a long time. The conclusions, recommendations, and proposals of the study were used in the development of the Regional program “Natural Resources Management and Environmental Protection” for 2017–2022 (Order of the Tver Region Government No. 414-pp of December 26, 2016 as amended on February 7, 2020).

Due to the unreliability of wired communications and the risks of controlling the process of transmitting data besides the complications that affecting data protection and the high costs of systems infrastructure, led to use wireless communications instead of wires media, but these networks are vulnerable towards illegal attacks. The side effects of these attacks are modifying data or penetrate the security system and discover its weaknesses, which leads to great material losses. These risks and difficulties led to the reluctance of wires communications and propose intelligent techniques and robust encryption algorithms for preventing data transmitted over wireless networks to keep it safe from cyber security attacks. So, there is a persistent need for providing intelligent techniques and robust algorithms to preserve conveyed information using wireless network. This paper introduces scenario for proposing intelligent technique to increase data reliability and provides a new way to improve high level of protection besides reduces infrastructure cost. The proposed system relies on two models, where the first model based on producing a knowledge base of risk rules while the aim of the second module is a risk assessment outcomes and encryption process according to attacks type. In this system, reducing risks levels based on renewable rules whereas a novel security system established on non-periodic keys with unsystematic operations using fuzzy system. We concluded that the proposed system has the ability to protect the transmitted data, increases its reliability and reduce the potential risks. MATLAB Toolkit 2014 then Weka open source package was used in encryption and data mining for the proposed system.<iframe class="ginger-extension-definitionpopup" style="left: -91.5px; top: -78px; z-index: 100001; display: none;" src="chrome-extension://kdfieneakcjfaiglcfcgkidlkmlijjnh/content/popups/definitionPopup/index.html?title=Abstract&amp;description=a%20concept%20or%20idea%20not%20associated%20with%20any%20specific%20instance"></iframe>

Face recognition, as one of the major biometrics identification methods, has been applied in different fields involving economics, military, e-commerce, and security. Its touchless identification process and non-compulsory rule to users are irreplaceable by other approaches, such as iris recognition or fingerprint recognition. Among all face recognition techniques, principal component analysis (PCA), proposed in the earliest stage, still attracts researchers because of its property of reducing data dimensionality without losing important information. Nevertheless, establishing a PCA-based face recognition system is still time-consuming, since there are different problems that need to be considered in practical applications, such as illumination, facial expression, or shooting angle. Furthermore, it still costs a lot of effort for software developers to integrate toolkit implementations in applications. This paper provides a software framework for PCA-based face recognition aimed at assisting software developers to customize their applications efficiently. The framework describes the complete process of PCA-based face recognition, and in each step, multiple variations are offered for different requirements. Some of the variations in the same step can work collaboratively and some steps can be omitted in specific situations; thus, the total number of variations exceeds 150. The implementation of all approaches presented in the framework is provided.

Research question: This paper, on the example of strategic alliances in the automotive industry, investigates how diagrams could be useful in studying complex power relationships. Motivation: The relative power of individuals and institutions is a crucial driving force of their interactions. It is however hard to evaluate because the interactions can take place simultaneously or sequentially in different markets or forums. Diagrams of power, that this study introduces, help us abstract the relative power of agents. This enables us to use insights of decision and game theory, especially those from the literature, in strategic decision making under uncertainty (Courtney, Kirkland, & Viguerie, 1997), to arrive at successful and sustainable solutions. They enable us to view relationships between firms as security dilemmas (Posen, 1993), which can explain why emerging market multinationals (EMMs) treat the acquired companies as strategic partners (Kale, Singh, & Raman, 2009). Idea: Diagrams of power and security dilemma help us better understand strategic alliances in the automotive industry. Moreover, we believe that diagrams of power could both offer new insights to scholars and represent an intuitive tool for businessmen and policy makers less experienced with advanced mathematical methods. Data: To quantify the power of several automotive producers, we have used selected contemporary data items from their annual reports and the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers. Tools: The tool we introduce to better understand power relationships between automotive producers are the diagrams of power. We then apply them to two cases from the industry to better understand the strategic interactions within alliances. Findings: We demonstrate that diagrams of power can help managers define the goals of strategic alliances, minimize the risks of their establishment and management, and recognize the problems and opportunities that arise in strategic partnerships due to security dilemmas, a concept that originated in the study of wars. Diagrams of power enrich the analytical toolkit of the existing literature, enabling faster understanding of the relationship between agents as well as decision making based on more complete information. Contribution: This paper introduces diagrams of power – a tool for study of strategic interactions – and applies the concept of security dilemma to the study of the automotive industry.

Introduction. The article is a survey study, the purpose of which is to analyze the evolution of concepts in the field of political сommunicativistics, aimed at understanding the role of information in the system of political processes from the middle of the 20th Century to the present day. Methods and materials. As the main toolkit for working with scientific texts, methods of qualitative text analysis, focused on the study of the conceptual description of social problems, aspects of the interaction between government and society were used. As materials for the analysis, the texts of Russian and foreign scientists devoted to the study of the role of information in public administration and in political processes and published in one of the leading scientific periodicals or central scientific publishing houses were used. Analysis. The article establishes the objective factors of enhancing scientific research in the subject area of political сommunicativistics in the 20th Century, examines the modern understanding of the role of information in the processes of public administration, the influence of the general information theory and the cybernetic approach on the development of Russian political communication. Result. Modern political science concepts do not demonstrate a unified understanding of the “information future” image that emerges under the influence of the “digital revolution”. The range of approaches is wide, from the libertarian assumption of a gradual weakening of the state functions and the transition to direct democracy, when citizens are in direct contact with each other using the technologies of the information and communication system of Internet and do not need the mediation of professional state administrators, to the revival of totalitarian forms of government based on control over information flows. The tendency of Russian scientists to correlate with the trends of state policy, shifting their research topics to the political aspects of information security, social networks and the activity of opposition public associations on the Internet, was revealed as the dominant trend at the current stage. This trend is ambiguous – it corresponds to the nature of modern challenges and threats in the information sphere, but in the future it can negatively affect the volume and quality of fundamental theoretical developments, and decrease the interest in them.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis that has gripped the world, causing governments and development agencies to search for critical measures to protect their people. The situation not only represents a significant health risk but has resulted in school closures that have disrupted agricultural education. This impedes the attainment of Africa’s larger food security and rural transformation agendas. Six months before the advent of the pandemic, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture initiated a pilot project, Start Them Early Program (STEP) whose goal is to reinforce pathways to careers in agriculture within secondary schools in DR Congo, Kenya, and Nigeria. The project has now been forced to rethink its approach while embracing information and communication technologies due to the school closures. This paper describes the process involved in that operational pivot, particularly concerning the shift from electronic teaching by instructors towards distance electronic learning by students. Key issues addressed are the consolidation of digital applications, development of a mobile-based toolbox for use by young farmers, and constraints to device ownership. The means of addressing these concerns through working with instructors and their larger school systems are explained. Action points and resources that are recommended include the distribution of upgraded instructor workstations, a listing of relevant software applications, and the design of a mobile-based all-in-one toolkit for agriculture students and young farmers. The latter two developments have wider application in the reform of agricultural extension amongst the tech-savvy youth taking up agribusiness.

In its commitment towards Sustainable Development Goals, India envisages comprehensive primary health services as a key pillar in achieving universal health coverage. Embedded in siloed vertical programmes, their lack of interoperability and standardisation limits sustainability and hence their benefits have not been realised yet. We propose an enterprise architecture framework that overcomes these challenges and outline a robust futuristic digital health infrastructure for delivery of efficient and effective comprehensive primary healthcare. Core principles of an enterprise platform architecture covering four platform levers to facilitate seamless service delivery, monitor programmatic performance and facilitate research in the context of primary healthcare are listed. A federated architecture supports the custom needs of states and health programmes through standardisation and decentralisation techniques. Interoperability design principles enable integration between disparate information technology systems to ensure continuum of care across referral pathways. A responsive data architecture meets high volume and quality requirements of data accessibility in compliance with regulatory requirements. Security and privacy by design underscore the importance of building trust through role-based access, strong user authentication mechanisms, robust data management practices and consent. The proposed framework will empower programme managers with a ready reference toolkit for designing, implementing and evaluating primary care platforms for large-scale deployment. In the context of health and wellness centres, building a responsive, resilient and reliable enterprise architecture would be a fundamental path towards strengthening health systems leveraging digital health interventions. An enterprise architecture for primary care is the foundational building block for an efficient national digital health ecosystem. As citizens take ownership of their health, futuristic digital infrastructure at the primary care level will determine the health-seeking behaviour and utilisation trajectory of the nation.

This paper discusses the changes in the key factors of socioeconomic development in Ukraine related to the transition to an innovation-driven economy, the most important of which are the availability and development of human resources that Ukraine is rapidly losing in the context of intensified external migration flows. The purpose of the article is to shape an institutional support framework to facilitate government migration management policy in Ukraine. The theoretical and methodological background of the research relies on scientific advances in migration, institutional and social economics theories. The methods of generalization and synthesis used in the study allowed to formulate research findings and develop proposals. The study presents a toolkit to ensure robust government migration management policy realization in Ukraine that in the first place envisages the need to develop and implement the concept of migration services infrastructure development, programs to encourage re-emigration of student and labor migrants and attain convergence of Ukrainian legislation with legislation of major recipient countries through international social security agreements enabling migrant pension applications, deepening of the cooperation between trade unions and migrant associations in recipient countries as well as with trade unions of EU citizens to develop a mechanism to ensure social protection of migrant workers. This study suggests an effective management mechanism to provide institutional support through launching of information and resource centres under the auspices of the State Migration Service of Ukraine, ensuring successful implementation of grant programs of international organizations and funds to create structures at border service offices, further development of financial institutions (funds, unions or investment banks) to foster effective migration remittance transfers to the real sector of the economy, creating strategic alliances between international corporations and institutions of higher education.

This paper aims to introduce the main aspects arising in the organisational context related to leadership roles when information security awareness is being engineered and developed according to purposes set within. Achieving these development purposes is connected to the commanding function of leadership, while being influenced by key human risk factors such as: leadership commitment and example setting, leadership quality, the state of being motivated and above all, the ability of responsible decision- making on a professional basis. In order to improve the effectiveness of putting the implementation into practice, a methodological toolset needs to be elaborated for the disposal of the leader, thanks to which, besides taking on a transactional leadership style and a cyclic program management, the continuous monitoring and tailoring to the organisation of the development purposes all become facilitated.

With regard to the threats of information society nowadays, the digital asset management and the safety of the related information systems as well as critical infrastructure elements became highly important. The defence of cyberspace itself evolved as a social necessity. This paper aims to provide an overview of how each of the occurring human risk factors influence the effectuation of information security purposes of firms and/or organisations operating critical infrastructure or critical information infrastructure, as well as the engineering of their data processing and data analytics procedures. Moreover, the helpful role of the possible methodological toolset (connected to HR, management and risk management) is also assessed in the context of managing and improving information security awareness.

Purpose After over 30 years’ reform and opening-up, China as the second largest economy is now facing the most essential transformation of management philosophy and the biggest challenging issue of business sustainable development, with people’s increasing worry of the deterioration of environmental pollution, food security and human health. It can be said that what China needs urgently today is business ethical value and long-term sustainable development concept, rather than rapidly growing GDP. The purpose of this paper is to assess how the term “sustainable development” is constructed and valued in the sustainability reports or corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports of Chinese corporations, so as to interpret these Chinese firms’ conception of sustainable development in their real business practices. Design/methodology/approach A corpus of sustainability reports collected from 30 Chinese corporations totaling 247,311 tokens is first of all compiled to realize the objective of study. Then the authors use the AntConc, a corpus analysis toolkit, to generate word lists, key-word-in-context concordances and collocation lists, as well as calculating statistical significance measures for collocates, of which the mutual information (MI) score 3 is most relevant to the paper’s purposes. Based on the key-word-in-context concordance and collocation list, the authors can find what context “sustainable development” usually appears in sustainability reports, thus inferring Chinese corporations’ conception of sustainable development. Findings The result indicates that Chinese corporations use the rhetoric of weak sustainability, indicating that sustainable development is compatible with further economic growth, which means that Chinese corporations in current China, strongly promoting the concept of new normal economy, still put economic growth as a dominant goal, on which other dimensions of sustainability like environmental protection depend. Research limitations/implications The data gleaned in current corpus are limited to the sustainability reports in 2014 thus the study provides no hints as to diachronic trends. However, this study increases our understanding of how Chinese corporations attach value to sustainable development from the view of corpus analysis. Originality/value Different from traditional discourse analysis, which usually carries out qualitative analysis to analyze how a word or phrase is constructed in a small number of texts, the authors’ study innovatively introduces the method of corpus analysis to explore how Chinese corporations construct “sustainable development” in their sustainability reports. Thus, the number of texts analyzed is larger in the authors’ study and their findings are more representative and convincing. The authors create a more qualitative understanding of what the reports are actually saying on their reports and prove that corpus methods can bring new application to the discourse analysis of the biggest challenging issue of China’s future economic growth, suggesting a potential novel way to work out the meaning and implication of sustainable development in Chinese real business world.

The authors proposed to design and implement a prototype research electronic automated teller machine service using Windows Communication Foundation to study the performance and scalability of implementing Web Service Security policy. The software chosen for building the service are C# programming language, Internet Information Service web server, Microsoft Structured Query Language database server and Visual Studio.NET Integrated Design Environment as development toolkits. To evaluate the different performance metrics, the Windows Communication Foundation Service has been tested by using testing tool Mercury LoadRunner, version 8.1. In this paper, the authors will present the architecture of the service, its testing procedures, and statistical analysis of the system performance.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) has become prevalent, a massive number of logs produced by IoT devices are transmitted and processed every day. The logs should contain important contents and private information. Moreover, these logs may be used as evidences for forensic investigations when cyber security incidents occur. However, evidence legality and internal security issues in existing works were not properly addressed. This paper proposes an autonomous log storage management protocol with blockchain mechanism and access control for the IoT. Autonomous model allows sensors to encrypt their logs before sending it to gateway and server, so that the logs are not revealed to the public during communication process. Along with blockchain, we introduce the concept “signature chain”. The integration of blockchain and signature chain provides efficient management functions with valuable security properties for the logs, including robust identity verification, data integrity, non-repudiation, data tamper resistance, and the legality. Our work also employs attribute-based encryption to achieve fine-grained access control and data confidentiality. The results of security analysis using AVSIPA toolset, GNY logic and semantic proof indicate that the proposed protocol meets various security requirements. Providing good performance with elliptic curve small key size, short BLS signature, efficient signcryption method, and single sign-on solution, our work is suitable for the IoT.

Abstract Within the realm of climate and environmental sciences, stakeholder engagement has traditionally been given a relative low priority in favor of generating tools, products, and services following the longstanding practice of pushing out information in the hopes users will pull it into their decision toolkits. However, the landscape is gradually shifting away from that paradigm and toward one in which the stakeholder community is more directly involved in the production of products and services with the scientific organization. This mutual learning arrangement, referred to as the coproduction of knowledge, has been applied to two user engagement activities within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the NOAA Office of Coastal Management (OCM) Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP). The iterative nature of such dialogues helped scientists within NCEI and OCM to better understand user requirements and as a result generate climate information that was locally relevant and regionally applicable. The recent engagement activities exemplified the benefits of a robust and sustained relationship between climate scientists and the user community. They demonstrate that the interactions between the two led to the empowerment of the local community to shape and mold climate information products as well as further enhancing user buy in of these products and services with which local agriculture and food security, disaster risk reduction, energy, health, and water decisions are being made. This coproduction of knowledge model for user engagement activities also serves to build trust between the scientific and user communities.

The subject of the study is a set of theoretical and methodological foundations, as well as econometric tools for substantiating the representation of the shadow economy as a negative factor for the development of the Ukrainian economy. The purpose of the study is to empirically analyze the peculiarities of the impact of the main factors and risks on the level of the shadow sector in Ukraine and other countries in the world, as well as to determine the strategic directions for further reducing of shadow part of Ukrainian economy with the use of the developed econometric toolkit. Such general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis as methods of comparative analysis, generalization, systematization, and grouping of data, methods of graphic and scenario analysis, as well as econometric tools, in particular methods and models of panel (longitudinal) data wereused in the process of research. Results. A significant amount of the shadow sector in Ukraine poses additional threats to the effective functioning of the economy and its economic development, especially in conditions of political and economic instability. The conducted statistical and empirical analysis confirmed the hypothesis that during a deep economic crisis, the shadow economy may not only be a consequence but also a cause of a growing fall in gross domestic product and, in turn, can aggravate a crisis that is also characteristic of the Ukrainian economy. Even though in recent years there has been a tendency of reducing the shadow level of the Ukrainian economy, it is still a considerable amount, which threatens the financial and economic security of the state and requires the formation of a scientifically grounded strategy for its lowering. The current situation requires not only an adequate definition of the sources of the shadow economy, mechanisms and development, the relationship with the formal economy but also the definition of the main factors affecting its level, as well as quantitative assessment of such impact using economic and mathematical methods of research. The empirical analysis of the impact of the main financial and economic indicators on the level of the shadow economy on the basis of panel data tools for a sample of more than 31 countries of the world allowed to identify not only the main macroeconomic factors affecting the shadow economy, taking into account the specifics of each individual state, but also significantly increase the number of observations and thus increase the accuracy of calculations in the conditions of limited information in a time dimension. Besides, the presentation of countries of different groups in the sample allows, for example, to measure how the country's entry into the European Union affects the level of the shadow economy and whether it affects it overall. According to the modeling results, the clustering of the countries was carried out depending on the level of the shadow sector and the initial conditions for the tendency to shadow. The hypothesis is that the shadow economy of Ukraine exists and even develops in favorable terms that are accompanied by low rates of social and economic development, the imperfection of the legislative and the judicial system, the complexity of opening and doing business, a rather high level of tax rates and a significant spread of corruption. Moreover, a scenario analysis based on the developed model showed that, in the wake of the economic crisis, the shadow economy of Ukraine would tend to increase, which will further deepen the economic downturn in the country in the medium term. Accordingly, the definition of strategic directions for lowering the part of the shadow economy in Ukraine becomes one of the priority tasks of its economic policy. The results of the study can be used by public authorities to form economic policies and strategic directions aimed at ensuring a gradual reduction of the shadow economy in Ukraine, enhancing its financial security and economic development. Conclusions. The presence of the shadow sector is characteristic for almost all countries in the world, but under current conditions of economic development, a significant part of shadow economy becomes an obstacle to the development of a robust corporate sector, the establishment of a functioning market economy and economic growth. The statistical and empirical comparative analysis of the factors influencing the level of shadowing of the economy of different countries confirms the fact that due to imperfect economic, social and legal reforms, many of them still have a high level of the shadow economy, including Ukraine, which negatively affects the level of its economic development. Moreover, according to the optimistic scenario based on the developed econometric model of panel data, the positive dynamics of the gradual reduction of the level of shadow economy to 30.2% of the country's GDP in 2022 were obtained. Despite that fact, according to more realistic assumptions, the growth of the shadow sector is somewhat probable to the level that far exceeds its current value. Accordingly, the definition of strategic directions for further reducing of shadow part of the Ukrainian economy is one of the critical tasks of its economic policy. At the same time, as statistical and empirical studies have shown, the effectiveness of the policy of deterrence should increase as a result of the implementation of elaborate measures aimed, in particular, at reducing the impact of factors that increase the level of the shadow economy in the country; increase of expenses from attraction to shadow activity and riskiness for its participants; raising public awareness about the harmful effects of shadow economy; growth of personal income and living standards of the population, etc.

Information and communication technology (ICT) managers in the modern enterprises face a bewildering array of decisions regarding planning of new systems, integration of new systems with existing ones, securing the ICT assets, and administrating the resulting complex ICT systems. The rapid introduction of wireless systems (mobile computing and wireless communications) in the business and government settings is further exasperating the situation, particularly in the developing countries. A Computer Aided Planner (Planner), part of the UN eNabler Toolset, has been developed to quickly and effectively produce detailed strategic plans for a wide range of egovernment services with particular attention to wireless systems. This paper presents a high level overview of this effort.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is commonly known as one of the most effective programs to use in the face of crisis, incident, and disaster, specifically for organizations to continue or resume their operations. Over time, the concept has gained popularity and has developed into one of the strategies in a resilience plan. The purpose of this study is to explore the trend of BCM, the subject, and the relationship between BCM and associated study fields through a preliminary systematic literature review. This research used the articles from ScienceDirect database from January 1, 1999, to December 31, 2018. This study analyzed the collected articles using their publication years, journal titles, countries, and relevant study fields. The result found that several papers have been published since 1999, which focus predominantly on the BCM standard. The rate of publication on BCM had escalated in 2015. There were 82 papers about BCM. The issues were categorized into ten main subjects. Among them, the most frequently mentioned are Information Technology (IT) security, followed by implementing BCM into diverse study disciplines, implementing new toolkits into BCM associated studies, BCM improvement, resilience, lessons learned, supply chain, and BCM advantages. The gap of the research lays a foundation for future studies in similar fields.

Introduction. Aviation psychology is a sphere of psychology that makes a significant contribution to ensuring aviation safety. The changes taking place at different levels of aviation psychology methodology require prompt reflection and critical assessment for prognostication of its further development. The purpose of this paper is to study the current stage of aviation psychology development in science and education, based on the materials from foreign and Russian sources. Materials and methods. The research materials represent a corpus of articles of foreign and Russian periodicals, collections of applied research conferences, monographs, and training toolkits. The research method represents the analysis of aviation psychology development directions, along with the consideration of peculiarities of the Russian aviation psychology development. Results. Aviation psychologists investigate the causes of aviation accidents caused by the human factor, improve the methods of psychological selection and simulator training, resolve the problems of optimisation of aircraft-specific work and find prerequisites for efficient operation of unmanned aerial vehicles in the conditions of the technological progress in the aerospace industry. Aviation psychology is taught at specialised higher education institutions and aviation training centres. Aviation psychology is in possession of inexhaustible cognitive resources for vocational guidance of young people. Conclusion. The current state of development of aviation psychology in science and education makes it possible to solve the pressing tasks aimed at increasing the reliability of aviation as a defence transport system. Most publications are related to engineering and psychological tasks involved in securing flight safety in the context of cockpit and control equipment ergonomics design, information support for pilots; improving the methodology of flight- and ground training of pilots based on digital technologies; development of interfaces for operators of remotely piloted aircraft. Russian aviation psychology is characterised by the orientation towards cultivating the cultural, historical, and moral foundations of professionalism in aviation.

Nowadays, there are many discussions on the fourth industrial revolution with a combination of real physical and virtual systems (Cyber Physical Systems), Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS). Along with this revolution is the rapid development of malicious code on IoT devices, leading to not only the risk of personal privacy information leaking but also the risk of network security in general. In this paper, we propose C500-toolkit, a novel tool for malware detection in Commercial-off-the-shelf routers, based on dynamic analysis approach. The main contribution of C500-toolkit is to provide an environment for fully emulating router firmware image including both operating system and web-interface. To show the advantage of C500-toolkit, experiments of this tool with embedded malwares Linux/TheMoon and Linux/Mirai are presented

Airports are exposed to various physical incidents that can be classified as aviation and non-aviation related incidents, including terrorist attacks, bombings, natural disasters (e.g. earthquake or tsunami and man-made disasters such as terrorist attacks) etc. (Kanyi, Kamau, & Mireri, 2016). In addition to this, cyber-attacks to airport operations are emerging especially with the increasing use of Information Systems (IS), such as electronic tags for baggage handling and tracking, remote check-in, smart boarding gates, faster and more reliable security screening technologies and biometric immigration controls etc. Any physical or cyber incident that causes loss of infrastructure or massive patient surge, such as natural disasters, terrorist acts, or chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive hazards could affect the airports’ services provision and could cause overwhelming pressure. During the crisis management, several stakeholders that have different needs and requirements, get involved in the process, trying to cooperate, respond and support recovery and impact mitigation. The aim of this paper is to present a holistic security agenda that defines the stakeholders involved in the respective processes followed during the crisis management cycle. This agenda is based both on normative literature, such as relevant standards, guidelines, and practices and on knowledge and feedback extrapolated from a case study conducted in the context of the SATIE project (H2020-GA832969). In meeting paper’s aim, initially the normative review of the phases of the crisis management cycle (preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation) in the context of airports as well as general practices applied, are presented. Moreover, the key airport stakeholders and operation centres involved in airports operations, as well as during the crisis management are analysed. By combining the information collected, a holistic cyber and physical crisis management cycle including the stakeholders and the relevant processes are proposed. The crisis management process is taken into consideration into the SATIE project, which aims to build a security toolkit in order to protect critical air transport infrastructures against combined cyber-physical threats. This toolkit will rely on a complete set of semantic rules that will improve the interoperability between existing systems and enhanced security solutions, in order to ensure more efficient threat prevention, threat and anomaly detection, incident response and impact mitigation, across infrastructures, populations and environment.

In the present digital world malware is the most potent weapon. Malware, especially ransomware, is used in security breaches on a large scale which leads to huge losses in terms of money and critical information for big firms and government organisations. In order to counter the future ransomware attacks it is necessary to carry out a forensic analysis of the malware. This experiment proposes a manual method for dynamic malware analysis so that security researchers or malware analyst can easily understand the behaviour of the ransomware and implement a better solution for reducing the risk of malware attack in future. For doing this experiment Volatility, Regshot and FTK Imager Lite Forensics toolkit were used in a virtual and safe environment. The forensic analysis of a Ransomware is done in a virtual setup to prevent any infection to the base machine and carry out detailed analysis of the behaviour of the malware under different conditions. Malware analysis is important because the behavioral analysis helps in developing better mitigation techniques thereby reducing infection risks. The research can prove effective in development of a ransomware decryptor which can be used to recover data after an attack has encrypted the files.

The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM) was deployed in 2014, following a request to the OSCE by Ukrainian government and the decision of Permanent Council. Since then, the OSCE remains the only organization that provides an international presence exactly in the conflict zone in the east of Ukraine. Unarmed civilian observers that represent OSCE participating states provide ongoing monitoring of the events and the security situation on the contact line and all over Ukraine. They monitor and control the implementation of the Minsk agreements, namely, observe the withdrawal of the heavy weapons from the demarcation line, monitor the facts of ceasefire violations, observe the humanitarian and security situation in the conflict zone. They also serve as a communication bridge between different parties of the conflict. By facilitating on-site dialogue, they are trying to reduce tensions and help to normalize the situation in the conflict zone. Information and communication activities are the core activities of the mission, defined by the objectives of its mandate. Communication and information exchange is carried out both by the direct leadership of the Mission, the Chief Monitor, the Deputy Chief Monitor and the observation teams on the ground near the contact line, and in ten regions all over Ukraine. The main target audience of SMM is OSCE’s 57 participating States, however in order to implement the mandate, Mission communicates with various target audiences from civil society representatives to the governmental officials and journalists. In its activities, Mission uses a broad communication toolkit that allows it to perform information interaction with various target audiences, which in turn, contributes significantly to the effective implementation of the objectives defined in its mandate. Key words: OSCE; OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM); communication; mediation; conflicts.

AbstractComplex human movement patterns driven by a range of economic, health, social, and environmental factors influence communicable disease spread. Further, cross-border movement impacts disparate public health systems of neighboring countries, making an effective response to disease importation or exportation more challenging. Despite the array of quantitative techniques and social science approaches available to analyze movement patterns, there continues to be a dearth of methods within the applied public health setting to gather and use information about community-level mobility dynamics. Population Connectivity Across Borders (PopCAB) is a rapidly-deployable toolkit to characterize multisectoral movement patterns through community engagement using focus group discussions or key informant interviews, each with participatory mapping, and apply the results to tailor preparedness and response strategies. The Togo and Benin Ministries of Health (MOH), in collaboration with the Abidjan Lagos Corridor Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adapted and applied PopCAB to inform cross-border preparedness and response strategies for multinational Lassa fever outbreaks. Initially, the team implemented binational, national-level PopCAB activities in March 2017, highlighting details about a circular migration pathway across northern Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. After applying those results to respond to a cross-border Lassa fever outbreak in February 2018, the team designed an expanded PopCAB initiative in April 2018. In eight days, they trained 54 MOH staff who implemented 21 PopCAB focus group discussions in 14 cities with 224 community-level participants representing six stakeholder groups. Using the newly-identified 167 points of interest and 176 routes associated with a circular migration pathway across Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, the Togo and Benin MOH refined their cross-border information sharing and collaboration processes for Lassa fever and other communicable diseases, selected health facilities with increased community connectivity for enhanced training, and identified techniques to better integrate traditional healers in surveillance and community education strategies. They also integrated the final toolkit in national- and district-level public health preparedness plans. Integrating PopCAB in public health practice to better understand and accommodate population movement patterns can help countries mitigate the international spread of disease in support of improved global health security and International Health Regulations requirements.

Increased maritime activities and rapid environmental change pose significant hazards, both natural and technological, to Arctic maritime operators and coastal communities. Currently, U.S. and foreign research activities account for more than half of the sustained hazard-relevant observations in the U.S. maritime Arctic, but hazard assessment and emergency response are hampered by a lack of dedicated hazard monitoring installations in the Arctic. In the present study, we consider a number of different sustained environmental observations associated with research into atmosphere-ice-ocean processes, and discuss how they can help support the toolkit of emergency responders. Building on a case study at Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, we investigate potential hazards in the seasonally ice-covered coastal zone. Guided by recent incidents requiring emergency response, we analyze data from coastal radar and other observing assets, such as an ice mass balance site and oceanographic moorings, in order to outline a framework for coastal maritime hazard assessments that builds on diverse observing systems infrastructure. This approach links Arctic system science research to operational information needs in the context of the development of a Common Operational Picture (COP) for Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) relevant for Arctic coastal and offshore regions. A COP in these regions needs to consider threats not typically part of the classic MDA framework, including sea ice or slow-onset hazards. An environmental security and MDA testbed is proposed for northern Alaska, building on research and community assets to help guide a hybrid research-operational framework that supports effective emergency response in Arctic regions.

Abstract Motivation Biological rhythmicity is fundamental to almost all organisms on Earth and plays a key role in health and disease. Identification of oscillating signals could lead to novel biological insights, yet its investigation is impeded by the extensive computational and statistical knowledge required to perform such analysis. Results To address this issue, we present DiscoRhythm (Discovering Rhythmicity), a user-friendly application for characterizing rhythmicity in temporal biological data. DiscoRhythm is available as a web application or an R/Bioconductor package for estimating phase, amplitude, and statistical significance using four popular approaches to rhythm detection (Cosinor, JTK Cycle, ARSER, and Lomb-Scargle). We optimized these algorithms for speed, improving their execution times up to 30-fold to enable rapid analysis of -omic-scale datasets in real-time. Informative visualizations, interactive modules for quality control, dimensionality reduction, periodicity profiling, and incorporation of experimental replicates make DiscoRhythm a thorough toolkit for analyzing rhythmicity. Availability and Implementation The DiscoRhythm R package is available on Bioconductor (https://bioconductor.org/packages/DiscoRhythm), with source code available on GitHub (https://github.com/matthewcarlucci/DiscoRhythm) under a GPL-3 license. The web application is securely deployed over HTTPS (https://disco.camh.ca) and is freely available for use worldwide. Local instances of the DiscoRhythm web application can be created using the R package or by deploying the publicly available Docker container (https://hub.docker.com/r/mcarlucci/discorhythm). Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

A rhetoric of freedom characterises much of the literature dealing with online communities: freedom from fixed identity and appearance, from the confines of geographic space, and from control. The prevailing view, a combination of futurism and utopianism, is that the lack of order in cyberspace enables the creation of social spaces that will enhance personal freedom and advance the common good. Sherry Turkle argues that computer-mediated communication allows us to create a new form of community, in which identity is multiple and fluid (15-17). Marcos Novak celebrates the possibilities of a dematerialized, ethereal virtual architecture in which the relationships between abstract elements are in a constant state of flux (250). John Perry Barlow employs the frontier metaphor to frame cyberspace as an unmapped, ungoverned territory in which a romantic and a peculiarly American form of individualism can be enjoyed by rough and ready pioneers (“Crime” 460). In his 1993 account as an active participant in The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), one of the earliest efforts to construct a social space online, Howard Rheingold celebrates the freedom to create a “new kind of culture” and an “authentic community” in the “electronic frontier.” He worries, however, that the freedom enjoyed by early homesteaders may be short lived, because “big power and big money” might soon find ways to control the Internet, just as they have come to dominate and direct other communications media. “The Net,” he states, “is still out of control in fundamental ways, but it might not stay that way for long” (Virtual Community 2-5). The uses of order and disorder Some theorists have identified disorder as a necessary condition for the development of healthy communities. In The Uses of Disorder (1970), Richard Sennett argues that “the freedom to accept and to live with disorder” is integral to our search for community (xviii). In his 1989 study of social space, Ray Oldenburg maintains that public hangouts, which constitute the heart of vibrant communities, support sociability best when activities are unplanned, unorganized, and unrestricted (33). He claims that without the constraints of preplanned control we will be more in control of ourselves and more aware of one another (198). More recently, Charles Landry suggests that “structured instability” and “controlled disruption,” resulting from competition, conflict, crisis, and debate, make cities less comfortable but more exciting. Further, he argues that “endemic structural disorder” requiring ongoing adjustments can generate healthy creative activity and stimulate continual innovation (156-58). Kevin Robins, too, believes that any viable social system must be prepared to accept a level of uncertainty, disorder, and fear. He observes, however, that techno-communities are “driven by the compulsion to neutralize,” and they therefore exclude these possibilities in favour of order and security (90-91). Indeed, order and security are the dominant characteristics that less idealistic observers have identified with cyberspace. Alexander Galloway explains how, despite its potential as a liberating development, the Internet is based on technologies of control. This control is exercised at the code level through technical protocols, such as TCP/IP, DNS, and HTM, that determine disconnections as well as connections (Galloway). Lawrence Lessig suggests that in our examination of the ownership, regulation, and governance of the virtual commons, we must take into account three distinct layers. As well as the “logical” or “code” layer that Galloway foregrounds, we should also consider the “physical” layer, consisting of the computers and wires that carry Internet communications, and the “content” layer, which includes everything that we see and hear over the network. In principle, each of these layers could be free and unorganized, or privately owned and controlled (Lessig 23). Dan Schiller documents the increasing privatization of the Net and argues that corporate cyberspace extends the reach of the market, enabling it to penetrate into areas that have previously been considered to be part of the public domain. For Schiller, the Internet now serves as the main production and control mechanism of a global market system (xiv). Checking into Habbo Hotel Habbo Hotel is an example of a highly ordered and controlled online social space that uses community and game metaphors to suggest something much more open and playful. Designed to attract the teenage market, this graphically intensive cartoon-like hotel is like an interactive Legoland, in which participants assemble a toy-like “Habbo” character and chat, play games, and construct personal environments. The first Habbo Hotel opened its doors in the United Kingdom in 2000, and, by September 2004, localized sites were based in a dozen countries, including Canada, the Unites States, Finland, Japan, Switzerland and Spain, with further expansion planned. At that time, there were more than seventeen million registered Habbo characters worldwide with 2.3 million unique visitors each month (“Strong Growth”). The hotel contains thousands of private rooms and twenty-two public spaces, including a welcome lounge, three lobbies, cinema, game hall, café, pub, and an extensive hallway. Anyone can go to the Room-O-Matic and instantly create a free guest room. However, there are a limited number of layouts to choose from and the furnishings, which must be purchased, have be chosen from a catalog of fixed offerings. All rooms are located on one of five floors, which categorize them according to use (parties, games, models, mazes, and trading). Paradoxically, the so-called public spaces are more restricted and less public than the private guest quarters. The limited capacity of the rooms means that all of the public spaces are full most of the time. Priority is given to paying Habbo Club members and others are denied entry or are unceremoniously ejected from a room when it becomes full. Most visitors never make it into the front lobby. This rigid and restricted construction is far from Novak’s vision of a “liquid architecture” without barriers, that morphs in response to the constantly changing desires of individual inhabitants (Novak 250). Before entering the virtual hotel, individuals must first create a Lego-like avatar. Users choose a unique name for their Habbo (no foul language is allowed) and construct their online persona from a limited selection and colour of body parts. One of two different wardrobes is available, depending on whether “Boy” or “Girl” is chosen. The gender of every Habbo is easily recognizable and the restricted wardrobe results in remarkably similar looking young characters. The lack of differentiation encourages participants to treat other Habbos as generic “Boys” or “Girls” and it encourages limited and predictable conversations that fit the stereotype of male-female interactions in most chat sites. Contrary to Turkle’s contention that computer mediated communication technologies expose the fallacy of a single, fixed, identity, and free participants to experiment with alternative selves (15-17), Habbo characters are permitted just one unchangeable name, and are capable of only limited visual transformations. A fixed link between each Habbo character and its registered user (information that is not available to other participants) allows the hotel management to track members through the site and monitor their behavior. Habbo movements are limited to walking, waving, dancing and drinking virtual alcohol-free beverages. Movement between spaces is accomplished by entering a teleport booth, or by selecting a location by name from the hotel Navigator. Habbos cannot jump, fly or walk through objects or other Habbos. They have no special powers and only a limited ability to interact with objects in their environment. They cannot be hurt or otherwise affected by anything in their surroundings, including other Habbos. The emphasis is on safety and avoidance of conflict. Text chat in Habbo Hotel is limited to one sixty-one-character line, which appears above the Habbo, floats upward, and quickly disappears off the top of the screen. Text must be typed in real time while reading on-going conversations and it is not possible to archive a chat sessions or view past exchanges. There is no way of posting a message on a public board. Using the Habbo Console, shorter messages can also be exchanged between Habbos who may be occupying different rooms. The only other narratives available on the site are in the form of official news and promotions. Before checking into the hotel, Habbos can stop to read Habbo Today, which promotes current offers and activities, and HabboHood Happenings, which offers safety tips, information about membership benefits, jobs (paid in furniture), contest winners, and polls. According to Rheingold, a virtual community can form online when enough people participate in meaningful public discussions over an extended period of time and develop “webs of personal relationships” (Virtual Community 5). By restricting communication to short, fleeting messages between individual Habbos, the hotel frustrates efforts by members to engage in significant dialogue and create a viable social group. Although “community” is an important part of the Habbo Hotel brand, it is unlikely to be a substantial part of the actual experience. The virtual hotel is promoted as a safe, non-threatening environment suitable for the teenagers is designed to attract. Parents’ concerns about the dangers of an unregulated chat space provide the hotel management with a justification for creating a highly controlled social space. The hotel is patrolled twenty-four hours a day by professional moderators backed-up by a team of 180 volunteer “Hobbas,” or guides, who can issue warnings to misbehaving Habbos, or temporarily ban them from the site. All text keyed in by Habbos passes through an automated “Bobba Filter” that removes swearing, racist words, explicit sexual comments and “anything that goes against the “Habbo Way” (“Bad Language”). Stick to the rules and you’ll have fun, Habbos are told, “break them and you’ll get yourself banned” (“Habbo Way”). In Big Brother fashion, messages are displayed throughought the hotel advising members to “Stay safe, read the Habbohood Watch,” “Never give out your details!” and “Obey the Habbo way and you’ll be OK.” This miniature surveillance society contradicts Barlow’s observation that cyberspace serves as “a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty” (“Crime” 460). In his manifesto declaring the independence of cyberspace from government control, he maintains that the state has no authority in the electronic “global social space,” where, he asserts, “[w]e are forming our own Social Contract” based on the Golden Rule (“Declaration”). However, Habbo Hotel shows how the rule of the marketplace, which values profits more than social practices, can limit the freedoms of online civil society just as effectively as the most draconian government regulation. Place your order Far from permitting the “controlled disruption” advocated by Landry, the hotel management ensures that nothing is allowed to disrupt their control over the participants. Without conflict and debate, there are few triggers for creative activity in the site, which is designed to encourage consumption, not community. Timo Soininen, the managing director of the company that designed the hotel, states that, because teenagers like to showcase their own personal style, “self-expression is the key to our whole concept.” However, since it isn’t possible to create a Habbo from scratch, or to import clothing or other objects from outside the site, the only way for members to effectively express themselves is by decorating and furnishing their room with items purchased from the Habbo Catalogue. “You see, this,” admits Soininen, “is where our revenue model kicks in” (Shalit). Real-world products and services are also marketed through ads and promotions that are integrated into chat, news, and games. The result, according to Habbo Ltd, is “the ideal vehicle for third party brands to reach this highly desired 12-18 year-old market in a cost-effective and creative manner” (“Habbo Company Profile”). Habbo Hotel is a good example of what Herbert Schiller describes as the corporate capture of sites of public expression. He notes that, when put at the service of growing corporate power, new technologies “provide the instrumentation for organizing and channeling expression” (5-6). In an afterword to a revised edition of The Virtual Community, published in 2000, Rheingold reports on the sale of the WELL to a privately owned corporation, and its decline as a lively social space when order was imposed from the top down. Although he believes that there is a place for commercial virtual communities on the Net, he acknowledges that as economic forces become more entrenched, “more controls will be instituted because there is more at stake.” While remaining hopeful that activists can leverage the power of many-to-many communications for the public good, he wonders what will happen when “the decentralized network infrastructure and freewheeling network economy collides with the continuing growth of mammoth, global, communication empires” (Virtual Community Rev. 375-7). Although the company that built Habbo Hotel is far from achieving global empire status, their project illustrates how the dominant ethos of privatization and the increasing emphasis on consumption results in gated virtual communities that are highly ordered, restricted, and controlled. The popularity of the hotel reflects the desire of millions of Habbos to express their identities and ideas in a playful environment that they are free to create and manipulate. However, they soon find that the rules are stacked against them. Restricted design options, severe communication limitations, and fixed architectural constraints mean that the only freedom left is the freedom to choose from a narrow range of provided options. In private cyberspaces like Habbo Hotel, the logic of the market rules out unrestrained many-to-many communications in favour of controlled commercial relationships. The liberating potential of the Internet that was recognized by Rheingold and others has been diminished as the forces of globalized commerce impose their order on the electronic frontier. References “Bad Language.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/badlanguage/>. Barlow, John Perry. “Crime and Puzzlement.” High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace. Ed. Peter Ludlow. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1996. 459-86. ———. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 8 Feb. 1996. 3 July 2004 http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>. Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2004. “Habbo Company Profile.” Habbo Hotel. 2002. Habbo Ltd. 20 Jan. 2003 http://www.habbogroup.com>. “The Habbo Way.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/habboway/>. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan, 2000. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random, 2001. Novak, Marcos. “Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991. 225-54. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day. New York: Paragon, 1989. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper, 1993. ———. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2000. Robins, Kevin. “Cyberspace and the World We Live In.” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000. 77-95. Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1999. Schiller, Herbert I. Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life. New York: Vintage, 1970. Shalit, Ruth. “Welcome to the Habbo Hotel.” mpulse Magazine. Mar. 2002. Hewlett-Packard. 1 Apr. 2004 http://www.cooltown.com/cooltown/mpulse/0302-habbo.asp>. “Strong Growth in Sulake’s Revenues and Profit – Habbo Hotel Online Game Will Launch in the US in September.” 3 Sept. 2004. Sulake. Sulake Corp. 9 Jan. 2005 http://www.sulake.com/>. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGuire, Mark. "Ordered Communities." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/06-mcguire.php>. APA Style McGuire, M. (Jan. 2005) "Ordered Communities," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/06-mcguire.php>.

The National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper—drafted to assist the Australian Government in developing the first national Cultural Policy since Creative Nation nearly two decades ago—envisages a future in which arts, cultural and creative activities directly support the development of an inclusive, innovative and productive Australia. "The policy," it says, "will be based on an understanding that a creative nation produces a more inclusive society and a more expressive and confident citizenry by encouraging our ability to express, describe and share our diverse experiences—with each other and with the world" (Australian Government 3). Even a cursory reading of this Discussion Paper makes it clear that the question of impact—in aesthetic, cultural and economic terms—is central to the Government's agenda in developing a new Cultural Policy. Hand-in-hand with the notion of impact comes the process of measurement of progress. The Discussion Paper notes that progress "must be measurable, and the Government will invest in ways to assess the impact that the National Cultural Policy has on society and the economy" (11). If progress must be measurable, this raises questions about what arts, cultural and creative workers do, whether it is worth it, and whether they could be doing it better. In effect, the Discussion Paper pushes artsworkers ever closer to a climate in which they have to be skilled not just at making work, but at making the impact of this work clear to stakeholders. The Government in its plans for Australia's cultural future, is clearly most supportive of artsworkers who can do this, and the scholars, educators and employers who can best train the artsworkers of the future to do this. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: The Challenges How do we train artsworkers to assess, measure and articulate the impact of what they do? How do we prepare them to be ready to work in a climate that will—as the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper makes clear—emphasise measuring impact, communicating impact, and communicating impact across aesthetic, cultural and economic categories? As educators delivering training in this area, the Discussion Paper has made this already compelling question even more pressing as we work to develop the career-ready graduates the Government seeks. Our program, the Master of Creative Industries (Creative Production & Arts Management) offered in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, is, like most programs in arts and cultural management in the US, UK, Europe and Australia, offering a three-Semester postgraduate program that allows students to develop the career-ready skills required to work as managers of arts, cultural or creative organisations. That we need to train our graduates to work not just as producers of plays, paintings or recordings, but as entrepreneurial arts advocates who can measure and articulate the value of their programs to others, is not news (Hadley "Creating" 647-48; cf. Brkic; Ebewo and Sirayi; Beckerman; Sikes). Our program—which offers training in arts policy, management, marketing and budgeting followed by training in entrepreneurship and a practical project—is already structured around this necessity. The question of how to teach students this diverse skill set is, however, still a subject of debate; and the question of how to teach students to measure the impact of this work is even more difficult. There is, of course, a body of literature on the impact of arts, cultural and creative activities, value and evaluation that has been developed over the past decade, particularly through landmark reports like Matarasso's Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts (1997) and the RAND Corporation's Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts (2004). There are also emergent studies in an Australian context: Madden's "Cautionary Note" on using economic impact studies in the arts (2001); case studies on arts and wellbeing by consultancy firm Effective Change (2003); case studies by DCITA (2003); the Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management (2009) issue on "value"; and Australia Council publications on arts, culture and economy. As Richards has explained, "evaluation is basically a straightforward concept. E-value-ation = a process of enquiry that allows a judgment of amount, value or worth to be made" (99). What makes arts evaluation difficult is not the concept, but the measurement of intangible values—aesthetic quality, expression, engagement or experience. In the literature, discussion has been plagued by debate about what is measured, what method is used, and whether subjective values can in fact be measured. Commentators note that in current practice, questions of value are still deferred because they are too difficult to measure (Bilton and Leary 52), discussed only in terms of economic measures such as market share or satisfaction which are statistically quantifiable (Belfiore and Bennett "Rethinking" 137), or done through un-rigorous surveys that draw only ambiguous, subjective, or selective responses (Merli 110). According to Belfiore and Bennett, Public debate about the value of the arts thus comes to be dominated by what might best be termed the cult of the measurable; and, of course, it is those disciplines primarily concerned with measurement, namely, economics and statistics, which are looked upon to find the evidence that will finally prove why the arts are so important to individuals and societies. A corollary of this is that the humanities are of little use in this investigation. ("Rethinking" 137) Accordingly, Ragsdale states, Arts organizations [still] need to find a way to assess their progress in …making great art that matters to people—as evidenced, perhaps, by increased enthusiasm, frequency of attendance, the capacity and desire to talk or write about one's experience, or in some other way respond to the experience, the curiosity to learn about the art form and the ideas encountered, the depth of emotional response, the quality of the social connections made, and the expansion of one's aesthetics over time. Commentators are still looking for a balanced approach (cf. Geursen and Rentschler; Falk and Dierkling), which evaluates aesthetic practices, business practices, audience response, and results for all parties, in tandem. An approach which evaluates intrinsic impacts, instrumental impacts, and the way each enables the other, in tandem—with an emphasis not on the numbers but on whether we are getting better at what we are doing. And, of course, allows evaluators of arts, cultural and creative activities to use creative arts methods—sketches, stories, bodily movements and relationships and so forth—to provide data to inform the assessment, so they can draw not just on statistical research methods but on arts, culture and humanities research methods. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: Our Approach As a result of this contested terrain, our method for training artsworkers to measure the impact of their programs has emerged not just from these debates—which tend to conclude by declaring the needs for better methods without providing them—but from a research-teaching nexus in which our own trial-and-error work as consultants to arts, cultural and educational organisations looking to measure the impact of or improve their programs has taught us what is effective. Each of us has worked as managers of professional associations such as Drama Australia and Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA), members of boards or committees for arts organisations such as Youth Arts Queensland and Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA), as well as consultants to major cultural organisations like the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and the Brisbane Festival. The methods for measuring impact we have developed via this work are based not just on surveys and statistics, but on our own practice as scholars and producers of culture—and are therefore based in arts, culture and humanities approaches. As scholars, we investigate the way marginalised groups tell stories—particularly groups marked by age, gender, race or ability, using community, contemporary and public space performance practices (cf. Hadley, "Bree"; Gattenhof). What we have learned by bringing this sort of scholarly analysis into dialogue with a more systematised approach to articulating impact to government, stakeholders and sponsors is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. What is needed, instead, is a toolkit, which incorporates central principles and stages, together with qualitative, quantitative and performative tools to track aesthetics, accessibility, inclusivity, capacity-building, creativity etc., as appropriate on a case-by-case basis. Whatever the approach, it is critical that the data track the relationship between the experience the artists, audience or stakeholders anticipated the activity should have, the aspects of the activity that enabled that experience to emerge (or not), and the effect of that (or not) for the arts organisation, their artists, their partners, or their audiences. The combination of methods needs to be selected in consultation with the arts organisation, and the negotiations typically need to include detailed discussion of what should be evaluated (aesthetics, access, inclusivity, or capacity), when it should be evaluated (before, during or after), and how the results should be communicated (including the difference between evaluation for reporting purposes and evaluation for program improvement purposes, and the difference between evaluation and related processes like reflection, documentary-making, or market research). Translating what we have learned through our cultural research and consultancy into a study package for students relies on an understanding of what they want from their study. This, typically, is practical career-ready skills. Students want to produce their own arts, or produce other people's arts, and most have not imagined themselves participating in meta-level processes in which they argue the value of arts, cultural and creative activities (Hadley, "Creating" 652). Accordingly, most have not thought of themselves as researchers, using cultural research methods to create reports that inform how the Australian government values, supports, and services the arts. The first step in teaching students to operate effectively as evaluators of arts, cultural and creative activities is, then, to re-orient their expectations to include this in their understanding of what artsworkers do, what skills artsworkers need, and where they deploy these skills. Simply handing over our own methods, as "the" methods, would not enable graduates to work effectively in a climate were one size will not fit all, and methods for evaluating impact need to be negotiated again for each new context. 1. Understanding the Need for Evaluation: Cause and Effect The first step in encouraging students to become effective evaluators is asking them to map their sector, the major stakeholders, the agendas, alignments and misalignments in what the various players are trying to achieve, and the programs, projects and products through which the players are trying to achieve it. This starting point is drawn from Program Theory—which, as Joon-Yee Kwok argues in her evaluation of the SPARK National Mentoring Program for Young and Emerging Artists (2010) is useful in evaluating cultural activities. The Program Theory approach starts with a flow chart that represents relationships between activities in a program, allowing evaluators to unpack some of the assumptions the program's producers have about what activities have what sort of effect, then test whether they are in fact having that sort of effect (cf. Hall and Hall). It could, for example, start with a flow chart representing the relationship between a community arts policy, a community arts organisation, a community-devised show it is producing, and a blog it has created because it assumes it will allow the public to become more interested in the show the participants are creating, to unpack the assumptions about the sort of effect this is supposed to have, and test whether this is in fact having this sort of effect. Masterclasses, conversations and debate with peers and industry professionals about the agendas, activities and assumptions underpinning programs in their sector allows students to look for elements that may be critical in their programs' ability to achieve (or not) an anticipated impact. In effect to start asking about, "the way things are done now, […] what things are done well, and […] what could be done better" (Australian Government 12).2. Understanding the Nature of Evaluation: PurposeOnce students have been alerted to the need to look for cause-effect assumptions that can determine whether or not their program, project or product is effective, they are asked to consider what data they should be developing about this, why, and for whom. Are they evaluating a program to account to government, stakeholders and sponsors for the money they have spent? To improve the way it works? To use that information to develop innovative new programs in future? In other words, who is the audience? Being aware of the many possible purposes and audiences for evaluation information can allow students to be clear not just about what needs to be evaluated, but the nature of the evaluation they will do—a largely statistical report, versus a narrative summary of experiences, emotions and effects—which may differ depending on the audience.3. Making Decisions about What to Evaluate: Priorities When setting out to measure the impact of arts, cultural or creative activities, many people try to measure everything, measure for the purposes of reporting, improvement and development using the same methods, or gather a range of different sorts of data in the hope that something in it will answer questions about whether an activity is having the anticipated effect, and, if so, how. We ask students to be more selective, making strategic decisions about which anticipated effects of a program, project or product need to be evaluated, whether the evaluation is for reporting, improvement or innovation purposes, and what information stakeholders most require. In addition to the concept of collecting data about critical points where programs succeed or fail in achieving a desired effect, and different approaches for reporting, improvement or development, we ask students to think about the different categories of effect that may be more or less interesting to different stakeholders. This is not an exhaustive list, or a list of things every evaluation should measure. It is a tool to demonstrate to would-be evaluators points of focus that could be developed, depending on the stakeholders' priorities, the purpose of the evaluation, and the critical points at which desired effects need to occur to ensure success. Without such framing, evaluators are likely to end up with unusable data, which become a difficulty to deal with rather than a benefit for the artsworkers, arts organisations or stakeholders. 4. Methods for Evaluation: Process To be effective, methods for collecting data about how arts, cultural or creative activities have (or fail to have) anticipated impact need to include conventional survey, interview and focus group style tools, and creative or performative tools such as discussion, documentation or observation. We encourage students to use creative practice to draw out people's experience of arts events—for example, observation, documentation still images, video or audio documentation, or facilitated development of sketches, stories or scenes about an experience, can be used to register and record people's feelings. These sorts of methods can capture what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" of experience (cf. Belfiore and Bennett, "Determinants" 232)—for example, photos of a festival space at hourly intervals or the colours a child uses to convey memory of a performance can capture to flow of movement, engagement, and experience for spectators more clearly than statistics. These, together with conventional surveys or interviews that comment on the feelings expressed, allow for a combination of quantitative, qualitative and performative data to demonstrate impact. The approach becomes arts- and humanities- based, using arts methods to encourage people to talk, write or otherwise respond to their experience in terms of emotion, connection, community, or expansion of aesthetics. The evaluator still needs to draw out the meaning of the responses through content, text or discourse analysis, and teaching students how to do a content analysis of quantitative, qualitative and performative data is critical at this stage. When teaching students how to evaluate their data, our method encourages students not just to focus on the experience, or the effect of the experience, but the relationship between the two—the things that act as "enablers" "determinants" (White and Hede; Belfiore and Bennett, "Determinants" passim) of effect. This approach allows the evaluator to use a combination of conventional and creative methods to describe not just what effect an activity had, but, more critically, what enabled it to have that effect, providing a firmer platform for discussing the impact, and how it could be replicated, developed or deepened next time, than a list of effects and numbers of people who felt those effects alone. 5. Communicating Results: Politics Often arts, cultural or creative organisations can be concerned about the image of their work an evaluation will create. The final step in our approach is to alert students to the professional, political and ethical implications of evaluation. Students learn to share their knowledge with organisations, encouraging them to see the value of reporting both correct and incorrect assumptions about the impact of their activities, as part of a continuous improvement process. Then we assist them in drawing the results of this sort of cultural research into planning, development and training documents which may assist the organisation in improving in the future. In effect, it is about encouraging organisations to take the Australian government at its word when, in the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, it says it that measuring impact is about measuring progress—what we do well, what we could do better, and how, not just success statistics about who is most successful—as it is this that will ultimately be most useful in creating an inclusive, innovative, productive Australia. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: The Impact of Our Approach What, then, is the impact of our training on graduates' ability to measure the impact of work? Have we made measurable progress in our efforts to teach artsworkers to assess and articulate the impact of their work? The MCI (CP&AM) has been offered for three years. Our approach is still emergent and experimental. We have, though, identified a number of impacts of our work. First, our students are less fearful of becoming involved in measuring the value or impact of arts, cultural and creative programs. This is evidenced by the number who chooses to do some sort of evaluation for their Major Project, a 15,000 word individual project or internship which concludes their degree. Of the 50 or so students who have reached the Major Project in three years—35 completed and 15 in planning for 2012—about a third have incorporated evaluation into their Major Project. This includes evaluation of sector, business or producing models (5), youth arts and youth arts mentorship programs (4), audience development programs (2), touring programs (4), and even other arts management training programs (1). Indeed, after internships in programming or producing roles, this work—aligned with the Government's interest in improving training of young artists, touring, audience development, and economic development—has become a most popular Major Project option. This has enabled students to work with a range of arts, cultural and creative organisations, share their training—their methods, their understanding of what their methods can measure, when, and how—with Industry. Second, this Industry-engaged training has helped graduates in securing employment. This is evidenced by the fact that graduates have gone on to be employed with organisations they have interned with as part of their Major Project, or other organisations, including some of Brisbane's biggest cultural organisations—local and state government departments, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane Festival, Metro Arts, Backbone Youth Arts, and Youth Arts Queensland, amongst others. Thirdly, graduates' contribution to local organisations and industry has increased the profile of a relatively new program. This is evidenced by the fact that it enrols 40 to 50 new students a year across Graduate Certificate / MCI (CP&AM) programs, typically two thirds domestic students and one third international students from Canada, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway and, of course, China. Indeed, some students are now disseminating this work globally, undertaking their Major Project as an internship or industry project with an organisation overseas. In effect, our training's impact emerges not just from our research, or our training, but from the fact that our graduates disseminate our approach to a range of arts, cultural and creative organisations in a practical way. We have, as a result, expanded the audience for this approach, and the number of people and contexts via which it is being adapted and made useful. Whilst few of students come into our program with a desire to do this sort of work, or even a working knowledge of the policy that informs it, on completion many consider it a viable part of their practice and career pathway. When they realise what they can achieve, and what it can mean to the organisations they work with, they do incorporate research, research consultant and government roles as part of their career portfolio, and thus make a contribution to the strong cultural sector the Government envisages in the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper. Our work as scholars, practitioners and educators has thus enabled us to take a long-term, processual and grassroots approach to reshaping agendas for approaches to this form of cultural research, as our practices are adopted and adapted by students and industry stakeholders. Given the challenges commentators have identified in creating and disseminating effective evaluation methods in arts over the past decade, this, for us—though by no means work that is complete—does count as measurable progress. References Beckerman, Gary. "Adventuring Arts Entrepreneurship Curricula in Higher Education: An Examination of Present Efforts, Obstacles, and Best pPractices." The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 37.2 (2007): 87-112. Belfiore, Eleaonora, and Oliver Bennett. "Determinants of Impact: Towards a Better Understanding of Encounters with the Arts." Cultural Trends 16.3 (2007): 225-75. ———. "Rethinking the Social Impacts of the Arts." International Journal of Cultural Policy 13.2 (2007): 135-51. Bilton, Chris, and Ruth Leary. "What Can Managers Do for Creativity? Brokering Creativity in the Creative Industries." International Journal of Cultural Policy 8.1 (2002): 49-64. Brkic, Aleksandar. "Teaching Arts Management: Where Did We Lose the Core Ideas?" Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 38.4 (2009): 270-80. Czikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. "A Systems Perspective on Creativity." Creative Management. Ed. Jane Henry. Sage: London, 2001. 11-26. Australian Government. "National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper." Department of Prime Minster and Cabinet – Office for the Arts 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://culture.arts.gov.au/discussion-paper›. Ebewo, Patrick, and Mzo Sirayi. "The Concept of Arts/Cultural Management: A Critical Reflection." Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 38.4 (2009): 281-95. Effective Change and VicHealth. 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