This item contains the agenda, minutes, and attachments for the Faculty Senate meeting on this date. There may be additional materials from the meeting available at the Faculty Center.

From Chapter 1: It was shortly after receiving his Master of Arts degree at Cambridge that Goodwin was converted, by his own report, recorded by his son Goodwin's conversion gives us remarkable insight into the spiritual condition of the early seventeenth century and William HaIler cites it as "worthy in its way to be compared to the most notable self-revelations of the Puritan soul "[1] Born on the 5th of October, 1600 in the Norfolk village of Rolesby and reared in Yarmouth, the eldest son of Richard and Catherine Goodwin came to Christ's College, Cambridge in 1613, at twelve years old, where he learned the Heidelberg Catechism and Ursinus' Commentary It was also a time when the Dutch church was in convulsions over the Arminian controversy With the memory of Perkins, deceased ten years, lingering in everyone's minds, Richard Sibbes - Perkins's successor - was preaching at Trinity Church, and his famous sermons attracted those who were dissatisfied with the embellished rhetoric of others Most notable among them was Dr Senhouse, an Arminian orator [2] At fourteen, Goodwin eagerly anticipated Easter, when he would receive his first Communion and he prepared earnestly for it by attending Sibbes' lectures and reading Calvin's Institutes ("and 0 how sweet was the reading of some Parts of that Book to me1") [3] In addition, he had many fine examples of godly and learned tutors As Whitsunday approached, Goodwin felt, "I should be so confirm'd that I should never fall away," but much to his surprise and embarrassment, he was too young Alas, when the day arrived, his tutor kindly kept him from receiving the Supper [4].

Remote attestation is a promising mechanism for assurance of distributed systems. It allows users to identify the software running on a remote system before trusting it with an important task. This functionality is arriving at exactly the right time as security-critical systems, such as healthcare and financial services, are increasingly being hosted online. However, attestation has limitations and has been criticized for being impractical. Too much effort is required for too little reward: a large, rapidly-changing list of software must be maintained by users, who then have insufficient information to make a trust decision. As a result attestation is rarely used today. This thesis evaluates attestation in a service-oriented context to determine whether it can be made practical for assurance of servers rather than client machines. There are reasons to expect that it can: servers run fewer programs and the overhead of integrity reporting is more appropriate on a server which may be protecting important assets. However, a literature review and new experiments show that problems remain, many stemming from the large trusted computing base as well as the lack of information linking software identity to expected behaviour. Three novel solutions are proposed. Web service middleware is restructured to minimize the software running at the endpoint, thus lowering the effort for the relying party. A key advantage of the proposed two-tier structure is that strong integrity guarantees can be made without loss of conformance with service standards. Secondly, a program modelling approach is investigated to further automate the attestation and verification process and add more information about system behaviour. Several sets of programs are modelled, including the bootloader, a web service and a menu-based shell. Finally, service behaviour is attested through source code properties established during compilation. This provides a trustworthy and verifiable connection between the identity of the software on a service platform and its expected runtime behaviour. This approach is applicable to any programming language and verification method, and has the advantage of not requiring a runtime monitor. These contributions are evaluated using an example e-voting service to show the level of assurance attestation can provide. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that attestation can be made significantly more practical through the described new techniques. Although some problem remain, with further improvements to operating systems and better software engineering methods, attestation may become a trustworthy and reliable assurance mechanism for web services.

This thesis is an empirical qualitative case study of the work of an evaluation commission which was established by the Ministry of Culture, Research and Art in the German state of Baden-Württemberg in 2003 to undertake a cross-sectional examination of the quality of teaching and research in universities and teacher training colleges offering courses in Educational Science (Erziehungswissenschaft). Although much literature on evaluation methods and models exists, little addresses the minutiae of evaluation work through the eyes of those doing it. This study therefore aims to augment this knowledge by examining the attitudes, experiences and difficulties which evaluators face. It contributes to the discourse on evaluation theory and practice by providing suggestions for what might help to improve decision-making processes in this particular environment. Informed by phenomenological theory, this exploratory study also uses decision-making theories as a means of providing knowledge on both individual and organisational issues which can augment our understanding of how expert commissions work: the social, political and cultural mechanisms that are involved, and the techniques that evaluators employ in order to provide institutions with an objective, fair, trustworthy and reliable evaluation report. As external review has become an accepted means of quality assurance, this research constitutes a contribution to the discourse on ways of improving quality assurance in higher education on a broader scale, not just within the context of German higher education. Furthermore, it also offers insight into the discipline of Educational Science itself and the notion of competing research paradigms, which have an impact on the way the discipline perceives itself and is perceived by others. The study is broadly divided into three main sections. The first contextualises the history of higher education evaluation, specifically within the German context. It looks at how the idea of what a university is has changed, especially during the last few decades of the 20th century, and notions of quality within this particular environment. The evaluation is also briefly introduced within the context of Baden-Württemberg. The second section explores the evaluation by examining the documents available in the evalag agency archive in Mannheim, thereby facilitating an understanding of the background to the commission and the processes which the evaluators underwent as work progressed. The third provides insight into what the evaluators themselves thought of the process and is based on interview analysis. The thesis concludes with a brief survey of more recent developments in quality assurance in Germany.

The overall purpose of this study was to examine how Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) perceive the potential use of assurance services to assess quality in accounting education programs. Survey questionnaires were mailed to a random sample of 250 CPAs in the north central Texas area. The questionnaire was designed to obtain demographic information and information relating to the respondents' perceptions of quality assessment of accounting education programs. An analysis of the results of this study suggest the following: CPAs consider (1) certain established criteria, such as SAT scores and faculty-to-student ratios, as effective measures for assessing quality attributes in accounting education programs and (2) traditional measures currently used for quality assessment in accounting education programs as only moderately effective by CPAs. CPAs are apparently seeking increased involvement with accounting education quality assessment and formulation of educational standards. They view the potential application of assurance services to accounting education quality as a way to offer a wider range of services to the public. CPAs perceive assurance services as a type of quality assessment that can be used to complement, but not replace, some of the more effective traditional methods, and as a way of enhancing the quality assessment process for accounting education.

Le présent mémoire introduit une nouvelle méthode de traitement des données IRMd permettant d’extraire des caractéristiques dans des endroits spécifiques du cerveau. Une méthode d’assurance qualité test-retest est également présentée et est appliquée à la nouvelle méthode de traitement dans le but d’assurer qu’elle extrait des résultats robustes. Enfin, cette méthode de traitement est appliquée à une base de données de patients atteints de la maladie de Parkinson et des différences significatives sont trouvées dans des régions spécifiques du cerveau où se connectent entre autres les régions motrices. Ces résultats concordent avec ceux d’autres études portant sur cette maladie.

This paper presents the background, aim and results of a small empirical study conducted in the setting of a medical hospital library. The background is found both in the quality ambitions of the medical professions and organizations and in the effort of medical libraries to show their importance to the total quality of medical decision making. As a first step in the library's quality process, the aim has been to identify quality performance indicators of value to library users in their contact with a medical hospital library. The second step- to identify satisfaction levels - is not included in this work. Another aim has been to compare the quality categories in this small study with the generally accepted quality categories that emerged in the comprehensive studies of Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry in which customers express their expectations and perceptions of services. This study is based on a small number of interviews with representatives from different user groups within a hospital. The analysis is inspired by phenomenography which build on perceptions of phenomena - in this case the phenomenon "quality". In the material from the interviews five quality categories were identified. Compared to generally accepted quality categories from the service sector none of these five categories were unique. Important conclusions were that despite the homogeneity of the user group, expectations and needs are different and vary from time to time. Consequently flexibility and individual treatment of library users are crucial if the library is to meet user expectations. But the material also shows that despite access to modern technology users have very traditional perceptions of the library seeing the library as a room. If libraries were to let only user expectations initiate changes, it would lead to stagnation. It is not realistic to rely only on the knowledge or interest of the users.

How do organizations rapidly assess command-level effects of cyber attacks? Leaders need a way of assuring themselves that their organization, people, and information technology can continue their missions in a contested cyber environment. To do this, leaders should: 1) require assessments be more than analogical, anecdotal or simplistic snapshots in time; 2) demand the ability to rapidly model their organizations; 3) identify their organization’s structural vulnerabilities; and 4) have the ability to forecast mission assurance scenarios. Using text mining to build agent based dynamic network models of information processing organizations, I examine impacts of contested cyber environments on three common focus areas of information assurance—confidentiality, integrity, and availability. I find that assessing impacts of cyber attacks is a nuanced affair dependent on the nature of the attack, the nature of the organization and its missions, and the nature of the measurements. For well-manned information processing organizations, many attacks are in the nuisance range and that only multipronged or severe attacks cause meaningful failure. I also find that such organizations can design for resiliency and provide guidelines in how to do so.

The aim of the research is to identify, evaluate and develop service quality measures/dimensions – from the students’ point of view – at independent Colleges in the UK. The primary objective of the study is to determine whether private higher education providers in the UK meet student expectations. In order to achieve the primary objective, the research identified two secondary objectives as: what are the areas of service quality that are most important to students, when choosing to study at a private college in the UK; and does their chosen private college meet student expectations in all these areas? The research consists of three stages: 1) an extensive analysis of literature followed by discussions with industry experts to map recent developments within independent colleges in the UK, 2) an analysis of a student focus group discussions as well as an expert panel review, of the focus group findings, in order to develop the initial conceptual model and the development of the measurement instrument i.e., online questionnaire, and 3) the online questionnaire link was then promoted to qualifying participants internationally using the official website (www.service-quality.co.uk) as well as social media, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. In addition, links to the survey and the progress have been listed at several discussion groups as well as included in online press releases. The online questionnaire was made available from 1st June to 30th November 2013, to ensure sufficient time was given to promote the survey and attract a good number of responses. 12,775 completed questionnaires were gathered during the six months period. The sample data was analysed for the normality of distribution followed by assessment of validity and reliability, using parametric statistical analysis tools. Finally, the research concluded that students chose to study at independent colleges as they offered five service quality dimensions as: flexible, market driven, assurance, customer focus and focus practitioners. The participants also agreed that their chosen independent college either met or exceeded their expectations. The research findings were inconclusive in terms of the order of importance of these service quality dimensions. The service quality and performance model for independent colleges in the UK requires these three components: service quality dimensions, measures, and implementation points, to continuously refine and develop. Following such a model, the organisation will continuously identify and refine the service quality dimensions and measures to meet changing student expectations on a continuous basis, whilst sustaining positive service gaps, thriving to remove negative service gaps and by converting neutral areas to positive service gaps.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.