Food insecurity among northern Inuit communities represents a significant public health challenge that requires immediate and integrated responses. In the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR), in the Northwest Territories (NWT), almost half of households experience some degree of food insecurity (33% moderate, 13% severe), and rates are even higher in Nunavut (35% moderate, 34% severe). Currently, food security issues in the Arctic are being addressed by multiple initiatives at different scales; however, the role that governance and policy plays in fostering or hampering Inuit food security remains under-evaluated. We took a participatory-qualitative approach to investigate how food security governance structures and processes are functioning in Inuit settlement areas, using case studies of the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR) and Nunavut, the latter of which has already developed a food security strategy through significant community consultation. Using 18 semi-structured interviews, we examined the development and implementation of the Nunavut Food Security Strategy (NFSS) and Action Plan to identify challenges and lessons learned, identified governance challenges and opportunities in the current way food policy decisions are made in the ISR, and determined ways to improve governance arrangements to address Inuit food security more effectively at a regional scale. Participants implicated in the NFSS process identified a number of challenges, including high rates of employee turnover, coordinating work with member organizations, and lack of a proper evaluation framework to measure the Strategy’s outcomes. In terms of lessons learned, participants expressed the need to establish clear lines of accountability to achieve desired outcomes, and the importance of sufficient and sustained financial resources and organizational capacity to address food security in a meaningful way. Similar themes were identified in the ISR; however, top-down government decision-making at the territorial level and an absence of meaningful community engagement from program administrators during the conceptualization of food security interventions were specific issues identified in this context. In terms of opportunities for regional-scale food security governance, the Government of Northwest Territories (GNWT) is in the process of developing a Country Food Strategy that will engage with a range of stakeholders to develop a broader selection of country food programing. These findings suggest that food security governance remains a key challenge for Inuit. First, sufficient resources are needed to address food security in a sustained manner. Second, existing and planned food security policies and programs should include an evaluation component to demonstrate greater accountability towards desired outcomes. Finally, findings point to the need to develop new collaborative, integrated, and inclusive food security governance arrangements that take into account local context, needs, and priorities. The NFSS is a useful model for collaborative food security governance from which other Inuit regions can learn and adapt.

M.Phil. (Electrical And Electronic Engineering) / The enormous increase in technology advancement and the need to secure information e ectively has led to the development and implementation of iris image acquisition technologies for automated iris recognition systems. The iris biometric is gaining popularity and is becoming a reliable and a robust modality for future biometric security. Its wide application can be extended to biometric security areas such as national ID cards, banking systems such as ATM, e-commerce, biometric passports but not applicable in forensic investigations. Iris recognition has gained valuable attention in biometric research due to the uniqueness of its textures and its high recognition rates when employed on high biometric security areas. Identity veri cation for individuals becomes a challenging task when it has to be automated with a high accuracy and robustness against spoo ng attacks and repudiation. Current recognition systems are highly a ected by noise as a result of segmentation failure, and this noise factors increase the biometric error rates such as; the FAR and the FRR. This dissertation reports an investigation of score level fusion methods which can be used to enhance iris matching performance. The fusion methods implemented in this project includes, simple sum rule, weighted sum rule fusion, minimum score and an adaptive weighted sum rule. The proposed approach uses an adaptive fusion which maps feature quality scores with the matcher. The fused scores were generated from four various iris matchers namely; the NHD matcher, the WED matcher, the WHD matcher and the POC matcher. To ensure homogeneity of matching scores before fusion, raw scores were normalized using the tanh-estimators method, because it is e cient and robust against outliers. The results were tested against two publicly available databases; namely, CASIA and UBIRIS using two statistical and biometric system measurements namely the AUC and the EER. The results of these two measures gives the AUC = 99:36% for CASIA left images, the AUC = 99:18% for CASIA right images, the AUC = 99:59% for UBIRIS database and the Equal Error Rate (EER) of 0.041 for CASIA left images, the EER = 0:087 for CASIA right images and with the EER = 0:038 for UBIRIS images.

This research study emanates from the inclusion of environmental risks on the global security agenda. Although dating back to the Rio Summit on Environment and Development (UNEP, 1992), this trend gained momentum following the publication of the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February 2007 (IPCC, 2007a). The report warned that the global climate system is changing mainly because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, exposing, amongst others, Africa as a continent most vulnerable to the impact of climate variability and change. Subsequent to the report, the security implications of climate change were discussed by the United Nations Security Council in April 2007 (UN, 2007a). With these developments as a point of departure, the aim of this exploratory study is to investigate the securitisation of environmental risks, particularly the impact of climate change, in South Africa, with specific reference to official perceptions of (and where applicable, policy responses to) environmental security between 2007 and 2012. As a literature and documentary case study on South Africa, the research utilises a conceptual framework that broadens and deepens the concept of security to include the environment as a non-traditional (non-military) aspect. In this context, environmental risks are discussed as a challenge to security, considering their contemporary relevance. Environmental security is discussed as an emerging security issue in the context of its global and regional scope; its linkage to and impact on food, water and energy security; and its influence on the political, economic, and social sectors of security. Further, the study indicates that Southern Africa in general, and South Africa in particular, are highly vulnerable to the impact of environmental risks such as climate change; and that such risks indeed exacerbate existing security risks and threats. Against this backdrop, the South African government’s securitisation (or lack of securitisation) of the environment is described and explored with reference to official views on environmental security. The analysis indicates that the Government securitises environmental risks such as climate change to a limited degree only (in terms of securitising speech and act); and the issue thus does not fall within the ambit of security, but rather that of sustainable development. The Government base their unsecuritised stance on the impact of environmental risks, on the country’s basic natural resources (such as food, water and energy) being overwhelmed by existing growth pressures; and that the Administration’s current priority is inter alia social development issues, such as employment and poverty eradication. The study concludes with a summary of key findings in response to the stated research problem, and with recommendations concerning the South African government’s response to environmental security. / Dissertation (MSS)--University of Pretoria, 2015. / Political Sciences / Unrestricted

The master’s thesis is focused on the design and creation of a solution for converting company’s software application into the mobile and web form. The main goal is make business processes more efficient and maintain information and cyber security. The result should be a system that brings an innovative and convenient solution, time and financial savings.

E-health is a growing eld which utilizes wireless sensor networks to enable access to effective and efficient healthcare services and provide patient monitoring to enable early detection and treatment of health conditions. Due to the proliferation of e-health systems, security and privacy have become critical issues in preventing data falsification, unauthorized access to the system, or eavesdropping on sensitive health data. Furthermore, due to the intrinsic limitations of many wireless medical devices, including low power and limited computational resources, security and device performance can be difficult to balance. Therefore, many current networked medical devices operate without basic security services such as authentication, authorization, and encryption. In this work, we survey recent work on e-health security, including biometric approaches, proximity-based approaches, key management techniques, audit mechanisms, anomaly detection, external device methods, and lightweight encryption and key management protocols. We also survey the state-of-the art in e-health privacy, including techniques such as obfuscation, secret sharing, distributed data mining, authentication, access control, blockchain, anonymization, and cryptography. We then propose a comprehensive system model for e-health applications with consideration of battery capacity and computational ability of medical devices. A case study is presented to show that the proposed system model can support heterogeneous medical devices with varying power and resource constraints. The case study demonstrates that it is possible to signicantly reduce the overhead for security on power-constrained devices based on the proposed system model.

The quest to decrease income inequality in South Africa relies in part, on the provision of quality education for learners so as to improve their employment opportunities and potential material outcomes. This study argues that if the drop-out rate of learners persists because of poor-quality education the potential threat to human security becomes a reality that needs to be explored. The historical legacy of poor-quality education for the majority of black learners persists in contemporary South Africa. A conceptual overview of the evolution of security, moves from a state-centric approach to a broader/deeper understanding of the human security agenda where people are the main referent for security. The focus of the study is human security and how education inequality might impact on it, particularly as the UNDP human security framework includes seven dimensions for security, but education, is not explicitly specified. People need to be secured and the ‘new’ security focus is on their protection and their empowerment. Thus, quality education is emphasised as a prerequisite for the realisation of all human security dimensions in the South African context. The study is theoretically grounded in the Welsh school of Critical Security Studies (CSS) where humanity is central to the concept of security. The aim of CSS is to improve the human condition and to eradicate injustice by radically re-conceptualising security. The methodology incorporates an exploratory design, and a literature-based study, and it draws on a snapshot of longitudinal secondary data from the South African Department of Basic Education (DBE) to describe the reasons for the chronic school drop-out rate in the country, which manifests as education inequality. It is argued that education inequality may be a cause of human insecurity. / Mini Dissertation (MA (Security Studies))--University of Pretoria 2020. / Political Sciences / MA (Security Studies) / Unrestricted

While it is evident that network services continue to play an ever-increasing role in our daily lives, it is less evident that our information infrastructure requires a concerted, well-conceived, and fastidiously executed strategy to remain viable. Government agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations (\NGOs"), and private organizations are all targets for malicious online activity. Security has deservedly become a serious focus for organizations that seek to assume a more proactive posture; in order to deal with the many facets of securing their infrastructure. At the same time, the discipline of data science has rapidly grown into a prominent role, as once purely theoretical machine learning algorithms have become practical for implementation. This is especially noteworthy, as principles that now fall neatly into the field of data science has been contemplated for quite some time, and as much as over two hundred years ago. Visionaries like Thomas Bayes [18], Andrey Andreyevich Markov [65], Frank Rosenblatt [88], and so many others made incredible contributions to the field long before the impact of Moore's law [92] would make such theoretical work commonplace for practical use; giving rise to what has come to be known as "Data Science". / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The tensions between China and the special administrative region of Hong Kong have increased rapidly during the last decade. Freedomhouse have concluded that Hong Kong is going through a development that is characterized with less freedom, and less democratic reforms and towards a more authoritarian path. This study aims to understand and explain the conflict between Hong Kong and the mainland China from a national- and internal securityconcept. The results indicates that China prioritize its national security first and therefore it wants to preserve the states values. When the citizens of Hong Kong in several ways have protested against the restrictions imposed on them or when the​ one country, two systems-f​ ramework have been perceived as disrespected, Beijing have responded in a maximalistic way. China have defined internal threats to its system and against the party CCP but it have cost the people of Hong Kong's legitimacy towards them, a development of a own national identity and can lead to even more negative economic consequences for the special administrative region of Hong Kong.

Thesis(M.Sc. Agricultural Management (Horticulture)) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / Amaranthus species, with their adaptability to grow under various agro-ecologies and soil types, have gained considerable attention in food security due to their high nutritional content. However, various Amaranthus species are host to the root-knot (Meloidogyne species) nematodes, with limited information on how the pest could affect the nutritional composition of the crop. In other crops, infestation with Meloidogyne species have deleterious effects on accumulation of certain essential mineral nutrient elements. However, the influence of Meloidogyne species on essential mineral nutrient elements had not been documented on Amaranthus. The objectives of the study, therefore, were to determine the influence of infestation by Meloidogyne species on growth and accumulation of selected malnutrition elements in four exotic Amaranthus relative to the local cultivar under both greenhouse and field conditions. In the greenhouse study, hardened-off seedlings were transplanted into 20-cm diameter plastic pots containing a steam-pasteurised growing mixture. The 5 × 2 factorial experiments were arranged in a randomised complete block design, with five replications. The first and second factors were five Amaranthus cultivars and two Meloidogyne species, namely, M. incognita and M. javanica. At 60 days after inoculation, plant growth and nematode variables were assessed using standard procedures. Roots of all five Amaranthus cultivars were heavily galled, with limited cultivar × nematode interactions on plant variables. Additionally, the common factor that influenced either plant or nutrient element variables was the cultivar type, whereas those of nematodes were highly variable, particularly on nutrient elements. Three best performing cultivars were further tested under field conditions under nematode infested and untreated control plots. An exotic cv. ′Tanzania′ had higher dry shoot mass, plant height and stem diameter, and accumulated higher Ca and K content than ′Candatus′ and ′Local 33′. Overall, the cultivar × nematode interaction reduced Na content in leaf tissues of Amaranthus cultivars under field conditions. / University of Venda, University of Limpopo and Agricultural Research Council

<p>Social Engineering attacks have been a rising issue in recent years, affecting a multitude of industries. One industry that has been of great interest to hackers is the Healthcare industry due to the high value of patient information. Social Engineering attacks are mainly common because of the ease of execution and the high probability of victimization. A popular way of combatting Social  Engineering attacks is by increasing the user’s ability to detect indicators of attack, which requires a level of cybersecurity education. While the number of cybersecurity training programs is increasing, Social Engineering attacks are still very successful. Therefore, education programs  need to be improved to effectively increase the ability of users to notice indicators of attack. This research aimed to answer the question - what teaching method results in the greatest learning gains  for understanding Social Engineering concepts? This was done by investigating text-based,  gamification, and adversarial thinking teaching methods. These three teaching methods were used  to deliver lessons on an online platform to a sample of Purdue students. After conducting analysis,  both text-based and adversarial thinking showed significant improvement in the understanding of  Social Engineering concepts within the student sample. After conducting a follow-up test, a single  teaching method was not found to be better among the three teaching methods. However, this study  did find two teaching methods that can be used to develop training programs to help decrease the  total number of successful Social Engineering attacks across industries. </p>