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The purpose of this paper is to explore sense-making of early childhood (EC) leaders in EC services rated as exceeding/excellent in Australian accreditation.

An interpretivist ontology and social constructivist epistemology informs the study. The conceptual framework uses the concept of sense-making to explore how leaders make sense of the policy frameworks and use these to shape practice.

Previous research identified that many leaders focussed on ensuring staff complied with new policy requirements. In contrast, this study found that these leaders paid more attention to relationships with staff and less to directing compliance.

The paper posits high quality service delivery is possible when leaders (in the words of a participant) look after their staff.

In Australia, neoliberal discourses have profoundly impacted on recent reforms in the EC sector. Previous research identified the ambiguities inherent in the Australian EC leadership role as leaders and staff grappled with new understandings and practices, and the uncertainties around lines of authority and influence. This paper is the first to explore the understandings of those leaders whose services are assessed to be operating at the highest level of quality.

The purpose of this paper is to present the architectural principles and the services of the D-NET software toolkit. D-NET is a framework where designers and developers find the tools for constructing and operating aggregative infrastructures (systems for aggregating data sources with heterogeneous data models and technologies) in a cost-effective way. Designers and developers can select from a variety of D-NET data management services, can configure them to handle data according to given data models, and can construct autonomic workflows to obtain personalized aggregative infrastructures.

The paper provides a definition of aggregative infrastructures, sketching architecture, and components, as inspired by real-case examples. It then describes the limits of current solutions, which find their lacks in the realization and maintenance costs of such complex software. Finally, it proposes D-NET as an optimal solution for designers and developers willing to realize aggregative infrastructures. The D-NET architecture and services are presented, drawing a parallel with the ones of aggregative infrastructures. Finally, real-cases of D-NET are presented, to show-case the statement above.

The D-NET software toolkit is a general-purpose service-oriented framework where designers can construct customized, robust, scalable, autonomic aggregative infrastructures in a cost-effective way. D-NET is today adopted by several EC projects, national consortia and communities to create customized infrastructures under diverse application domains, and other organizations are enquiring for or are experimenting its adoption. Its customizability and extendibility make D-NET a suitable candidate for creating aggregative infrastructures mediating between different scientific domains and therefore supporting multi-disciplinary research.

D-NET is the first general-purpose framework of this kind. Other solutions are available in the literature but focus on specific use-cases and therefore suffer from the limited re-use in different contexts. Due to its maturity, D-NET can also be used by third-party organizations, not necessarily involved in the software design and maintenance.

Examines the environmental legislation facing companies in the United Kingdom. Discusses the legislative background, environmental audit definition, audit types, the American experience, the reasons for auditing, the auditing team, collecting information, conducting the audit, and the audit report. Concludes that the environmental legislation means a period of uncertainty for the commercial property sector, the evidence from American industry showing that any party can demand an environmental audit.

Considers the ways in which property managers can minimize difficulties after a disaster by appreciating potential damage by smoke, water and hazards such as asbestos. Summarizes the benefits of proactive damage management to be: stabilization of damage, effective reinstatement and disaster recovery planning. Examines one case of damage management : Portsmouth City Council′s civic offices. Concludes that property managers should develop closer links with loss adjusters since swift action can make the difference between survival and failure of a business.

Early childhood education (ECE) centre directors have to meet various leadership demands at present, and this has become even more important in a time of extensive policy changes. There is little research on work-related stress from the perspective of ECE directors. The purpose of this study was therefore to enhance one’s knowledge of (a) what ECE centre directors perceive to be work-related stressors; (b) what causes stressful situations; and (c) how they cope with the identified stressors.

Eighty directors from three groups in part-time leadership education programmes participated between 2017 and 2020. Data was collected through class discussions and whiteboard notes, focus group interviews with 24 directors and student role-play scenarios that were acted out in class.

The findings illustrated three main categories of stressors: an overwhelming number of administrative tasks, leading others and lack of social support. Unexpected findings were a lack of knowledge about coping strategies and a need for more resources so that directors can focus on pedagogical leadership.

The study has been done in the Norwegian educational context with Norwegian ECE centre directors participating in a leadership programme. Several qualitative methods were used on three groups of centre directors. These limitations must be considered when generalizing.

The results can be used as guidance for supporting ECE centre directors, owners and policymakers in how to develop and sustain leadership and increase well-being and work satisfaction.

The current study is among the few ones focussing on perceived stressors among centre directors and the consequent coping in the early childhood setting.

This paper reports on one segment of a research project which investigates what faculty members perceive to be acting as barriers in their attempts to integrate [information and communication] technology into their teaching at a laptop university. A web-based questionnaire was used to collect information from 69/288 (24%) faculty members from a small U.A.E. university. From the data gathered, patterns and associations emerged from which the researcher is able provide recommendations as to what type of interventions and programs could be provided to increase current levels of teaching with technology.

This study, by critically analyzing material from multiple sources, aims to provide an overview of what is available on evaluation tools for educational apps for children. To realize this objective, a systematic literature review was conducted to search all English literature published after January 2010 in multiple electronic databases and internet sources. Various combinations of search strings were used due to database construction differences, while the results were cross-referenced to discard repeated references, obtaining those that met the criteria for inclusion.

The present study was conducted according to the methods provided by Khan et al. (2003) and Thomé et al. (2016). The whole procedure included four stages: planning the review, identifying relevant studies in the literature, critical analysis of the literature, summarizing and interpreting the findings (Figure 1). Furthermore, in this analysis, a well-known checklist, PRISMA, was also used as a recommendation (Moher et al., 2015).

These review results reveal that, although there are several evaluation tools, in their majority they are not considered adequate to help teachers and parents to evaluate the pedagogical affordances of educational apps correctly and easily. Indeed, most of these tools are considered outdated. With the emergence of new issues such as General Data Protection Regulation, the quality criteria and methods for assessing children's products need to be continuously updated and adapted (Stoyanov et al., 2015). Some of these tools might be considered as good beginnings, but their “limited dimensions make generalizable considerations about the worth of apps” (Cherner, Dix and Lee, 2014, p. 179). Thus, there is a strong need for effective evaluation tools to help parents and teachers when choosing educational apps (Callaghan and Reich, 2018).

Even though this work is performed by following the systematic mapping guideline, threats to the validity of the results presented still exist. Although custom strings that contained a rich collection of data were used to search for papers, potentially relevant publications that would have been missed by the advanced search might exist. It is recommended that at least two different reviewers should independently review titles, abstracts and later full papers for exclusion (Thomé et al., 2016). In this study, only one reviewer – the author – selected the papers and did the review. In the case of a single researcher, Kitchenham (2004) recommends that the single reviewer should consider discussing included and excluded papers with an expert panel. The researcher, following this recommendation, discussed the inclusion and exclusion procedure with an expert panel of two professionals with research experience from the Department of (removed for blind review). To deal with publication bias, the researcher in conjunction with the expert panel used the search strategies identified by Kitchenham (2004) including: Grey literature, conference proceedings, communicating with experts working in the field for any unpublished literature.

The purpose of this study was not to advocate any evaluation tool. Instead, the study aims to make parents, educators and software developers aware of the various evaluation tools available and to focus on their strengths, weaknesses and credibility. This study also highlights the need for a standardized app evaluation (Green et al., 2014) via reliable tools, which will allow anyone interested to evaluate apps with relative ease (Lubniewski et al., 2018). Parents and educators need a reliable, fast and easy-to-use tool for the evaluation of educational apps that is more than a general guideline (Lee and Kim, 2015). A new generation of evaluation tools would also be used as a reference among the software developers, designers to create educational apps with real educational value.

The results of this study point to the necessity of creating new evaluation tools based on research, either in the form of rubrics or checklists to help educators and parents to choose apps with real educational value.

However, to date, no systematic review has been published summarizing the available app evaluation tools. This study, by critically analyzing material from multiple sources, aims to provide an overview of what is available on evaluation tools for educational apps for children.

Currently, negotiation on global carbon emissions reduction is very difficult owing to lack of international willingness. In response, geoengineering (climate engineering) strategies are proposed to artificially cool the planet. Meanwhile, as the harbor around one-third of all described marine species, coral reefs are the most sensitive ecosystem on the planet to climate change. However, until now, there is no quantitative assessment on the impacts of geoengineering on coral reefs. This study aims to model the impacts of stratospheric aerosol geoengineering on coral reefs.

The HadGEM2-ES climate model is used to model and evaluate the impacts of stratospheric aerosol geoengineering on coral reefs.

This study shows that (1) stratospheric aerosol geoengineering could significantly mitigate future coral bleaching throughout the Caribbean Sea; (2) Changes in downward solar irradiation, sea level rise and sea surface temperature caused by geoengineering implementation should have very little impacts on coral reefs; (3) Although geoengineering would prolong the return period of future hurricanes, this may still be too short to ensure coral recruitment and survival after hurricane damage.

This is the first time internationally to quantitatively assess the impacts of geoengineering on coral reefs.

This study aims to examine the factors that influence hotel/motel employees’ helping behavior toward the victims of human trafficking.

Using a survey-based quantitative method, this study examines and compares two models of helping behavior based on egoism and altruism theories to measure the helping tendencies of lodging employees toward victims of human trafficking.

The study results show that perceived intrinsic rewards of helping and empathy with the victims are the major antecedents of employees’ likelihood to help the victims.

The study contributed to the egoism school of thought and the Cost-Reward Model by showing that only perceived intrinsic rewards drive individuals’ intention to help in risky covert situations, such as human trafficking, while perceived extrinsic rewards may demotivate people to help in these situations.

Previous studies overlooked the role of the lodging industry in human trafficking. This study focuses on service employees as potential helpers of the victims as they notice in hotels/motels.

This contribution aims to present the core components of a framework and illustrate the main concepts of a methodology for the systematic design and realization of security‐critical inter‐organizational workflows with a portion of a workflow‐scenario drawn from e‐government. It is additionally shown how the framework can be adapted to incorporate advanced security patterns like the Qualified Signature, which extends the concept of digital signature by requiring a natural person to sign.

The framework is based on a methodology that focuses on the correct implementation of security‐requirements and consists of a suite of tools that facilitates the cost‐efficient realization and management of decentralized, security‐critical workflows.

The framework has been prototypically validated through case studies from the healthcare and e‐government sector. Positive results in pilot applications with industrial partners encourage further steps: the set of supported security requirements is continuously extended (e.g. rights delegation, four eyes principle), a testing environment for industrial settings is being implemented, and the requirements for the efficient management of inter‐organizational workflows are being analysed systematically.

The framework caters to the needs of an industrial audience, in need of a cost‐efficient support for the systematic and correct realization of secure, inter‐organizational workflows.

The contribution provides a description of the Sectet framework. It is shown how it can be adapted to incorporate advanced security patterns like the Qualified Signature, which implement a legal requirement specific to e‐government.