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THE following list of contracts placed by the Air Ministry during April lias been extracted from the May issue of The Ministry of Labour Gazette:—

The use of optical fibres in sensors is opening up new possible applications for industrial measurement

This study aims to investigate the collaboration processes of immigrant families as they search for online information together. Immigrant English-language learning adults of lower socioeconomic status often work collaboratively with their children to search the internet. Family members rely on each other’s language and digital literacy skills in this collaborative process known as online search and brokering (OSB). While previous work has identified ecological factors that impact OSB, research has not yet distilled the specific learning processes behind such collaborations.

For this study, the authors adhere to practices of a case study examination. This study’s participants included parents, grandparents and children aged 10–17 years. Most adults were born in Mexico, did not have a college-degree, worked in service industries and represented a lower-SES population. This study conducted two to three separate in-home family visits per family with interviews and online search tasks.

From a case study analysis of three families, this paper explores the funds of knowledge, resilience, ecological support and challenges that children and parents face, as they engage in collaborative OSB experiences. This study demonstrates how in-home computer-supported collaborative processes are often informal, social, emotional and highly relevant to solving information challenges.

An intergenerational OSB process is different from collaborative online information problem-solving that happens between classroom peers or coworkers. This study’s research shows how both parents and children draw on their funds of knowledge, resilience and ecological support systems when they search collaboratively, with and for their family members, to problem solve. This is a case study of three families working in collaboration with each other. This case study informs analytical generalizations and theory-building rather than statistical generalizations about families.

Designers need to recognize that children and youth are using the same tools as adults to seek high-level critical information. This study’s model suggests that if parents and children are negotiating information seeking with the same technology tools but different funds of knowledge, experience levels and skills, the presentation of information (e.g. online search results, information visualizations) needs to accommodate different levels of understanding. This study recommends designers work closely with marginalized communities through participatory design methods to better understand how interfaces and visuals can help accommodate youth invisible work.

The authors have demonstrated in this study that learning and engaging in family online searching is not only vital to the development of individual and digital literacy skills, it is a part of family learning. While community services, libraries and schools have a responsibility to support individual digital and information literacy development, this study’s model highlights the need to recognize funds of knowledge, family resiliency and asset-based learning. Schools and teachers should identify and harness youth invisible work as a form of learning at home. The authors believe educators can do this by highlighting the importance of information problem solving in homes and youth in their families. Libraries and community centers also play a critical role in supporting parents and adults for technical assistance (e.g. WiFi access) and information resources.

This study’s work indicates new conditions fostering productive joint media engagement (JME) around OSB. This study contributes a generative understanding that promotes studying and designing for JME, where family responsibility is the focus.

Requirements management (RM), as practised in the aerospace and defence sectors, attracts interest from construction researchers in response to longstanding problems of project definition. Doubts are expressed whether RM offers a new discipline for construction practitioners or whether it repeats previous exhortations to adopt a more disciplined way of working. Whilst systems engineering has an established track record of addressing complex technical problems, its extension to socially complex problems has been challenged. The dominant storyline of RM is one of procedural rationality and RM is commonly presented as a means of controlling dilettante behaviour. Interviews with RM practitioners suggest a considerable gulf between the dominant storyline in the literature and how practitioners operate in practice. The paper challenges construction researchers interested in RM to reflect more upon the theoretical debates that underpin current equivalent practices in construction and the disparity between espoused and enacted practice.

Large-Scale Assessments in Germany have shown that language-minority students as well as students with special educational needs (SEN) perform significantly less well than language-majority students or students without SEN. This performance gap may be related to a limited accessibility of the tests. One way to test whether assessments allow all students to demonstrate their knowledge in a comparable way is the analysis of differential item functioning (DIF). In this chapter, we evaluate DIF coefficients in order to examine group-specific difficulties in reading comprehension for language-minority students and students with SEN in the German National Educational Assessment.

In the first study, we investigate the assessment of reading literacy of language-minority learners and German monolinguals from low-SES families. We found only a few items with moderate DIF and no items with large DIF. This indicates that the reading assessment was equally valid for second-language learners and German monolingual students.

In our second study, we report about the psychometrically successful development of easy and more accessible reading tasks for students with SEN. Further analyses showed that DIF predominantly occurred in items that captured contents that are not necessarily covered in literacy instruction targeted at students with SEN.

This paper aims to focus on requirements management of projects constructed under traditional procurement system. It seeks to discuss the requirements management processes highlighting the limitations and addressing the need for a practical framework for facilitating the implementation of requirements management in the construction industry.

Two research instruments were used in this paper: semi‐structured interviews and case studies.

The literature review introduced a generic process for requirements management practice potentially to be adopted in the construction industry. The research study identified that the processes and limitations of current practice included the lack of a practical framework, misinterpretation of requirements, difficulties in identifying requirements, conflicts between expectation and constraints, complex hierarchy of client's organisation and communication problems in eliciting client requirements. Recommendations are given that an inclusive project brief and a competent project manager to manage the project requirements are necessary in capturing and tracing the requirements during the project development process. A practical framework is needed to improve the requirements management practice within the construction industry.

The research findings establish the basis for further research to examine the implementation of these potential solutions and development of a systematic framework for RsM. The research is of significant value to the construction industry where value generation is essential and critical, especially in difficult economic and financial situations.

Requirements are the foundation of the projects which are critical to the successful delivery of the projects. Although many guidelines have been published for managing client requirements, the existing practice on requirements management is still considered to be inadequate. This research provides insight for professional practitioners in the construction industry to improve the requirements management practices for development projects.

Although the movement of goods by consumers represents a large proportion of the economic and environmental impact of the distribution chain, this topic has been insufficiently explored in the retailing literature. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of shopping travel-mode choice in the context of grocery shopping.

The paper presents findings from a Swedish national survey of 1,694 respondents that included questions regarding travel-mode choices and consumer characteristics, mobility conditions, shopping behaviours and environmental interests and engagements.

This paper shows how travel modes interrelate and how various consumer characteristics, shopping behaviours, mobility conditions and environmental interests and engagements relate to and affect travel-mode choice in grocery shopping. General travel patterns and distance to store are shown to be the most important factors in explaining the mode of transport for grocery shopping.

This paper presents data from a national representative survey and provides novel analyses of travel-mode choices in grocery shopping and the interrelationships among those choices, in addition to the interrelationship between travel-mode choice and the use of home delivery. This paper contributes to a further understanding of consumer mobility in the context of grocery shopping.

The purpose of this paper is to explore existing problems and potential solutions of managing Employers' Requirements in the project development process of construction projects under traditional procurement systems.

Two research instruments are used: semi‐structured interview and questionnaire survey, to investigate the problems and potential solutions to Requirements Management in the construction industry.

The research revealed that Requirements Management is crucial to the successful delivery of construction projects. However, the current practice of Requirements Management in the industry is informal and there is a lack of a systematic approach to tackle the problems. The authors also propose potential solutions to Requirements Management as well as a vision for further research.

The paper presents the problems of managing Employers' Requirements, and the potential solutions to improve the Requirements Management process that need to be addressed.

The paper improves one's comprehension of the nature, characteristics, problems and potential solutions of Requirements Management in the project development process under the traditional procurement systems in the construction industry, relevant to both practitioners and scholars. A model is proposed as a “preliminary framework” to show the processes involved.

This paper aims to present the “Vulnerability Sourcebook” methodology, a standardised framework for the assessment of climate vulnerability and risk in the context of adaptation planning. The Vulnerability Sourcebook has been developed for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and has been applied in more than twenty countries worldwide.

It is based on a participative development of so-called climate impact chains, which are an analytical concept to better understand, systemise and prioritise the climate factors as well as environmental and socio-economic factors that drive climate related threats, vulnerabilities and risks in a specific system. Impact chains serve as the backbone for an operational climate vulnerability assessment with indicators based on quantitative approaches (data, models) combined with expert assessments. In this paper, the authors present the concept and applications of the original Vulnerability Sourcebook, published in 2015, which was based on the IPCC AR4 concept of climate vulnerability. In Section 6 of this paper, the authors report how this concept has been adapted to the current IPCC AR5 concept of climate risks.

The application of the Sourcebook is demonstrated in three case studies in Bolivia, Pakistan and Burundi. The results indicate that particularly the participative development of impact chains helped with generating a common picture on climate vulnerabilities and commitment for adaptation planning within a region. The mixed methods approach (considering quantitative and qualitative information) allows for a flexible application in different contexts. Challenges are mainly the availability of climate (change) and socio-economic data, as well as the transparency of value-based decisions in the process.

The Vulnerability Sourcebook offers a standardised framework for the assessment of climate vulnerability and risk in the context of adaptation planning.

The study attempted to assess the food security status of urban agriculture households in Ghana and India. Also, the extent of urban agriculture participation and its effect on food security in Ghana and India were examined.

A total of 650 urban agriculture farmers were interviewed for this study in Ghana and India. Food security status of urban households was assessed by the use of the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale, whereas the determinants of the extent of urban agriculture and its effect on food security were analysed by the use of the heteroskedastic linear regression and the Seemingly Unrelated Regression models, respectively.

From the study on average, households in Ghana were mildly food insecure, but that of India was moderately food insecure. The results further revealed that various demographic, economic, institutional and health and nutrition factors differently influenced urban food security and urban agriculture. Also, the extent of urban agriculture participation positively influenced food security.

Several studies in Asia (India) and Africa (Ghana) on urban food security have been geographically limited to New Delhi, Mumbai and Greater Accra, with few studies in the Middle Belt of Ghana, and Bihar in India. Besides, there is a limited, rigorous, empirical study on the effect of the extent of UA on food security in Asia (India) and Africa (Ghana) individually and together. Moreover, we extend the frontiers of the methodological approach by applying the Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) model to understand if the factors that affect food-security accessibility based on two food security accessibility tools are correlated.