Outsourcing Security: The Need,the Risks,the Providers,and the Process

Abstract

The securing of data and networks is vital for any organization, yet not all organizations have the resources to keep up with the latest security issues and threats. One option is to outsource the professionals needed to get the work done. Outsourcing is defined as contracting professionals from the outside to do services that are core or non-core to the business. Yet, outsourcing does have its risks. Allowing non-employees to manage key security operations can be scary. The decision is not an easy one, which is discussed here to allow security managers to make a more informed decision. This article discusses the need for outsourcing security, determining the risks, choosing a provider. and managing the process. The premise is that outsourcing can be used as a successful tool for saving an organization money by allowing outside providers to perform non-core competencies.     

Jobs, trades, skills, and the profession

Is the reputed shortage of IT skills a political scam or is the computing profession itself at fault? The author considers IT professional responsibility and training issues.     

Iterative rework: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Iterative development can take many forms, depending on the project's goals: iterative prototyping can help evolve a user interface. Agile development is a way to closely involve a prototypical customer in a process that might repeat daily. Incremental build lets developers produce weekly builds of an evolving product. A spiral model can help the team confront and mitigate risk in an evolving product. Each iteration involves a certain amount of rework to enhance and fix existing capabilities (the good). However, excessive rework could indicate problems in the requirements, the developers' skills and motivation, the development processes or technology used, or all of the above (the bad). Exorbitant levels of rework result in truly untenable situations (the ugly). On the other hand, too little rework could indicate insufficient review and testing or too little anticipation of the product features needed to support the next version (bad that can turn ugly). Understanding and correcting the root causes of problems that result from too much or too little rework can significantly increase productivity, quality, developer morale, and customer satisfaction.     

Text-encoding, Theories of the Text, and the 'Work-Site'

This essay emerges from the recent debates in editorial theoryand, on the practical level, from a project for producing electronicscholarly editions. It reflects on the nature of text, exploresthe implications for text encoding in relation to recent debate,and outlines a methodology using stand-off markup within whichtext encoding can respond to the theoretically enunciated problems.     

从物到形——点、线、面、色彩和肌理的游戏

在传统构成课的基础上,探索和实践更具有趣味性、操作性和时代性的设计基础教学。通过一系列整合的课题设计,让同学们在自我探索与创造的空间里,打破传统思维方式,尝试用点、线、面、色彩和肌理,将一个真实物体从常态衍变到非常态的视觉形象。     

Uncertainty, prediction, and the unexpected

There is a common (and I think, accurate) perception that today's high-technology markets contain an irreducible amount of uncertainty. It's easy to explain part of this uncertainty. Few people are considered experts on many technologies. Thus, most high-tech watchers are frequently surprised, disappointed, and delighted by commercial developments in fields about which they know almost nothing. That said, more than just lack of expertise affects uncertainty. Uncertainty has comprised the industry zeitgeist for decades. Many young programmers living on Internet time may not believe that, but it's no less true today than it was in the past. Only the sources of uncertainty change in each era-the presence of uncertainty does not. Previously observers associated disruption and instability with the introduction of, for example, notebook computers, PDAs, networked computers, laser printers, PCs, minicomputers, or a range of other technologies     

Security, wiretapping, and the Internet

In a move that is dangerous to network security, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation is seeking to extend the Communications for Law Enforcement Act to voice over IP. Such an extension poses national security risks.     

Superimposition, symbology, visual attention, and the head-up display

In two experiments we examined a number of related factors postulated to influence head-up display (HUD) performance. We addressed the benefit of reduced scanning and the cost of increasing the number of elements in the visual field by comparing a superimposed HUD with an identical display in a head-down position in varying visibility conditions. We explored the extent to which the characteristics of HUD symbology support a division of attention by contrasting conformal symbology (which links elements of the display image to elements of the far domain) with traditional instrument landing system (ILS) symbology. Together the two experiments provide strong evidence that minimizing scanning between flight instruments and the far domain contributes substantially to the observed HUD performance advantage. Experiment 1 provides little evidence for a performance cost attributable to visual clutter. In Experiment 2 the pattern of differences in lateral tracking error between conformal and traditional ILS symbology supports the hypothesis that, to the extent that the symbology forms an object with the far domain, attention may be divided between the superimposed image and its counterpart in the far domain.     

Markets, standards, and the information infrastructure

The author presents a synthesis of thinking within the economics field about network development and standardization. The analysis focuses on understanding economic factors shaping important contemporary events and the development of standards in tomorrow's information infrastructure. The motivation for such a synthesis is that many observations about market mechanisms are not consistent with one another, nor do they all transparently synthesize into a single policy vision. The key to understanding this confusion is that standards take on a dual role, as a coordinator and as a constraint. These insights should be useful for the development of appropriate public policy and management strategy     

The digital divide, the UN, and the computing profession

The term digital divide usually refers to the great disparities between and within societies in the use of digital technology. In December 2003, the United Nations held a World Summit on the Information Society to adopt a declaration that embodies, in its draft form at least, "the ambitious vision" of "bridging the digital divide." The declaration's hopes focus on the rapid pace of development of ICTs (information and communication technologies) unprecedented in history - which allows for the development of applications that make it possible that no one is left behind and that those who were left marginalised in previous development cycles can have a real opportunity to attain higher levels of development without having to follow the traditional path nor its time requirements. This article considers the shortcomings of this proposal.     

PCs, the Internet, and you

Reflects on where the PC industry is going. For the last two decades private firms have developed PC businesses relatively unimpeded by the government. For all intents and purposes, the PC suffered almost no government regulation-with the possible exception of the recent Microsoft antitrust trial. It seems unlikely that this freedom will continue much longer, particularly as the PC begins to embody more communications capabilities in one form or another. That is, because communications industries in the United States have been subject to government regulation for almost one hundred years, this history will tempt politicians to meddle in the PC industry as they have in other communications markets. I'm not sure I like this future, but it appears unavoidable. The future of the PC is tied to the future of the Internet, a future that, in turn, is tied to whether the Internet is regulated like all past communications industries. This raises concerns that soon somebody will try to eliminate the asymmetric treatment of different access modes, promote common carrier regulation over the Internet, and apply principles of universal service to the Internet. We have quite a future in front of us     

Connectionism, Systematicity, and the Frame Problem

This paper investigates connectionism's potential to solve the frame problem. The frame problem arises in the context of modelling the human ability to see the relevant consequences of events in a situation. It has been claimed to be unsolvable for classical cognitive science, but easily manageable for connectionism. We will focus on a representational approach to the frame problem which advocates the use of intrinsic representations. We argue that although connectionism's distributed representations may look promising from this perspective, doubts can be raised about the potential of distributed representations to allow large amounts of complexly structured information to be adequately encoded and processed. It is questionable whether connectionist models that are claimed to effectively represent structured information can be scaled up to a realistic extent. We conclude that the frame problem provides a difficulty to connectionism that is no less serious than the obstacle it constitutes for classical cognitive science.     

Java, the Web, and software development

The author discusses how the World Wide Web and Java mark the death of fatware and the birth of dynamic computing built on rented components. The real paradigm shift will be the replacement of purchased software packages with transaction-oriented rental of Java applets attached to Web pages. In the move to a full-scale Internet based application development environment, developers are grappling with seven key issues: how to integrate e-mail, FTP, and HTML; the absolute need for security; the dearth of high-end visual tools; configuration management and version control; support for a flexible, sophisticated user interface; a common development environment; and performance, which has several components. Each of these issues are discussed by the author     

Josef,the robot

Computers cannot be properly understood without at least an elementary exposure to programming. Many teachers would reject this proposal on the grounds that for many people programming is too difficult and uninteresting. This objection is probably correct if we imply that programming should be introduced in a general purpose programming language. Its validity becomes questionable if the vehicle is a special programming language which puts the student into a natural environment, familiar to every ordinary person.The LOGO system is a well known example of such a natural environment. This article presents a related language called Josef which is used to program a robot moving on the map of a computer terminal. The distinguishing features of Josef are: (a) Extensibility of built-in vocabulary: (b) Possibility of fully top-down approach to the solution of large problems; (c) Similarity to general purpose languages in terms of concepts available in the language and the syntax used to express them: (d) Ability to work on ordinary computer terminals.The larger part of the article attempts to present the general philosophy of the language on a few programming examples of medium complexity.     

The asymptotic behaviour,the angles of departure,and the angles of approach,of the characteristic frequency loci

In algebraic function theory, there is a well established method which uses ‘Newton's diagram’ to find the series expansions of an algebraic function q(x) in the neighbourhood of a point x₀ . In this paper it is shown how, for a linear, time-invariant, multi-variable feedback system, this method can be used to find :

(i) the asymptotic behaviour of the characteristic frequency loci (multivariable root loci) ;

(ii) the angles of departure of the characteristic frequency loci from the open-loop poles ; and

(iii) the angles of approach of the characteristic frequency loci to the finite zeros of such a system.     

The Good,the Bad,and the Ugly Face Challenge Problem

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Face Challenge Problem was created to encourage the development of algorithms that are robust to recognition across changes that occur in still frontal faces. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly consists of three partitions. The Good partition contains pairs of images that are considered easy to recognize. The base verification rate (VR) is 0.98 at a false accept rate (FAR) of 0.001. The Bad partition contains pairs of images of average difficulty to recognize. For the Bad partition, the VR is 0.80 at a FAR of 0.001. The Ugly partition contains pairs of images considered difficult to recognize, with a VR of 0.15 at a FAR of 0.001. The base performance is from fusing the output of three of the top performers in the FRVT 2006. The design of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly controls for posevariation, subject aging, and subject “recognizability.” Subject recognizability is controlled by having the same number of images of each subject in every partition. This implies that the differences in performance among the partitions are a result of how a face is presented in each image.     

Information Security,Business, and the Internet

Abstract

This is the beginning of the age of the Global Networked Economy. Benefits will come with the network as the market, and the network as the channel for the market. Society increasingly is excited by the resulting opportunities. Economists have recognized the possible start of the next Long- wave of economic growth — the 5th Kondratieff Cycle, named after a Russian academician of the early 20th Century. The stock market investor sees a major shift in business opportunities and future corporate profitability driven by the exploitation of IT/Telecommunication services. The stock market levels reached daily in the United States and Europe during the Spring of 1998 highlight this expectation.     

Writing, technologies, and the fifth canon

Andrea Lunsford's keynote address to the 2005 Computers and Writing Conference at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, expands the definition of writing to include epistemic, multivocal, multimodal, and multimediated practices in the computers and writing classroom. The article describes the development and piloting of a new undergraduate course in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric that applies these concepts to the undergraduate composition process. The address closes with a challenge to create classroom experiences that allow students to compose in “the most compelling discursive modalities of their generation”.     

Discrete Convexity, Straightness, and the 16-Neighborhood

In this paper, we extend some results in discrete geometry based on the 8-neighborhood to that of the 16-neighborhood, which now includes the chessboard and the knight moves. We first present some analogies between an 8-digital arc and a 16-digital arc as represented by shortest paths on the grid. We present a transformation which uniquely maps a 16-digital arc onto an 8-digital arc (and vice versa). The grid-intersect-quantization (GIQ) of real arcs is defined with the 16-neighborhood. This enables us to define a 16-digital straight segment. We then present two new distance functions which satisfy the metric properties and describe the extended neighborhood space. Based on these functions, we present some new results regarding discrete convexity and 16-digital straightness. In particular, we demonstrate the convexity of a 16-digital straight segment. Moreover, we define a new property for characterizing a digital straight segment in the 16-neighborhood space. In comparison to the 8-neighborhood space, the proposed 16-neighborhood coding scheme offers a more compact representation without any loss of information.     

At twenty years of age,the will reigns,at thirty,the wit; and at forty,the judgement

Abstract

To assess the subjective health status of day- and shift-working police officers, a questionnaire-based study was carried out All the day-workers had previous shift experience. To control the age factor the total population of 2659 shift-working and 1303 day-working police officers was divided into four ten-year age classes. Factor analysis revealed that all the symptoms included in the questionnaire could be grouped into six factors. The prevalence rates of complaints showed that four of these factors )autonomous symptoms, musculoskeletal symptoms, disturbance of appetite and indigestion, respiratory infections) were influenced by the main effects of age and shift work. Across all age classes the age-related changes in prevalence rates were strengthened by shift-work. In the other two factors (nervous symptoms, gastro-intestinal symptoms) an additional interaction effect could be observed. While the prevalence rates of the day-workers increased with age, those of the shift-workers decreased in the oldest age class. This drop of prevalence rates may be attributed to the influence of selection processes.