Leader’s dilemma game: An experimental design for cyber insider threat research

One of the problems with insider threat research is the lack of a complete 360° view of an insider threat dataset due to inadequate experimental design. This has prevented us from modeling a computational system to protect against insider threat situations. This paper provides a contemporary methodological approach for using online games to simulate insider betrayal for predictive behavioral research. The Leader’s Dilemma Game simulates an insider betrayal scenario for analyzing organizational trust relationships, providing an opportunity to examine the trustworthiness of focal individuals, as measured by humans as sensors engaging in computer-mediated communication. This experimental design provides a window into trustworthiness attribution that can generate a rigorous and relevant behavioral dataset, and contributes to building a cyber laboratory that advances future insider threat study.     

How the Kano model contributes to Kansei engineering in services

Recent studies show that products and services hold great appeal if they are attractively designed to elicit emotional feelings from customers. Kansei engineering (KE) has good potential to provide a competitive advantage to those able to read and translate customer affect and emotion in actual product and services. This study introduces an integrative framework of the Kano model and KE, applied to services. The Kano model was used and inserted into KE to exhibit the relationship between service attribute performance and customer emotional response. Essentially, the Kano model categorises service attribute quality into three major groups (must-be [M], one-dimensional [O] and attractive [A]). The findings of a case study that involved 100 tourists who stayed in luxury 4- and 5-star hotels are presented. As a practical matter, this research provides insight on which service attributes deserve more attention with regard to their significant impact on customer emotional needs. STATEMENT OF RELEVANCE: Apart from cognitive evaluation, emotions and hedonism play a big role in service encounters. Through a focus on delighting qualities of service attributes, this research enables service providers and managers to establish the extent to which they prioritise their improvement efforts and to always satisfy their customer emotions beyond expectation.     

Optimization of Geoscience Laser Altimeter System waveform metrics to support vegetation measurements

The Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) has collected over 250 million measurements of vegetation height over forests globally. Accurate vegetation heights can be determined using waveform metrics that include vertical extent and extent of the waveform's trailing and leading edges. All three indices are highly dependent upon the signal strength, background noise and signal-to-noise ratio of the waveform, as the background noise contribution to the waveforms has to be removed before their calculation. Over the last six years, GLAS has collected data during thirteen observation periods using illumination from three different lasers. The power levels of these lasers have changed over time, resulting in variable signal power and noise characteristics. Atmospheric conditions vary continuously, also influencing signal power and noise.To minimize these effects, we optimized a noise coefficient which could be constant or vary according to observation period or noise metric. This parameter is used with the mean and standard deviation of the background noise to determine a noise level threshold that is removed from each waveform. An optimization analysis was used with a global dataset of waveforms that are near-coincident with waveforms from other observation periods; the goal of the optimization was to minimize the difference in vertical extent between spatially overlapping GLAS observations. Optimizations based on absolute difference in height led to situations in which the total extent was minimized as well; further optimizations reduced a normalized difference in height extent. The simplest optimizations were based on a constant value to be applied to all observations; noise coefficients of 2.7, 3.2, 3.4 and 4.0 were determined for datasets consisting of global forests, global vegetation, forest in the legal Amazon basin and boreal forests respectively. Optimizations based on the power level or the signal-to-noise ratio of waveforms best minimized differences in waveform extent, decreasing the percent root mean squared height difference by 25-54% over the constant value approach. Further development of methods to ensure temporal consistency of waveform indices will be necessary to support long-term satellite lidar missions and will result in more accurate and precise estimates of canopy height.     

Kinematics of heelstrike during walking and carrying: implications for slip resistance testing

Slip resistance measurements of shoes and floors are used to evaluate the potential for slip and fall injuries. These measurements are believed to have increased validity when they more closely reflect actual heelstrike biomechanics during locomotion. The purpose of this study was to describe heelstrike kinematics during load carrying to provide data towards improved slip resistance testing. Foot kinematics during load carrying (unladen and carrying from 0 to 13.5 kg) at various cadences (70, 90, 100 steps/min) was recorded. Measures before, during and after heelstrike were analysed. Cadence was an important predictor for all variables measured, associated with changes from 13% to over 100%. The load carried was an important predictor for only the heel slip distance after heelstrike, but this effect needs to be investigated further. These results can be used to improve the fidelity of slip resistance measurements, which is critical to reduce slip and fall injuries in the workplace or during activities of daily living.     

Large displays enhance optical flow cues and narrow the gender gap in 3-D virtual navigation

OBJECTIVE: Existing reports suggest that males significantly outperform females in navigating 3-D virtual environments. Although researchers have recognized that this may be attributable to males and females possessing different spatial abilities, most work has attempted to reduce the gender gap by providing more training for females. In this paper, we explore using large displays to narrow the gender gap within these tasks. BACKGROUND: While evaluating various interaction techniques, we found that large displays affording wider fields of view seemed to improve virtual navigation performance in general and, additionally, to narrow the gender gap that existed on standard desktop displays. METHOD: We conducted two experiments (32 and 22 participants) exploring the individual contributions of display and geometric fields of view to the observed effects as well as isolating factors explaining performance increases seen on the large displays. RESULTS: We show that wider fields of view on large displays not only increase performance of all users on average but also benefit females to such a degree as to allow them to perform as well as males do. We further demonstrate that these benefits can be attributed to better optical flow cues offered by the large displays. CONCLUSION: These findings provide a significant contribution, including recommendations for the improved presentation of 3-D environments, backed by empirical data demonstrating performance benefits during navigation tasks. APPLICATION. Results can be used to design systems that narrow the gender gap in domains such as teleoperation and virtual environments for entertainment, virtual training, or information visualization.     

Ignitable Liquid Classification and Identification Using the Summed-Ion Mass Spectrum

Abstract

The mass spectra calculated by summing the intensities of each nominal mass over all chromatographic times, the summed ion spectra, were calculated for a set of 440 commercially available ignitable liquids that had been analyzed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. Each ignitable liquid is generally comprised of a mixture of chemicals, and the mixtures may be very complex in some cases, e.g., petroleum distillates, gasoline, etc. The summed ion spectra were evaluated to determine if they contained sufficient information content to allow their use for rapid and accurate identification of the ignitable liquid in a database or library. The summed ion nominal mass spectra were encoded in one bit per channel at 1% transition intensity and a set of 96,580 unique pairwise comparisons were made between spectra, resulting in an average of approximately 50 differing channels per comparison. A subset of 62 summed ion spectra were further compared by a similarity metric and found by cluster analysis to group closely along the ASTM ignitable liquid classification scheme. Receiver operator characteristic analysis of the use of the similarity index in combination with the summed ion spectra was shown to provide 99% probability of correct liquid identification and 95% probability of correct ASTM classification by primary and sub-class. Interlaboratory tests found 95% probability of correct liquid identification and 85% probability of correct ASTM classification at the primary class level. These results demonstrate the use of the summed ion spectrum as a first step in the rapid identification of an ignitable liquid by database or library searching.     

Integrating carrier selection with supplier selection decisions to improve supply chain security

Supply chain security is a major concern for logistics managers who have responsibility for inbound and outbound shipments to and from both domestic and international locations. We propose here that logistics decisions concerning security in the supply chain will be made more effectively when made in concert with decisions in related supply chain processes, especially supplier and carrier selection. Indeed, managers may minimize cost, transit time, and security risk by integrating decision processes internally, as well as with their carrier's and supplier's operations. Thus, we account for both intra‐firm collaboration between logistics and purchasing managers, as well as inter‐firm collaboration among buyers, suppliers, and carriers in a supply chain. In this paper, we propose a decision process that features a set of security rules and a multi‐objective optimization model to accomplish this aim. We then provide an illustration to demonstrate the potential usefulness of these concepts in practice.