A Realist Ethnography of Nuclear Security Officer Culture

This realist ethnography describes the heretofore unexamined culture of commercial nuclear power security officers over a one-year period from an active participant observer’s perspective. Data include field notes taken during observations at various sites and 15 interviews with security leaders working at or who had recently worked at 12 different commercial nuclear power plants and had previously worked at a dozen other commercial nuclear power plants, thus representing a broad overview of the commercial nuclear security culture. The data also include more than 58 unclassified documents from these sites, industry organizations, and regulatory agencies. An analysis of the data reveals 16 key themes that are characteristic of the nuclear security officer culture. The study describes how, although safety and security are of paramount concern at a commercial nuclear plant, the cultures of security workers and safety workers differ significantly. Not only is the nuclear security officer culture different from that of the safety culture at the same plant, but it often conflicts with it in its attitudes, goals, procedures, supervision, and job satisfaction. The commercial nuclear security officer culture is unique in many ways, including the isolation of security officers— institutionally, physically, and socially—from the other plant workers; their working conditions and benefits; their need to work oftentimes long, boring, unpredictable shifts and carry heavy equipment to remote sites; and their responsibility to respond immediately and, if necessary, with deadly force, even putting their lives on the line. iii Supplementing the data analysis, and in keeping with a realistic ethnography, are a series of vignettes describing the typical day in a nuclear security officer’s life. The study also points out differences between the commercial nuclear security culture and that of the private non-nuclear security cultures. The study concludes with recommendations for improving the commercial nuclear security officer culture and for future research into a culture we know little about but whose members are invested with one of the greatest responsibilities in our country—protecting us from potential acts of terrorism perpetrated on nuclear plants and the resultant exposure to the effects of nuclear waste, which can last for generations

The Foundation and the Liberal Society: A Discussion With Kenneth Prewitt

This transcript is based on a roundtable discussion on the subject of the place and purpose of philanthropy in a modern liberal democracy. The speaker addresses the need for a nation to establish a foundation sector and explains how philanthropic funding is different from the state funding and other non-profit organisations already active in a society

Towards Understanding and Applying Security Assurance Cases for Automotive Systems

Security Assurance Cases (SAC) are structured bodies of arguments and evidence used to reason about security properties of a certain artefact.SAC are gaining focus in the automotive domain as the need for security assurance is growing due to software becoming a main part of vehicles. Market demands for new services and products in the domain require connectivity, and hence, raise security concerns. Regulators and standardisation bodies started recently to require a structured for security assurance of products in the automotive domain, and automotive companies started, hence, to study ways to create and maintain these cases, as well as adopting them in their current way of working.In order to facilitate the adoption of SAC in the automotive domain, we created CASCADE, an approach for creating SAC which have integrated quality assurance and are compliant with the requirements of ISO/SAE-21434, the upcoming cybersecurity standard for automotive systems.CASCADE was created by conducting design science research study in two iterative cycles. The design decisions of CASCADE are based on insights from a qualitative research study which includes a workshop, a survey, and one-to-one interviews, done in collaboration with our industrial partners about the needs and drivers of work in SAC in industry, and a systematic literature review in which we identified gaps between the industrial needs and the state of the art.The evaluation of CASCADE was done with help of security experts from a large automotive OEM. It showed that CASCADE is suitable for integration in industrial product development processes. Additionally, our results show that the elements of CASCADE align well with respect to the way of working at the company, and has the potential to scale to cover the requirements and needs of the company with its large organization and complex products

Reframing the measurement of women’s work in the sub-Saharan African context

This research note considers how we measure women’s work in the sub-Saharan African (SSA) context. Drawing on qualitative work conducted in Burundi, the note examines how existing measures of women’s work do not accurately capture the intensity and type of work women in SSA undertake. Transcripts from qualitative interviews suggest that women think of work to meet their roles and responsibilities within the household. The women in the interviews do not frame work as a career or a primary activity in a time-use allocation. As a result, researchers need to nest questions regarding women’s work within surveys that ask about roles and responsibilities within the household, and about how women meet these responsibilities with a financial component.Published versionAccepted manuscrip

The Walking Talking Stick: Understanding Automated Note-Taking in Walking Meetings

While walking meetings offer a healthy alternative to sit-down meetings, they also pose practical challenges. Taking notes is difficult while walking, which limits the potential of walking meetings. To address this, we designed the Walking Talking Stick -- a tangible device with integrated voice recording, transcription, and a physical highlighting button to facilitate note-taking during walking meetings. We investigated our system in a three-condition between-subjects user study with thirty pairs of participants ($N$=60) who conducted 15-minute outdoor walking meetings. Participants either used clip-on microphones, the prototype without the button, or the prototype with the highlighting button. We found that the tangible device increased task focus, and the physical highlighting button facilitated turn-taking and resulted in more useful notes. Our work demonstrates how interactive artifacts can incentivize users to hold meetings in motion and enhance conversation dynamics. We contribute insights for future systems which support conducting work tasks in mobile environments.Comment: In CHI 202

Social-ecological soundscapes: examining aircraft-harvester-caribou conflict in Arctic Alaska

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017As human development expands across the Arctic, it is crucial to carefully assess the impacts to remote natural ecosystems and to indigenous communities that rely on wild resources for nutritional and cultural wellbeing. Because indigenous communities and wildlife populations are interdependent, assessing how human activities impact traditional harvest practices can advance our understanding of the human dimensions of wildlife management. Indigenous communities across Arctic Alaska have expressed concern over the last four decades that low-flying aircraft interfere with their traditional harvest practices. For example, communities often have testified that aircraft disturb caribou (Rangifer tarandus) and thereby reduce harvest opportunities. Despite this longstanding concern, little research exists on the extent of aircraft activity in Arctic Alaska and on how aircraft affect the behavior and perceptions of harvesters. Therefore, the overarching goal of my research was to highlight the importance of aircraft-harvester conflict in Arctic Alaska and begin to address the issue using a scientific and community-driven approach. In Chapter 1, I demonstrated that conflict between aircraft and indigenous harvesters in Arctic Alaska is a widespread, understudied, and complex issue. By conducting a meta-analysis of the available literature, I quantified the deficiency of scientific knowledge about the impacts of aircraft on rural communities and traditional harvest practices in the Arctic. My results indicated that no peer-reviewed literature has addressed the conflict between low-flying aircraft and traditional harvesters in Arctic Alaska. I speculated that the scale over which aircraft, rural communities, and wildlife interact limits scientists' ability to determine causal relationships and therefore detracts from their interest in researching the human dimension of this social-ecological system. Innovative research approaches like soundscape ecology could begin to quantify interactions and provide baseline data that may foster mitigation discourses among stakeholders. In Chapter 2, I employed a soundscape-ecology approach to address concerns about aircraft activity expressed by the Alaska Native community of Nuiqsut. Nuiqsut faces the greatest volume of aircraft activity of any community in Arctic Alaska because of its proximity to intensive oil and gas activity. However, information on when and where these aircraft are flying is unavailable to residents, managers, and researchers. I worked closely with Nuiqsut residents to deploy acoustic monitoring systems along important caribou harvest corridors during the peak of caribou harvest, from early June through late August 2016. This method successfully captured aircraft sound and the community embraced my science for addressing local priorities. I found aircraft activity levels near Nuiqsut and surrounding oil developments (12 daily events) to be approximately six times greater than in areas over 30 km from the village (two daily events). Aircraft sound disturbance was 26 times lower in undeveloped areas (Noise Free Interval =13 hrs) than near human development (NFI = 0.5 hrs). My study provided baseline data on aircraft activity and noise levels. My research could be used by stakeholders and managers to develop conflict avoidance agreements and minimize interference with traditional harvest practices. Soundscape methods could be adapted to rural regions across Alaska that may be experiencing conflict with aircraft or other sources of noise that disrupt human-wildlife interactions. By quantifying aircraft activity using a soundscape approach, I demonstrated a novel application of an emerging field in ecology and provided the first scientific data on one dimension of a larger social-ecological system. Future soundscape studies should be integrated with research on both harvester and caribou behaviors to understand how the components within this system are interacting over space and time. Understanding the long-term impacts to traditional harvest practices will require integrated, cross-disciplinary efforts that collaborate with communities and other relevant stakeholders. Finally, my research will likely spark efforts to monitor and mitigate aircraft impacts to wildlife populations and traditional harvest practices across Alaska, helping to inform a decision-making process currently hindered by an absence of objective data

Efficiency and Automation in Threat Analysis of Software Systems

Context: Security is a growing concern in many organizations. Industries developing software systems plan for security early-on to minimize expensive code refactorings after deployment. In the design phase, teams of experts routinely analyze the system architecture and design to find potential security threats and flaws. After the system is implemented, the source code is often inspected to determine its compliance with the intended functionalities. Objective: The goal of this thesis is to improve on the performance of security design analysis techniques (in the design and implementation phases) and support practitioners with automation and tool support.Method: We conducted empirical studies for building an in-depth understanding of existing threat analysis techniques (Systematic Literature Review, controlled experiments). We also conducted empirical case studies with industrial participants to validate our attempt at improving the performance of one technique. Further, we validated our proposal for automating the inspection of security design flaws by organizing workshops with participants (under controlled conditions) and subsequent performance analysis. Finally, we relied on a series of experimental evaluations for assessing the quality of the proposed approach for automating security compliance checks. Findings: We found that the eSTRIDE approach can help focus the analysis and produce twice as many high-priority threats in the same time frame. We also found that reasoning about security in an automated fashion requires extending the existing notations with more precise security information. In a formal setting, minimal model extensions for doing so include security contracts for system nodes handling sensitive information. The formally-based analysis can to some extent provide completeness guarantees. For a graph-based detection of flaws, minimal required model extensions include data types and security solutions. In such a setting, the automated analysis can help in reducing the number of overlooked security flaws. Finally, we suggested to define a correspondence mapping between the design model elements and implemented constructs. We found that such a mapping is a key enabler for automatically checking the security compliance of the implemented system with the intended design. The key for achieving this is two-fold. First, a heuristics-based search is paramount to limit the manual effort that is required to define the mapping. Second, it is important to analyze implemented data flows and compare them to the data flows stipulated by the design