Women C-Suite Executives In Cybersecurity: Transformational Experiences And Gender Barriers On Their Leadership Journeys

Cybersecurity is one of the fastest growing industries with a critical role in protecting businesses and people from attacks that continue to grow and affect our nation. There is an increasing gap between the demand to fill jobs in the field and the skilled professionals available. Women currently fill less than 17% of those skilled positions. Understanding the paths of success and the barriers experienced by women cybersecurity leaders is key to determining how to fill the skill gap in the industry. This study uses a qualitative methodology with a descriptive phenomenological design to answer the research questions from the perspective of sixteen women C-Suite executives in the cybersecurity industry. The study focused on the human experience and behavior through descriptions of transformational experiences on a journey toward leadership. Exploring the concepts of mentorship, sponsorship, and trusted advisor in relation to the experiences of these women executives in cybersecurity provides insight into how organizations can replicate similar situations to overcome gender bias and encourage career growth for women in the industry. Participants described organic and informal instances of mentorship and other significant relationships as crucial to their success. Sponsorship was described as the most influential contribution to pivotal moments in their careers. The barriers the participants described were a variety of instances related to gender bias and discrimination with clear examples of both the glass ceiling and the glass cliff. Findings from this study provide organizations a framework by which to shift the organizational mindset away from marginalizing women and toward attracting and retaining them through support, sponsorship, and continued career and leadership development. Some recommendations from the study are: 1. Make it an organizational strategy to define, recognize, and deconstruct microaggressions in practices and processes that perpetuate unconscious bias. 2. Develop sponsorship for women at all levels of the organization. 3. Develop job descriptions in cybersecurity that create pathways for women. 4. Educate women to navigate various aspects of an organization and how to develop relationships that can support their growth

Gravitational Effects in Quantum Mechanics

To date, both quantum theory, and Einstein's theory of general relativity have passed every experimental test in their respective regimes. Nevertheless, almost since their inception, there has been debate surrounding whether they should be unified and by now there exists strong theoretical arguments pointing to the necessity of quantising the gravitational field. In recent years, a number of experiments have been proposed which, if successful, should give insight into features at the Planck scale. Here we review some of the motivations, from the perspective of semi-classical arguments, to expect new physical effects at the overlap of quantum theory and general relativity. We conclude with a short introduction to some of the proposals being made to facilitate empirical verification.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures, review article. Submitted to Contemporary Physic

Differences between families in the amount of salivary H substances *

The saliva ABO inhibition titres of the members of twenty-eight 0X0 and ten BxO mating types were determined. The results of the examinations suggest that: (1) A precursor ‘H’ substance is formed by all secretors which is converted into A, B, or AB depending on the individual's blood group. (2) the titres of the H substance secreted by members of the same sibship and of the same blood group are very uniform (high intra-class correlation) indicating genetic control over the amount of the soluble ABO substances secreted. A genetic hypothesis was put forward to account for these findings.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66443/1/j.1469-1809.1962.tb01308.x.pd

Virtue and austerity

Virtue ethics is often proposed as a third way in health-care ethics, that while consequentialism and deontology focus on action guidelines, virtue focuses on character; all three aim to help agents discern morally right action although virtue seems to have least to contribute to political issues, such as austerity. I claim: (1) This is a bad way to characterize virtue ethics. The 20th century renaissance of virtue ethics was first proposed as a response to the difficulty of making sense of ‘moral rightness’ outside a religious context. For Aristotle the right action is that which is practically best; that means best for the agent in order to live a flourishing life.There are no moral considerations besides this. (2) Properly characterized, virtue ethics can contribute to discussion of austerity. A criticism of virtue ethics is that fixed characteristics seem a bad idea in ever-changing environments; perhaps we should be generous in prosperity, selfish in austerity. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that people indeed do change with their environment. However, I argue that virtues concern fixed values not fixed behaviour; the values underlying virtue allow for different behaviour in different circumstances: in austerity, virtues still give the agent the best chance of flourishing. Two questions arise. (a) In austere environments might not injustice help an individual flourish by, say, obtaining material goods? No, because unjust acts undermine the type of society the agent needs for flourishing. (b) What good is virtue to those lacking the other means to flourish? The notion of degrees of flourishing shows that most people would benefit somewhat from virtue. However, in extreme circumstances virtue might harm rather than benefit the agent: such circumstances are to be avoided; virtue ethics thus has a political agenda to enable flourishing. This requires justice, a fortiori when in austerity

Factive and nonfactive mental state attribution

Factive mental states, such as knowing or being aware, can only link an agent to the truth; by contrast, nonfactive states, such as believing or thinking, can link an agent to either truths or falsehoods. Researchers of mental state attribution often draw a sharp line between the capacity to attribute accurate states of mind and the capacity to attribute inaccurate or “reality-incongruent” states of mind, such as false belief. This article argues that the contrast that really matters for mental state attribution does not divide accurate from inaccurate states, but factive from nonfactive ones

Random circuits by measurements on weighted graph states

Random quantum circuits take an input quantum state and randomize it. This is a task with a growing number of identified uses in quantum information processing. We suggest a scheme to implement random circuits in a weighted graph state. The input state is entangled with the weighted graph state and a random circuit is implemented when the experimenter performs local measurements in one fixed basis only. The scheme uses no classical random numbers and is a new and natural application of weighted graph statesComment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Multi trace element profiling in pathogenic and non-pathogenic fungi

Acknowledgements SW and EM were funded by an MRC NIRG to AB (G0900211/90671). AP was funded by a British Mycological Society Summer Studentship. AB was funded by a Royal Society URF (UF080611) and a Senior Wellcome Research Fellowship (206412/A/17/Z), which also funded TB. DW was funded by a Senior Wellcome Research Fellowship (214317/A/18/Z). The work was carried out in the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology (MR/N006364/2). This article is part of the Fungal Adaptation to Hostile Challenges special issue for the third International Symposium on Fungal Stress (ISFUS), which is supported by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo grant 2018/20571-6 and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior grant 88881.289327/2018-01.Peer reviewedproofPublisher PD

The unacknowledged legacy

This paper presents a critical discussion of the treatment of mimetic art, and particularly poetry and the theatre, in the work of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427-347 BC). It centres on Plato's discussion of the corrupting powers of the arts in the Republic, and the implications that his fierce attack on poetry and theatre have for his construction of the ideal polity. The legacy of Platonic ideas in later elaborations of the corrupting power of the arts is discussed. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between current debates on cultural policy and the Platonic idea that the transformative powers of the arts ought to be harnessed by the state to promote a just society. The conclusion thus reached is that “instrumental cultural policy”, rather then being a modern invention, was in fact first theorized precisely in Plato's Republic

An Alternative Interpretation of Statistical Mechanics

In this paper I propose an interpretation of classical statistical mechanics that centers on taking seriously the idea that probability measures represent complete states of statistical mechanical systems. I show how this leads naturally to the idea that the stochasticity of statistical mechanics is associated directly with the observables of the theory rather than with the microstates (as traditional accounts would have it). The usual assumption that microstates are representationally significant in the theory is therefore dispensable, a consequence which suggests interesting possibilities for developing non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and investigating inter-theoretic answers to the foundational questions of statistical mechanics