Progress and Regress in the MBA Curriculum: The Career and Practice Skills Gap

The question of MBA (master of business administration) curriculum relevancy has extended over many years, but surprisingly there has been little cohesive effort on the part of business schools to modify their approach in preparing students for successful practice management. Our research provides support to the growing concern that managerial and behavioral skills education has been overshadowed by the quantitative orientation emphasized in most MBA programs, despite the weak relationship found between MBA curricula and career success. The results of our study, based upon the perceptions of successful executives, revealed a set of prioritized managerial advancement skills as essential to their business success. However, these skills have not been widely embraced by business schools facing well-entrenched structural impediments to curricula change. We offer some prescriptive measures to help address these issues, with the intention of elevating the relevancy of the MBA curriculum

The PER model of abstract non-interference

Abstract. In this paper, we study the relationship between two models of secure information flow: the PER model (which uses equivalence relations) and the abstract non-interference model (which uses upper closure operators). We embed the lattice of equivalence relations into the lattice of closures, re-interpreting abstract non-interference over the lattice of equivalence relations. For narrow abstract non-interference, we show non-interference it is strictly less general. The relational presentation of abstract non-interference leads to a simplified construction of the most concrete harmless attacker. Moreover, the PER model of abstract noninterference allows us to derive unconstrained attacker models, which do not necessarily either observe all public information or ignore all private information. Finally, we show how abstract domain completeness can be used for enforcing the PER model of abstract non-interference

Towards a Type System for Security APIs

Abstract. Security API analysis typically only considers a subset of an API’s functions, with results bounded by the number of function calls. Furthermore, attacks involving partial leakage of sensitive information are usually not covered. Type-based static analysis has the potential to alleviate these shortcomings. To that end, we present a type system for secure information flow based upon the one of Volpano, Smith and Irvine [1], extended with types for cryptographic keys and ciphertext similar to those in Sumii and Pierce [2]. In contrast to some other type systems, the encryption and decryption of keys does not require special treatment. We show that a well-typed sequence of commands is non-interferent, based upon a definition of indistinguishability where, in certain circumstances, the adversary can distinguish between ciphertexts that correspond to encrypted public data.

Plucked human hair as a tissue in which to assess pharmacodynamic end points during drug development studies

We have demonstrated the feasibility of detecting and quantifying six cell-cycle-related nuclear markers (Ki67, pRb, p27, phospho-p27 (phosphorylated p27), phospho-pRb (phosphorylated pRb), phospho-HH3 (phosphorylated histone H3)) in plucked human scalp and eyebrow hair. Estimates of the proportion of plucked hairs that are lost or damaged during processing plus the intra- and intersubject variability of each nuclear marker with these techniques are provided to inform sizing decisions for intervention studies with drugs potentially impacting on these markers in the future