Using Prospect Theory to Investigate Decision-Making Bias within an Information Security Context

Information security is an issue that has increased in importance over the past decade. In this time both practitioner and academic circles have researched and developed practices and process to more effectively handle information security. Even with growth in these areas there has been little research conducted into how decision makers actually behave. This is problematic because decision makers in the Department of Defense have been observed exhibiting risk seeking behavior when making information security decisions that seemingly violate accepted norms. There are presently no models in the literature that provide sufficient insight into this phenomenon. This study used Prospect Theory as a framework to develop a survey in an effort to obtain insight into how decision makers actually behave while making information security decisions. The survey was distributed to Majors in the Air Force who represented likely future information security decision makers. The results of the study were mixed, showing that prospect theory had only limited explanatory power in this context. The most significant finding showed that negatively connotated decision frames result in significantly more risk seeking behavior. These results provide insight into decision maker behavior and highlight the fact that there are biases in information security decision making

Going beyond two degrees? The risks and opportunities of alternative options

Since the mid-1990s, the aim of keeping climate change within 2 °C has become firmly entrenched in policy discourses. In the past few years, the likelihood of achieving it has been increasingly called into question. The debate around what to do with a target that seems less and less achievable is, however, only just beginning. As the UN commences a two-year review of the 2 °C target, this article moves beyond the somewhat binary debates about whether or not it should or will be met, in order to analyse more fully some of the alternative options that have been identified but not fully explored in the existing literature. For the first time, uncertainties, risks, and opportunities associated with four such options are identified and synthesized from the literature. The analysis finds that the significant risks and uncertainties associated with some options may encourage decision makers to recommit to the 2 °C target as the least unattractive course of action

Norm entrepreneurs promote local values and practices in pursuit of just and sustainable forest governance.

This paper explores the dissonance between conceptions of justice among forest-adjacent communities and their representation in global forest policies, a persistent barrier to delivering just sustainability. We empirically track justice claims of rural villagers upwards through specific intermediaries or ‘justice brokers’: civil society, state, or private sector actors operating at local to international levels, who navigate different institutions to advance various social and ecological interests. We draw on interviews with 16 intermediaries in each of Nepal and Uganda and find that recognition of local values and practices such as customary tenure systems are key justice concerns of forest-adjacent communities in each country. However, intermediaries perceive a low likelihood of advancing those claims through national or international climate and forest policy debates, such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), in large part because deliberations on justice are subordinated to concerns such as carbon accounting and arrangements for distributing monetary benefits. This suggests these policy processes must be modified to offer potential for transformational pathways. Intermediaries who pursued recognition justice issues developed innovative tactics in alternative forums. These ‘norm entrepreneurs’ adopted a suite of complementary strategies to attain influence, including: (1) formation of associations at the grassroots level; (2) media and advocacy campaigns through national coalitions to reach powerful international donors, and; (3) drawing on international support networks for advice, training and to influence national government. In both Uganda and Nepal these strategies were evidenced to enhance recognition for local values and practices

Approaching Conformality with Ten Flavors

We present first results for lattice simulations, on a single volume, of the low-lying spectrum of an SU(3) Yang-Mills gauge theory with ten light fermions in the fundamental representation. Fits to the fermion mass dependence of various observables are found to be globally consistent with the hypothesis that this theory is within or just outside the strongly-coupled edge of the conformal window, with mass anomalous dimension consistent with 1 over the range of scales simulated. We stress that we cannot rule out the possibility of spontaneous chiral-symmetry breaking at scales well below our infrared cutoff. We discuss important systematic effects, including finite-volume corrections, and consider directions for future improvement.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letters. v2: corrected global fits. v3: corrected estimation of confidence interval

Barriers to equity in REDD+: Deficiencies in national interpretation processes constrain adaptation to context

A national interpretation process involving diverse actors and interests is required to transform global environmental initiatives into policies appropriate to the national or subnational context. These processes of localising norms are critical spaces to formulate equitable pathways to environmental conservation, yet have received limited attention from policy makers and researchers. We explored national policy processes for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) in Uganda and Nepal from the perspectives of ‘intermediaries’, state and civil society actors at subnational and national scale who promote the interests of various stakeholder groups. Through think-tank meetings and semi-structured interviews with a range of intermediaries, we uncovered that REDD+ implementation processes in both countries are dominated by international actors, applying a demanding administrative agenda and restricting space for deliberation. Consequently, social aspects of policy were compartmentalised, reduced to technical exercises and local equity concerns inadequately addressed in national REDD+ policies. For example, social safeguards approaches were perceived to lack substantive guidelines to promote equity. Limited national political space to criticise government policy and lack of attention to relevant evidence further restricted ability to address entrenched injustices such as status inequalities faced by marginalised groups. Although civil society organisations choose to maintain official involvement with REDD+, many expressed a possibility they would oppose REDD+ in future, or serious doubts about its design and expected outcomes. Concerns centred on lack of recognition of indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ values, identities, practices and institutions such as customary tenure systems, alongside possible detrimental impacts to decentralised forest governance regimes, well established in Nepal and emerging in Uganda. We suggest features to be enshrined in REDD+ policy for adapting national interpretation processes to become more effective spaces for empowering diverse intermediaries to negotiate and influence localisation of international norms, ultimately to promote more equitable pathways to reduced deforestation and degradation

Lattice simulations with eight flavors of domain wall fermions in SU(3) gauge theory

We study an SU(3) gauge theory with Nf=8 degenerate flavors of light fermions in the fundamental representation. Using the domain wall fermion formulation, we investigate the light hadron spectrum, chiral condensate and electroweak S parameter. We consider a range of light fermion masses on two lattice volumes at a single gauge coupling chosen so that IR scales approximately match those from our previous studies of the two- and six-flavor systems. Our results for the Nf=8 spectrum suggest spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, though fits to the fermion mass dependence of spectral quantities do not strongly disfavor the hypothesis of mass-deformed infrared conformality. Compared to Nf=2 we observe a significant enhancement of the chiral condensate relative to the symmetry breaking scale F, similar to the situation for Nf=6. The reduction of the S parameter, related to parity doubling in the vector and axial-vector channels, is also comparable to our six-flavor results