Beyond the Cuff: Understanding Cumulative Stress Overload

In 2017, the amount of police officer suicides outnumbered the line of duty deaths, 140 to 129 (Heyman, Dill, & Douglas, 2018). Mental health and behavioral health issues are a sensitive topic for law enforcement personnel. The terms mental and behavioral create a negative barrier for officers. Many officers believe that if they seek out help, they will be shunned or “black balled” from the law enforcement world. In July of 2017, the International Association of Fire Chiefs published a document called, “The Yellow Ribbon Report, Under the Helmet: Performing an Internal Size-Up.” This report suggests the use of a new term “Cumulative Stress Overload.” Cumulative Stress Overload is what happens when first responders, who start with the same everyday stressors as the rest of the world, add to their day an additional layer of extreme stress experienced in the line of duty (there are exceptions, of course: mass shootings, bombings, terrorist attacks, etc.). Agencies need to provide debriefings for high stress incidents. Supervisors need to be familiar with their subordinates and should be able to determine if their actions require attention. Agencies should provide an effective program to their officers to assist in preventing mental/behavioral issues that occur from on the job stressors

Geometrical optics limit of stochastic electromagnetic fields

A method is described which elucidates propagation of an electromagnetic field generated by a stochastic, electromagnetic source within the short wavelength limit. The results can be used to determine statistical properties of fields using ray tracing methods

Evolution of Network Enumeration Strategies in Emulated Computer Networks

Successful attacks on computer networks today do not often owe their victory to directly overcoming strong security measures set up by the defender. Rather, most attacks succeed because the number of possible vulnerabilities are too large for humans to fully protect without making a mistake. Regardless of the security elsewhere, a skilled attacker can exploit a single vulnerability in a defensive system and negate the benefits of those security measures. This paper presents an evolutionary framework for evolving attacker agents in a real, emulated network environment using genetic programming, as a foundation for coevolutionary systems which can automatically discover and mitigate network security flaws. We examine network enumeration, an initial network reconnaissance step, through our framework and present results demonstrating its success, indicating a broader applicability to further cyber-security tasks

Veritas & Vanitas

A journal of creative nonfiction produced by students at the Marion campus of The Ohio State University with contributions from the students and faculty at the Marion campus of The Ohio State University and Marion Technical College