Brain Betrayal: A Neuropsychological Categorization of Insider Attacks

Thanks to an abundance of highly publicized data breaches, Information Security (InfoSec) is taking a larger place in organizational priorities. Despite the increased attention, the threat posed to employers by their own employees remains a frightening prospect studied mostly in a technical light. This paper presents a categorization of insider deviant behavior and misbehavior based off of the neuropsychological foundations of three main types of insiders posing a threat to an organization: accidental attackers; neurologically “hot” malcontents, and neurologically “cold” opportunists

Perceptions of Disability, Identity, Agency, Goal Attainment, and Young Adult Disability Programs

Youth with disability are oppressed and marginalized by a dominant cultural narrative called ableism (Adams, Reiss, and Serlin, 2015; Campbell, 2015 as cited in Adams et al., 2015). Challenging ableism is a matter of social justice. Without serious attitudinal shifts and the removal of systemic barriers, our youth with disabilities will continue to experience negative outcomes and underdeveloped agency. This study was conducted to provide a more detailed look into how adults with disabilities, who participated in disability advocacy programs as youth, perceive their past involvement with such programs in relation to defining their disability, identity, and capacity for agency. In addition, the study sought to assess the relevance of disability-positive environments based on participants’ perceptions. The study’s primary research question was: How and to what extent do youth with disabilities perceive disability advocacy programs in Pittsburgh as disability-positive environments? The supplemental research question was: How do young professionals with disabilities perceive and describe living with a disability, developing an identity, and maturing as an agent in the context of past participation in a disability advocacy program? Ten participants were included in the study. Participants were young professionals with disabilities recruited through the researcher’s advocacy network. This study collected qualitative data through semi-structured, in-person interviews. Data were organized and analyzed using Template Analysis; contextualized through the parameters of social cognitive theory, the youth-adult partnership model, and principles of disability-positive environments. The following major themes emerged from the interview data: (1) their seminal experiences with disability as children and as young adults; (2) how they cultivated, defined, and internalized their disability-identity; and (3) how their sense of purpose and achievements provided context for future plans. The concept of disability-positivity, social cognitive theory, and the history of youth-adult partnerships were used as frames to organize the findings into a model called, the Path of Advancement for Development of Positive Disability-Identities model. This model captures the four stages the interviewees experienced during their transition from adolescence to young adulthood. The stages cover avoidance of disability, self-defining epiphanic experiences, established individualized goals and roles, and the accumulation of these experiences, perceptions, accomplishments, and action plans are represented by stage four, the actualization of positive disability-identities. This study found that the development of agency was not situated in any particular advocacy program. Rather, the interviewees’ perceptions of agency and their experiences as individuals with disabilities living in an ableist society were woven into an organized narrative that shaped an understanding of disability, identity, and forged a driving sense of purpose that translated into achieving meaningful goals. The dissertation ends with my agenda as an educational leader: to create a cross-disability advocacy collective that will empower, partner, and amplify strong, new disability narratives with the objective of replacing ableism with agency

A matter of time: exploring survival analysis through cybersecurity

Despite the impact of employee behavior on organizational security, the topic of cybersecurity historically remains the responsibility of Information Security Management researchers and Information Technology professionals. However, the exponential increase in the prevalence and repercussions of cyber-related incidents invites collaboration between the fields of I-O Psychology and cybersecurity. The proposed presentation discusses the potential for I-O Psychology to contribute to cybersecurity efforts while demonstrating the fundamentals and applicability of survival analysis

3D Visualization of Cardiac Anatomy: New Approaches for Patient Education

3D Visualization is a growing field in medicine. It is used for diagnosis, intervention design, and patient education. Medical students and physicians have little difficulty picturing a heart in their mind. Most physicians and medical students can envision an anatomically correct heart, and also congenital heart defects. Patients and their families, however, do not always have this extraordinary ability. Objective: It is this potential disadvantage that provides motivation to develop innovative 3D tools that can be used to educate patients in clinical and hospital settings. Design: The primary focus of this study is to recover 3D structures and images from CT Data. The data were acquired from a number of sources, including Cardiology Radiologists at St. Vincent Hospital Cardiovascular Imaging Department and the National Institutes of Health Cancer Imaging Archive. Setting: The study was performed in the Marian University College of Osteopathic Medicine 3D Visualization Laboratory. Methods: The CT data sets were analyzed with the 3D analytical software FEI Amira, and relevant anatomical structures, landmarks, and anomalies were identified and discriminated. Results: The researchers present two 3D projects: one of an anatomically correct heart, and the other of a heart after corrective surgery for the Tetralogy of Fallot congenital anomalies. Conclusions: We find that by developing our skills in 3D Visualization, we can create more accurate, interactive, and detailed images of cardiac anatomy. Our 3D Visualizations show great potential in advancing patient education and better enable us to care for our patients, both in clinical and hospital settings

Employees that want to stay: How relationships with leader and organization interact to predict affective commitment

Previous research has attempted to explain how Leader-member exchange (LMX) is related to subordinate affective commitment to organizations. Since affective commitment is highly related to employee turnover, understanding the effects supervisors have on affective commitment is of great importance for fostering high-quality relationships within the workplace. While previous research has been conducted on this relationship, past conceptualizations have yet to account for both the moderating effects of supervisor’s organizational embodiment (SOE) in conjunction with the mediating effect of perceived organizational support (POS). The current study proposes a comprehensive moderated mediation model, describing a path that accounts for variability due to employee perceptions of supervisors and organizations alike. The main hypothesis for the proposed study is that SOE will serve as a moderating variable such that the relationship between LMX and affective commitment will be stronger at high levels of SOE. Similarly, SOE will also moderate the relationship between LMX and POS. Finally, we hypothesize that POS will partially mediate the relationship between LMX and affective commitment. These hypotheses will be tested using the SPSS macro PROCESS, using bootstrap sampling techniques to estimate these effects. Multiple survey timepoints will be used to collect self-report data, with the intent to reduce the effect of common method bias. The predictor and moderator variables will be collected at time one, followed by the mediator, and finally the outcome of affective commitment. This collection method should enable us to make stronger claims as to the direction of these relationships. Our proposed model aims to direct future research on describing these relationships and organizational efforts to increase employees’ affective commitment to the organization, retaining employees in the long term

Organizational perceptions of I-O interventions: Construction of a diagnostic measure

Despite the fact that Industrial-Organizational (I-O) psychology consultants provide interventions meant to benefit companies, many organizations remain skeptical about the effectiveness of consultants and have concerns about I-O psychologists, their methods, and the results they promise. This skepticism may manifest through resistance towards interventions, resulting in strained client-consultant relationships and a decreased interest in future use of I-O consultant services. Understanding and evading these negative outcomes is highly relevant to the interests of I-O psychology as a whole, but research has yet to quantitatively examine factors contributing to an organization’s decision to pursue I-O consultation. The purpose of the current study is to develop a diagnostic tool to understand perceptions that organizations may have about I-O consultants and to link these to a company’s likeliness to purchase I-O consulting services. The proposed measure is made up of seven individual facets regarding both organizational and consultant entities: readiness for change, duration of project, cost/benefit, depth of intervention, internal/external implementation, faith in I-O expertise, and attitudes towards consultants. Items will be refined through pilot testing, and the measure structure will be analyzed through the use of factor analytic methods. Unique samples will be used to examine the factor structure of the measurement through both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. We hypothesize that the measure will exhibit a seven-factor structure, entailing each dimension as its own factor. We also hypothesize that a two-factor structure will also fit the measure data, including one for organizational factors and one for consultant factors. Additionally, we hypothesize that scores on the measure will positively predict the likelihood to purchase I-O consulting services. Utilization of this measure should enable consultants to quantitatively locate and target specific insecurities and skepticism contributing to organizational resistance toward I-O interventions, potentially increasing the effectiveness of these interventions and boosting consumer confidence in I-O psychologists

Farmer Workshop

Sunday afternoon October 13, 2013 from 1:00 to 4pm, at the New England Small Farm Institute in Belchertown MA (275 Jackson Street) Join fellow farmers and gardeners in an interactive, educational, and highly stimulating presentation/workshop about what biochar is (and is not) along with details about how and why biochar can help you achieve your growing goals. Learn about the many benefits of soil conditioning with biochar, application techniques and amounts, carbon stability, and other practical advice. Rachel Hestrin from Cornell University will deliver a hands on technical presentation and field expert David Yarrow will review his extensive SARE grant trials

How to get a job: deception in the applicant advice industry

The performance of applicants in a job interview is a well-studied topic within I-O psychology, yet less attention has been given to applicant preparation throughout the hiring process. While professional interview coaching has been rigorously tested, the surfeit of freely-available information circulating the internet has yet to be examined for content accuracy and integrity. In an attempt to highlight this industry under-examined by researchers, the current study proposes an investigation of online materials aimed at job applicants. Particularly, the proposed study aims to determine the sources of advice materials and whether they promote applicant deception during the job interview. Using a team of trained undergraduate coders, the proposed study will systematically categorize and analyze all articles available through Google from March 2017 to March 2019. Articles will be coded according to their primary topic of advice (i.e., ideal attire, charismatic nonverbal behavior, or commonly-asked interview questions), the source of the information (i.e., professional publication, mainstream news outlet, non-professional publication), and the overall goal of the article. As the proposed study aims to determine whether the online advice industry attempts to enable applicants to promote themselves beyond their abilities—potentially compromising the integrity of the job interview—each article is labeled along a continuum of deception, from purely-descriptive Informational materials to more prescriptive Image Maintenance and Image Creation materials. Classification in this manner will provide a systematic overview of the content and motive of recent advice materials, informing I-O researchers and practitioners of the potential influence of this industry. Preliminary results from April 2017 point to a prevalence of descriptive Informational materials and somewhat-prescriptive Image Maintenance materials, with deception-tolerant Image Creation appearing less frequently. Materials focused on appropriate answers for popular interview questions (50% of articles), do’s and don’ts for leveraging social media in the hiring process (12% of articles), and the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities contributing to successful job interviews (11% of articles). Mainstream news outlets emerged as the second-largest source of advice materials, publishing one-third of coded articles. Initial results suggest the promotion of mild impression management by the advice industry through self-enhancing techniques provided in Image Maintenance materials. Fully categorizing recent advice materials will enable more thorough examination and comparison of online advice materials to research-supported interview techniques. In the absence of other research on this industry, completion of the proposed study will enhance I-O understanding of the magnitude and nature of these materials’ impact

Survival of the safest: examining organization risk factors for cybersecurity incidents

[Invited adaptation from presentation proposal, A Matter of Time: Exploring Survival Analysis Through Cybersecurity] Given that employees pose a large threat to organizational cybersecurity, much research attention has been directed to identifying individual risk factors for cybersecurity noncompliance and misbehavior at the cost of examining broad organizational risk factors. However, no study to date has formally examined how the risk of organizational cybersecurity incident changes over time, or how organizational characteristics affect this risk. The proposed study aims to conduct a survival analysis (SA) of cybersecurity events across the past decade, examining broad factors that impact the changing probability of cyberincidents. In particular, the proposed study will examine associations between cyberbreaches and industry type, annual revenue, and the sensitivity of information handled in the organization. While other studies have examined organization-wide risk factors, none have done so in a longitudinal analysis such as SA. The proposed study emphasizes the necessity of examining changes in risk across time due to the abundant evidence that cybersecurity incidents are increasing in both frequency and severity. Previously-employed methods such as odds ratios fail to account for the time-based component needed for properly analyzing the continuously-changing threat of cyberattacks. To analyze the impact of organizational factors on the risk of cyberincident, the proposed study will record security breaches (or lack thereof) for organizations listed in the top Fortune 1000 from 2005 to 2019, using publically-available data on over 9,000 cyberincidents recorded by Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Event data will be examined in R, and organizational factors will be examined for covariance with the risk of cyberincident. Preliminary results from 2004 Fortune 500 companies indicate significant associations between cyberincident risk and both industry type and annual revenue. By utilizing Survival Analysis, the proposed study will provide an enhanced, time-based view on the past prevalence of cybersecurity incidents and the organizational factors associated with increased risk. Emphasis of these factors serves to alert organizations of their unique vulnerabilities, inspiring increased attention to the subject of security

Microbial community assembly differs across minerals in a rhizosphere microcosm.

Mineral-associated microbes drive many critical soil processes, including mineral weathering, soil aggregation and cycling of mineral-sorbed organic matter. To investigate the interactions between soil minerals and microbes in the rhizosphere, we incubated three types of minerals (ferrihydrite, kaolinite and quartz) and a native soil mineral fraction near roots of a common Californian annual grass, Avena barbata, growing in its resident soil. We followed microbial colonization of these minerals for up to 2.5 months - the plant's lifespan. Bacteria and fungi that colonized mineral surfaces during this experiment differed across mineral types and differed from those in the background soil, implying that microbial colonization was the result of processes in addition to passive movement with water to mineral surfaces. Null model analysis revealed that dispersal limitation was a dominant factor structuring mineral-associated microbial communities for all mineral types. Once bacteria arrived at a mineral surface, capacity for rapid growth appeared important, as ribosomal copy number was significantly correlated with relative enrichment on minerals. Glomeromycota (a phylum associated with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi) appeared to preferentially associate with ferrihydrite surfaces. The mechanisms enabling the colonization of soil minerals may be foundational in shaping the overall soil microbiome composition and development of persistent organic matter in soils