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Psychology professor Robert Provine participated in this year’s annual question on Edge.org, which features a collection of online essays that is later published as part of a high-profile and top-selling series of books for a general audience. Contributors each year are leading scientists, philosophers and artists and the event draws global news coverage.
This year’s question was “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” In his response titled “Common Sense,” Provine writes about behavioral and brain science: “We fancy ourselves intelligent, conscious and alert, and thinking our way through life. This is an illusion. We are deluded by our brain’s generation of a sketchy, rational narrative of subconscious, sometimes irrational or fictitious events that we accept as reality.”
Provine goes on to write: “Our lives are guided by a series of these guesstimates about the behavior and mental state of ourselves and that, although imperfect, are adaptive and sufficiently accurate to enable us to muddle along. However, as scientists, we demand more than default explanations based on common sense. Behavioral and brain science provides a path to understanding that challenges the myths of mental life and everyday behavior.”
Robert Provine has participated in Edge.org’s annual question for several years. To read “Common Sense” and all of his essays from prior years, click here.
]]>Loyal.Constant.
Strong and Resilient.
Season to Season.
Survival.Growth.
These are just some of the many qualities of the Wye Oak Tree – Maryland’s state tree – and so many of the same qualities we find in the Women’s Center at UMBC. For some, a tree provides shade to rest under on a hot summer day. To others it provides leaves that fall to the ground to play in on a crisp autumn day. In the winter months, we look at trees covered in frost and snow with wonder and awe until we finally see the earliest buds come to life once again on the first days of spring. The tree is many thingsto many people, just like the Women’s Center is to the UMBC community. We are a place to find comfort, a listening ear, and friendship. Much like the tree, we seek to be strong but flexible, loyal but open to growth, courageous to challenges but loving with support. Our roots dig deep into the grounds of feminism and our many limbs reach further towards social justice, activism, and the honoring all of our intersecting identities.
This new logo reflects our ongoing growth and evolution as a women’s center which is grounded in our steady core values and reliable strengths so many UMBC community members have come to know and love. As always, and much like the great Wye Oak beckons, all are welcomed in our space, so long as they respect each other, their stories, their experiences, their potential.
Many thanks to UMBC’s Creative Services for designing our new logo which is modeled after UMBC’s very own Wye Oak Tree.
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For Immediate Release:
Gloria Larkin Presenting the Federal Impact on Real Estate During the CREW Baltimore Luncheon Titled “2014: The Road Ahead”
The CREW Baltimore Panel discusses economic changes and strategies in the real estate market in 2014.
Baltimore, MD – January 17, 2014 – Gloria Larkin, President of TargetGov, will be presenting on a panel for the CREW Baltimore Luncheon “2014: The Road Ahead” which focuses on the economic future of the real estate market in the Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C. areas. The event will be held at the Hotel Monaco on Thursday, January 23 from 11:30am-2:00pm.
Mrs. Larkin will discuss the impact Sequestration and budget cuts has had on the regional real estate markets, including those related to the Department of Defense and Civilian agencies, with an update on legislation affecting government contracting and the real estate market.
“While the Emerging Trends in Real Estate ©2014 report has a gloomy perspective on the Baltimore-DC real estate market,” says Gloria Larkin, “I anticipate the solidified budget is actually loosening the pent up need for real estate expansion in the civilian agencies.”
Moderating the panel is Nancy R. Ferrell, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of NorthMarq Capital and other panelists include Brenda McKenzie, President & CEO of the Baltimore Development Corporation, Roger Staiger, Managing Director of Stage Capital, LLC, Anita Kramer, Vice President of the ULI Center for Capital Markets and Real Estate, and Mary Ann Scully, President and Chief Executive Officer of Howard Bank.
These subject-matter experts will join Gloria Larkin in examining the role of capital markets as indicators for future events, key economic and financial trends, and how federal spending could impact real estate development in the region.
To learn more about CREW Baltimore or to register for this event, visit http://www.crewbaltimore.org.
About Gloria Larkin:
Gloria Larkin, National Marketing and Business Expert, is President of TargetGov. Larkin has been interviewed on MSNBC, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and TheStreet.com. She is an expert author with articles regarding federal business development published in local, regional, national and international publications. She is also the author of two books: “The Basic Guide To Government Contracting” (book & Kindle) and “The Veterans Business Guide: How to Build a Successful Government Contracting Business” now in the fourth printing (book & Kindle). TargetGov clients have won federal contracts worth billions of dollars and the company focuses on government procurement and related business development and marketing services including minority certification services, contract development, proposal management, contract administration and expert federal contracting services.
]]>These days, many people use the Web as a natural extension of their day-to-day lives. Whether it is socializing with friends, keeping up with current events, conducting ad hoc research or watching movies, they can't get enough of the Web. We are well aware that the bad guys know this, too.
IT risk managers often preach the standard Web security advice for end users -- don't click haphazardly, uninstall plug-ins, change passwords frequently, use antivirus and so on -- but it never seems to stick. So, it's no surprise that the Web has become the No. 1 source of malware infections. This realization, along with other advancements in technology, has given rise to a flurry of new Web-borne attacks. Fortunately, there are also a number of new opportunities for mitigating risks associated with Web browsing, especially the risk of getting infected by malware.
Here's the thing to remember about malware: It has to be running to be destructive. This means there must be a process in memory using the resident system's CPU to perform its nefarious deeds. With this in mind, it is not hard to realize that the notion of which system the malware resides on becomes crucial to determining the extent of the damage from any infection. Separating that process from other production services can reduce that damage.
Separation -- and its stricter form, isolation -- are long-standing techniques to reduce risk in the realm of technology risk management. The military separates classified from unclassified systems using the "air gap" of separate physical systems or sometimes separate virtual machines. Enterprises have long separated networks using firewalls and other network devices. To achieve Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI-DSS, compliance, companies often separate out-of-scope systems at the data level using tokenization.
One means of so-called situational separation is the sandbox. A sandbox is an isolated (usually virtual) environment that confines a computing program or process, limiting or preventing it from interacting with other programs or processes. Sometimes a sandbox is used as a fishbowl of sorts to watch and assess the activity of suspicious software. Other times, it is used in production to run either important functions like online banking apps or, alternatively, the less important, often risky operations that users enjoy. In either or both cases, separating the browser from the operating environment minimizes the impact that any malware infection might have.
Given this history, it should be no surprise to find that separation is useful for browsing the Web securely. An increasingly popular form of separation on the Web is the hosted browser, which typically runs on a completely separate physical system that interacts with the Web on the front end and completes the connection to the user by mirroring the activity to the user's device on the back end. In contrast with secure Web gateways that terminate connections, run some analysis and then forward approved packets in their original form to the end user, hosted browsers transform the content and pass it to the end user via proprietary protocols similar to the remote desktop protocol, or RDP, used for desktop virtualization. Hosted browsers provide benefits similar to those of a sandbox mentioned, though in Web-only form. Right now, they are more of a complement to analytical sandboxes that typically bring more threat research and response capabilities to bear. The benefits are clear: If a malware process only has access to resources on the browser's resident system, separating that system from high-value resources significantly restricts its ability to do harm.
In addition, hosted browsers provide anonymization capabilities by providing a clean browsing environment for every session.
Products that accomplish this include Check Point's WebCheck, Authentic8's SILO, Light Point Security's Light Point Web and Spikes Security's AirGap.
We are at a tipping point with information security where we must recognize that traditional techniques can only go so far in protecting users from Web-borne malware infections. It is time to employ other options for mitigating risk that reduce or eliminate user involvement while still protecting them. Separation models are well understood and the technology is advanced enough to provide this opportunity.
About the author:
Pete Lindstrom is principal of Spire Security, an industry analyst firm addressing challenges in technology risk management and cybersecurity economics. In his 20+ year career, Lindstrom has held other industry analyst positions at Burton Group and Hurwitz Group, as well as enterprise positions as a security architect for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and an IT auditor for PwC and GMAC Mortgage. Lindstrom honed his finance and technology (and rifleman!) skills in the United States Marine Corps. He is a frequent speaker and writer on information security topics and is a director of the International Systems Security Association (ISSA). He has a finance degree from the University of Notre Dame.
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