The ITS government sector findings are presented in this section under four headings:

* The Insiders
* The Incidents
* Detecting the Incidents
* Consequences of the Incidents

The Insiders reports findings related to the characteristics of the individuals who perpetrated the incidents, their roles within the target organizations, their workplace behaviors, and their motives for carrying out their illicit activities. Information provided under The Incidents concerns the insiders’ pre-incident planning and technical information regarding methods for advancing the incidents. Detecting the Incidents presents findings concerning the manner in which the insiders’ illicit activities were uncovered and the insiders were identified. The final section, Consequences of the Incidents, is comprised of two subcategories. The first subcategory reports findings related to insiders’ perceptions of the potential consequences of their actions, disciplinary actions taken by the target organizations, charges filed, and the outcome of cases. The second subcategory describes the characteristics of the target organizations and the damages they incurred.

Thirty-six incidents and 38 insiders were examined within the ITS government sector. As noted, some research questions in this study concern the insider, while others bear on the incident. Accordingly, the denominator for statistics in this report will vary depending upon whether the finding pertains to the insider or the incident.

Insider Threat Study: Illicit Cyber Activity in the Government Sector

From the U.S. Army War College:

This document provides an overview of Department of Defense (DoD) Information Operations (IO) doctrine and organizations at the joint and individual service levels. It is intended to serve students and staff of the US Army War College as a ready reference for IO information extracted and summarized from a variety of sources. Wherever possible, Internet web sites have been given to provide access to additional and more up-to-date information. The booklet is intentionally UNCLASSIFIED so that the material can be easily referenced during course work, while engaged in exercises, and later in subsequent assignments.

This booklet begins with an overview of Information Operations and Strategic Communication. The booklet then goes from the national level to the Department of Defense, to the Joint Operations level and then finally to the service level. At each level it describes strategies or doctrine, agencies, organizations, and educational institutions dedicated to the information element of national power. Finally, the document concludes with an overview of Information Operations Condition (INFOCON) and an IO specific glossary.

Information Operations Primer

The waning of the office phone call is one of those cultural declines that few people are likely to lament.

But the fact that a generation has grown up unaware of pulse dialing and seven-digit numbers seems meaningless when everyone still talks on the phone, constantly — on sidewalks, while riding the bus, in line at the store. That we’ve transferred a lot of office business to e-mail — well, who cares?

Ultimately, resorting to e-mail rather than picking up the phone results in not merely a quieter workplace but also a feebler one. Until we can convince senior employees to do a better job of sharing what they know about business and how they know it, we’re all better off making phone calls — and eavesdropping on those of others.

From the archive:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

See also, The Big Bing [2]:

You have to walk before you can run. Then later, when you're running, you need more sophisticated guidance, because doing a bunch of important things while running isn't all that easy.

In the beginning, as opposed to now, I really didn't know what I was doing. So the first things I looked at were overall strategies to very simple things that turned out to be a lot harder than they looked. Giving good phone. Taking lunch with distinction. Considering how to tackle the everyday tactical challenges that, taken together, could help define a career.

The Office Phone Call Was Music to the Ears

One night, we were all sitting around at three in the morning on exercise balls. Everyone had finished coding for the day, and we were talking about what Google could do. A bunch of us had read that day about the Library of Congress possibly wanting to digitize. Should we pursue that? How would that help Web search? Would that be a good thing for the world? How would you do it? We brainstormed about projects that we wouldn’t get a chance to explore for years, such as Google Book Search. There was an immense sense of hope and innovation.

I remember George Harik, who’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, jumped into the middle of the circle and said, ‘Stop! I want everybody to savor this moment, because no matter what happens from here on out, it’ll never be as good as it is right now.’

George, who is almost never wrong, couldn’t have been more wrong. If you listen to that conversation and you listen to the conversations that inevitably will happen tonight around the pool table or the foosball table here, they sound the same.”

Marissa Mayer | Fast Company

They met on a train and fell in love. Then Jason P Howe discovered that his girlfriend Marylin was leading a secret double life – as an assassin for right-wing death squads in Colombia's brutal civil war. With their story set to become a major Hollywood film, he recalls an extraordinary, doomed romance

'I fell in love with a female assassin'

You've probably seen this, but still ...

Earth at Night | Incredimazing

Here’s one simple way to keep your children healthy: Ban the bedroom TV.

Should Children Have Television in Their Bedrooms?

To investigate the neural substrates that underlie spontaneous musical performance, we examined improvisation in professional jazz pianists using functional MRI. By employing two paradigms that differed widely in musical complexity, we found that improvisation (compared to production of over-learned musical sequences) was consistently characterized by a dissociated pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex: extensive deactivation of dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions with focal activation of the medial prefrontal (frontal polar) cortex. Such a pattern may reflect a combination of psychological processes required for spontaneous improvisation, in which internally motivated, stimulus-independent behaviors unfold in the absence of central processes that typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance. Changes in prefrontal activity during improvisation were accompanied by widespread activation of neocortical sensorimotor areas (that mediate the organization and execution of musical performance) as well as deactivation of limbic structures (that regulate motivation and emotional tone). This distributed neural pattern may provide a cognitive context that enables the emergence of spontaneous creative activity.

Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation

Commetrix is Dynamic Network Visualization and Analysis Software that supports Community Moderators, Members, and Network Researchers. It provides exploratory yet comprehensive access to network data and allows for:

* Extracting virtual communities in electronic communication networks
* Visualizing dynamic network lifecycles, properties, and structures
* Creating rich expert network maps from communication logs
* Searching, filtering, navigating social corpora, like e-mail, discussions
* Understanding and utilizing your social networks
* Trace dissemination of topics or properties through the network
* Extendable to all sources of network data

Commetrix - Dynamic Visualization of Networks

With all the intensity and brilliance he is known for, Alan Kay gives TEDsters a lesson in lessons. Kay has spent years envisioning better techniques for teaching kids, and in this talk, after reminding us that "the world is not what it seems," he shows us how good programming can sharpen our picture. His unique software lets children learn by doing, but also learn by computing and by creating lessons themselves.

See also, from yesterday:

The STEPS project is setting out to create “Moore’s Law Software”: a high-risk high-reward exploratory research effort to create a large-scope-and-range software system in 3-4 orders of magnitude less code than current practice.

Alan Kay: An infectious idea for teaching ideas