Selil

I have successfully defended my dissertation for a PhD from Purdue University. The title of the dissertation is “Cyber warfare as a form of conflict: Evaluation of models of cyber conflict as a prototype to conceptual analysis”, and my advisor was Dr. Marcus Rogers.

Lots of significant people helped me get this far, and lots of friends made sure I stayed on the right path.

In our vegetarian experiment we have tried a number of meat substitutes. We have tried tofu, tempeh, and seitan. Now for the confession. We hate them all. No one in the family likes the texture or the taste. I have tried these in a variety of recipes and every time we all leave the table feeling disappointed and unsatisfied.

But there is good news. You can be a vegetarian and not eat any meat substitute. The trick is to find really satisfying recipes that focus on vegetables, beans, rice, and quinoa. This has been my quest. I have found some outstanding recipes that have quickly become family favorites. And we don’t miss the meat. Shepherd’s Pie is one of those recipes. I love Shepherd’s Pie in the winter. It is warm and comforting and a great excuse to eat mashed potatoes. Here is my version.

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On my two hour run today I was thinking about information security and the research vectors that I see within the discipline. I don’t publish very much so I have little effect on the space. I was thinking about how the discipline hasn’t moved forward and more importantly how it seems to be stagnant within the field of systems security versus thinking about information. I apologize up front if this sounds disjointed, normally I use a structured writing method and this is more stream of consciousness. So if my normal writing sucks this will be worse.  [Read more →]

This is a little bit of a rant. I have been noticing an increase in over the top marketing language. We have revolutionary new products. We have wars on everything from drugs to Christmas. We see it and hear it so often that it doesn’t even phase us.

Here is my problem with this. Language is important. Words have meanings. Every time we co-opt a word for our over the top marketing we diminish the word.

Think about this: the word revolutionary is defined as (from google)

rev·o·lu·tion·ar·y/?rev??lo?oSH??ner?/

Adjective: Engaged in or promoting political revolution.

Noun: A person engaged in political revolution.

rev·o·lu·tion/?rev??lo?oSH?n/

Noun:  A forcible overthrow of a government or social order for a new system.

(in Marxism) The class struggle that is expected to lead to political change and the triumph of communism.

Now think about the last product you saw advertised as “revolutionary”. Was it engaged in or promote a revolution? Did it involve the forcible overthrow of a government system? Or any system? Even if it is a really cool new product, chances are it was not revolutionary.

Our use of the word war is actually worse. We have declared war (officially or unofficially) on everything. If we have a war on drugs, a war on obesity, a war on Christmas (and this list goes on and on), what does it do to our sense of urgency when there is a real war – one with guns, bullets, bombs, injuries and death? It means that we no longer believe that war is that serious. We just do our patriot duty and return to our shopping. When we entered WWII we rationed critical supplies, we retooled industry to build war machines, we recruited women to work in the factories and we bought war bonds. The whole country mobilized in a war effort. War had meaning. It was serious and we took it seriously.  Now that we have wars on everything, how do we communicate the seriousness of an actual war? How do we talk about bombs and bullets and the true sacrifice of our soldiers? How do we mobilize the country?

When we were attacked on September 11^th I was ready for the mobilization. I was ready to hear the call to manufacturing to build up for war? I was ready to buy war bonds and to make sacrifices and plant victory gardens. And none of that happened. We were told to go shopping. I don’t know about you, but going shopping didn’t make me feel safer.  And it didn’t feel like a war effort.

So let’s stop the over the top marketing language. Let’s call really cool products what they are – really cool. Let’s rename all those wars on all those other things. Make we can take a stand against obesity and drugs. We can make a pledge to keep the meaning in Christmas if that is what is important to us.

And let’s reach for a dictionary and find a more appropriate word the next time we want to use a great adjective. Because words matter.

I recently was having a discussion with a noted scholar of conflict and I said “throwing history under the bus”  meaning lets look at this thing as a new thing. My goal was to get out of the box of constructed knowledge and examine things freshly and challenge the assumptions. A problem had been created (in my opinion) that was formed by the current and previous thinking. I never really considered thinking outside the box as especially troubling. The discussion though took a natural bend when the noted scholar said “Well expert so and so in this highly regarded article said…” I’ve got a fairly negative reaction to that. [Read more →]

Something I’m working on.

A whole lot of data crunching to get one graph (click to make larger)