Building a strategic security organisation.

In everyone's day-to-day jobs there is constant need to deal with current and newly detected matters. This is now a world of immediacy, driven by the cadence of the business and its needs. These concerns should not be ignored, as failing to deal with these issues would not bode well for the future. It is essential that the gears are kept spinning. The challenge for any security organisation is to identify its short-term tactical requirements, while developing longer-term strategic needs. Once done, the differences can be accounted for and strides can be made toward a desired future state. This paper highlights several steps that the author and his team have taken in their own journey. There is no magic answer, each organisation will have its own unique challenges. Nevertheless, some of the approaches to building a strategic security organisation described in this paper are applicable to all organisations, irrespective of their size.

Hippocampal anatomy supports the use of context in object recognition: a computational model.

The human hippocampus receives distinct signals via the lateral entorhinal cortex, typically associated with object features, and the medial entorhinal cortex, associated with spatial or contextual information. The existence of these distinct types of information calls for some means by which they can be managed in an appropriate way, by integrating them or keeping them separate as required to improve recognition. We hypothesize that several anatomical features of the hippocampus, including differentiation in connectivity between the superior/inferior blades of DG and the distal/proximal regions of CA3 and CA1, work together to play this information managing role. We construct a set of neural network models with these features and compare their recognition performance when given noisy or partial versions of contexts and their associated objects. We found that the anterior and posterior regions of the hippocampus naturally require different ratios of object and context input for optimal performance, due to the greater number of objects versus contexts. Additionally, we found that having separate processing regions in DG significantly aided recognition in situations where object inputs were degraded. However, split processing in both DG and CA3 resulted in performance tradeoffs, though the actual hippocampus may have ways of mitigating such losses.

Gains in sensitivity with a device that mixes microarray hybridization solution in a 25-microm-thick chamber.

A microarray hybridization system that allows mixing in volumes comparable to those used by glass coverslips is presented. This system is composed of a disposable flexible lid that binds to 1 in. x 3 in. glass slides via an adhesive gasket, forming a uniform 25-microm-thick hybridization chamber. This chamber rests on a base unit for temperature control. The lid contains two air-driven bladders that continuously mix the hybridization fluid. Mixing enhances sensitivity from a typical microarray experiment 2-3-fold. Mixing is particularly effective at high spotted probe and low labeled target concentrations and overcoming local target depletion that occurs when homologous probes are spotted in close proximity. Mixing appears to be compatible with most hybridization conditions; however, mix versus no-mix control experiments should be performed. Also covered are a number of microfluidic issues related to manufacturing, filling, mixing, and packaging.