Education or Training: what’s the difference? Do we really care in this age of total connectivity? Everything’s connected to everything, isn’t it? This is the Information Age…why isn’t everyone informed, educated and trained to operate in cyberspace…why is this even an issue? Those in the business of preparing people to think and perform better in life are clear in distinguishing the difference between education and training. We need both but as
Craig Harm poses in his article The Laws of the Science of Cyberspace – A Beginning, that the first principle law of the Science of Cyberspace will be, “a law grounded in the social sciences.” To that extent, the SENDS Pilot Project has developed the modeling and simulation tool SENDSim to, “better understand how people and information technology interact and the interdependencies that arise with the convergence of these two sources of vulnerability.” Accepting that the Science
This week I had the privilege of talking about SENDS at the summer, 2011 meeting of the Coalition for Advancing Cybersecurity Education (CACE), in Dayton, OH. I’ve had a long-term relationship with the USAF’s Center for Cyberspace Research (CCR) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, and I’m not surprised that CACE would hold their meeting here. The CCR is also part of the CACE effort, and a cosponsor of SENDS. CACE is an “open” association in
History always seems to repeat itself, even when we don’t think it’s happened yet. That’s more likely to be true in cyberspace history than anywhere else because people and things are just so darned connected. Time as we know it today, Craig Harm writes, seems sometimes irrelevant. The lessons of history apply to the future too...it’s just a matter of perspective! Take the lessons we thought we learned from our own
This past Wednesday, Craig and I delivered the SENDS Pilot Project Out-Brief to our government sponsors in the US Air Force Institute of Technology Center for Cyberspace Research and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. It was a challenge to capture a year’s worth of effort within a two-and-a-half hour presentation and demonstration, but it was also a stimulating experience. We had a great story to tell! You can follow along with the slides from the
In past blogs, we shared our thoughts about the future, the potential of virtual worlds and their use in developing the SENDS Center for the Science of Cyberspace (SCSC). Let’s discuss what we have learned and how we visualize the virtual world component of the SCSC. Our journey began in the “real world” with the concept of a real brick and mortar facility; a very traditional approach requiring the expenses of a physical plant, its furnishings, and the corresponding
Last week, Craig and I presented an early glimpse of the SENDS Center for the Science of Cyberspace at the National Defense University’s Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds (FCFW) Conference at Ft. McNair, Washington, DC. The conference itself was an amazing assembly of people and projects seeking to “explore multi-agency and intra-agency collaboration using the robust capabilities of virtual worlds, examining best practices across multiple sectors,” as the
Cyberspace security probably has a lot of faces but we write these columns to stimulate thinking not just despair. A finite number of possible solutions are easier for humans to think about than the seemingly infinite number of approaches we’ve tried since cyberspace security became an issue. At the rate we’re going in the arms race between attackers and defenders within cyberspace, the number may actually turn out to be infinite;
Our kids get social networking while we scratch our heads trying to understand why they run up our electric bills by simultaneously using their computers, video games, and cell phones to talk to their friends. We are presented with numerous analogies by news media to help us understand how social networking transforms, extends, and enhances our real life communities. More users continue to change the way they use cyberspace by participating in social networking activities, while many others wait and
Many of today’s leaders grew up before cyberspace started exposing them to the benefits and challenges of massive connectivity and the emergence of social networking on such an immense scale. Many of them became “accidental” luddites…it takes one to know one and I’ve known a great many. These luddite-leaders actually performed a worthwhile service for cyberspace development: through their resistance to change, they slowed things down enough so that technology didn’t
