Andrew Patrick

The NRC has decided to make some program changes, and that includes canceling my program on Information Security, a program on Software Engineering, and a third one on Acoustics. They are also making significant changes to the science and technical library (CISTI).

So, this means that some of Canada’s top experts in these fields are now looking for new positions.

In the Information Security area, we have 8 people who are experts in conducing R&D in a variety of areas, including:

• agent technologies
• biometrics
• cryptographic key management
• data mining
• human-computer interaction
• privacy protection and compliance
• risk analysis and visualization
• secure software
• security protocols
• security systems
• social networks and work flow analysis
• trust management
• usable security
• web crawling
• web services and e-services

If you know of anyone interested in advanced R&D in these areas, please let me know.

Advanced brain research continues to be fascinating. Brain imaging techniques are allowing us to study physiological responses that seem to be separate for psychological experience. Here the topic is smells associated with sexual arousal and unconscious responses in women.

We are very interesting animals…

Varying Sweat Scents Are Noted by Women

Men’s sweat smells different when they are sexually aroused, and women can tell the difference, a new study finds — even though they are not conscious of it.
…
In their verbal responses, all but two subjects denied smelling any sweat, or anything human, and none verbally distinguished the sexual from the neutral sweat. But their brain activity told a different story.

Not surprisingly, researchers have demonstrated that the face recognition systems being included in some new laptops can be easily fooled. Anyone relying on this form of biometric authentication should reconsider.

Researchers Hack Faces In Biometric Facial Authentication Systems – DarkReading

A Vietnamese researcher will demonstrate at Black Hat DC next week how he and his colleagues were able to easily spoof and bypass biometric systems that authenticate users by scanning their faces.

The researchers cracked the biometric authentication embedded in Lenovo, Asus, and Toshiba laptops by spoofing the biometric systems with everything from a photo of the authorized user to brute-force hacking using fake facial images.

Geek time (also known as Unix epoch time) is about to reach a cool milestone: 1234567890 seconds. Watch the fun at

http://coolepochcountdown.com/

Brainstorming is one of those faddy methods that is supposed to help people come up with creative and useful ideas. It can be fun and popular, but it actually produces worse results than having the same people work alone. Here is an alternative technique, brainwriting, that seems to combine people writing on their own with time spent working together. Might be worth a try next time somebody suggests another lame brainstorming session.

Forget brainstorming – try brainwriting!

Brainstorming sessions are popular but surprisingly ineffective. Research shows that people actually come up with more ideas working on their own than they do brainstorming together. According to business psychologist Peter Heslin, an alternative way for groups to generate ideas is called “Brainwriting”, and early evidence suggests that it, unlike brainstorming, helps groups to spawn more ideas than the same number of people working alone.

Here is a nice article reviewing 10 different privacy settings on Facebook that you should be thinking about. Some of them are obvious, while others are a bit more obscure (e.g., who can see when you are tagged in photos uploaded by other people). Every Facebooker should have a look.

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use – going to just mostly family stuff.”

Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.