Spotlight

To paraphrase an old saying: “One person’s prevention is another person’s protection.” This may well apply to the wearing of masks during the pandemic, the efficacy of which is still being hotly ...

Prevention lies somewhere between avoidance and protection, and preventative methods can belong to either. For example, what is stopping outsiders from entering your country or state or town in order to limit ...

There are a number of confusing differences of opinion with respect to handling the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the confusion seems to center around a common misunderstanding of the roles of various ...

Like many others during this stay-at-home period, I have been sorting through old articles and reports, culling out those that are no longer of value. But, in the process, I came across ...

The more “mature” among us may recall when decision-making under uncertainty was based on the concept of “rational economic man.” We estimated or calculated the probability and amount of a loss (or ...

Systems use negative feedback in order to converge to stability and equilibrium (a positive quest). Positive-feedback systems diverge, which leads to instability and sometimes surging out of control (usually a negative outcome) ...

There is a cartoon in The New Yorker of March 30, 2020 showing four mobsters, one with a gun, sitting around a table. The caption reads: “For health and safety reasons, we’ll ...

There are a number of different types of models—and the output from each must be viewed and used differently depending on the form of the model. First, you have relationships derived from ...

Recently, I happened upon a short article about the demise of internal data centers in favor of cloud services. The article, by John Delaney, appeared on page 28 of the May 2020 ...

We have discussed previously, such as in my May 18, 2020 BlogInfoSec column, some of the more challenging characteristics of data, such as those relating to value and uncertainty, which are generally ...