Why Don’t You Get It?

Now You See It, Now You Dont: how social cues and questions misdirect our attention

Magic tricks offer powerful tools to manipulate people’s attention and conscious experience. Using realworld eyetracking we can investigate how different misdirection cues drive people’s eye movements. Moreover, by measuring people’s susceptibility to the trick, we can evaluate how these cues influence people’s conscious experience. We used a magic trick to explore the way in which spoken quest...

Nice work if you can get it.

Trustworthy Software: Why we need it, Why we don't have it, How we can get it

We have become increasingly dependent on a national technological fabric that contains software, computers, and communication networks as essential components. Unfortunately, our ability to build affordable software systems for which there exists compelling evidence that the systems delivers their services in a manner that satisfies certain critical properties has not kept pace with the importa...

Why Do We Need It ? How Do We Get It ?

ECURITY EXPERTS FREQUENTLY REFER TO PEOPLE AS “THE WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN” OF SYSTEM SECURITY. Famed hacker Kevin Mitnick revealed that he hardly ever cracked a password, because it “was easier to dupe people into revealing it” by employing a range of social engineering techniques. Often, such failures are attributed to users’ carelessness and ignorance. However, more enlightened researchers...

Why Standards Alone Won't Get You Portable Software and

The need to write portable software that runs on a variety of computing platforms becomes more obvious every day. Leading mainstream computer vendors, such as IBM, HP, Compaq, and Dell, offer a mix of Windows, Linux, and UNIX operating systems across their hardware platforms. Likewise, as people become ever more connected and mobile, many computer vendors are also supporting embedded and handhe...