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Author: John Sisler
Infrastructure Automation
I stood in front of an applauding crowd of almost 30 people, and I was smiling. I was elected president of the (ISC)2 Raleigh Durham chapter and I was happy about it… so why was there a little voice in my head telling me, “you should be careful what you wish for”?Over the next month I dove headfirst into learning chapter operations and that little voice often returned. There was little documentation and almost everything we needed was in the founding member’s head. The membership wasn’t large, but the board was working at full capacity and often over capacity to pull off meetings. It was obvious there was no way to scale; at least not without some changes.
How was I going to lead this group? How was I going to make the founder proud of his legacy? How could I grow an organization that wasn’t particularly organized?
After a year and half, we have automated almost all our routine processes like member registration, paying dues, distributing newsletters, financial accounting, and tracking attendance for CPE’s. If these tasks sound familiar, it’s because we provide them for AICPA members. In fact, my experience learning about the processes at AICPA are how I was able to help grow the local (ISC)2 chapter to three times its size, and below explains how.
The (ISC)2 is the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium and serves as the international trade organization for cyber security. There are many similarities between the (ISC)2 and the AICPA, including:
- Operating as Not-for-profit (NFP) organizations representing a complex discipline,
- Promoting the disciplines and recruiting to grow the industry
- Serving different membership types based on credentials,
- Delivering education and tracking CPE’s,
- Providing an international presence and supporting locally run chapters,
- Sponsoring public awareness campaigns to educate the general population, and of course
- Both have incredibly complicated acronyms
Automating the Business
For 5 years the (ISC)2 Raleigh Durham Chapter had been functioning by either using tools that did not integrate with each other or performing tasks manually – so we started by questioning everything. There were challenges shifting from existing tools but with a formed idea of the experience we required, and the architecture needed to support that experience, it became clear what was going to work and what was not.
While establishing the website we invested time to define solid journeys for customers to register, login, retrieve passwords, and open support tickets.
Next we established how to pay dues electronically, which has iterated continuously over the last year. What began as either cash or unbranded PayPal experiences are now branded experiences that shows payment history on our site. Recently we closed our financial accounts for the first time and 2020 dues supports recurring invoices that can be paid by a button in an email from a phone.
The integration architecture supports taking payments (online or in person) and synchronizing real-time with our infrastructure to provision access, update marketing segmentation, and update our back-end financial system.
Our events management and recording attendance was also manual. Today, we provide online registration and onsite a board member checks one box to confirm attendance. (If guests attend, we ask them to register, login, and RSVP on their phones (which is why journeys needed to be as intuitive and painless as possible).
Attendance is recorded and provides confirmation email to the customer, a record for CPE’s, and a report to our host facility.
The next step to improve check-in is to use an AI program given to me by Professor Ng from Stanford that uses facial recognition whilst literally walking past a facing camera.
Since automating administrative tasks, we now have the time to build quality into training programs.
Our public awareness training partners with (ISC)2 Safe and Secure Online to help people ‘surf safely’. The audiences range from youth, parents (should I be concerned about my child’s online experience; and what is Fortnite?), and seniors who get online to connect with family (we know you love them, but your grandchildren’s names’ make horrible passwords).
How AICPA helped
As mentioned, there are many parallels between the (ISC)2 and the AICPA, and it would be remiss to not acknowledge some of the experiences that have helped me to help the chapter:
- Peggy McIntyre who helped me understand customer feedback and promoted the idea of making the experience ruthlessly simple.
- Andy Sedaca who helped me put ruthlessly simple designs to the test over and over as we iterated to improve the content and experience at AICPA.
- Elisabeth Pinekenstein, who has inspired me to learn more about accounting – which led to our chapter being singular in how seriously we take accounting and closing books.
- Kati McDaniels, who manages our dues playbook, taught me that if we can simplify the process, simplification to manage and reduced exceptions should follow.
- Clar Rosso who’s team developed the NFP program that I completed to learn more about the accounting practices required for NFP’s.
Chapter growth
Growing our membership is a governing value, but we chose to be patient and build the right processes before actively driving growth. Despite the pause, automated processes now support membership growth which has tripled in the last 15 months and is forecast to double again in 2020.
Thanks to our growth we have more opportunities to draw different speakers to our meetings and to support partner organizations. Currently we support several groups including WiCyS (Women in Cyber Security) and the Scholarship Opportunities with the (ISC)² and the center for Cyber Safety and Education. Also, we have a newly thriving marketing segment for volunteers who help us better promote our programs and industry.
Preposterous Popliteus
If you are told that you have an overdeveloped or inflated popliteous you may not know if it is a compliment or not. I did not :). Over time I have gone to different massage therapists, even some that volunteered at running events, and nobody has an explanation for the ‘bumps’ behind my knees.
They are symmetrical to each other and can be flexed and relaxed so I believe they are muscles and the closest thing I can find is popliteus.
Despite my love affair with running that I found in my 40’s, I have had these as long as I can remember, although I ran 5 miles at a time with my Pop-Pop on Saturdays when I was 5 and 6 years old.
If anyone else seems to have or have seen this let me know, I am curious.
The popliteus muscle in the leg is used for unlocking the knees when walking, by laterally rotating the femur on the tibia during the closed chain portion of the gait cycle (one with the foot in contact with the ground). In open chain movements (when the involved limb is not in contact with the ground), the popliteus muscle medially rotates the tibia on the femur. It is also used when sitting down and standing up. It is the only muscle in the posterior (back) compartment of the lower leg that acts just on the knee and not on the ankle. The gastrocnemius muscle acts on both joints.
– Wikipedia
Typically they are not visible from the outside of your body, but apparently mine are grotesque.
Pic here…
Pic here…
The Amazing Octopus-post
The octopus is an amazing creature. Considering how they have adapted and evolved so differently compared to ourselves and even other sea creatures is fascinating. There is also an element of mystery about them being from the ocean. The octopus’s mere form has become an image for both children’s shows as well as nightmares of ancient sailors. They are surprisingly intelligent creatures and have been observed ‘playing’.
There have been numerous accounts of octopus that were on display in large aquariums ‘sneaking’ out to other tanks for snacks. Some of the tactics used include such tactics as timing their movements between scheduled rounds of guards and even squirting water streams into lights to short-circuiting fixtures to move in the cover of darkness.
The plural is often referred to as octopi or octopuses but is debated. It is perhaps not surprising that the benefit to human intelligence is both labeling things and disagreement that we do not have a standard convention for the plural. Nor has the standard name for a group been established although I have heard several attempts like clutch, gang, cloud, and even salad for those small groups served before an entrée. Until there is some consensus on this I am fond of the terms mob or skulk but am certain that the wikipedia page with group names will be updated eventually.
An excellent article about demonstrating the uniqueness of individual specimens is from The Atlantic:
First, different individuals have different temperaments. Some are shy, some are bold; some are inquisitive, some aggressive. Because of this individuality, people who hang out with them, whether in the sea, at a public aquarium, or in the laboratory, tend to give them names—an honor normally reserved for mammals such as dolphins and chimpanzees. Cousteau spoke of an octopus called Octopissimus; one scientific paper I read referred to Albert, Bertram, and Charles.
Second, some octopuses will engage with you. They might reach out an arm and touch your hand. They will investigate an object you present to them, giving every impression of thinking about it as they do so. All the while, they will appear to watch you with their large, mobile eyes. Again, these are behaviors we associate with dolphins and dogs—but not with, say, fish, let alone animals such as sea urchins or clams.
Third, octopuses often behave in surprising ways. Although Albert and Bertram were prepared to pull levers to receive pieces of fish, Charles destroyed the experimental equipment—he pulled it apart with his arms—and repeatedly squirted the experimenter with water. On a recent diving trip, my partner and I came across a little octopus sitting in the sand, two of its arms holding a large half clamshell over its head like a roof. For a while, we looked at it, and it looked at us. Then it shifted. It must have been reaching down with its other arms, because suddenly, like a small animated bulldozer, it tossed up a heap of sand. It did this several times, watching us closely and giving us the sense that, though it was interested in checking us out, it was also ready, if necessary, to pull the shell down like a lid and disappear into the seafloor.
One breed in particular has an amazing color palate at its disposal, and beautiful rings. Aptly named, the Blue Ringed Octopus is a relatively small and fits in a human hand, but is highly venomous. My personal theory is that the Blue Ring became venomous as a defense mechanism due to intrusive humans that couldn’t keep their hands off of the gorgeous creature.
There are also reports of octopus recognizing individuals, which seems almost absurd considering that we are mostly clad in clothing, and worse, in a lab may wear lab coats or uniforms that match our colleagues. Below is an excerpt from the Orion Magazine noting such an identification.
Occasionally an octopus takes a dislike to someone. One of Athena’s predecessors at the aquarium, Truman, felt this way about a female volunteer. Using his funnel, the siphon near the side of the head used to jet through the sea, Truman would shoot a soaking stream of salt water at this young woman whenever he got a chance. Later, she quit her volunteer position for college. But when she returned to visit several months later, Truman, who hadn’t squirted anyone in the meanwhile, took one look at her and instantly soaked her again.
Yes this is, in fact, a dumbo Octopus sticking it’s tongue out at you. Draft…
Carrier Protein Kinesin
credit: John Liebler The Kinesin are the molecules that carry protein to nerves, like the amazing network in our brains.
Kinesins were discovered as MT-based anterograde intracellular transport motors. The founding member of this superfamily, kinesin-1, was isolated as a heterotetrameric fast axonal organelle transport motor consisting of 2 identical motor subunits (KHC) and 2 “light chains” (KLC) via microtubule affinity purification from neuronal cell extracts. Subsequently, a different, heterotrimeric plus-end-directed MT-based motor named kinesin-2, consisting of 2 distinct KHC-related motor subunits and an accessory “KAP” subunit, was purified from echinoderm egg/embryo extracts and is best known for its role in transporting protein complexes (IFT particles) along axonemes during cilium biogenesis. Molecular genetic and genomic approaches have led to the recognition that the kinesins form a diverse superfamily of motors that are responsible for multiple intracellular motility events in eukaryotic cells. For example, the genomes of mammals encode more than 40 kinesin proteins, organized into at least 14 families named kinesin-1 through kinesin-14.
These videos are exceptionally well made and explanatory:
- In the first video, the animation is fantastic and the analogy of city commuting well represent the challenges facing the process. ~ 5 min.
- The second is a Ted Talk ~ 10 min
- The third video is a more in-depth explanation by Ron Vale and it is great, but it is ~40 minutes and gets pretty deep. This is for you if you want to learn about the reasons why Kinesin and other carriers travel ‘one-way’ (spoiler; the nucleated centrosomes create polarized microtubials).
Could PBH’s have created all Dark Matter?
My final paper for this class was to represent the theory that explains that although Dark Matter can be created by a Primordial Black Hole that the amount of Dark Matter in the Universe is far more than the mathematics can support; until recently. The Double-Inflation theory extends the possibility of what happens in the volatile scenario and accounts for a significant increase in Dark Matter creation. The shortcomings of several aspects of the previously leading theory are identified and redefined to explain what we now believe to be the case.
This class is part of the Natural Science program from the University of Oxford. The nature of the assignment was to write it as one would explain it to peers, which would be master’s level asto-physicists and astro-biologists, but I tend to take it a bit further. Generally, I try to write at a basic level and the metric for success to me is that my son can understand the content; he is 14 at this stage and that precludes some details in the math, but not the spirit of the math, it’s previously defined constraints, or how we now have found to overcome them.
Could PBH’s have created all Dark Matter?
Below is an overview describing the findings that are published in “Double Inflation as a single origin of PBHs for all dark matter and LIGO”[1]. The material in and of itself is a compelling argument illustrating how much we understand about the Universe. What is equally compelling, to me, is how much we still do not know, and how significant this time in research is continually becoming as we continue to refine methods and learn more.
What do we see when we look up into space? Mostly ‘nothing’ compared to the things that our eyes can see like planets, stars, galaxies, or other things that exist in the visible spectrum.
Although space appears largely ‘empty’ to our eyes we know that dark matter can be repeatedly tested and confirmed by at least observing gravitational effects.
The idea of understanding the origin of dark matter seems likely to be a critical key in understanding our universe better, since we know little of it now we must wholeheartedly admit that we do not know what makes up over 90% of the Universe.
Quite possibly, the explanation of dark matter creation lies within the secrets bound in the primordial black holes (PBH’s); which, for now, we also do not completely understand.
Math has supported that PBH’s could be the source for some dark matter, but the volume of dark matter in its entirety is so vast that there is a significant gap between what we can calculate was created from PBH’s and the reality of dark matter density.
One attempt at reducing this gap is the idea that the process used to support the dark matter was not representative of the natural occurrence. There is a concept of inflation since we expect the process would have been subject to heat, and molecular acceleration in ways that we know that other ‘matter’ is created like stars; but perhaps there was more going on during the inflation process than initially presumed.
The idea of a more complex inflation theory has been shown to account for constraints in the single inflation model and suggests support for all dark matter.
As the paper explains, “In general, any realistic inflation model results in the extended mass function, not a monochromatic mass function. Extended mass functions are constrained more severely than monochromatic ones.”
Hence the theory of Dark Matter being created from PBH’s by way of a double-inflation, which focuses primarily on the PBH’s that were created in the radiation dominated era and where the curvature perturbations follow the Gaussian distribution.
To understand the testable math behind the theory we must still establish some boundaries. As you may expect, we are not going to be able to rely on a complete set of reliable constants as could be provided in laboratories or would be available to us calculating against a uniform Universe.
The approach to test the theory against a more realistic set of criteria the scientists divided the components into two groups by mass.
Within each mass group there are some constraints that had bound previous testing, and it is important to understand these limitations. The definition of these limitations alone accounts for a bold step in the direction of understanding. The constraints, as presented, explain why the mathematical support that existed before was not able to account for the mass of dark matter.
The first group is defined as O (10-14 – 10-10)M⊙ and this mass has two documented limitations that have led to inaccurate calculations:
- Gravitational microlensing, and
- Sublunar mass from observation of white dwarfs
The effect of gravitational microlensing cannot be said plainer than in the paper, which is, “The gravitational microlensing occurs when the lens objects pass through our line of sight to background stars and is observed as the temporary amplification of the light of the background stars.” Considering that the tools we use to gather such data perform high-cadence sampling we need to consider the previously discounted wave effect. Previous theories that identified the wave effect excluded it from the calculations without an understanding that once the wavelength of light is larger than the Schwarzschild radius of the lensing object that the light waves should be calculated because the geometric optics approximation becomes invalid.
The second group is defined as O (10)M⊙ and this mass has several documented limitations that have led to inaccurate calculations including effects from:
- Radio and X-ray accretion, and
- Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies
“Radio and X-ray from accretion review has set a new upper limit on the abundance of primordial black holes (PBH) based on existing X-ray data.”[2] Interstellar medium will interact with PBH’s and result in significant fluctuations of X-ray photons. The fluctuations contribute to the observed number-density of compact X-ray objects in galaxies. The range of mass subject to these fluctuations ranges from a few M⊙ to 2 x 107M⊙.
As explained by Timothy D. Brandt’s paper[3], ultra-faint dwarf galaxies provide strong constraints on massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) of gsim5 M⊙ as the main component of dark matter. What has been observed is that the dwarf galaxy cluster is dynamically heated by the dark matter, the heat increase can be significant enough that the cluster grows and speeds up until its host galaxy consumes the dissolved remains. The stars in these galaxies are subject to the same heat, and that we can observe at least 10 examples of such galaxies there are independent limits on MACHO dark matter of masses gsim10 M⊙. “Both Eri II’s cluster and the compact ultra-faint dwarfs are characterized by stellar masses of just a few thousand M⊙ and half-light radii of 13 pc (for the cluster) and ~30 pc (for the ultra-faint dwarfs). These systems close the ~20–100 M⊙ window of allowed MACHO dark matter and combine with existing constraints from microlensing, wide binaries, and disk kinematics to rule out dark matter composed entirely of MACHOs from ~10−7 M⊙ up to arbitrarily high masses.”[4]
Considering these shortcomings brings us to the concrete inflation model where we have a pre-inflation process that nurtures the proper inflation steps. Our new equation accounts for a stabilization term, Vstb 1, to represent the pre-inflation stabilizing at the origin.
Next, the inflation, catalyzed by the pre-inflation, the inflation oscillates and functions as the Universe would be expected to do when dominated by matter.
Further, the new-inflation begins when the inflation energy becomes smaller than the new-inflation energy scale; this occurs due to a combination of the inflations reduction during decay and the new-inflation’s influence from our expanding Universe.
The mechanics behind the process are first, the inflection point of the new-inflation potential, and second, the Hubble Induced mass during the oscillation.
Figure 1 From Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, we see that the perturbation curvature peaks sharply which is characteristic of the double inflation model.
What the paper has clarified is that PBH’s around the sublunar mass can explain the existence of all dark matter. It appears that the double inflation model can “simultaneously explain PBHs as DM and PBHs as the BHs detected by LIGO.”[5] The two peak curvature perturbations (as represented in Figure 2) have been confirmed in multiple test.
We have clearly taken amazing steps forward since our ancient ancestors first looked up to the sky. Remembering archaic theories such as flat earth, the earth being the universe center, and even that we have come to be upon a tortoise back! Because of what we know, it is very easy to become a bit complacent and justified in our progress.
Figure 2 However, I submit to you that this time in history is not merely exciting because of what we have learned, but because we have learned how much we have yet to learn. The prospects of further exploration and ability to collect and organize data pave an unprecedented and very exciting future of discovery for us all. Not unlike the rolling boil of water in a kettle, or perhaps a flywheel, every molecular unit of work is significant and provides a contribution to the ultimate acceleration and future state.
We live in exciting times, and with no small thanks to those who have come before us and those who are continually working towards improving theories.
[1] This paper was chosen from the provided list and the original can be found online in the Cornell University library.
[2] Y. Inoue and A. Kusenko, JCAP 1710, 034 (2017), arXiv:1705.00791 [astro-ph.CO].
[3] T. D. Brandt, Astrophys. J. 824, L31 (2016), arXiv:1605.03665[astro-ph.GA].
[4] T. D. Brandt, Astrophys. J. 824, L31 (2016), arXiv:1605.03665[astro-ph.GA].
[5] This paper was chosen from the provided list and the original can be found online in the Cornell University library.The paper that this work summarizes is below.
Fair warning, the scope of my paper was to ‘support the math’ in 1500 characters which is entirely different than detailing all of the mathematical calculations. If you are interested in more of the math please enjoy the paper below:
Support of the Big Bang
The first assignment in my Universe class was to support the Big Bang theory in under 500 words.Since I believe that knowledge should be always obtainable in distribution and content level, I have written this at a U.S. high school level and I used my 14 year old son to proofread.
The content below has been updated with suggestions from Dr. Grant Miller.
What evidence is there for the Big Bang?
As early as 1912 an astronomer detected a galaxy’s doppler shift that indicated the body was moving away from us. At the time there was more significance in the what was happening compared to the why it was happening, observations have for over 100 years been mounting to confirm aspects of The Big Bang Theory.
The range of phenomena that we test and reprove related to The Big Bang Theory only begins with the concept of the Universe expanding, however this is a very important point. The idea that the singularity from which the Universe began had grown into the reality that we observe implies a massive expansion, and even raised questions of collapse by scientists including Albert Einstein; however, advances in testing do not support that expansion will reverse to collapse. In fact, the concept of the expansion has been tuned to support data which suggests that the universe is expanding at speeds proportion to their distances from us[1].
If we follow the evidence that the Universe is expanding, then the obvious questions become, from what origin, and for how long, as well as, what was there before. The expansion begs that the beginnings we smaller and the magnitude of the expansion suggests that there was a lot of energy fueling the process.
To address the origin from the perspective of size, we rely on a particularly clever tool called the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric (FLRW metric) which is able to measure the multidirectional expansion by placing the relative unit bodies onto a grid. By combining the idea of comoving coordinates and the scale factor the grid can be used to measure the velocity of expansion, which tells us not only the direction but the speed, and therefore distance.
Once we understand how the Universe is moving around us, it becomes practical to use that math to work our way back to origin, which we believe to be roughly 13.7 billion years old.
As to what fueled the event, we have the benefits of observing space itself for by-products of the initial expansion. Fortunately, we have been able to detect the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which has been left over[2] from that era, and it is literally everywhere in space. The by-product CMB is the evidence that allows us to reverse engineer the process to determine the original biochemistry.
Next, there is mounting data being collected that provides us an opportunistic glimpse into the past. By combining the abilities, we currently have, to see far with the understanding that light has a finite speed we can see history. The great distances that we deal with in space allow us to observe light that has been travelling to us since the actual light source has long since gone, but we can still see that light, and with modern tools we can witness the distance, direction, and speed of the objects.
[1] Hubble’s Law states that galaxies are moving away from us at a speed proportional to their distance.
[2] Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a 2.725-degree Kelvin Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) in 1965 winning them the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mandelbrot set built from Fibonacci sequence?
This is evidence that phenomena still raises it’s head, and our eyebrows, as we are able to look deeper and deeper into formulation.By looking closely at the Mandelbrot set, we can normalize the set geometrically and find an order; that order is a framework built upon the Fibonacci sequence. Who knew?
If you are remotely interested in math consider following the Numberphile series on YouTube.
Also, JoCo wrote a song about Mandelbrot that can be seen here.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LQvjSf6SSw[/embedyt]
