With nightmare visions of a gunman stalking school halls, districts often rush to hire police officers to patrol their campuses after news of a school shooting. Critics of that impulsive response, which has been in high gear nationwide since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December, acknowledge the concern for student and staff…

Organizations in all sectors of business have become highly dependent upon information systems for the conduct of business operations. Of necessity, these information systems are designed with many points of ingress, points of exposure that can be leveraged by a motivated attacker seeking to compromise the confidentiality, integrity or…

Cyber-security involves the monitoring a complex network of inter-related computers to prevent, identify and remediate from undesired actions. This work is performed in organizations by human analysts. These analysts monitor cyber-security sensors to develop and maintain situation awareness (SA) of both normal and abnormal activities that occur on…

This dissertation uses design science research and engineering to develop a cloud-based simulator for modeling next-generation cybersecurity protection frameworks in the United States. The claim is made that an agile and neutral framework extending throughout the cyber-threat plane is needed for critical infrastructure protection (CIP). This…

This report describes the policies and programs implemented and reported through an institutional survey undertaken by Association of American Universities (AAU) member universities to prevent and respond to campus sexual assault and misconduct. Fifty-five of the 62 leading research universities that comprise AAU's membership completed the survey,…

Schools watch their students. Nearly every responsibility that schools shoulder includes an element of surveillance--from ensuring that preschoolers do not wander off, to keeping third graders on task, to stopping bullying and sexting. These responsibilities are not new, but schools' increased ability to monitor students continuously is. Despite…

School psychologists are often the first professionals to reach students with mental illness, and part of their role is to help identify threats that can lead to events such as the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which left 20 children and six adults dead, including school psychologist Mary Sherlach, who was one of the…

The 1990s represented a unique decade in which to analyze the determinants of police strength in the United States. This decade was a time in which crime initially increased, then substantially decreased. Furthermore, this decade also was characterized by increases in the minority population throughout large American cities. Finally, the 1990s…

The highly publicized story of unfathomable abuse by Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, as well the unfathomable response of those with the power to stop it, makes it clear that abuse can happen anywhere--and that adults need to be vigilant and educated. All of those who oversee schools must also ensure that their faculty and staff are well…

As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan works with other Obama administration officials on policy responses to the shootings at a Connecticut elementary school, he brings a personal and professional history that has acquainted him with the impact of gun violence. As schools chief in Chicago from 2001 to 2008, he was affected by the gun deaths…

The present pilot study examines the use of story structure for lesson design to promote student engagement in a lesson focusing on sexual assault prevention. The effect of the story-based lesson on undergraduates' knowledge and perceptions of sexual assault was studied using a quasi-experimental mixed methods design. Results of the study…

Prevention programs yield modest reductions in bullying in North American schools. This study explored the perspective of educators regarding factors limiting the impact of these initiatives. Transcripts from nineteen 90-min focus groups with 103 educators were coded thematically. Educators felt that off-site incidents, cyberbullying, and the…

This exploratory study of 168 undergraduate students examined the perceptions of college students about cyberbullying. The study focused on students' knowledge of the topic, opinions about cyberbullying, and personal experiences they may have had as either a victim or a witness of cyberbullying. Reporting of cyberbullying incidents was also…

The question of whether guns should be permitted on college and university campuses in the United States reflects the tension between two competing perspectives. America has both a robust gun culture and an equally robust (if less well known) gun-control culture. The gun culture is as American as apple pie: There may be as many as 300 million…

Recent rapid malware growth has exposed the limitations of traditional in-host malware-defense systems and motivated the development of secure virtualization-based solutions. By running vulnerable systems as virtual machines (VMs) and moving security software from inside VMs to the outside, the out-of-VM solutions securely isolate the anti-malware…