Should you be picking the low growing fruit

NOT SURE WHICH WAY TO TURN?

SHOULD YOU TAKE A LOWER PAID JOB?

When searching for a new job and the time starts to drag on and on, normally extending beyond three months, it is natural to begin to wonder if you should take a lower-level or lower paid job just to get some sort of paycheck again.

It's a sensible and an honest question but also a difficult one to answer. After working so hard to build a career and climb the corporate ladder, taking a step or two back, can affect more than your pride.

Some career experts will warn you against taking a lower-level job. They will advise you to hold out for a better offer that will better advance your career and not set you back a step, or three. Clearly, this is not an issue when you need a money to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. It doesn't matter what job you get, just as long as it's honest and helps pay the bills.

There is a strong argument that taking a lower-level job can be a smart career move, especially if it prevents you from being unemployed for more than 12 months, and with the economy as slow as it is, 12 months of unemployment is not unrealistic.

Its a simple but realistic outlook. You may want to consider positions at a level lower. You will increase your chances of getting a job sooner if you keep your options open and consider lower-level positions in addition to relocating and switching industries. This advice goes for executives too. There is an expression that says; 'A' class talent always rises to the top. Clearly, holding out for the perfect or even a comparable job opportunity in this economy may be even more risky than taking a step or two back.

Its OK to hold out for a perfect or promoted post for three to nine months. Even up to a year can be acceptable and justifiable, but if you're out of a job for 12 to 18 months, you're in danger of devaluing your skills and marketability. Today's business moves so fast and there are so many changes and new regulations, new laws and new competitors arriving on a 7-by-24 basis that being out of the market and out of touch for 12 or more months, is a big gap to jump.

The dilemma is; If you spent some of the time you were unemployed doing contract or short term consulting work would this mean that you were still in touch with the business world? Taking on short term and consulting projects definitely will help, for a number of reasons but it's important to take on projects that will help you gain the knowledge and experience that will help you get a promoted post. Also, employers tend to consider these projects as part of a job seeker's portfolio, if they are made aware of them by you.

The down side could be; If you, as an experienced executive, picked up a consulting contract managing a company's payroll, a prospective employer may not consider this as suitable experience, a diversion away from, and dilution of your normal key skill sets. Thus, they may look disfavourably upon your application as an IT executive. They may not think it was at a high enough level and would have preferred to see you working on a more strategic project.

In conclusion; Diversify by all means but be mindful of what contracts and consulting projects you take on. It may seem to contradict my earlier recommendation to seriously consider lower-level jobs, especially if money is tight but consider the circumstances well and do not forget the overall perception that may be given out by some positions, with respect to new employers. They may not see it as a positive move for your career.

Frustrated? Its not you, believe me!

Don't let it get you down! It's not you. It's the economy.

Remember, that what's happening in commerce and the world of employment in general, is a reflection of the overall slow economy and the safe measures being taken to reduce economic exposure and commercial risk. It's not a criticism or a commentary on you and your specific qualifications. You cannot stop the world going around each day, even if sometimes we get a bit dizzy from it. Don't take it personally.

Lots of highly qualified people are available on the job market and aren't getting responses to their résumés or callbacks for interviews, let alone job offers. It's not because you lack experience, good sense and credentials. It's not because you're doing something intrinsically wrong. It's the economy, so beating yourself up over the lack of progress you're making in your job search, is not going to help. In fact it will erode your confidence further.

Revitalize, don't reinvent. Job seekers may not need to "reinvent" themselves for today's job market. They may only need to "repackage" themself. A much more agreeable and achievable task.

Forget about the instant makeovers. These are for people who have something to hide. Companies need the experience and accomplishments you have earned over time. Leverage what you already have and focus on it, instead of what you fear you may lack.

This will go a long way toward helping you feel more confident about your experience, rather than makimg you feel old, tired and out-of-touch. (passed it and passed over)

Beware of getting suckered in by personality tuners and career coaches. When times get tough, the tough can be assailed by hype. There are good consultants out there that can offer to revise your résumé', put you in touch with the 'hidden job market' or coach you to become a newer, more marketable you but be cautious and keep your wallet closed.

Not all career coaches as snake-oil salesmen. They provide a worthwhile service, especially to people who have not been in the market for some time and need help with their communication and marketing skills. Good consultants' customers will vouch for them.

There is an old adage that says; Seduction trumps selling. The tight job market has made some job seekers overly aggressive. They think they need to hunt down and beat prospective employers over the head with their qualifications, and can resort to telling hiring managers that they are the "perfect candidate" rather than letting their experience speak for itself.

In business as in love, infatuation rarely develops into a long lasting relationship from being pushy or gushing out a soft schmoo routine. By all means explain and align, but resist the urge to exclaim and alarm. Let people reach their own conclusions about whether you are a potential world class employee or not, they will whether you like it or not.

Yes, by all means be different from the crowd. Stand out at the selection process but remember there is a narrow line between; very attentive and stalking, great enthusiasm and desperation, highly confidence and arrogance. As with meeting new friends and potential mates, do not be afraid to show some aspect of your vulnerable side and I don't mean walk with a limp.

Another big dilemma the job seeker faces is whether to take a lesser job that's a temporary fix, a stopgap. Some wil urge you to choose your next job wisely and not take stop-gap measures. In the real world, life and bills go on. People need to pay their mortgages and feed their families. I will cover some of this discussion in my next blog.

Re-thinking IT Security in tough times

The current economic downturn is forcing a corporate change and metamorphosis that, when combined with ever broadening security threats, presents information security groups with an opportunity to radically change their identity and add more value to the business.

To capitalise on the moment, security groups need to reassess their approach, add visibility and transform the very role of security.

It is good timing because maintaining security during tough economic times is critical. Besides external threats that evolve even more rapidly in economic downturns, business slumps increase the probability of disgruntled employees striking out using intimate knowledge of corporate systems.

Risk is further exacerbated by the fact that, since the last economic crisis of this magnitude, companies have become far more reliant on information technology systems, which are now highly complex and essential to sound operations.

Your current security path represents existing programs, capabilities, processes, etc. The goal is to create a parallel path that influences existing practices and allows you to refine a new strategy without disrupting current expectations. In time, the new path will become a dominating force and take you in a new direction.

Step 1: Tuning the Approach
During the last decade security has been virtually defined by compliance. For many companies, it has been less about security than it has been about ensuring that certain regulatory demands are being met. Unfortunately, compliance does not necessarily enable the business, align with core initiatives, and alone may not thwart debilitating attacks.

Understanding this, some security groups have strived to use compliance efforts to improve their security posture.

Unfortunately, not all companies see the value of such activities and instead simply see compliance as a cost of doing business.

You have to convert the security practices that fall under the banner of "mandated for compliance" into specific activities that resonate with the business. For example, a predominant force in business is time to market and the rapid conversion of investments to revenue generation. This can materialize as a new service, application, communication platform, network or alliance. The key to tuning your approach is to optimize security features to help the business move more quickly, reduce barriers or accommodate a requirement quickly.

Key to being able to accomplish this is institutional knowledge within the security group and leveraging and combining resources in ways that benefit the business as much as it does security, for example: supporting secure coding practices through collaboration with the development team, optimizing standard builds to stand up servers more quickly, security testing as part of performance testing, or utilization of directory services to support streamlining of access controls for a new partner.

Fundamentally, it is about operating in a risk/reward model. Prioritize activities based on risk as well as where the greatest opportunities are for the business. By becoming intimate with business goals and mapping against elements of risk, what begins to surface is a common thread that demonstrates a point where the business and security goals become more closely aligned.

A good place to start is within the project management arena, where risks to the initiative or life cycle will become apparent, in addition to helping identify critical paths and what is most important or critical to the business unit. By using information of this nature, combined with institutional knowledge that the security group possess, you can begin to interpret demands and risks in business initiatives and quickly find areas of common ground.

Step 2: Adding Visibility
Security groups typically make security efforts visible to executive management by presenting security metrics, risk dashboards, and the like. However, along the way, many encounter some key challenges.

The first challenge is that the measurements are only focused on security and typically do not provide insights to other aspects of security operations that demonstrate effectiveness. For example, a dashboard may present compliance risk, operational risk, technical risk and current threats. It is assumed that keeping the values in an optimal or desired range means that security is doing its job.

However, company executives are increasingly focused on efficiency, effectiveness and overall alignment to business initiatives. They want to know how well these objectives are being met, what influence they have had on other key business performance indicators (such as time to market, customer retention), and how resources and other valuable assets are being utilized.

Executives are concerned about inefficient or wasteful activities and want to ensure all activities focus on the bottom line. Presenting to the board a risk dashboard can be helpful to demonstrate your alignment to security concerns, but that's only one part of the equation in the eyes of executives. The more effectively security can reduce the need to translate security results into something meaningful for the business, the better.

The second challenge relates to the "gap" factor. The gap refers to the difference in what security is providing to executives as visibility and the ability for the security group to influence the system to enact change.

For example, a report may demonstrate that the number of vulnerabilities in Internet-facing applications is increasing significantly quarter over quarter. However, the security group may not have the capacity or capability to reduce that number to a reasonable value. As a result, some senior security managers find themselves tasked to correct an issue they simply do not have the ability to accomplish.

In short, information from the security program is misaligned with its ability. Some use this to justify investments that would address the gap. But unfortunately this pattern is growing increasingly ineffective as business owners demand more accountability. The solution is to create a security program that not only presents good and bad trends, but more importantly, has the ability to have a meaningful impact in changing them.

The challenges can be summarized as providing visibility into more than security in security terms, but also in a manner that is more readily digested by executives and easier to align to business goals. Secondly, build a security program that not only produces meaningful information relative to security and business metrics, but also has the inherent capability to institute change and thereby meet expectations.

Providing additional visibility to existing risk-based perspectives can be enormously valuable. To accomplish this, you need to become more intimate with what resonates with the executives -- the measurements they focus on day in and day out, the performance indicators they study beyond the financial ones. Each company is different and each business unit may have a different spin. Moreover, many may seem like the furthest thing from security, such as shipping metrics, warehousing, capacity indicators, system use or even collaboration indicators. You have to look behind these to begin to see where security can begin to mimic the same philosophies.

From a security perspective, look to report on areas within your domain of influence and help reflect how well you're running as a business. It can be as simple as resource utilization, project involvement or performance quality scores from your peers.

From there you can start tying to other reported information and trends, such as the planned decline in effort to perform regular vulnerability testing, but an incline in report quality and effectiveness, essentially demonstrating that you are meeting security and business objectives. Or show how, through collaboration activities (which have been measured) and modifications to technologies, you've helped reduce the number of security related helpdesk tickets. These are, of course very basic. Nevertheless, the point is to find related information between what you are doing for security and how well you are doing related to business expectations.

This approach helps form your new path for security, drawing from your original strategies and enhancing them. Start small, test the waters and seek mentorship within the organization. As more confidence grows in providing additional perspectives on activities, you can move into closing the gap.

Step 3: Service orientation
By this point you've learned how to orchestrate your core competencies to help the business reach its goals using a risk/reward method. And you've started experimenting with adding visibility to the executives on alignment. As a result, the identity of security is beginning to shift. It may not be obvious, but it's happening. However, this is a critical stage and the time to innovate. Once executives see something they like, they want more, expectations increase, and that "good job" turns into "what have you done for me lately?"

One of the common pitfalls is not following through to ensure a foundation exists to keep up with new expectations. As a result, massive ground is lost and you're back to square one.

Adopting a service orientation can help you continue to move forward. Service orientation has three primary objectives:

1) Convert tactical best practices that were once hidden within compliance efforts into business services that can be consistently utilized.

2) Close the gap between what you can control/influence and what you're reporting on.

3) Create a foundation for building a highly agile security approach.

The key is to learn from experimental practices in tuning activities and report on additional metrics and indicators relative to business goals. For the development of security services, it's the tuning of the approach that provides the information you need to get started.

In the most simple of definitions, a security service is a well-formed package of related processes, technologies and capabilities that has a predictable outcome that is needed or in demand by the business. What makes security services differ from traditional security activities is input.

Just about everything requires input to feed a process to produce an output. For security, the input is usually "self-assigned," meaning the business must meet a specific policy or some other documented requirement to have security perform an action. For example, a policy may read, "Any material change to an Internet-facing application requires a penetration test." That's a sound approach, but it's reactive and misses the opportunity to gain valuable insights to underlying business needs and goals.

While looking for risk/reward scenarios, you will see a pattern emerge and the tuning efforts outlined above should help you identify opportunities to incorporate specific business attributes into what you're performing.

The basis for security services is taking advantage of this pattern. In fact, you're doing this today to some degree. For example, an application is due for a test, but you've learned that the changes relate to one of several roles defined in the system. As a result, you may limit testing to that one area because of your knowledge and comfort with the application from previous tests. Now, extrapolate this to all things in security. It's less about simply doing what you do and more about giving the business additional opportunity to feed the process in order to refine the activity -- or service in this case -- to the business need.

The next important characteristic of security services is how people, processes, tools, methods and technology are architected to perform the service relative to input and output. This is a lot easier to say than to do. Organizations tend to approach these elements as independent or loosely coupled. Moreover, some security architectures and frameworks facilitate segmentation, making alignment of them seem alien and uncomfortable.

One challenge is internally developed standards that are either overly comprehensive or too granular. Successful implementation of security services typically starts with reviewing the standards and looking at them as a common foundation to services as opposed to specific elements for a given security function.

As with all things of this nature, a slow and methodical approach wins the race. Don't try to create a services model over night. Take what you've learned in tuning, couple it with something you're already doing today (such as vulnerability testing, patch management, identity management, data protection, monitoring), and then pilot a services approach with a friendly business unit.

As this approach begins to solidify, several interesting things start to happen. The identity of security and perceived value continues to shift in a positive direction. Nevertheless, you will quickly realize that you have far more capabilities to measure operational details of your organization, and more importantly -- you inherently have more influence over them as a result.

This essentially slams the door on the gap. Services facilitate the risk/reward model, they make it possible to organize activities specific to demand, provide the means to measure those activities more effectively, and allow for the controlled management of each element to ensure that what is being reported can be influenced. This can be a perfect storm, but you're not done. To truly transform, you have to close the loop with governance.

Step 4: Governance Loop
The "governance loop" is the final step and provides the opportunity to realize real transformation. To this point, you've tuned, experimented, tested and created the early stages of services and are beginning to rely on the new path and less on the old one.

This has helped increase visibility, initial alignment to the business and promotes effectiveness. Nevertheless, at this point, time becomes your enemy -- without governance, the services will eventually break down. Governance, interestingly, provides the mechanism to ensure expectations are being met, but also the means to promote adaptability, closing the loop with the business.

Governance acts as the bonding agent between ebbs and flows in the business, compliance, risk and security activities. More importantly, this is where risk/reward is measured and fed back into the system to instigate change. It is also important to realize that risk (management, assessments, reporting) has played a pivotal role throughout the journey, and governance is the means to realize full potential. Risk remains at the top of the pyramid, but now with services underlying it, supported by governance, it can move far closer to the business.

In short, governance is analogous to "inspect what you expect" and influence change. That means creating a set of responsibilities and practices with the goal of providing direction as well as ensuring objectives are achieved and resources are used responsibly. In so doing, measurements from the oversight of security not only ensure efficient and effective execution, but also facilitate change in the program through intimate connections with risk management and the business offering feedback into the system.

In some companies governance is associated with enforcement. Although partly true, a security group empowered by services and close interlinks with overall enterprise governance through risk management activities will be able to put governance to work for them. This is similar to how, over the last several years, many security organizations have changed their perspective of the audit group.

Historically seen as a regular and painful exposure of operational weakness in security, audit processes are now being seen as a way to strengthen security. It's turning what is usually thought of as a negative into a positive force. The same is true with governance processes that are outside of the control of the security group or where security is part of a governance committee.

Nevertheless, an important aspect is to understand that the security group is ultimately responsible for its activities -- good and bad. Therefore, it is recommended that governance be reflected in the security services and program owned and operated by management resources within the group. This is not a replacement for enterprise governance -- rather, it's an extension focused on the betterment of security.

Organizations need security more now than ever, and as a result, are more receptive to security as a community. What you do with that attention today could have enormous influences on the future of security within your company. Although times are tough, don't assume this means opportunities don't exist. The economy will correct itself and businesses will emerge stronger and with a new sense of determination and demands for operational maturity. Taking advantage of what appears to be short-term focus on security for long-term gains is the crux of the opportunity, and opportunity favors the prepared.

This article is by James Tiller, author of The Ethical Hack and Technical Guide to IPSec VPNs, and contributing author on several other books, including the Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CBK, is vice president of security services for BT in North America. He consults with organizations globally on how security can enable business. You can reach him at james.tiller@bt.com.

Doing Less With Less leads to less

Where do you stand in today's market? and who's standing there with you?

Now that your company has fashionably reduced its staffing levels and you have survived the axe, are you being asked to do more with less, in the wake of these layoffs?

Yes you say, but are you actually doing more? I'm sorry but the real answer is; probably not. According to a US survey conducted in December by Leadership IQ.

When the US research and training firm polled 4,172 workers at 318 companies that had recently laid off employees, 74% of the people who responded said their own productivity has declined. Other findings:

• 87% of surviving workers said they are less likely to recommend their organisations as good places to work. (Quelle surpris! This is a sign of a badly handled layoff)
  
• 64% of surviving workers said the productivity of their colleagues has also declined. (The bad layoff was indicative of poor management motivational skills in the company)
  
• 81% of surviving workers said the quality of service that customers receive has declined. (This should have alarm bells ringing! This way, monsters lie!)7
• 77% of surviving workers said they see more errors and mistakes being made. (Realistically, they may be looking closer, with a more critical and negative attitude or have access to more info through expanded roles)
• 61% of surviving workers said they believe their companies' future prospects are worse.
  

This summary is probably correct, if their customers are sensing negative vibes and are experiencing reduced service, in today's buyer's market. Staff and management should be made aware that they have a vital role to play in convincing customers that there is value to be had by maintaining their loyalty.

Loyal customers and repeat business should be cherished, protected and sustained through innovation and strong management.

If the company has implemented reduced staffing levels without refreshing the management team, its motivation and its attitudes, then the only changes they will need to manage are the shrinkages of its customer base, the obsolescense of its products and services, with the subsequent failure of the whole lame duck enterprise.

Do not mistake Movement for Action

Living in a state of Déjà vu

Maybe you've heard this one before but believe me, you haven't. You only think you have.

Mr P, an 80-year-old Polish émigré and former engineer, knew he had memory problems, but it was his wife who described it as a permanent sense of déjà vu. He refused to watch TV or read a newspaper, as he claimed to have seen everything before. When he went out walking he said the same birds sang in the same trees and the same cars drove past at the same time every day. His doctor said he should see a memory specialist, but Mr P refused. He was convinced that he had already been.

Déjà vu can happen to anyone, and anyone who has had it will recognise the description immediately. It is more than just a sense that you have seen or done something before; it is a startling, inappropriate and often disturbing sense that history is repeating, and impossibly so. You can't place where the earlier encounter happened, and it can feel like a premonition or a dream. Subjective, strange and fleeting, not to mention tainted by paranormal explanations, the phenomenon has been a difficult and unpopular one to study.

Now that is changing, spurred in part by Mr P and a handful of people who, like him, have dementia and experience continuous déjà vu, and also by the discovery that there is a group of people with epilepsy who have déjà vu-like auras before a seizure. They are making it possible for researchers to catch the process in action, bringing hope that the secrets of this strange and disturbing phenomenon could finally be unlocked. Surprisingly, not only is déjà vu proving an interesting window on the peculiar ways that our memory works, it is also providing a few clues about how we tell the difference between what is real, imagined, dreamed and remembered - one of the true mysteries of consciousness.

Speculations about past lives or telepathy aside, the first biological explanations of déjà vu were based on ideas that two sensory signals in the brain - perhaps one from each eye or each hemisphere of the brain - for some reason move out of sync, so that people have the experience of reliving the same event. "Mental diplopia", as it was called, is intuitively appealing but the evidence is stacked against it. Information from the two eyes mixes very early in visual processing, long before we perceive a scene. What's more, déjà vu - rather ironically as the term means "already seen" - can occur in blind people, according to Chris Moulin, a psychologist at the University of Leeds, UK, (Brain and Cognition, vol 62, p 264). Then there are the cases of people who have had their two cortical hemispheres surgically separated in an attempt to relieve intractable epilepsy. If the mental diplopia idea were correct you might expect them to have permanent déjà vu, yet there are no reports of this happening.

A second intuitive explanation is some sort of distortion in time perception. Somehow, incoming signals must get misinterpreted and labelled with an inappropriate time stamp, making the experience seem old as well as current. If the brain's memory system is like a tape recorder, it is as if the recording head has got muddled with the playback head. It is an interesting analogy, but it does not appear to have any anatomical basis in the brain.

Now another theory is gaining credibility. Perhaps déjà vu feels like reliving a past experience because we actually are - at least to some extent. Psychologist Anne Cleary of Colorado State University in Fort Collins came to this idea via an interest in memory problems. Keen to explain instances such as when something seems to be on the tip of the tongue, or when we recognise a face but can't place it, she started looking for parallels with déjà vu. "One particular theory of déjà vu is that it may be a memory process," she says. "Features of a new situation may be familiar from some prior situation."

Her first experiments seem to support this. In one, she was able to induce familiarity for images of celebrity faces or well-known places, even if the viewer couldn't place the image, simply by first presenting subjects with lists of their names. In another study volunteers reported familiarity with words that sounded similar to ones presented in an earlier list. Nevertheless, Cleary acknowledges that this can't be the whole story. "Déjà vu is unique in that it is not just another instance of familiarity, it actually feels wrong," she says.

How to account for this? One possibility is that déjà vu is based on a memory fragment that comes from something more subtle, such as similarity between the configuration or layout of two scenes. Say you are in the living room of a friend's new house with the eerie feeling that you have been there before, yet knowing you can't possibly. It could be just that the arrangement of furniture is similar to what you have seen before, suggests Cleary, so the sense of familiarity feels misplaced.

To test the idea, her team produced a large range of images showing scenes such as a bar, a bowling alley, landscapes or rooms from a house. Volunteers saw a subset of these, then they were tested on a new set, half of which were entirely novel and the other half resembling scenes from the first set in structure and configuration but not content. Not only did the similar layouts produce familiarity without recall, subjects also reported a sense of the inexplicable, having been told that all the scenes were different.

Although the familiarity idea appeals to many, Moulin, for one, is not convinced. His scepticism stems from a study of a person with epilepsy that he conducted with Akira O'Connor, now at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. This 39-year-old man's auras of déjà vu were long-lasting enough to conduct experiments during them. The researchers reasoned that if familiarity is at the root of déjà vu, they should be able to stop the experience in its tracks by distracting the man's attention away from whatever scene he was looking at. However, when he looked away or focused on something different, his déjà vu did not dissipate, and would follow his line of vision and his hearing, suggesting that real familiarity is not the key. The fact that an epilepsy aura can cause déjà vu at all suggests that it is erroneous activity in a particular part of the brain that leads to misplaced feelings of familiarity, suggests Moulin.

Hypnotic dissociation

But how? Moulin and O'Connor think déjà vu is the consequence of a dissociation between familiarity and recall. We know that we can have a sense of familiarity for a face or name without actually remembering where we know it from. Using hypnosis, O'Connor and Moulin have been able to create a more mysterious sense of familiarity that leads people to draw parallels with déjà vu. One group of people was given a puzzle to solve. Then, while under hypnosis, they were told they would be given the puzzle again, but would not recall it. Another group did not do the puzzle but were told under hypnosis that they would be given it later and that they would experience feelings of familiarity but not understand why. Both situations produced a sense of eerie familiarity, which some people likened to déjà vu. Moulin and O'Connor hope that their ability to induce a déjà vu-like state in the lab will help them probe the phenomenon. They also believe these experiments support the idea that familiarity and recall are dissociable, and that you can have a sense of familiarity without actually having any prior experience of something.

Studies of the brain also support the idea that separate circuits mediate recollection and familiarity, according to John Aggleton and Malcolm Brown of Cardiff University, UK, who recently reviewed brain imaging and animal studies (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 10, p 455). They point out that different parts of the medial temporal lobe, at the side of the brain, are responsible for different aspects of memory recall (see illustration). The curved tube-like hippocampus, which runs through the centre of the lobe, mediates recollection, particularly of autobiographical memories. Meanwhile, the studies show that the surrounding parahippocampus, particularly the perirhinal cortex, may provide the feelings of familiarity.

This fits well with the evidence from brain scans of Mr P and others like him, who show huge degeneration of neurons in the medial temporal lobe, and the fact that it is epilepsy originating in the medial temporal lobe that leads to déjà vu auras.

It is possible that both Moulin and Cleary are correct. The perirhinal cortex may store information about spatial relationships, rather than time, place and sequence of events, and so normal familiarity feelings could come largely from layout and configuration, backing Cleary's findings. Indeed, there may be many ways to produce false familiarity, according to psychologist Alan Brown of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, author of The déjà vu experience (Psychology press, 2004). His own experiments indicate some other possibilities. For example, he has induced the feeling by distracting volunteers while they saw a glimpse of a scene and then moments later giving them a good look. "If you take a brief glance when distracted, and look at the same scene again afterwards, it can feel like you've seen it before but much earlier," says Brown. He has also induced it by showing people images of things they had forgotten. "Just as a stomach ache can hurt the same way but be caused by lots of different processes, it could be the same way with déjà vu," he says.

The real problem with explaining déjà vu, however, is not how we can get familiarity without recognition, but why it feels so disturbing. "We'd get it all the time if it were just familiarity with real experiences," says Ed Wild from the Institute of Neurology in London. He suggests that mood and emotion are also important contributors to the sensation of déjà vu. We need the right combination of signals, not just the layout of a scene but how we feel at the time, to believe something is familiar when really it is not.

A matter of degree

Moulin agrees it may be matter of degree. The regions thought to mediate recall, familiarity and emotions are all extremely closely linked. A small amount of stimulation could produce a mild sense of familiarity, while a stronger stimulus could spread into neighbouring emotion regions producing a more disturbing feeling, or even the striking sense of doom or premonition some people report with déjà vu.

Cognitive neuroscientist Stefan Köhler from the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, believes the role of emotion is even more central in generating the sense of weirdness that accompanies déjà vu. He recently had the chance to image the brain of a person cured of epilepsy with déjà vu auras by removal of a large tumour that was triggering the seizures. The excised areas consisted of parts of the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex, but also included the amygdala. It suggests that this region, which is known to be heavily tied up with emotion, was also involved in creating the déjà vu. Köhler speculates that without the appropriate emotional arousal, perhaps the brain cannot recognise a person or place we have encountered before as truly familiar. On the other hand, inappropriate emotional arousal may make us believe something is familiar when actually it is not.

The final element of déjà vu, a sense that it feels impossible, probably comes from the reasoning parts of our brain. According to Köhler, when our rational knowledge tells us one thing, but our emotional instincts tell us another, it can feel very wrong. This final element is missing in people with dementia, including Mr P, who accept their experiences as perfectly normal. Köhler suspects this may be because neurodegeneration in these individuals has caused a disconnection between the temporal lobes, which are generating sensations, and the frontal lobes which are continuously interpreting them.

Our brains are looking for associations all the time. Déjà vu is interesting, says Kohler, because it points to a brain mechanism that helps you interpret what you are doing. When you are having a memory, you have the sensation of recollection. It feels like having a memory, and doesn't feel like daydreaming or current reality. "Déjà vu is a fault in a kind of cognitive process that is going on in the background all the time. When it goes wrong, it's very striking," says Moulin. At the extreme, patients with permanent déjà vu - dubbed déjà vecu, for already experienced - actually make up stories to make sense of it.

While déjà vu is starting to divulge some of its secrets, there is still a long way to go before we understand how we actually decide what is real, imagined, dreamed or experienced, and how these various tags lead to such different conscious experiences. One anecdotal finding that came to light while working on this article is that people who think a lot about déjà vu are more prone to it. I had déjà vu about reading about déjà vu, and researchers have had déjà vu about having déjà vu. It certainly retains mystery enough to justify further study. After all, says Wild, "déjà vu is one of weirdest brain experiences that normal people have".

Stranger becomes stranger yet

• About 10 per cent of people claim never to have experienced déjà vu, while some individuals report having it regularly.

• Children first get it at around age 8 or 9, suggesting that a degree of cognitive maturity is required.

• Déjà vu happens less as you get older and more when you are tired, anxious or stressed.

• It is particularly prevalent in people with certain conditions known to produce problems in time perception, such as schizophrenia and epilepsy.

• Although there is no gene for déjà vu, it is possible that certain versions of genes associated with epilepsy make some of us more prone to it.

• Just reading this article could give you déjà vu.

Article appeared in New Scientist on 25 March 2009 by Helen Phillips

LinkedIn and Beyond: More Sites to Help You Network

LinkedIn, Facebook and Myspace can be useful tools for networking with consumers and peers, but there are other social networks on the web with more specific purposes or narrower audiences. The list is almost endless and the variety equally so. Here is a selection of other popular sites.

APSense.com: Tap into an affiliate marketing revenue stream by promoting products and sites on your business profile, and get paid for the friends you refer. (This is not the same service as Google's ADSense)

Biznik.co.uk: Join your local (US or UK) business community to connect and collaborate with nearby entrepreneurs, and find out about local seminars and events.

Entrepreneur Connect & Women Entrepreneur Connect: Share ideas, join groups, publish content and promote your business on (Women) Entrepreneur's own network.

FastPitchNetworking.com: Create a profile, product listings and blog, and take advantage of e-mail marketing and virtual trade shows. Their website is also available in German, Spanish and Chinese languages.

GoBigNetwork.co.uk: Get serious about fast growth in this startup community focused on finding funding, talent and expert advice.

Konnects.com: Build a network among other startup entrepreneurs and launch your own branded network when you're ready. Twitter friendly!

Marzar.com: Connect with other business owners while promoting products and services in the marketplace.

Xing.com: Search this global site for business partners, contacts and professional opportunities. Multiple European, Chinese and Asian languages supported

This list is for information only. I am in no way recommending them over any others. Explore and enjoy but make up your own mind about how useful or otherwise, they are to you.

NB: many of the above sites are US or UK based, but some have multiple language support and may have a separate more localised, website for your country. If not, well, you now have an opportunity to develop something for your city, region or catchment area.

If you are already connected and using the above sites, I would be very interested to hear your comments and feedback on them. As well as your links and suggestions for bigger and better networking sites.

Connecting with Intelligence at www.ted.com

Eurozone Says No to Fresh Stimulus

European Ministers reject U.S. calls for budget injection as "not to our liking."

Eurozone finance ministers yesterday rejected calls for increased economic stimulus measures, despite a worsening outlook for the EU economy. They also rejected any easing of the requirements for joining the Eurozone.

Speaking after a meeting of the Eurogroup, which brings together the finance ministers of the 16 Eurozone countries, Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister and finance minister of Luxembourg, said: "We don't feel we need to pile deficit on top of deficit and add further to our debt."

Juncker, who chairs the Eurogroup meetings, added: "We would not want to give the impression we are considering putting together other recovery packages."

His remarks followed comments from Larry Summers, director of the U.S. National Economic Council, in an interview with the Financial Times, that governments should pump more public money into their economies to fight the recession. "Recent American appeals" for a European budgetary effort are "not to our liking," Juncker said.

Juncker said ministers had rejected any relaxation of the criteria for joining the euro, including the length of time that countries have to spend in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism II. "There is no question of changing the criteria," Juncker said. "The credibility of monetary union is at stake," he added.

Both Juncker and Joaquín Almunia, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, said that assessments of Europe's economic outlook are now worse than they were earlier this year. Juncker said that the recession is "certainly deeper than what we saw at the beginning of the 1990s." Almunia said that "the recovery will take longer than we were expecting a few months ago," and that he now expects a "gradual recovery" to start in 2010.