Information security management is a necessity for all institutions and enterprises that regard company information as valuable assets. Developing, auditing and managing information security depends upon professional expertise in order to achieve the desired information security governance. This research seeks the key skills required for the position of information security management as well as the methods to develop these skills through professional training programs. The study adopts the Delphi method which requires building a list of items through a literature survey and involves experts with certain expertise to modify the list until a consensus on less than 20% of the items is reached. Through completing three rounds of the Delphi technique - data collection, relevance voting and ranking - sixteen skills are shortlisted as the key skills. In the final list, the majority belong to core information security skills, and the top two skills belong to project/process management skills and risk management skills, indicating the importance of these skills for the information security manager role. In addition, a series of related professional training programs and certifications are surveyed, the outcome of which highlights a number of most comprehensive and appropriate programs to develop these determined skills.

Medical images modalities are extensively adapted and used for disease diagnosis. These imaging modalities include computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound (US), and X-ray… etc. The problem associated with medical images is the storage space and bandwidth required for archiving and transmission of this kind of images. Thus image compression is a key factor to reduce the bit rate for transmission or storage while maintaining an acceptable reproduction quality In this paper, an efficient ROI compression approach using hybrid lossy lossless compression technique will be presented. This method is based on applying discreet wavelet transform (DWT) as a lossy method and grayscale matrix (GSM) coding algorithm as lossless method. The results show that the performance of the proposed method is much better than the other existing techniques especially with smaller regions of interest.

Produce is increasingly recognized as a reservoir of human pathogens and transferable antibiotic resistance genes. This study aimed to explore methods to characterize the transferable resistome of bacteria associated with produce. Mixed salad, arugula, and cilantro purchased from supermarkets in Germany were analyzed by means of cultivation- and DNA-based methods. Before and after a nonselective enrichment step, tetracycline (TET)-resistant Escherichia coli were isolated and plasmids conferring TET resistance were captured by exogenous plasmid isolation. TET-resistant E. coli isolates, transconjugants, and total community DNA (TC-DNA) from the microbial fraction detached from leaves or after enrichment were analyzed for the presence of resistance genes, class 1 integrons, and various plasmids by real-time PCR and PCR-Southern blot hybridization. Real-time PCR primers were developed for IncI and IncF plasmids. TET-resistant E. coli isolated from arugula and cilantro carried IncF, IncI1, IncN, IncHI1, IncU, and IncX1 plasmids. Three isolates from cilantro were positive for IncN plasmids and bla_CTX-M-1 From mixed salad and cilantro, IncF, IncI1, and IncP-1β plasmids were captured exogenously. Importantly, whereas direct detection of IncI and IncF plasmids in TC-DNA failed, these plasmids became detectable in DNA extracted from enrichment cultures. This confirms that cultivation-independent DNA-based methods are not always sufficiently sensitive to detect the transferable resistome in the rare microbiome. In summary, this study showed that an impressive diversity of self-transmissible multiple resistance plasmids was detected in bacteria associated with produce that is consumed raw, and exogenous capturing into E. coli suggests that they could transfer to gut bacteria as well.

The type VI secretion system (T6SS) is a multi-protein complex that injects bacterial effector proteins into target cells. It is composed of a cell membrane complex anchored to a contractile bacteriophage tail-like apparatus consisting of a sharpened tube that is ejected by the contraction of a sheath against a baseplate. We present structural and biochemical studies on TssA subunits from two different T6SSs that reveal radically different quaternary structures in comparison to the dodecameric E. coli TssA that arise from differences in their C-terminal sequences. Despite this, the different TssAs retain equivalent interactions with other components of the complex and position their highly conserved N-terminal ImpA_N domain at the same radius from the centre of the sheath as a result of their distinct domain architectures, which includes additional spacer domains and highly mobile interdomain linkers. Together, these variations allow these distinct TssAs to perform a similar function in the complex.

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Colour image watermarking has become one of the most important algorithms for copyright protection. The following paper will present an innovative scheme for watermarking blind colour images using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), fast Walsh Hadamard transform (FWHT) and the Hessenberg decomposition as its basis. First, two-level DWT followed by FWHT are used to decompose the host image’s red channel. Next, the FWHT coefficients are split into 4× 4 non-overlapping blocks. Then, each selected block is decomposed using Hessenberg decomposition, where the first row, first column element of the upper Hessenberg matrix H is quantified to embed the watermark information. Peak signalto-noise ratio, normalized cross-correlation and structural similarity index measure are used to evaluate the feasibility and the robustness. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed watermarking scheme is highly invisible with PSNR> 40 dB, for several watermarked colour images, with a capacity of 4096 bits and execution time of 0.7415 s. The proposed watermarking scheme is also highly resistant to both common image processing and geometrical attacks such as filtering, JPEG2000, noise adding, cropping, scaling, blurring and sharpening, and others