[Steve Wrote] as an academic who frequently does research involving human subjects, generally including surveys -- that this is a very normal way to proceed. Finding enough subjects is always hard; it's the single biggest obstacle we encounter. Paying people is the usual approach, but for a group like this, the usual nominal amount we pay undergrads ($10-25) isn't enough. Other common approaches -- flyers all over campus, offers on Mechanical Turk, ads on Facebook or Google Adwords, etc. -- won't work if you're trying to get people with specialized knowledge or skills. What's left? Steve, thank you - you captured the background and nature of this process very well. Rest assured that this project is approved by the school and is part of our MBA coursework (we students get graded for this - this is not just a side project). To provide full disclosure, this academic project is part of UCLA Anderson's Strategic Management Research projects and is sponsored by Cisco. Mike, to address your concerns: the survey is part of a primary research to understand what the market needs are directly from people involved in the field. Like Steve points out, this means finding avenues where the domain experts are available - such as our school Alumni lists, Linkedin and mailing lists like Nanog. I have been a member of Nanog for a few months now and have found that very well informed discussions take place here. I would therefore consider it a privilege to have the input from the NANOG group members. While you are right that the give aways are small compared to the intangible value the research will gain from your insights, this is just a small way we students want to thank our survey participants within the limited budget we have been allocated for this. I do hope you understand and I really would appreciate your feedback as well as other Nanog members'. Please let me know if there are any other questions. Thank you, Best Regards, Arch ________________________________________ From: Steven Bellovin [smb@cs.columbia.edu] Sent: Friday, May 27, 2011 8:14 AM To: Michael Holstein Cc: Sunder Rajan, Archana Devi; nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: IT Survey Request: Win an iPad2 or Kindle! On May 27, 2011, at 10:24 22AM, Michael Holstein wrote:

...

I am a student at UCLA Anderson School of Managment and my MBA field study team is working on a research that involves conducting a survey of CIOs, IT Managers/Administrators, IT Engineers to understand challenges in managing IT infrastructure.

Could you please help by filling out this really short survey?

A more cynical view would be as an MBA student, you're researching cheaper ways to recruit contact information and current projects. A kindle is $139 .. that's pretty cheap for a list of people/projects considering what that lead information is worth to vendors of the "solutions" to the challenges you ask about.

I know nothing of this student, the school, or the study. I will say -- as an academic who frequently does research involving human subjects, generally including surveys -- that this is a very normal way to proceed. Finding enough subjects is always hard; it's the single biggest obstacle we encounter. Paying people is the usual approach, but for a group like this, the usual nominal amount we pay undergrads ($10-25) isn't enough. Other common approaches -- flyers all over campus, offers on Mechanical Turk, ads on Facebook or Google Adwords, etc. -- won't work if you're trying to get people with specialized knowledge or skills. What's left? I might add that by federal law, all government-funded research involving human subjects has to be approved by an "IRB" -- an Institutional Review Board -- and many universities (including my own) impose that requirement on all research, even if no federal funds are involved. While it's certainly not rare to do studies that involve (initial) deceit of the subjects (you want them reacting normally, rather than giving the answers they think you want), the IRB has to see the full protocol and experiment design. You may be right, of course; I can't say. I haven't contacted the student's professor nor have I asked to see the IRB protocol. Given that any legitimate study of this type would be conducted along the lines explained in the original post, I'd say that the burden of proof is on you. (Of course, as a security guy I know full well that that notion of "normal behavior" is the best way to hide an attack.) References: http://www.usenix.org/events/upsec08/tech/full_papers/garfinkel/garfinkel.pd... https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/wecsr2011-irb.pdf --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

On May 27, 2011, at 9:50 AM, Michael Holstein wrote:

Not picking on you personally .. but let's call a spade a spade, shall we? .. this is market research sponsored by a vendor with a hat in the game. Not exactly objective, and wasn't disclosed up-front.

OK, let me step in here. This was sponsored under http://www.cisco.com/research, which is a program in which we hand out smalls amounts of money in the form of grants to further the industry. It is done as a grant from and to a 501(3)c. As a result, under US law, we are explicitly precluded from directly benefiting from the research. We can read the paper when it's published, and we might or might not draw conclusions from it, but the paper will at that point be in the open. Yes, it's Cisco funding. It's UCLA research, and as far as we know it is exactly as described by Sunder - he's gathering data for a paper. Listen folks. If you want to be involved, Sunder will appreciate it. If you don't, don't be. But don't beat the kid up over unfounded assumptions.

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:38, JC Dill <jcdill.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

The cynic in me wonders how they will track how many people I forwarded this to. I plan to win the prize for "the person who refers the survey to the most number of people" by forwarding it to millions of people.  :-)

(I suspect that the prize will be won by the person who others (who take the survey) claim referred them to the survey, which is different from the criteria set for the prize.)

If you'll say that I'm the one who referred you, I'll enter you in a drawing for a free iPad.