April Is Thesis Month On SAM! (Original Research)

Mercyhurst's graduate students in applied intelligence did some extraordinary work last year and I have been negligent in not making their theses more widely known. With this apology/explanation in mind, I have decided to make April, "Thesis Month".

My intent is to summarize and publicize as much of the good research done by our grad students over the next 30 days (or so) as I can. I will focus first on the theses where I was a reader since I know them best but I hope to shine some light on some of the student work done under the auspices of other readers as well.

In order to pique your interest, here are a few of the topics covered by the grad students last year (It should make for some interesting reading):

• A Study Into The Size Of The World's Intelligence Industry
• Explicit Conceptual Models: Synthesizing Divergent and Convergent Thinking
• The Effectiveness of Multi-Criteria Intelligence Matrices In Intelligence Analysis
  
• The Effect Of Labels On Analysis
• And more!

CIA Abolished! New Agency Formed (Reuters)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In a surprise move, President Obama moved to abolish the CIA today and replace it with an agency more closely associated with the issues of the 21st Century.

According to a Reuters report, President Obama stated, after signing the executive order, "The CIA is an institution born of the post WWII environment and fundamentally an instrument of the Cold War. While it has often served this nation honorably and well, its time is past."

According to the AP, replacing the CIA is the newly formed Social Network Intelligence Agency (SNIA). Overwhelmed in recent years by technological advances such as wikis, blogs and cloud computing, the new agency will attempt to exploit these technologies in the interest of US national security.

Based on a Top Secret study completed in the last years of the Bush presidency, the new SNIA will focus largely, but not exclusively, on social networks. "We took a hard look at it," said one agency insider speaking on condition of anonymity, "and we decided we had the resources to either watch our Facebook pages and update our Twitter status or spy on foreign governments and terrorist groups, but not both." He continued, "In these days of budget austerity and economic crisis, something had to go."

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