ONI's New "Hoo-ahh!" Video, Deconstructing Analysis Techniques, The Geography Of Job Loss And The Future Of Shopping (Link List)

Lot's of interesting stuff crossing my desk this week:

• The Office of Naval Intelligence has a new promotional (i.e. "hoo-ahh) video out. It gives a brief overview of the ONI's new organizational structure and mission. Many people don't think about ONI as an intel career option but they actually do some pretty cool stuff. The video is certainly worth 5 minutes of your time (Note: It takes a few minutes to get started (I don't understand why these guys don't just upload these videos to YouTube...). Also, if you are interested, see it quickly as Matchbox Twenty's lawyers may slap a take-down notice on the ONI for unauthorized use of copyrighted material (not even a music credit, ONI? That was cold...).

• My favorite online design magazine, Johnny Holland, continues its excellent (if slow-motion) series of posts on deconstructing analysis techniques. The current entry focuses on transformation or "the act of taking a set of values from a dataset, processing them in some way (depending on the aims of the research) and arriving at a new set of values with the goal of revealing some aspect of the data from a new perspective." The entire series is very good and well worth the read.

• Visualizing information is a powerful way to communicate analysis. A good example of this is Tip Strategies infographic showing job loss and gain in the US from 2004-2009. It is both stunning and depressing but clearly shows the value of a good visual (Sorry, no embed. You will have to go to the site to see it).

• One of the trends I have been tracking now for a number of years is the growth and influence of virtual worlds and augmented reality. Cisco has recently produced an interesting video (via Kzero) that explores the future of shopping (you can see the video below). It sounds mundane but the underlying technical implications are pretty significant to intelligence and become doubly so when you realize that this world is just around the corner.

Intel Legend Art Hulnick On The Future Of OSINT (ISN)

The ISN, on one of its recent podcasts, scored a very good (if too short) interview with Professor Arthur Hulnick (see picture at right). Art currently teaches intelligence related courses at Boston University and has for a number of years. Before that he was at the CIA for several decades and has contributed significantly to the open body of literature on intelligence through his books (including Keeping Us Safe: Secret Intelligence and Homeland Security (2004) and Fixing the Spy Machine: Preparing American Intelligence for the 21st Century (1999)) and many articles.

Art is one of those guys who has been around, as we used to say in the army, "since Christ was a corporal" and is always worth listening to. Unfortunately, the ISN did not make an embeddable version of the podcast but you can get it on iTunes, download the MP3 or just go to the ISN site to listen to it.