Teaching High School Students To Be Intel Analysts (Goerie.com)

The Erie City Schools, in cooperation with the Institute Of Intelligence Studies here at Mercyhurst, recently announced that they would begin to offer an intelligence analyst track in one of their high school career academies.

The full news article is here but there is more to this story. This is another one of Bob Heibel's visionary initiatives and it appears to me to be a natural extension of the increasing number of colleges and universities that are offering intelligence courses or even full programs.

While this may sound a bit too visionary for some, let me put it into perspective. We are in the middle of a study that is trying to get at the size, in dollars and people, of the "real" intelligence community. This real community includes all the law enforcement analysts and intelligence professionals in business as well as those in the national security community.

Our initial estimates indicate that there are as many analysts in the US national security community alone as there are petroleum engineers in the entire US (17,000). Our rough estimate suggests that, when you add in all of the law enforcement, competitive intel and other analysts in the business community, the total number of intel analysts in the US doubles. This exceeds the number of chemical engineers (30,000) in the country.

According to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the chemical engineering profession, however, has nearly 150 colleges and universities feeding it qualified graduates and STEM programs have become a staple offering in virtually every high school in the country. In contrast, there are only a handful (a growing handful but still a handful...) of colleges and universities offering even introductory intel courses, much less a full four year program.

Nearly 20 years ago, Bob started the Mercyhurt program based on a single insight: If the government can depend on academia to educate its entry level doctors and lawyers, engineers and architects, computer specialists and military officers, why can't it depend on academia to provide entry level education to its intelligence analysts? In this light, extending this vision to the high school level makes it seem less radical -- in fact, it looks downright logical.

MCIIS Participation In Graffiti Task Force Highlighted (Goerie.com)

In case you missed it in this morning's Erie Times News (doesn't everyone read that?), the paper highlighted the Institute of Intelligence Studies' participation in the anti-graffiti task force here in Erie. The effort is pretty large but we are just doing the analysis part. Interesting work for Professor Dave Grabelski and some of his students!

A Lovely Spring In Erie Found Courtesy Of Compfight (Compfight Via ReadWriteWeb)

Spring in Erie has really been very nice this year. The flowers have been spectacular and we have had a number of warm, clear days and cool, but pleasant, nights. I was looking at the last of my dogwood blossoms out of my window and thinking about uploading some pictures just to show everyone that Erie wasn't some sort of bleak, frozen, icebox of a place and I realized I had not taken any really good pictures this year.

Along comes CompFight (via an article in ReadWriteWeb), a tool that lets you more easily search the vast Flickr image pool for free-to-use Creative Commons (and other types) of pictures. Here are a couple of pictures showing the two things almost everyone takes a picture of in Erie, some of the wildlife at Put-in Bay at Presque Isle and one of our magnificent sunsets (Click on the links for more info about the pictures).