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!

Resource Roundup (Link List)

I have run across a number of potentially useful sites recently. Here they are in no particular order:

FuzzFind Web Search. Fuzz Find is a new search engine aggregator that is still in beta. It only aggregates hits from Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search And Del.icio.us right now. While Dogpile.com is still my favorite aggregator, I really like the way FuzzFind displays the results of the search and think that the unique "tuning" feature could prove useful. It is worth playing with right now and keeping an eye on for the future.

OFFSTATS. The University of Auckland Library in New Zealand seems to be offering a one stop shopping place for official statistics with multiple links to every country and an interesting feature that allows the searcher to narrow the focus. It is probably not as easy to use as Nationmaster but I can see it getting you closer to the primary source material.

ABYZ News Links. This is a very comprehensive site containing links to all sorts of regional and local news sources. I particularly like the fact that it explicitly lists in what languages the news feed is available. To give you a sense of the depth of the links, this site lists 24 news sources for the Maldives!

Newsroom101.com. This site has a ton of easy to do exercises to improve your grammar, spelling and punctuation. Designed for journalists (with the AP style in mind) the site is almost just as useful to intelligence analysts who have to learn to write in the concise style of a journalist. I also like the way the exercises are put together. If you get the right answer, the site doesn't bore you with the details. If you get the wrong answer, however, the site lets you know what you did wrong and why immediately.

Deep Web Resources. I have mentioned Marcus Zillman's very useful site before. He scans the internet looking for good sources and tools and then posts them to his blog and then sorts and saves them to various sites he runs. The amount of stuff he finds can be staggering and it is tempting to just start at the top and satisfice. I strongly recommend you did a bit deeper into this particular list as there are some interesting sites buried here.

Firm's Arrival Underscores Area's Potential (More Shameless Self Promotion)

In case you missed it, there was a very positive follow-up editorial in the Erie Times News this morning to a news feature published last Sunday. While the editorial was more about the companies that are using intelligence to help their bottom line than about the Mercyhurst Intel Studies program, it was still nice to see that the editors of the paper realized the potential inherent in a strong intel studies program with respect to the local economy.