You read that title right, sports fans! 360 degree videos. As in you can now decide where you want to look, left, right, up or down in a video. Take a look at this recent video shot by a couple of guys visiting North Korea...
One of my students, Karl Gustafson, used an interesting combination of geospatial and political data to create a video (see below) that examines some historic cases of gerrymandering in Pennsylvania. He used this as background for looking into what appears to be some pretty clear cases of gerrymandering in the making.
While the production quality on the video is none too slick, Karl does a good job of using a series of overlays, a clear, direct script and the features of Google Earth to explain what gerrymandering is and how it has been used ion the past and how it is currently being used to literally re-shape Pennsylvania politics.
You can see Karl's evaluation of the methods and processes he used here.
Wired magazine's excellent blog, Danger Room takes another look at the use of PowerPoint in the US military. While the entire article is worth reading (Danger Room has covered the relationship between PPT and the military extensively), the video embedded below is priceless...
OK. Cupcakes? Check. Cannon that shoots cupcakes with 125 psi pressure? Check. Camera that shoots slow-mo at 700 FPS? Check. Willing idiots? Check. Ready... (via Gizmodo)
Imagine a brilliant piece of intelligence analysis -- well-researched, well-written and actionable. Now imagine that same report written in an 8 point Gothic font over multiple pages with half inch margins. No title, no paragraphs, no sub-sections, no indentations; just a single block of text. Would you read it? Would anyone else?
Point 1:Form matters. How we say something is often as important, if not more important, than what we say. __________________
Now, take a look at this video:
It is a fake. It was originally created with some off the shelf software by a CGI artist and then modified by someone to look like a NASA video. Here is the original:
The most distressing thing about the two videos, however, is not the fakery. It is the number of views. Again, you have to go to the YouTube sites to confirm this but the original has only 23,000 or so views while the fake has over 150,000 views.
Furthermore, cleverly modified videos are not the only way to twist, spin, modify and deceive. Check out FactCheck.org's Whoppers of 2009 for other ways that people have cleverly manipulated the form of the message to lie to us.
Which leads to Point 2: It is getting easier and easier to lie with form. ___________________
Richards Heuer pointed out in his classic, The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, that "once information rings a bell, the bell cannot be unrung." He was capturing a phenomena that is well known to psychologists: People continue to act as if a piece of information were true even after the piece of information has been proven to be false.
Over and over again, people have been put in experiments that make them falsely believe that they have a capacity to do something -- distinguish the effect of risk-taking and success as a firefighter, for example -- that they do not have. Even after they have been shown conclusive proof that the experiment has been manipulated to give the subjects the impression that they have an ability they do not, in fact, have, these subjects continue to act as if the original information were correct.
All that is bad enough but when you combine this psychological effect with the power of visualization, you get an absolutely scary combination. Check this video out:
Which leads to Point 3: Lies persist and visual lies likely persist more strongly than textual lies. ______________________
So what does this all have to do with communicating the results of intelligence analysis?
The US national security intelligence community has been accused of trying to sell its intelligence. The 2005 WMD Commission report accused the intelligence community of this with regards to the President's Daily Brief (PDB): "The daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence—in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested."
Which leads to Point 4: Good intelligence doesn't "sell" its products. __________________________
When I took my first job as an analyst (back in the 80's...), I didn't make my own slides. PowerPoint was deemed to be too complicated and tricky. It required a specialist, trained in its vagaries, to generate the slides necessary to brief the decisionmakers who pulled my strings.
That did not last long. Very quickly it went from rare to common to expected that analysts would be able to generate their own slides. What's more, today analysts are increasingly being asked to create visuals to supplement or replace the results of what was previously text-based analysis.
Yet, analysts get very little training in appropriate ways to visualize information and virtually no training in how not to lie or mislead with colors and graphics, how to spot photoshopped pictures or fake video, or how to ensure that the form is as objective as the content.
Which leads to My Question: How do we know when we are lying (or misleading) with the form of our intelligence products? ________________________
It seems to me that we spend a good bit of time analyzing text for evidence of bias or puffery or misleading statements. In virtually every intelligence organization of any size, there is a quality control process to ensure that the content -- the words going out the door -- conform to the standards of the agency.
Within the US national security intelligence community these standards are laid out in ICD 203 and I suspect that other intelligence agencies and organizations worldwide have something similar.
But who makes sure the same thing is true for the form?
All of this is a very long precis to an exercise I do in my Intelligence Communications class. In the vast majority of the exercises and assignments in that class, I ask students to focus on the elements of good intelligence communication: Bottom-line up front estimates, concision, clarity, decisionmaker focus, accuracy, etc.
In one exercise, though, I ask them to take a written report and re-imagine it as a primarily visual product. I task them to keep all the elements of a good intelligence product but to visualize those elements rather than put them in print.
Over the years, I have received some wonderfully innovative products. This year was no different. One of the products stood out, however. Nimalan Paul, using online software from Xtranormal.com, created an amusing and compelling animated video that contains virtually exactly the same content as the written product on the same topic.
Before you see the video, I will share the written version of the report with you. It follows the generic form guidance that we use here at Mercyhurst in our intelligence communications classes for written products:
Which report is better at communicating the results of the analysis? One of our grad students actually did a study on this a number of years ago. His findings showed that if you are above a "certain age", the text document is the best at communicating but that if you are below that certain age, then the animation is likely to be more effective.
Beyond the age distinction, what else makes one format better than the other? Is it all personal preference? Is one more "honest" than the other or is one just more traditional?
Finally, if one of these forms is more honest than the other, shouldn't we be teaching how to recognize that difference?
A friend (Thanks, Chris!) recently pointed me towards a video on YouTube that makes some really good suggestions for improving Intellipedia. You can see it below:
Beyond the quality of the idea (which makes sense to me, though I am in no position to evaluate it), I am fascinated by the choice of venue for the video -- YouTube. Bringing the debate into a public forum is bound to draw some attention from national security bloggers such as the guys over at Danger Room or intel community watchdogs like the guys over at the Federation of American Scientists. It may even interest wiki experts such as the ones at Wikinomics.
I don't know if this external debate will change anything but I don't see how it can hurt. Thanks to ckras, the video's author, for sharing his ideas!
I recently ran across a very nice little tool for visualizing the connections between a YouTube user, his or her subscribers and his or her "friends". The tool, called YT Visualizer, is in beta but has worked very well since I started using it yesterday.
A trial version of the software is available for download from Loco Citato, the website of XMT Partners, a UK software design firm. (Note: I scanned the software for viruses and spyware/malware with two separate programs and found nothing but, as with all software you download, you do so at your own risk).
To get it to work (after you have downloaded and installed the software), all you have to do is enter the user name of someone who has uploaded a video to YouTube. For demonstration purposes, I used "almasri002".
Almasri002 has uploaded 323 videos to YouTube, many of which are videos that appear to support Islamic extremism. According to his "channel" on YouTube, he also has 488 subscribers and 567 "friends". Understanding more about this social network could conceivably be valuable in understanding the who, what, when, where, why and how of Islamic extremism on the internet but trying to do so manually, given the size of the network, would seem impossible.
YT Visualizer solves the problem by capturing and graphing all of this data into an easy to understand chart. Talking about it makes less sense that showing how it works so I built a little screencast of the tool in action (using one of my other favorite web-based tools, Screencast-o-matic) below:
I only let YT Visualizer run for a minute or so in this demo and, as a result, only managed to import 30 some odd people into the graph (YouTube gets fussy when you send too many requests too rapidly to their servers).
The full version of the software allows as many as 1000 entities to be imported into the graph (the demo version I have allows only 200). As the graph gets larger though, the software cleverly starts to fade out the less important nodes making the graph readable regardless of the number of nodes.
As you can also see in the demo, YT Visualizer pulls in some of the other data available from YouTube so that, when you mouse over the nodes you can see who they belong to, etc.
For the real social networking geeks, the best feature probably is the ability to download the data behind the visualization into a CSV file so that you can then upload it into other, more powerful programs like ORA, UCINET or Analyst's Notebook. This feature is disabled in the trial version so I was unable to test it out.
As cool as this is, I am pretty sure that it would be more useful for business professionals than national security types. I can see it providing some sort of contextual information for the national security intel analyst (though that context is pretty limited when you think about the constraints on the data set). I can also see it providing useful leads of the "I gotta start somewhere, so I might as well start here" variety.
Business/competitive intel analysts, however, might really be able to use this tool to identify influence hubs (at least on YouTube) of supporters and detractors of their products.
The potential is also there, of course, for speculative leaps far beyond the scope of the data but the possibilities inherent in the technology far outweigh the risks (for a careful researcher) in my mind.
I have finally gotten over enough of my jet lag to get back to work and it seems like everywhere I turn there is something interesting cropping up on visual analysis.
Two projects, in particular, recently crossed my desk, one by a student in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class, Andrew Canfield, and the other from the US's premier resource on visual analysis, the National Visualization and Analytics Center at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories.
Visual analysis allows people to more easily identify patterns in the massive data flows that are pervasive today. There are a wide variety of tools available for this purpose but Andrew focused on one, Starlight, to conduct his preliminary analysis (which he conveniently documented in the YouTube video below) of Turkish foreign policy with respect to the Caucasus.
While subject matter experts on Turkey might disagree with Andrew's conclusions, the real intent of his efforts was to experiment with the method. I think his video gives a fine introduction to some of the benefits of visual analysis.
In addition to Andrew's work, the NVAC also recently published their quarterly magazine on visual analytics, called VAC Views. Under the heading of full disclosure, I suppose I have to mention that Mercyhurst gets a nice write-up (on page 19 for those of you keeping score at home...). Beyond the shameless self-promotion, however, there are a number of articles that are quite interesting, not the least of which is NVAC's taxonomy of visual analytics. Previous issues of VAC Views contain other, similar, gems.
The rest of the NVAC site is also worth checking out. It contains a wide variety of videos and other resources including the invaluable Illuminating The Path e-book. Much more than the research agenda it describes itself as, Illuminating The Path is an essential background reference for anyone interested in visual analysis.
Ever since Warren Buffet was outed (as a very good ukulele player...), it seems that YouTube has been flooded with a surprisingly good selection of ukulele videos. Ukulele Zo is one of my favorites and this is her entry for a world competition (Who woudda guessed?) of ukulele music.
Michael Wesch is an anthropology professor at Kansas State University and he has, over the last several years, with nothing but creativity and his student's efforts, put together some of the most thought provoking short videos on the web.
Many people are already familiar with Dr. Wesch's work but in case you aren't, you should start with the five minute video, "The Machine Is Us/ing Us" (seen below)...
There are at least two other videos that are worth watching. The first is Dr. Wesch's incredible collaborative effort with his students called "A Vision Of Students Today". This 4+ minute film is a real eye-opener for anyone who teaches college students or for anyone who is about to send a student off to college.
The final and most recent Wesch production is his hour long lecture at the Library of Congress titled "An Anthropological Introduction To YouTube" (I saw it first mentioned on the DataMining blog). Make sure you have a full hour to devote to it. Once you start it, you will not want to stop watching.
A group of five students in my winter Strategic Intelligence class were asked to take a look at "the nature, volume, and likely current use of YouTube, other hosted video sites and Second Life by jihadist networks and individuals, and what will the likely future use of these mediums be over the next 12-24 months?" They started the project in early December, 2007 and finished it in mid-February, 2008.
With Congress' and the intelligence community's growing interest in the possibilities for terrorist use of virtual worlds and other Web 2.0 platforms, I thought these student's findings would be more than a little interesting to most readers of this blog. Since they used a wiki as the basic tool for collecting, analyzing and producing their intelligence report, it is pretty easy for me to share the findings (and point you to the key parts of the report).
The main entry page for their project is here (We used our old friends at Wikispaces again. As usual, the students were glad for the low barriers to entry at the beginning but were chafing a bit at the end. To get the look and feel they wanted, for example, they had to borrow some html code from another team and make it their own).
From the main page it is pretty easy to navigate to all of the parts of the wiki. You will likely want to start with the Key Findings which specifically addresses all of the issues in the requirement in the first paragraph above. In general, however, they found:
"YouTube: The primary current and future nature of jihadist postings on YouTube and other hosted video sites over the next 12-24 months is likely propaganda and recruitment."
"Western Europe will likely be the main region for jihadist use of YouTube due to readily available broadband internet access, a large population of disaffected Muslims, and the location of their target audience, who are young, Western European Muslims."
"YouTube will likely remain the top video hosting website for jihadist videos over the next 12-24 months..."
"Law enforcement will unlikely be able to keep pace with the number of jihadist postings over the next 12-24 months."
"Second Life: Jihadists are likely currently very minimally using Second Life (SL)...
"...over the next 12-24 months jihadists will likely begin to explore the ability and utility of the virtual world's applications for money laundering, communication, and recruitment through propaganda...Use will likely be limited to merely exploring due to currently existing alternatives..."
"The most effective countermeasures will likely rely on a close, working relationship with Linden Labs due to the systems in place to monitor financial transactions, avatar activity, and communication."
Beyond the key findings, there is an overall estimate on YouTube and an overall estimate regarding Second Life. The subordinate estimates might also be interesting to readers looking for more detail. Beyond the estimates, there are a number of resources pages, including a video library and a methods and process section. A couple of the more interesting pages include the Keyword Search Results where one team member cataloged the results of her searches using specific keywords (in English and Arabic) in a number of different video hosting sites. Beyond the video library, there is also a video database as well. I also like the presentation of the data in the Second Life User Statistics section (the data itself, of course, comes largely from Linden Labs). As with all of our wiki -based products, we try to source all of our facts, make liberal use of internal hyperlinks and add relevant still graphics and videos to the various reports.
As with other strategic intelligence projects, the primary goal is for the student-analysts in the class to learn what it takes to prepare and present strategic level intelligence to real world decisionmakers. The students do these projects on their own (with a little stick and rudder guidance from me) trying to use, in the process, all of the skills and knowledge they have acquired up to this point in their education. They have no additional resources (monetary or otherwise) and use only open sources. All of the projects last ten weeks from start to finish and none of them are perfect. Expert users of both of these services, for example, will undoubtedly find places where the analysis could have been tighter (Most of the time the students are climbing at least two learning curves -- the "what is strategic intelligence and how do you do it" curve combined, in this case, with the "I really need to know a lot more about YouTube and Second Life if I am going to analyze it" curve). As with all college students, this is just one of the classes and commitments they have to keep up with.
With these caveats in mind, I still think their product, particularly at the "higher" levels of analysis, adds value to the discussion on this topic. The resource pages, spreadsheets and other custom products made for this project are worth the price of admission all by themselves. It is also another good example of how a wiki might be used to help the analytic process. Beyond the collection and process value of the product, I think they have managed to avoid all of the hyperbole surrounding this issue and have offered a sober, nuanced and fact-based estimate regarding the potential for use (and misuse) of these two web-based tools. I thought it was worth sharing.
Original material on Sources and Methods Blog by Kristan J. Wheaton is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
How does it work? Incredibly simply! Just click the arrows in the circle in the upper right hand corner of the video image. Take a look at the annotated screenshot to the right if I am not being clear enough.
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