Extremely Cool Interactive Breakdown Of The UK's Intelligence Community

Nick Hare (the Head of Futures and Analytic Methods at the UK Ministry of Defense) and his team of analysts put together this interesting presentation that breaks down the UK Intel community.  He notes in the LinkedIn post where he first announced it that "The sizes of the parts roughly correspond to numbers of people and / or budgets."

Good stuff!

Teaching Budgeting To Intelligence Analysts (Link List)

One of the things we like to expose our students to here at Mercyhurst is the unspeakable horror of the budgeting process.  If learning to be an intelligence analyst were not difficult enough, trying to figure out what that analysis is worth and what you can reasonably charge for it, is sheer, but necessary, agony for most students.

To make the process a little more interesting (or maybe just a little less onerous), there are a number of simulators that I have either used or would recommend to add depth to lessons on budgeting for intel analysts.  All of these simulations help teach the points that budgeting is often a series of painful trade-offs, that some expenses or policies that receive an awful lot of attention don't really matter when it comes to balancing a budget and, finally, understanding your priorities is the key to achieving your goals while staying within your budget.

http://doiop.com/BudgHero

Budget Hero.  This is one of my favorites and I have used this successfully in class.  This simulation asks the student to determine which policies they wish to enact and which they wish to ignore and then shows how their decisions will impact the US federal budget next year and over the next 20 years.  The data is mostly current and is based on Congressional Budget Office figures and projections. 

http://doiop.com/NYTBudgPuzz

New York Times Budget Puzzle.  The target in this recent interactive infographic is the same as above -- the US federal budget.  The presentation is very different, however.  The interface is simpler and it would be a better choice if time is an issue.

www.budgetsimulator.com

Budget Simulator.  This online product is very different from either of the previous two simulators.  Here, you can actually create your own budget, list your own priorities and involve your students in establishing what matters within the scope of a budget.  The possibilities here are quite intriguing.  For example, the East Sussex County  Council in the UK is using the simulator to help gather input on how they should cut the budget by a whopping 30%.  

I am sure there are other budget simulation programs and games available.  Leave your favorite in the comments!

Can You Balance The US Budget? Can You Make Decisions Like A Chinese Official? (American Public Media And Wikiversity)

With all the brouhaha concerning DIA's recent announcement concerning the creation of several video games to help train new analysts, I thought it would be worth mentioning a couple of other "serious games" I have run across (one yesterday and one quite some time ago).

The first, Budget Hero, is a flash based game (see screenshot below) that lets you pick options to help balance the US Federal Budget. Basically, after a short intro brief, you get to pick tax and spending policies in order to try to accomplish your goals without busting the budget. Once you have selected your series of policies, the game calculates how well you have done against a couple of benchmarks and then reports back to you on how well you have accomplished your goals and how well in tune you are with others who have played the game.

The game really gives you a good idea of the relative values of different policies. It also highlights the fact that some policies are important for their emotional impact but have little real impact on the total budget (By the way, if this game is at all accurate, the next administration will have its work cut out for it. The kind of answers that tend to work are not going to be very palatable). The best I have been able to do is to keep the government afloat until 2044. If anyone figures out a way to beat that, drop a comment.

The second game is one I have been meaning to blog about for some time. One of our former students (he just graduated), Pat Noble, an analyst with the FBI, put together an interesting simulation of Chinese political decisionmaking processes called Forbidden Kingdom (he did this last year in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class so, no, there is no relation to the movie of the same name). The screenshot below shows the game board (which you have to build) and the rules and all the other materials you need are available for free over at Wikiversity.

All simulations have to balance playability with realism. Pat's challenge was to make a game that captured some of the essence of modern Chinese political thinking in a short, interesting game. As someone who watched the research and development of the game, has played the game and heard countless stories about others playing the game, I think Pat accomplished just that.