Cheap, Re-usable Cell Phone Microscope? Yeah, It's A Thing...

For the last couple of years I have been exploring the idea of intelligence support to entrepreneurs.  The cool thing about this is that I get exposed to lots of new ideas.  The most recent - and one of the most interesting - products I have seen is the Button Microscope.

This is a microscope that you can attach to the lens of any cell phone with a camera.  It immediately turns it into a powerful microscope.  To be honest, others have done much the same thing but their products tend to be clunky, DIY projects that require far more patience than I have for that sort of thing.

The Button Microscope just works.  More importantly, it is going to be pretty inexpensive to produce and re-usable as well.  

I can't show you the prototypes I have been playing around with this morning (top secret, hush-hush stuff, you know) but I can show you some of the pics I took with them (with zero training I should add).

This first pic is one of a piece of graph paper I had lying around.  I edited both the left and the right image for size and brightness in the online photo editor, PicMonkey, but other than that both images are straight from my cell phone.

You can get a little bit better feel for the power of the microscope in this image.  On the left is the venerable Intelligence Analyst's Deck Of Cards (still available for sale...ahem...).  On the right is a close up of the box (focused on the "L" in "Analyst's").  You can see that the microscope has a distinct focal point and that the image blurs some at the margins.  That may be an existential feature of the device or it may just be that I am a pretty poor photographer.  I'll need to play around with it some more to see.

To me, this is the most impressive image set.  On the left you see one of the playing pieces from my game, Cthulhu Vs. Vikings.  On the right you see an image taken using the Button Microscope from the top down.  These pieces were all printed on the 3D printer and the macro view allows you to see every layer quite clearly and captures a surprising amount of detail even as the playing piece recedes from the focal point.

The broader intel/investigative implications of a device like this are pretty interesting to contemplate.  Clandestine collectors who are looking to get extreme closeups of, I don't know, circuit boards and such will love it.  Investigators look for trace evidence or fingerprints are going to love it too (If you have a clever idea for something like this, drop it in the comments!).

When can you get one of these amazing devices for your own cell phone?  Well, we hope to launch a Kickstarter campaign in October to fund the initial production run.  

Next we will add a mass spectrometer (currently available for $249 - no shit) and we will be well on our way to a tricorder.  Oh, wait.  That's due in January.

Spymaster - Test My New Card Game About Collection Management!

Last year I was struggling with how to make the classroom discussion of collection management (you know... the allocation of collection assets such as spies and satellites in order to gather required information in a timely manner) more interesting.

Couldn't do it.  

Even people who find the job enormously gratifying (and there are many), seem to have a hard time explaining why they like it so much.  

So...I decided to make a game out of it.

I call the game Spymaster and I have been using it in classes and playing it in my weekly Game Lab for most of the last year.  It seems to work really well both as a game and as a tool for making the challenges of collection management more real to students and young intel professionals.

It plays fast - in about 15 minutes - and is a cooperative game.  For those of you unfamiliar with this term, a cooperative game is one where all the players are on the same side trying to beat the game.  If you have ever played the board games Pandemic or Forbidden Island, you have played a cooperative game).  You can even play it solitaire but I have found it works best with 4-5 players and works really well in a classroom.

I have spent the last week or so cleaning up the game and making it look pretty and writing down the rules and a brief tutorial.  Now I am looking for people who would like to take this "beta" version out for a spin.

If you are interested in receiving a print-and-play version of the game on the condition that you give me some feedback, drop me a line at kwheaton@mercyhurst.edu. If you just want to follow along as I develop the game, check out the Spymaster Facebook Page.

Lessons Learned: DARPA Balloon Challenge

Nope, we didn't win the DARPA Balloon Challenge. These guys did and congratulations to them. It was clearly a well-thought-out and well-executed effort on their part.

While, for the participants, the contest was clearly about winning, it was also about learning. Here, in more or less random order, are some of the things I took away from the experience (Bear in mind, though, that I only watched about two hours of the student's work on Saturday and got to observe through emails, etc. some of the planning. It is my hope that some of the participants will add their own insights in the comments section to this post -- Hint, hint!):

• This contest was incredibly motivating. DARPA is to be applauded for their willingness to sponsor something like this. I am not sure if they got what they hoped to get (and I hope they make public their findings), but it really fired up many of our students.

• The Mercyhurst strategy was good... I was very impressed with how the students modeled the problem and self-organized to handle the various tasks. Their fundamental strategy was to identify lesser known networks which would likely be in a position to see the balloons and then motivate people in those networks to report. For example, the students, early on, identified local law enforcement intelligence analysts and crime analysts as an excellent potential network to tap into. Furthermore, they thought that this might not be a network that other participants would think of/have access to. Other examples of networks they tried to tap into included interstate truckers and Mercyhurst alumni. Their secondary strategy was to monitor a wide variety of online sources for leads on the day and then work to confirm or deny them.

• ... And clearly had some success... The Facebook group the students set up grew from 0 to 447 members in the 24 hours before the contest began. Likewise, some bloggers, such as Deborah Osborne, picked up on the effort and a number of Twitter users re-tweeted the call for help.

• ... But we got started too late. We did not hear about the contest until 3 DEC and the team did not form until 4 DEC. This gave the team about 24 hours to organize and get the word out. Clearly it was not enough. Looking at the non-traditional social networks was a very good idea but I think it simply was going to take more lead time to energize them.

• The Game Day execution was brilliant (and fun to watch). With the social networking strategy not panning out the way they had hoped, the students fell back to monitoring online sources and running down leads. The students had done a simple IPB before the contest and had made some judgments about where the balloons were likely to be deployed before the contest even began (for example, they had mapped where all the DARPA funded sites were across the US thinking that the DARPA guys would stick close to home for deployment purposes). That way, as reports started to come in, they were in a position to rank order the leads for viability. It was impressive to be able to watch one of the team members quickly examine a new target and rattle off four or five reasons why it was likely worth exploring or not in a matter of seconds.

• HUMINT was particularly important. One of the most impressive aspects of the operation was the ability of the students to utilize human sources to track a target. Once a potential target had passed the IPB test, the students used Google Earth to identify restaurants or stores close to the target site and then just called those stores. Listening to the conversations was always interesting: "Uh, this is going to sound weird, but can you look out your window and see if you see a red balloon?" It was also surprising how often people were willing to call back or to go out of their way to confirm or deny the info (one woman got in her car and drove 20 minutes only to call back and indicate that there was not a balloon at the reported location). The big exception here seemed to be in areas where the weather was bad.

• A custom collection management tool would have been useful. I don't think anyone expected the number of leads that poured in. Each had to be sorted out and tasked for follow up. A system emerged over the course of the several hours I watched the team at work but having something that was custom designed to deal with the problem would have been nice. Here again, I think the late start was a critical factor.

• We could have gotten more out of the IPB. The OPFOR at NTC used to do something interesting before an attack. They would figure out where the defenders were likely to put scouts and then just shell the stuffing out of all of those locations. They knew that they would likely be blowing up a lot of dirt and trees and only occasionally hitting the defender's scout units but they had plenty of artillery and the strategy was almost guaranteed to blind the defenders. Given the IPB work done in advance of the contest and the generous submission guidelines set by DARPA (each entrant could submit up to 25 entries), it would have been possible to make "good guesses" and enter each of those submissions as soon as the contest opened up.

Massive kudoes to all of the students who participated and massive thanks to all those who helped! Post your own thoughts on the experience in the comments...