What You Should Be Reading! (Blog List)

A few weeks ago, I asked ... well ... everyone: "What are you reading?"  I had noticed, with some dismay, that my own list of intel-related blogs and sources was a bit outdated and contained a number of now dead links.

Fortunately, my colleagues on LinkedIn, friends and acquaintances from a number of intelligence related email lists and the loyal (long-suffering?) readers of SAM were able to fill the void.  Without further ado, below is the list of all the blogs and other sources we managed to accumulate:



I asked my research assistant, McKenzie Rowland, to organize all the notes and emails and comments into a single user-friendly spreadsheet. We sorted the sites by how often they were mentioned by different people. There were lots of ties, though, so don't take the order too literally. 

Since I sent the announcement to all three of the major intelligence communities (National security, business and law enforcement), McKenzie also included a brief description of what we thought was the primary audience of the blog. We were lucky enough to get a number of non-US sources as well. 

Finally, I do not consider this list exhaustive. If YOUR favorite blog/source on intel didn't make the list, please leave a comment or drop me a note at kwheaton at mercyhurst dot edu!

Help! Where Can I Find A Job?? (RFI)

I am in the process of updating and compiling my list of job resources for entry-level intelligence analysts and I could use your help!  

If you  know of any good websites or resources, please either send them to me (kwheaton at mercyhurst dot edu) or post them in the comments below.  

What kind of links am I looking for?

• Job links for entry-level intelligence analysts.  If you know of a company or organization that has intelligence analyst jobs on the books that can be filled by an entry-level analyst, send a link.
• Job links for intelligence analyst-like positions.  Lots of positions within the private sector (such as anti-money laundering positions with most banks) are good fits for entry-level intelligence analysts but they are rarely easy to find through straightforward job searches.  
• Job links for international positions (for nationals and expatriates).  There doesn't appear to be a good list of job resources for individuals with intelligence analyst skills who want to work outside their native country.  Likewise, expatriates often having a hard time finding intelligence-like jobs in foreign countries.
• Job links for Non-Governmental Organizations.  NGO's rarely if ever title analyst positions as "intelligence" positions, yet the intelligence analyst skill set is often the best fit.

Beyond job boards or specialist search sites, what else can you provide?  Job preparation resources.  Getting a job in any intelligence position in challenging.  Any hints or tips that are particularly relevant to the intel job search would be appreciated.  What kind of stuff am I talking about?

• Interview skills
• Resumes
• Social Media Usage/Presence (LinkedIn in particular)
• Job Fairs
• Hints and tips for breaking in

Once I get everything compiled, I will post the list here!

How To Write An Awesome Resume, How to Organize Your Internship Search, How To Make Money While You Are Waiting And Other Advice For The Job Hunter (Link List)

It has been some time since I talked about the unspeakable horrors of the entry level intelligence analyst job search and it will probably be some time before I re-visit that particular issue.  Here are some useful sites to tide you over while you wait:

Top 10 Ways To Rock Your Resume.   Lifehacker has put together a good list of their advice to resume writers.  It is an excellent place to start.

Create A Master Resume For Easy, Targeted Applications.  If you are a college student you should be reading Hack College.  If you know one, forward them this link.  It is one of the best blogs for useful advice about how to get the most out of the college experience and this post is a good example.

MeganMcCollum.com.  Resumes, they are a changin'!  Meg McCollum, one of our recent grads, is on the job market again and took a very different approach this time to the traditional resume for analysts.  It is worth a look if only for some ideas (of course, if you are looking to hire an extraordinary young analyst, you should take a look in order to offer Meg a job...).

RezScore.  This site allows you to upload your resume and get feedback on how good or bad it is.  It actually gives your resume a letter grade!   Even if you are hesitant to upload your resume to the site, you still want to take a look at the "A", "B" and "C" resumes available on RezScore's home page.

The Idealist Guide To Non-Profit Careers For First Time Job Seekers.  While not written with intelligence analysts in mind, this online guide provides a wealth of useful guidance for all entry-level job seekers.  In addition, I find that many people who are interested in intelligence jobs are also interested in serving their country or their communities in other ways.  This guide is even more useful for those students.

Organize Your Internship Applications With A Spreadsheet.  Internships not only help secure a job, they are also one of the best ways to help you figure out if intelligence analysis is right for you.  These internships are typically pretty difficult to find and to get, so multiple applications are a necessity.  This useful tip from Hack College (again) is worth exploring if you find yourself submitting multiple internship applications.

8 Websites To Get Tips On Job Interview Questions And Answers.  After the applications and the resume comes the interview.  These sites offer some helpful tips for managing that part of the job hiring ordeal with equanimity.

5 Salary Comparison Tools For Your Next Job Search.  Another handy list from MakeUseOf.com

A Mind Map Of 100+ Tips For Using LinkedIn More Effectively.  Most students are familiar (too familiar?) with Facebook.  In my experience, though, the social networking site that might actually help you get a job is LinkedIn.  Becoming actively involved in LinkedIn's various groups and taking advantage of its tools for building a professional network are things most students simply do not know how to do.  The mind map, available for download from this site, does a good job of organizing and outlining many of the tasks you can accomplish with LinkedIn.

The Monster List Of Freelance Job Sites.  One of the big problems with a career as an intelligence analyst is waiting for the clearance process to be completed.  While the wait time for this has gone down over the last several years, it is still an unfortunate fact of life.  Rather than working at Wendy's, recent grads often have skills they can use in the freelance world.  This list of sites is essential for these kinds of short term job searches.

Make Money In Your Spare Time Doing Simple Online Tasks.  Another way to help fill some empty months with a little bit of cash flow.

Any other sites I have missed?  Leave them in the comments!

Make Better Presentations, Use Language More Effectively, Pronounce Foreign Words Perfectly And Generally Become A Better Analyst (Link List)

I am determined to play catch up for months of ignoring some really good websites and some really useful tools that have come across my desk:

50 Tips For Better Presentations.  I have always liked Clive On Learning and this list of 50 tips is a pretty good example why.  Some are a little obvious ("Keep off the booze") and some I disagree with ("Spare the thanks"  -- though I do agree that a lengthy introductory "thank you" is unnecessary) and some are clearly from hard-earned experience ("Use humor with caution").  Whatever your level of experience, however, you will find something of use or, at least, interest here.

50 Rhetorical Devices For Rational Writing.  After years in the business of both intelligence and teaching intelligence analysis to students, I have come to think that the art of rhetoric needs more emphasis.  Understanding these tools can really improve your own writing but can also let you better understand the tricks that others are pulling on you.  My favorite?  Litotes.

8 Online Pronunciation Guides That Help You Speak Words Correctly.  Nothing destroys your reputation as an analyst faster than mispronouncing foreign words.  It sends an immediate signal that you are not an expert in the area you are discussing.  While some of these sites are designed to help you pronounce English words better, several of them also offer good foreign language pronunciation guides.

Copy, Paste, Map -- IssueMap.org.  This new tool from, of all places, the Federal Communications Commission and FortiusOne, allows users to relatively painlessly move data from a spreadsheet to a map.  It looks both pretty cool and pretty easy to work with.

The 6 Best Free Online Meeting Tools To Collaborate With Your Team.  While probably not very useful for analysts trapped inside various "bubbles" around the world, these tools might be very helpful for business professionals (particularly entrepreneurs) or student teams working on various projects.

A final tip of the hat to MakeUseOf.com which provided two of today's links -- it is a site worth subscribing to!

Where Can I Find Good SITREP Info On Various Countries? (Link List)

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php

An RFI (Request for Information) rolled across my desk this morning asking where to find good SITREP (Situation Report -- this post is likely to be a little acronym heavy...) information for various countries in the world.

The idea, as I understood it, was to be able to prepare and deliver unclassified briefings on the current situation in a country of interest. Some people call these kinds of reports INFOSUMs (Information Summaries) or INTSUM's (Intelligence Summaries) or something else entirely but, whatever you call them (and there are some important technical differences between them all), they fundamentally focus on what happened in an area of interest (geographical or functional) over a standard period of time.

There are a couple of places that I think are particularly good for this kind of information. The first is Google News Alerts. If you are really hardcore, you should use the service in the native language of the country (if available) as well as in English.

Second, I would check out the ReliefWeb pages for the country of interest. While ReliefWeb does not cover every country, if it is a country of interest for the US intel community, it is probably on ReliefWeb as well. The site contains a wealth of hard to find SITREPs from the UN and various humanitarian agencies as well as a very complete map collection.

I also like the International Crisis Group's Crisis Watch. It has the look and feel of an old school intel watch report but the ICG has on the ground reporters and analysts in many countries. In addition to the Crisis Watch report, the ICG also prepares short analytic reports and, on occasion, detailed strategic intel reports on various hotspots around the world.

Finally, while more useful for natural disasters than standard SITREP type info, you might want to look at this near real time map (you can see a screenshot of a portion of it at the top of this post) of all of the stuff going on in the world. It is pretty nifty to look at even if some countries are not as well served as others.

I am sure that everyone has their favorite sites (please leave 'em in the comments!) but thought these sites are particularly useful since they aggregate content.

Get Detailed Feedback On Your Writing, Explore Your Searches More Fully And View The Best Jobs In America (Link List)

Some really interesting stuff crossing my desk recently...

Paper Rater. This one is a must-have, must-distribute for anyone who spends any time writing. You just cut and paste whatever it is you are working on into the online editor and it spits out an immediate and detailed report of the issues with it. It even reports on possible plagiarism! My experience with the tool is that it tends to over-report problems but it doesn't appear to miss much that is truly an issue. Paper Rater strikes me as a painless, tireless, first draft editor. Via Lifehacker.

What Do You Suggest? Anyone who has ever played around with Google knows that it has a built in "suggest" feature. So, if you typed in "intelligence", for example, the first suggestion Google would make would be "Intelligence test". What if you could see all the choices, sorted by relevance and number of hits in a kind of branching tree? Very cool and potentially useful. Take a look at the output below:


Via Lifehacker.

Best Jobs In America Infographic. I have previously reported on CNN's evaluation that I personally have the best job in America (combination of Intel Analyst (#9) and College Professor (#3)). Now I have this cool infographic to prove it (Click on the picture to get the full chart). Via Boing Boing and Thanks, John!.

The Turkey Industrial Complex, The Best Pie (Chart) Ever And The Happy Turkey Day Song (Thanksgiving Link List)

A Happy Thanksgiving to all SAM readers! May your turkey fryers not explode and may your Cool Whip not be lite! Here are a few non-shopping, non-football related sites to help you enjoy the day:

The Turkey Industrial Complex. Ever wonder how farmers manage to get 46 million turkeys to table on Thanksgiving? One piece of advice: Read it after you eat...

The Best Pie (Chart) Ever. Please let this be a joke, please let this be a joke... By the way, if your eighth grader doesn't "get it" then you should probably have a word with his or her math teacher.

The Happy Turkey Day Song. MST3K is still a favorite in my household (If you are not familiar with the series, ask for Manos: Hands of Fate for Christmas). This may not be the perfect Thanksgiving song, but it is nostalgic.

Email Hoaxes Aimed At Intel Professionals (!), New Report On The Pakistani Military And Rising Ethnic Violence In The UK (Link List)

A number of interesting reports have come out over the last several days. Here are three that caught my eye:

• The FBI is warning that three fraudulent email hoaxes have been circulating recently. With subject lines that read, “Intelligence Bulletin No. 267,” “New DHS Report” and “RE: Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate," these seem to be specifically targeting law enforcement, military and intelligence professionals. The FBI warns that the attachments (all .exe files) "may contain files that are harmful to the recipient’s system and may try to steal user credentials."

• The Institute of South Asian Studies (out of the National University of Singapore and via the ISN) has recently issued a report on the Pakistani military under General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Given all the recent bad news about Afghanistan, this report is remarkably optimistic, claiming that Kayani "does not harbor ambitions of interfering in politics" and that "crushing the Taliban now seems to be an objective that General Kayani is strongly committed to."

• ISN has also just published an Intel Brief on the rising ethnic tension in the UK between Islamic and Skinhead groups. The article, written by Mercyhurst alumna, Ania Dunin, claims that the right-wing English Defense League has been "deliberately trying to provoke a response from ethnic minorities in order to create wider violence and mayhem" and that the extremist groups "will likely pose a significant security threat in the UK in the near future, not due to their manpower, but to their tactics."
  

Top 100 Tools For Learning, Top 15 Visualization Tools And A Heckuva Video Search Engine Disguised As A File Converter (Link List)

Here is a quick link list of some interesting tools for use in the classroom and on projects:

Top 100 Tools For Learning -- I am a big fan of Jane Hart and her blog, Jane's E-learning Pick of The Day. At the link above, she has aggregated a list of 100 very interesting online tools to support a variety of learning activities. Definitely worth the look.

15 Effective Tools For Visual Knowledge Management -- Eric Blue's Blog has done a very nice job of compiling a number of tools (some free, some not; some online, some for download) to help you organize and visualize knowledge. I picked this up by way of the always insightful Outil Froids (Cold Tools) -- another blog worth adding to your RSS feed.

Excellent Video Search Engine Disguised As A File Converter -- Free FLV Converter describes itself as a way to easily convert online video (FLV) files to AVI, MPEG4, etc. files. This little free download does way more than that, though. You can actualy search through YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Videos, Metacafe, Spike, iFilm, Veoh, Yahoo, Crackle, Broadcaster, ZippyVideos, MySpace, Revver, LiveLeak, EyeSpot, CollegeHumor, SevenLoad, Break, CrunchyRoll, Blip.tv, lulu.tv, archive.org, TinyPic, EbaumsWorld, Uncut AOL, Guba, Youku, Tudou, Reuters, BBC News and vh1 for online videos of interest. Enormously useful.

Following The Month-long Elections In India (Link List)

Beginning tomorrow, India is going to take a month(!) to decide the new composition of its Parliament, the Lok Sabha. 700 million voters will decide on about 500 seats in a series of elections that begin on April 16 and end on May 16, 2009.

We spend an awful lot of time in this country talking/worrying about China but for my money, the real player over the next 20 years is going to be India. Whether you agree with that assessment or not, India is definitely going to be important and watching the Indian political process unfold and estimating the future trajectory of India's policies based on the results makes a good bit of sense.

It is going to be a complex operation, though, and, in the past, these votes were marred with all sorts of bribery and other shenanigans. Fortunately, there are a number of online tools that will allow Indians to more actively take part in (and the rest of the world to watch) these elections.

I would start with the Wikipedia article on the elections. It provides a nice overview with a massive number of links and other data. Particularly interesting is the discussion tab on the Wikipedia page. It gives some insight into a number of the behind-the-scenes issues and arguments with respect to this election. Another good general overview comes from the BBC in their special report on the 2009 elections.

The University of Maryland's (Baltimore County) Ebiquity Research Group has also put together a very nice website that will track news and other data emerging from the elections as they take place. Likewise, the blog Google Maps Mania points to a joint Hindustan Times/Google effort to track the elections as well.

Google Maps Mania also points to my personal favorite: Vote Report India. Using the innovative Ushahidi platform, Vote Report India will allow people all over India to email, text, tweet or otherwise report violations of India's electoral code. The site is already active and already getting hits (See image below for recent reports of violence).

This tool has the potential to provide an unparalled transparency to the electoral process. While it will inevitably have many of the flaws of any "tip" line, it also holds out the promise of some really interesting HUMINT on the elections.

How To Detect Deception, Using Second Life In The Classroom And Sister Wikis (Link List)

Image by a4gpa via Flickr

Just back from the high desert and busy catching up. Here are a few links that caught my eye:

• How To Detect Deception. The Confidential Resource points to this series of posts (Part 1, Part 2) on detecting deception in interviews over at The Keyboard Detective. The posts contain some good material and a fair number of links to other interesting stuff.
• Second Life In Education. I have often blogged about using Wikispaces for analytic projects but Wikispaces is a platform to over a half a million wikis of various types. One of the more interesting ones I recently ran across (via New World Notes) is a wiki on using Second Life In Education. Lots of cool projects you can do/places you can go here with students.
• 8 Sister Wikis From Wikipedia. The always helpful MakeUseOf.com has put together a list of "sister" projects to Wikipedia that everyone should know about. My favorites are the Wikimedia Commons, because it links to a number of free or public domain graphics, and Wikiversity, because it often has useful tutorials on a variety of topics.
  

Online Declassified Document Archives (Link List)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's recent decision to create an online repository of all of the Freedom of Information Act documents it has collected over the years got me to thinking about other such efforts in both the government and private sectors.

Archives such as the EFF's are full of primary source documents and are excellent teaching and research resources. Here is the list of such archives I could think of off the top of my head:

EFF's FOIA Document Archive. Primarily designed to "shed light on controversial government surveillance programs, lobbying practices, and intellectual property initiatives."

George Washington University's National Security Archive. One of the oldest and best sources for formerly classified documents and expert analysis of their impact/import to historical events.

Federation Of American Scientists' Secrecy Project. While not always FOIA generated, the FAS keeps tabs on the policies and practices surrounding classified information and often posts primary source documents relevant to intelligence community operations.

Wikileaks. Actually, this is NOT FOIA generated as the material here often has not yet been de-classified or authorized for distribution. Still, very much worth knowing about.

CIA Reading Room. Most people do not know that the various intelligence agencies in the US often maintain a FOIA reading room on their websites (I list the CIA here as a particularly good, but by no means the only, example).

The National Archives' Checklist. From an intelligence and classified documents standpoint, this is a hit or miss kind of thing. I always find something interesting but I always wish it were a bit easier or that I could find a bit more.

Do you have any others? List 'em in the comments!

Make A Map, Build An Early Warning System, Buy A Laptop, Analyze Insurgencies... (Link List)

I am going to try to do a little bit of spring cleaning today. Most of the time I post interesting sites that I don't have time to write about in the "SAM's Shared Items" box in the right hand column of this blog. Some sites, though, I tag for writing about later as full posts ... and then promptly forget about them.

Today, I am cleaning out the vault of "interesting or useful sites I have not written about but should have". Without further ado (and in no particular order):

Research and Documentation Online (via Lisa Gold: Research Maven). What an excellent collection of authoritative research sites this is! Diana Hacker has done an outstanding job collecting all sorts of good sites into a single database (along with some helpful tips on researching and validating sources in general).

Customizable Map Of the World. This site allows you to easily create maps of the world with custom colors. Boyond the customizable map, the Aneki.com main site contains a number of useful indices and ranking systems for global issues.

The World Value Survey. Want the low-down on what a particular culture values most? The World Values Survey is the right place to start. Featuring such useful items as the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World (See image to the left), the WVS is a good place to know about if you are interested in how values are changing worldwide.

Ushahidi. Ushahidi apparently means "testimony" in Swahili and it is an effort to build a platform that crowdsources crisis information. According to the site, it "allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response." Worth exploring.

Net-Map. Billed as a tool to construct an influence map of a social network, this is another non-profit attempt to get modern analytic methods off the computer and into the hands of people with limited technical skills or equipment. I could easily see this as a classroom exercise that would introduce the basics of social networks and influence mapping to students as well.

CIA's Guide To The Analysis Of Insurgency. The Federation of American Scientists have acquired and are making available a 1980's CIA Manual on how to analyze an insurgency.

23 Sources of User and Expert User Reviews and Laptop Buying Guide 2009. The always helpful MakeUseOf.com has done it again with two great sites. The first is a list of places to go to see what someone else thinks about the gadget you are thinking about buying and the second is an informative laptop buying guide in case you are in the market.

How To Write A Resume That Will Land An Interview. Very solid article with numerous good links to additional resources.

Top Eleven "Top Ten" List (Extended Version)

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This time of year it seems that everyone is doing a Top Ten (or "Top Eight" or "Top Five" or "Top Something") list. Rather than report every single one of them separately, I decided to list them all and let you sort out the ones of interest...

• Top 10 Forecasts for 2009 and Beyond
• Top 10 Alternative Search Engines + 8 Other Top Ten Web Related Lists
• Top 10 Worst Predictions of 2008 (Thanks, Rex!)
• Top Online Security Threats for 2009
• Top 10 Science Breakthroughs
• Top 10 Treehouses
• Top 10 Technology Breakthroughs
• Top Weird Gadget Lists of 2008
• Top Influencers on Social Media in 2009
• 10+ Web Tools to Save Your Butt in School
• 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year

And here is the extended version...

• 10 USB Gadgets to Keep You Warm
• 5 Methods to Bypass Blocked Sites
• 8 Machines That Can Assemble Themselves
• 10 Ways to Enhance Brain Fitness Online
• Most Trusted Companies for Privacy
• Top 3 Serious Games
• Top 5 Indie Games (last week!)
• Top 10 Ways to Repurpose Your Old iPod
• Megatrends of Game Design
• Identity Events of the Year
• 3 Websites to Learn Cool Tricks and Impress Friends
• Top 21 USB Flash Drives
• 55 Great Websites to Download Free Sound Effects
• The Essential Guide to the Internet and Software for First-time Computer Users

Finally, if you were wondering why this list went to 11 (and beyond) let's just say that it is an homage to the mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap (See relevant clip below), which some of us may remember as one of the best Christmas gifts ever.

Spinal tap amp

T-INT: Thanksgiving Week Intelligence You Can Use (Link List)

Thanksgiving is a great holiday. Not only is it a time for us all to give thanks for our blessings, it is also a time to give something back to the communities in which we live. So, be thankful for your health, your family, your friends and your freedom and get out there and give to the local food drive, work for a good cause or just write a check to your favorite charity.

But...

We'd all be lying if we didn't admit that we are going to be doing a little bit of eating and maybe even some shopping over the next several days. For some of us (those who love Black Friday sales) this is heaven and, for some of us (on a !@#$ diet), this is ... not heaven.

Here are some links to get you through the season:

Topics To Avoid At Thanksgiving Dinner. What a perfect way to start the holler-days: A huge fight with your crazy Aunt Edna over elections/religion/economy/what-have-you. Don't do it. Really. Don't. Do. It.

Last Minute Thanksgiving Tips And Tricks. Never cooked a turkey in your life? Your significant other's parents coming over for dinner? Been there, my friend, and so have these people.

Coupon Codes For Discount Eating Out. So the turkey is dry and Aunt Edna put the rum in the dressing instead of the sweet potato pie. Don't let this spoil your dinner; go out! No need to pay full price, though, and this site offers links to coupons, etc. for discount meals at a variety of popular chain restaurants.

Full now? Try these shopping sites:

Top 5 Black Friday Tips. For shopaholics only.

The Pogue-o-matic. Not sure what gadget to get someone on your gift list? Not sure what gadget to ask for? The personal technology columnist for the NYT, David Pogue, has a fun, interactive site to help you decide.

Cool Spy Gadgets. Mom, Dad, don't know what to get your intel studies student? Here is your shopping list. I guarantee that they would enjoy almost anything on this list.

OLPC Give One, Get One. Here's a way to give something AND do some shopping. The One Laptop Per Child Foundation is offering its buy one, give one promotion again this year. You pay for two OLPCs and you get to keep one of them while the other is given to a child who needs one. It is a very cool piece of technology that works exactly as advertised (I got one and gave one last year).

I hope this helps at least some of you and, to the 50,000(!) of you who took some time out of your day to read, comment or link to these posts over the last year, thank you for making this a great first year blogging at SAM! Happy Thanksgiving!

"It's The Filter, Stupid!" And Other Links Of Interest (Link List)

Too many fascinating things crossing my desk today...

Lifehacker is carrying a video (see below) of Clay Shirky's brilliant speech at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in New York on information overload and filtering. I know, I know; it sounds like it is about as much fun as exploratory surgery, but once you start to watch I think you will be (as I was) riveted. Shirky puts an entirely different spin on information overload and then makes a compelling case for his point of view. It made me look at the issue from an entirely different perspective.



The "filtering problem" that Shirky discusses is about to get bigger if Technorati's 2008 The State Of The Blog report is any indication (Check out the graphic below -- click on it to go to the report). They will be releasing it in bits and pieces. So far they have put out the Intro and their section on "Who Are The Bloggers?" The answers will surprise you, I suspect, as the blogosphere continues to not only grow in terms of numbers but also to broaden in terms of appeal.



One of the possible solutions to filtering is known as the "semantic web", where the computer and user can understand each other in more natural terms. Thomson Reuters has just released its semantic application, Calais, into the wild to see what people do with it (Thanks, Krishna!). See the promo video below:




The Institute For The Future (wouldn't you love to work there?) is putting together its own what-could-be-called filtering solution in the form of a predictive game called "Superstruct". The game doesn't go online until 6 OCT 2008 but it looks a good bit like Impact Game's "Play The News" which I think is a fantastic (and sometimes humbling) learning tool. The video below gives you some idea of the type of scenario they will be examining but you really need to go to the site to get the details

Plato, A Platypus And Identity In The 21st Century (Link List)

Recently, I have been thinking about identity and what it means in the 21st Century. It all started with a good little book called Plato And A Platypus Walk Into A Bar... It is a primer on a number of philosophical concepts using jokes as examples. The book is a lot of fun and very much worth the read. You aren't particularly interested in what I think of it, though. You are just hoping that I will repeat some of the jokes. OK...

A King and his dukes and earls went out for an elk hunt. All of a sudden a peasant broke from cover shouting, "I am not an elk!!" The king took careful aim and shot the man.

"Sire", said a duke, "why did you shoot the man? He said he was not an elk".

"Good Lord", said the king, "I thought he said he was an elk!"

Or this one...

Nurse: "Doctor, doctor! There's an invisible man in the waiting room!"
Doctor: "Tell him I can't see him."

The discussion of existentialism got me thinking about identity. When I think about identity, of course, I always start with Dick Clarence Hardt's speech at the OSCON 2005 Convention. Hardt has fallen on some tough times recently but I still think he does a good job in this speech making the problem of identity in the internet age more accessible to the rest of us.

Then, when I saw this post on the laws of identity on B2fxxx today, I knew I needed to put together a quick link list for those, like me, who find this sort of thing fascinating.

PS. To find out about Plato and the platypus you will have to read the book.

Related Posts:
Intel Official: Expect Less Privacy

Designing Safe Living, Architectures Of Control And Wine Economics (Link List)

Virtually everyone knows that the way a large grocery store is laid out is a careful exercise in design. All the fresh veggies as you come in the entrance and all those free sample carts at the end of the aisle are designed to get you to buy more -- and more expensive -- items.

Using design principles to manipulate people in predictable ways is not particularly new but I happened to run across a trio of very interesting posts on this idea that seemed worth sharing.

The first is from the American Association of Wine Economists (where do I sign up?) titled, They Always Buy The Ten Cent Wine (via Marginal Revolution). Apparently the way wines are organized on a shelf is designed to make sure you see the expensive, special occasion wines.

The second is not so much a post but a blog called Architectures Of Control. Besides having a very cool blog name (is it a blog or a thrash metal band?), the author, Dan Lockton, is a PHD researcher in Industrial Design at Brunel University (which also has one of the few intel studies programs in Europe) in the UK. The evolution in Dan's thinking about how to use architecture to control people, for good and bad purposes, is fascinating to watch. He is a keen observer of this niche and is always worth reading.

Finally (and I read this on AOC), there is actually a conference on using design to improve security: New Science s Of Protection--Designing Safe Living in Lancaster, UK from 10-12 July, 2008.

Related Posts:
The Serious Play Series

Factors In Food Security Price Increases, FBI Audio History And Background Briefs On Alternative Fuels (Link List via LII)

The Librarian's Internet Index highlights three sites of particular potential use to intel professionals and students this week:

Factors In Food Security Price Increases. The USDA has put together a list of their latest reports on food prices and the factors that are influencing them worldwide. Nice one-stop shopping page.

FBI Audio History. This site contains audio snippets from interviews with FBI Historian Dr. John Fox.

Alternative Fuels Background Info. PBS has an interesting site with some background data on alternative fuels. Of particular interest to teachers might be the lesson plan on car choices and alternative fuels.

Three Great Databases, Three Cool Resources (Link List)

I have run across a number of interesting databases and resources over the last several weeks. Here is a quick roundup:

World Economic Outlook Database. You have to love the IMF! They have put together a great database of economic forecasts that goes out to 2013 on a wide variety of indicators in just about every country in the world. Authoritative, comprehensive, detailed and free! Not much more you could ask for...

History Research Online. This site is simply an extensive, organized list of history sites on the web and therein lies its utility. It is not entirely clear who runs this site but I found it to be useful in pointing to a number of sites I had not heard about previously.

The Global Terrorism Database. All of the terrorism analysts will no doubt be familiar with this excellent National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (at the University Of Maryland) product but, for the rest of us, it is a great one stop shop for historical information about terrorist attacks. I found the database to be particularly useful in helping me search for patterns and trends I wanted to identify for a recent classroom exercise in crisis briefing and reporting.

Printable Paper. How many times have you needed a sheet of graph paper or some such and not had any on hand? With the Printable Paper site you can download a wide variety of templates for printing out on ordinary bond paper for free.

Picture-based Computer Tutorials. We often have our students push the outside of the capability envelope of MS Office and other software tools we use in our classes. This site has a number of useful picture-based tutorials on how to do all sorts of routine and advanced operations in Word, Excel and Powerpoint as well as in a variety of other types of software.

36 Beautiful Resume Ideas That Work. While I can't comment on how well they might work, I found many of these resume ideas to be useful in thinking about resumes in a new way. If you are looking for ideas on how you might make your resume "pop", there is likely something here for you.