How Did I Miss This? YouTube Now Has A 360 Degree Video(!) From North Korea(!)

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...

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.

Right now it appears to only work on Chrome or Android devices and I found that other videos (and there are a growing number of them) often had to pause to buffer.

The North Korean video was shot with an Etaniya camera and some specialized software.  Apparently YouTube (via Google) is working with the software and the hardware manufacturers to make it easier.

In the interim, there are some guides starting to be produced to help you get going making your own 360 degree video.

(H/T to WK!)

An Interesting Perspective On What It Means To Be A Vet

If you have a few minutes this Veterans' Day, this video is worth your time...

Modern Spies, An Excellent BBC Documentary

One of our sharp-eyed alums just informed me of an excellent new BBC series called Modern Spies.  It appears to be focused primarily on the HUMINT side of the business but it does include interviews from active officers in MI6, MI5, the FBI and CIA.  The full series does not appear to be available through the main website to people outside the UK but episode 1 (embedded below) is available through YouTube.

This Is How The Daleks Got Their Start... (Drone Swarms!)

Some frighteningly clever people at Penn's GRASP Lab have developed software that allows harmless children's toys to swarm...

Over a million people have already seen the video.  If you aren't one of them, take a look below:



Oh, and if you are unfamiliar with the Dalek reference, you can find them on Wikipedia or here.  Or just watch the vid below:




If you want a more serious look at the potential impacts of this technology, take a look at John Robb's recent post (via @nof)

Evaluating The Reliability Of Social Media Sources, An Amazing Technology Roadmap And Reagan's Visual SFARs (Link List)

I love having friends and alumni that send me interesting links and this week contained an extraordinary crop!  Here are three of the best things that happened to cross my desktop:

Some of the Ushahidi Deployments

How To Verify Social Media Content.  We have known for some time how to evaluate online sources for credibility in a general sense (See Dax Norman's thesis and checklist here.  Not only it is a brilliant piece of research, it is also the only such document designed by an intelligence analyst for use by other intelligence analysts).  When it comes to understanding how to evaluate social media sources, however, the question becomes much trickier.

Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and previously co-directed Harvard's Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning (If you are not familiar with the crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, stop now and go here).  He has had extensive real-world experience with social media sources in the hundreds of uses of the Ushahidi platform in crises world-wide and he has translated that experience into an outstanding list of hints and tips for evaluating social media (Twitter specifcially).

While his insights into evaluating social media are born of this experience rather than more rigorous statistical analyses (like Dax's), his findings ring true and certainly operate as an excellent general purpose checklist until the science catches up. 

http://envisioningtech.com/

Envisioning Emerging Technology For 2012 And Beyond.  Through a series of serendipitous accidents, I have worked on a number of projects looking at technology trends. 

While I normally start with Gartner on these types of questions, I have just added Michael Zappa and his excellent work at Envisioning Technology to my short list of go-to sources.

The technology roadmap he has built is awesome (you can see the compact version to the right but I strongly recommend you take a look at the interactive version here (Note to Michael Zappa:  If you are going to make it Creative Commons, you might as well make it embeddable as well...Please!)).

Ronald Reagan: Intelligence and the End of the Cold War.  Finally, I like to emphasize the importance of production skills for my students with a variety of stories about high-level decisionmakers who preferred their intelligence in "alternative" formats.

For example, John F. Kennedy had the President's Intelligence Checklist (the PICL -- analysts who worked on the product were said to work in the "PICL Factory").  Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, liked to see some of his intelligence, at least, in the form of short videos.

(Note:  One of the kinds of analytic report writing we teach at Mercyhurst is called, generically, the Short Form Analytic Report, usually pronounced "Ess-Far".  When this type of report contains more visual elements than written ones, we call it a visual SFAR, hence the title to this post).

Many have speculated that this was because Reagan was an actor and naturally gravitated to film but, whatever the reason, it is an interesting lesson in the importance of producing intelligence -- that is, the ability to fully communicate the results of analysis to the decisionmaker that the intel unit is supporting.

You can see the full report here or watch the videos on the CIA's YouTube channel (!).   I have embedded my favorite (because I lived through it...) below:

An Internet Murder?

I ran across this remarkable video today and it occurred to me that I might be able to use it to offer a brief but challenging thought experiment:

Given this video, what question would you ask first?

Leave your answer in the comments!

Intelligence Tools For Understanding Any Website (YouTube)

Jeffrey Kotvas on the always insightful Competitive Intelligence Forum points to the excellent video below that reviews various online tools for understanding the traffic patterns behind any website (sort of a modern and open-source version of the much more venerable intel sub-discipline of traffic analysis...).

The video, put together by Scrappybusiness.com, focuses on the use of these tools by intelligence professionals in the business world but these tools might also be of some use to amateur (and, perhaps, professional) cyberthreat analysts as well. 



For those of you not familiar with the Competitive Intelligence Forum, I recommend you check it out as well. There are lots of good places to talk about intelligence on the internet these days but the CI Forum is one of the best. Founded by longtime CI professional, Arik Johnson, this social networking site for those involved in intelligence work for the business community has really taken off and now boasts over 1300 members. Click on this link to preview the site.

Related Post: 
Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools To Do Intel Analysis

Surreal Saturday: Flaming Pants Walking (YouTube)

I have no idea what this means but it seems entirely appropriate for finals week...

Surreal Saturday: Cupcake Cannon (YouTube)

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)

This Too Shall Pass (SAM Soundtrack)

Normally, I save this sort of thing for Saturday or Sunday but we have been on break for the last week and all the students are coming back today.

So, if you love Rube Goldberg devices (as I do) and you like OK Go (as I do), then welcome back (!) and don't forget...

Rethinking Information Overload

"America has, in fact, transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence, [...] the frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and, as a general thing, no disposition."

Yesterday's George Will column? Guess again. The year is 1891 and journalist W. J. Stillman is complaining about the telegraph and the death of "real" news!

I have been interested in the process of managing information overload for some time now. The most interesting recent thoughts I have seen come out about how to deal with this fundamental (and apparently long-term) problem come from NYU professor and tech guru Clay Shirky. I have pointed to Shirky's work before but, if you have not seen Shirky's recent speech at the Web 2.0 Expo and you are at all concerned with the issue of information overload, you owe it to yourself to do whatever you have to do to see this video. Shirky's a good speaker and the insight he provides into this problem is brilliant:

Sunday Funnies: How To Get Road Salt Off Your Car With One Bucket Of Water (YouTube via Neatorama)

Mercyhurst is in Erie PA and we have dealt with snow salt for as long as there has been snow salt.

We realize that many of our brethren to the south of us are less familiar with tried and true ways to keep the salt from eating into your paint job.

So, for all the Washingtonians dealing with massive amounts of snow salt this year, Neatorama points to this helpful video:

Surreal Saturday: Coming Soon To A Dark Sky Near You... (MIT SENSEable City Lab)

Amazingly cool idea...

Sunday Funnies: American Football Explained (YouTube)

It never ceases to amaze most Americans that "football" means something entirely different to the rest of the world and that what most of us are going to do this evening is perceived as little more than a bizarre tribal ritual by the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.

This short story by Andy Griffith might help you to explain it to them:

Surreal Saturday: Oil Navigates Maze; Rats, Mice Consider Forming Union (New Scientist)

According to a recently published paper with the unlikely title: "Maze Solving by Chemotactic Droplets", by the equally unlikely research group called the Grzybowski Group, oil droplets can, like rats trying to find cheese or wizards trying to find the Goblet of Fire, solve mazes all on their own. See the video below:

Sunday Funnies: What Do You Do With Your Old Christmas Tree? Shoot It Into Space!

5, 4, 3, 2, 1...!

Change Blindness Plus (YouTube via Schneier)

The Schneier On Security blog points today to an interesting video (embedded below) that demonstrates and discusses the phenomena of Change Blindness:



There are several good videos and resources on this effect and you can find them all here.

24: The Christmas Special (YouTube)

Surreal Saturday: The Pong Prom (Vimeo)

From the interestingly titled Department of Covert Athletics...

Pong Prom from Ed Keeble on Vimeo.

Sunday Funnies: Spy Pigeon! (YouTube)

Great short video about what would happen if pigeons got access to Top Secret information...