Drive-by Reviews Of Analytic Methods (ADVAT.blogspot.com)

Everyone has heard of a drive-by shooting but what about a "drive-by review"?

I am teaching a graduate seminar in Advanced Analytic Techniques this term. The core of the course is a series of student projects that hyperfocus on the application of a particular analytic technique (such as patent analysis or social network analysis) to a discrete topic (such as the political situation in Turkey or the future of oil and gas exploration in the Caspian Sea). The best of these projects wind up in The Analyst's Cookbook.

Each week, however, in addition to diving deep into these individual techniques and topics, we also work as a group to come to some conclusions about a number of other techniques. In preparation, each of the students selects, reads and summarizes a number of articles on whichever technique is under the microscope for the week.

They then post these summaries and links to the full text of the articles on our Advanced Analytic Techniques blog. Each Thursday, we sit down and have a discussion about the readings. We also run a short exercise using the technique. From the combination of discussion and exercise, we try to answer four questions:

• How do we define this technique?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of this technique?
• How do you do this technique (Step by step)?
• What was our experience like when we tried to apply this technique?

Once we think we have pretty good answers to these questions, we post what we have developed to the blog in order to capture our collective thinking on the technique in question.

Obviously, this is where the term "drive-by review" comes from. Such an exercise only serves to familiarize the students with the technique under consideration. The blog format, however, permits us to open this series of exercises up to practitioners, academics and intel studies students at other institutions for comment and additional insights -- which is what I am doing with this post.

This year, due to the very large size of the class, we are actually able to do a little comparative analysis. I have divided the team into two halves. We explore the techniques collectively but each team comes to it own conclusions independently. It is sort of like getting a second opinion after a visit to the doctor.

Last week we took a look at Delphi and this week we are examining Roleplaying. Over the last couple of weeks we have looked at Best Practices, Red Teaming and Imagery Analysis.

Don't hesitate to jump in! We learn from your experience and expertise.

The Whole Of The Cyberthreat In A Single Tweet (Scribd.com)

According to ReadWriteWeb, Raffi Krikorian, a developer for Twitter, posted a complete version of a single "tweet", or 140 character Twitter message, this weekend on Scribd.com.

You can see the results for yourselves below:

map-of-a-tweet

In addition to the 140 (or less) characters in a tweet, this map shows all of the metadata thrown off by each and every post.

Some of this stuff is harmless but it is surprising how little metadata it takes to uniquely identify a particular computer. Don't believe me? Check out Panopticlick. Based on their fairly clever method, it only takes about 33 bits of data to uniquely ID a computer.

Note, I said ID the computer, not the user behind it. Likewise, knowing which 33 bits of data one needs to hide or dirty up helps the bad guys hide themselves and makes it difficult if not impossible to determine attribution by technical means alone.

More importantly, it leaves the rest of us, who do not know how much personal and identifying data we are providing, at the mercy if those who do. "Those who do" doesn't just include criminals either. It includes corporations and governments as well.

What to do about all of this is beyond me (though I think Jeff Carr at IntelFusion does some of the best thinking on the subject) but it is charts like this one that, for me, highlight the importance of this issue.

Surreal Saturday: The Periodic Table Of Periodic Tables (Flickr via Neatorama)

Nothing more to say, really. Click on the pic or this link to get the full image... (via Neatorama)

The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do (Brsts.com)

"A revolutionary new theory showing how we can predict human behavior..."

"...the patterns of human mobility in an era of total surveillance..."

"Your life may look random to you, but everything from your visits to a web page to your visits to the doctor are predictable, and happen in bursts."

I haven't even had a chance to read Laszlo Barabasi's new book, Bursts, (it doesn't come out until the 29th) but the quotes above (from the book itself, Clay Shirky and Ogi Ogas) have got me pretty excited.

Yes, yes, some of it is back of the book puffery but more important than the quotes is the author. We still use Barabasi's book, Linked, as supplemental reading material in our theory class. It is an intellectually rich, yet still accessible, look at the emerging science of networks and I heartily recommend it.

Now, it seems that Barabasi thinks he can make some accurate predictions regarding human behavior. This, of course, is going to be of definite interest to intelligence analysts. I will hold comments until I actually get to see the book but, given the reputation of the author...let's just say my spider sense is tingling.

One of the most fascinating things Barabasi is doing in advance of the release of his book is a little social experiment. You can go to the Bursts website and "adopt" a word from the book (You can see my certificate above -- I got the word "along").

Once you adopt a word, you can gain points by guessing other words in the book. As you and others who are playing the game do so, the book gradually becomes revealed to all of the players. Top point scorers also get signed free copies of the book from Barabasi.

I am just guessing but I suspect that Barabasi thinks that the data generated from the activity of the players will confirm some aspect (or many aspects) of his predictive model. I can see where number of participants might well come in bursts (My posting this to my blog may cause, for example, a burst of activity). I can see where sections of the book will be uncovered by the participants in bursts of activity and how the number of books sold might also occur in predictable bursts. I can also see how one burst might be predictive of the next burst.

Pure speculation, of course, but even if I am wrong, the Bursts game is fun (and a clever piece of marketing strategy) and the game of trying to figure out what Barabasi is up to this time is even funner.

Google Proves Massively Useful Once Again; Continues To Try To Dominate World (Google Docs)

One of my former students (Thanks, Meg!) sent me the big news: Google has added real-time, collaborative editing to Google Docs. This means that you and up to 9 collaborators can jump on a single Google Doc and simultaneously type and edit.

While this may not appear to support Google's attempt at world domination to quite the extent the headline to this post makes it seem (whew!), it does.

Previously, a wonderful little online product called Etherpad was the only such real-time collaborative tool available. Lots of people loved it but, when Google (the plot thickens...) bought it out a few months ago, the people who wept loudest were -- wait for it -- teachers.

I myself had used it in the classroom. It was easy and efficient and got students working together quickly without a whole lot of admin fuss and bother. The final collaborative product wasn't very pretty (no real formatting options) but, once the content was agreed upon by the students working on the project, it was easy to move that content into Word or PowerPoint or, for that matter, Google Docs, to pretty it up.

For those of you who did not have a chance to experience the magic of Etherpad, you can still see what all the fuss was about. Google (kindly) made the code for Etherpad open-source and several people developed almost identical clones of the product (my favorite is Typewith.me). I strongly encourage you to find a buddy or two and use this product. Everyone who has played with it, loves it.

Particularly teachers.

Where teachers go, students are sure to follow. Once you have had a taste of the speed, the increased level of intellectual engagement and, frankly, the fun of real-time collaboration, it will be very difficult to go back to the old emailing-the-doc-around-sort-of-thing. Google is more than happy to share its apps with schools and over 7 million students currently use them. Students (at least here at Mercyhurst) are already using Google products extensively and Google has just given the millennials one more reason to go Google and stay Google.

I have a couple of gripes, though. First it seems you have to have a Google account to set up a Google Doc. It is unclear whether or not you have to have a Google account to access the doc (We tried this in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class today and people with Mercyhurst addresses could not access the site while people with Gmail addresses could). This was not the case with Etherpad.

Likewise, you can only have 10 active collaborators at a time (though more can view the doc). While I recognize that teachers and classes aren't the only audience for this product, maybe in Mountain View they only have 10 students to a class but I would suggest that this is not the norm.

More importantly, some of the features demoed in the video below were not obviously available to us when we did get access. If the version we used this afternoon is supposed to look like the version in the video, it didn't -- and there was no obvious way to change it. We also experienced some lag in seeing each others' edits, something I had not experienced before with Etherpad.

Finally, the URL for sharing a doc looks like this: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AbJaj3wMNjkSZGhrcWs0ZGhfMjNodGRoam1jaA&hl=en

Not the easiest thing to share...

One thing you can count on with Google, though, is that it will continue to improve its flagship products. I may not like what they are currently offering ( I am sticking with Typewith.me for the time being) but I am virtually certain it will get better over time (and, in this case, fairly quickly, I expect).

Whether you like Google or you hate it, don't blink -- it is definitely coming to a document near you soon.



One last thought: My personal hope is that someone will take the open source Etherpad code and make an extension for MediaWiki. Can you imagine the increase in productivity (not to mention usage...) of Intellipedia with an extension that allowed easy real-time collaboration? Yoikes!