SAM Soundtrack: Stand By Me (Vimeo.com)

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It is a little early in the week to be making off subject posts but this is so good, I could not resist.

Once you watch a little bit of this and realize how it is being done, you will want to know the backstory. You can find it here.


Playing For Change Song Around The World "Stand By Me" from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

Want To Learn ACH? Watch More House! (Fox.com/house)

I really like the television show House. This surprises me as I am not a big fan of medical mysteries generally and do not find the House character particularly likable. It occurred to me recently, however, that I might like the show more for its method than its characters or story.

The main method used in each of the shows -- differential diagnosis -- bears a remarkable resemblance to one of my favorite intelligence analysis techniques, Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH).

OK, OK, I know this sounds weird, but bear with me for a moment. In the first place, making the connection between medicine and intel is old hat. My colleague Steve Marrin does it all the time.

In the second place, these two methods even sound similar. Differential diagnosis "involves first making a list of possible diagnoses, then attempting to remove diagnoses from the list until at most one diagnosis remains." ACH "requires an analyst to explicitly identify all the reasonable alternatives and have them compete against each other for the analyst's favor, rather than evaluating their plausibility one at a time." Sort of sounds the same...

The true test, I thought, would be to use an ACH matrix to map a differential diagnosis. The medical lingo is beyond me, though, so I figured I would search out someone who had summarized a particularly good House episode and use their abstract.

Enter Scott.

Scott (FNU) is a former Air Force doctor now in general practice in Illinois who summarizes and critiques every episode of House over at his blog, Polite Dissent. Very cool, slightly obsessive and enormously useful for this exercise.

I chose the "Let Them Eat Cake" episode from Season 5 as Scott said the medicine was pretty good (he gave it an "A").

Scott starts his summary like this: "Emmy, a thirty year-old fitness instructor, is filming an infomercial when she experiences sudden difficulty breathing and collapses, breaking her ankle in the fall. She is admitted to House’s service for evaluation and all the initial tests were normal. Taub suspects her of steroid use, Kutner mentions environmental allergies, and Cuddy suspects exercise induced asthma." (Note: Taub and Kutner are both members of Dr. House's team. Cuddy is house's boss)

Mapping this to an ACH Matrix (and I am using the PARC ACH 2.0.3 software here), looks something like this:



I am making some assumptions here, of course. The team considers the asthma hypothesis to be the best but Scott is quiet as to why. I am just guessing that the fact that the initial tests were all normal was inconsistent with the other two hypotheses.

Anyway, Scott continues: "The last (i.e. exercise induced asthma) seems the most likely, so the team sets about to recreate Emmy’s episode, the best they can with her broken ankle. Sure enough, while in the middle of exercising, she once again collapses and is found to be pulseless." Scott doesn't say this explicitly but I have to assume that this extreme reaction is not what they expected and is inconsistent with any of the current hypotheses.

This means it is back to the drawing board for House and the team. Interestingly, an intel analyst in a similar position would do exactly the same thing. Scott continues his narration, "Kutner suggests she may have Carcinoid syndrome." None of the existing evidence rules this out so, Scott continues, "A CT is obtained which shows no carcinoid tumor..." Intel analysts in a similar position would also task additional collection in an attempt to disprove the unclear hypothesis.

The IMINT -- sorry, I mean CT Scan -- reveals something new, though. Emmy has had gastric bypass surgery! This has, in Scott's words, "them rethinking their differential diagnosis: now diabetic neuropathy (nerve damage caused by diabetes) and sleep apnea are added."

Reviewing the bidding after the most recent round shows a matrix that looks something like this:

As the show progresses both the diabetic neuropathy and the sleep apnea diagnoses/hypotheses are eliminated and several more (well, LOTS more) hypotheses are added to the mix. If you are interested in how all this plays itself out, you can read the rest on Polite Dissent along with Scott's deconstruction and evaluation of the episode.

As I thought about other episodes of House, I realized that many of the common problems that ACH deals with repeatedly come up. For example, it is not unusual for the doctors in House to suspect deception (e.g. patients that lie) when it comes to some of the information they collect. Likewise, the story often turns on an assumption concerning a patient that turns out to be false. Deliberately deceptive information is daily fare for the intel analyst and we came up with Structured ACH as a way to get at underlying assumptions.

Once you start to think about this idea, it really starts to grow on you. Next time you watch House, think about ACH. If you come up with anything neat, post it in the comments!

Teaching Intel At Los Alamos (Coolest Thing I Have Done In The Last Couple Of Months...)

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to run a couple of workshops on intelligence theory and intelligence communiciations at Los Alamos National Laboratory with my colleague Linda Bremmer. Beyond the details of the workshop (which you can read here online), I have to say it was one of the most interesting and unique opportunties that Mercyhurst has offered me.

We do a surprisingly large amount of off-site training for a variety of institutions and agencies. Our professors have taught as far away as Sri Lanka. Still, there are a number of reasons why Los Alamos was special.

First, look at the cool stuff they did just last year:



Second, the environment there is absolutely unique. You are 7500 feet straight up on the top of a desert plateau. If you are not accumstomed to that altitude, it can sneak up on you. We were told that they had seen instructors (presumably ones that talked too fast...) actually faint in the middle of a presentation. That story might be a little bit of an exaggeration to scare the low country folks but you could seriously feel the impact of the altitude every time you took the stairs. Beyond that, they also have 340 days of sun in one of the bluest skies I have ever seen. If all that isn't "unique enough" for you, you are also out in the desert with all the beauty and danger that this kind of environment implies.

In the third place, it was enormously challenging -- and rewarding. Most professionals have taught an "intelligence for dummies" class at one point or another, usually to a group of only modestly interested beginners. Imagine an "intelligence for rocket scientists, nuclear physicists and engineers" class! It was an extraordinary teaching experience. As students, they were engaged from the first minute and very, very quick; even when the material was wholly unfamiliar.

Finally, it was one of the most hospitible groups of people I have ever had the pleasure to work with. The administrative and technical support was first rate and the sponsors of the workshop truly went out of their way to make sure we were both comfortable and had the tools we needed to conduct the workshops. Despite a flight that required four (!) layovers, it was one of the easiest and most rewarding trips I have been on.

Amazing Resource On Intel Analysis Methods (FOR-LEARN)

One of the sites my students came across in the course of our studies into advanced analytic techniques is the very good FOR-LEARN online guide to analytic methods. It is a site that ought to be bookmarked by every analyst -- business, law enforcement and national security types included.

Put together under the auspices of the European Commission's Joint Research Center, FOR-LEARN seeks to guide "users throughout the critical steps of design, implementation and follow-up of a Foresight project and gives a description of the main methods that can be used." Simply replace the word "Foresight" in the previous sentence with "intelligence", and this resource becomes an invaluable (and free) starting point for research into all sorts of analytic methods.

There is a ton of good info here but the first golden nugget is the "methods table" the authors have put together (See static image below. Click on the image to go to the interactive version).

Each of the methods listed, in turn, has a broad, structured overview of the method, along with a brief how-to, its strengths and weaknesses, a case study and some links for additional research. The outline is remarkably similar to the one we used in The Analyst's Cookbook and continue to use in our Advanced Analytic Techniques course (clearly a case, by the way, of great minds thinking alike...).

The site contains much more than just methodologies, however. There are sections on how to scope and run an analytic project as well as extensive additional resources included on almost every page of the guide.

The guide does not contain everything, of course. There is a good bit more to many of these approaches than what the authors have chosen to cover here. There are also a number of intelligence methods that are not mentioned here. Despite these quibbles, it is an excellent product overall and deserves some attention from any serious analyst.

Interactive Map Of Complexity Science (Art-sciencefactory.com via Elearnspace.com)

Complexity science is enormously important for intelligence professionals to understand. It holds great promise, I believe, for helping analysts get beyond the 69% threshhold.

It is, however, a daunting topic to tackle unassisted. I spent many years reading everything I could find on the topic that I thought could help me understand the consequences of what is, in many ways, a new way of thinking. I read James Gleick, of course, but I also read Per Bak, Steven Strogatz and Stuart Kaufmann, etc. (My favorite? Laszlo Barabasi).

Eventually, though, the topic become too broad -- there was simply too much to keep up with. Today the field is crowded with all sorts of new entries. If only there was a guide, a "map" of some kind to help orient newcomers to this field...

Voila!

The picture above is just a partial screenshot of a fantastic, interactive map of the wide range of complexity sciences. The map is part of the larger Art and Science Factory site (worth exploring in its own right...). Links on the map go to important individuals and to key websites that explore the various topics.

Elearnspace (where I first saw mention of the map) comments that the map may be incomplete. They, as I, think, however, that it is a very useful product; particularly for beginners.