What If The Gulf Oil Spill Happened In My Home Town? (IfItWasMyHome.com)

The website, IfItWasMyHome, allows the user to place the BP Gulf oil spill over any town or city in the world.  It is an enormously useful tool for visualizing the current size of the spill and the area it actually impacts.  The picture below is a screenshot taken with the spill centered on Washington DC.  For the interactive version of the site (where you can put the spill over your town, too), go to IfItWasMyHome.com or click on the picture below. 

How To Grade Sources (Link List)

Dax Norman at the National Cryptologic School has done the most authoritative work on general reliability of online sources with intel specifically in mind.  You can find his JMIC/NDIC thesis on the topic and his matrix here.  We teach Dax’s approach in our classes as his research is the best I have seen on the subject and the research was done with the needs of intel analysts in mind.

In the 1997 version of the CIA’s Analytic Tradecraft Notes, the Agency seems to abandon the traditional A1, B2, etc system in favor of a new, less rigorously defined taxonomy.

FBIS used to (and probably still does within the OSC) publish source notes with each of its translated articles.  The BBC does some of this at the end of its Country Reports (See this example).

The website of any library associated with a research university will likely have a section that talks about source reliability.  Here is an example from Cal Berkeley on online sources and here is an example from George Mason on non-web-based sources.

One of my students, Kristina Jakomin, recently completed a study in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class into what law enforcement analysts tend to refer to as “statement analysis”.  She synthesized the “rules’ (such as they are) into a handy cheat sheet and ran a classroom exercise that suggested that these rules were useful in ferreting out some deceptive statements/sources. She then applied the rules to some statements made recently by Hamid Karzai. You can go to her website to see the results…

Finally, I have a student, Nimalan Paul, who is doing a comparative study of HUMINT source evaluation techniques for his master’s thesis.  Nimalan comes to us from the rough and tumble world of Indian primary source (ie HUMINT) intelligence in the business world and will be looking at best practices across all three intelligence communities (national security, law enforcement and business) to see what the common denominators of HUMINT source reliability are. I expect results on that research by this time next year if not sooner.

Memorial Day Isn't About Sales Or Cookouts... (CNN.com via FlowingData)

CNN has created an excellent infographic that brings home the human cost to the US of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Click on the picture below or the this link to see the interactive version.

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The Effects Of Labels On Analysis (Thesis Months)

(Note: At the risk of making this an all-Jeff-Welgan blog, I thought this week I would cover Jeff's thesis work on the effects of labels on analysis right on the heels of last week's discussion of his work embedded in the new book, Hyperformance).

Does a name matter? Shakespeare says, "No, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" but most psychologists would disagree. The well known "framing effect" shows that the way a question is asked can determine how people will answer it. Likewise, psychological campaigns aimed at dehumanizing an enemy often accompany wars.

Jeff Welgan, in his thesis called, The Effects Of Labels On Analysis, tests these ideas in the realm of intelligence analysis. Some of you may remember taking Jeff's survey last year. In it, he presented a fictitious scenario set in the Horn of Africa. Each participant was asked to read an identical report of an activity. The only thing that changed was the word used to describe the group conducting the activity. Specifically, Jeff tested the words "group", "insurgent", "rebel", "militia", or "terrorist". He hypothesized that the specific word used would affect the analytic conclusions that participants would draw.

Jeff did not aim his study at a random sample of the general population, however. He took pains to engage analysts in the national security realm, in law enforcement or in business. The results in the image to the right are self-reported (the inevitable cost of a web-based survey...) but he was fairly careful in his approach to getting participants. In all, some 233 of you participated in the experiment (Many thanks!).

Despite his hypotheses, it was unclear what he would actually find. These psychological biases are deep-seated and robust but, on the other hand, there is good research to suggest that credible evidence helps overcome framing issues and intel analysts are typically trained to be on the lookout for sources of bias. As Jeff stated, "My thesis will examine to what extent the quality of analysis is at risk, if it is indeed at risk, as the differing connotations of these labels would suggest."

In the end, the labels wound up making little difference for trained intel analysts. As Jeff bluntly stated, "My hypothesis that these particular labels have significant meaning, and many individuals have a preconceived idea, or cognitive biases, regarding the kinds of actions each of these particular groups conduct must be rejected at this time due to an overall lack in statistical significance across the labels."

This is clearly good news for the intel community at large. It certainly suggests that at least some of the training to defeat at least some of the cognitive biases is working.

The full text of the thesis is below or can be downloaded from Scribd.com.

The Effect of Labels on Analysis

Hyperformance: An Excellent New Book On Intelligence In The Business World (Wiley.com)

I really liked T. J. Waters new book, Hyperformance: Using Competitive Intelligence For Better Strategy And Execution. I wasn't sure that I would (even though one of my former students is featured prominently in it -- more on that in a minute), but I do.

It is an excellent book in many, many ways. If you are looking for a book that explains the value of intelligence to your C-level, if you want to convince your clients or partners that intelligence can help them make better decisions, or if you just want to introduce a student to the broader world of intelligence in business, then this is the book.

Waters, who worked at the CIA and is perhaps best known for his earlier work, Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class, covers numerous intelligence methods and practices that could just as easily describe national security or corporate work.

For example, he talks about networks but does so in the context of Apple's development of ITunes; he talks about analysis of competing hypotheses but does so in the context of detecting deception in new product launches; he talks about elicitation techniques but does so in the context of an industry trade show.

In fact, if there is a fault in the book, it is that Waters treats these subjects too lightly, that he does not spend enough time with any aspect of intelligence in business to do it justice. This is unfair criticism, however. Waters is not writing the book for seasoned intelligence professionals. The main purpose of the book seems to be to introduce many of the fundamental concepts of intelligence to corporate leaders who may be unfamiliar with them. In this, he is not alone. There are many books that have attempted to do the same thing -- but few have done it better.

Oh, and my student? It was Jeff Welgan. Jeff published the results of his research into using Search Engine Optimization techniques as an intelligence method last year. As a result, Jeff became something of an internet star (probably as much for the subject of his study -- Starbucks vs. Caribou Coffees -- as for his innovative use of SEO as a competitive intelligence methodology).

His research caught Water's eye as a perfect example of "new school" collection techniques. "The market implications are staggering...," wrote Waters. "He could start a business tomorrow offering this service to marketing departments, public relations firms, lawyers, press agents, journalists and political campaign managers across the nation."

My sentiments exactly.