Cognitive Biases In Financial Analysis (Vanguard.com)

The mutual fund firm, Vanguard, has an interesting interview with longtime money guru, Jason Zweig, on the impact of cognitive biases in investing. You can hear the 10 minute interview, titled Balancing Emotions And Investment Decisions by clicking on the link or you can read the transcript.

New Blog On The Block (RUEE)

Prof. William McGill at Penn State has just started a blog called Risk, Uncertainty and Everything Else. His purpose behind the blog is, as he puts it on his "About" page, "to capture my thoughts and comments about various things I have found, read, seen, or heard about in relation to risk and uncertainty." He goes on to say, "this blog will keep people informed about the latest research and activities in risk and uncertainty modeling, and how it relates to security and safety risk analysis problems." So far he has a good post listing journals in the field and a more technical post talking about "Pignistic probability density functions that convey the epistemic uncertainty associated with the cumulative distribution function values for different levels of loss." And may he have many more...

Seriously, McGill is part of a new effort at Penn State to explore, as I understand it, the more technical side of intelligence analysis. As a "risk professional and methodologist" with both DOD and DHS, I expect he will try bring some rigor to the unruly data that makes up most of our input. I wish him well with his research and his blog!

Excellent Competitive Intel, Law Enforcement Intel, World News Mapping Resources (PolicyMap And Google Earth)

I stumbled across two good mapping resources last night. The first is actually a new service available through Google Earth. If you look at the "Layers" now available in Google Earth (in the lower left hand panel) and you check the "Gallery" box, you will discover that there is a new layer there: "Google News". Check that box and then go wherever you want to go. If Google News has picked up a story from that location, you will see a newspaper icon that you can click on to open up the summary of the story. For more information on this service, take a look at the Google Lat Long Blog.

The second mapping resource is a service called PolicyMap. It only covers the US but does a very good job of layering multiple data sets on the NavTeq mapping API. The service breaks down the data in just about any way you might want to see it: By census tract, by zip code, by Congressional District, etc. It provides good leads for business and CI professionals and Law Enforcement Intel types looking at strategic issues. For example, if I wanted to focus a marketing campaign on the retiree communities in Erie, I might want to use the map below that shows aggregated retiree income by census tract in Erie (darker colors mean more retiree income). Its just a screenshot of part of the data, though; if you want the full map, you will have to go to PolicyMap.com as the service provides no embed feature.

Related Posts:
NGO Intel: Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Groups Map
COOLINT Part Deux: "The World Through The Eyes Of Editors In Chief"
COOLINT: Heat Map Of Search Terms By Country
9 Great Map Resources
Terrorism Threat Map
Famine Early Warning System
Excellent African Map Source
High Priced Oil Adds Volatility To Power Scramble (NY Times)

Can You Balance The US Budget? Can You Make Decisions Like A Chinese Official? (American Public Media And Wikiversity)

With all the brouhaha concerning DIA's recent announcement concerning the creation of several video games to help train new analysts, I thought it would be worth mentioning a couple of other "serious games" I have run across (one yesterday and one quite some time ago).

The first, Budget Hero, is a flash based game (see screenshot below) that lets you pick options to help balance the US Federal Budget. Basically, after a short intro brief, you get to pick tax and spending policies in order to try to accomplish your goals without busting the budget. Once you have selected your series of policies, the game calculates how well you have done against a couple of benchmarks and then reports back to you on how well you have accomplished your goals and how well in tune you are with others who have played the game.

The game really gives you a good idea of the relative values of different policies. It also highlights the fact that some policies are important for their emotional impact but have little real impact on the total budget (By the way, if this game is at all accurate, the next administration will have its work cut out for it. The kind of answers that tend to work are not going to be very palatable). The best I have been able to do is to keep the government afloat until 2044. If anyone figures out a way to beat that, drop a comment.

The second game is one I have been meaning to blog about for some time. One of our former students (he just graduated), Pat Noble, an analyst with the FBI, put together an interesting simulation of Chinese political decisionmaking processes called Forbidden Kingdom (he did this last year in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class so, no, there is no relation to the movie of the same name). The screenshot below shows the game board (which you have to build) and the rules and all the other materials you need are available for free over at Wikiversity.

All simulations have to balance playability with realism. Pat's challenge was to make a game that captured some of the essence of modern Chinese political thinking in a short, interesting game. As someone who watched the research and development of the game, has played the game and heard countless stories about others playing the game, I think Pat accomplished just that.

Excellent "Lesser Taught" Language Resource (DLI via DangerRoom)

Wired.com's DangerRoom featured an excellent language resource from the Defense Language Institute for some of the lesser known (only because they are lesser taught in the US) languages. Not everything on the site is accessible to non-military but the stuff that is available is very good. In addition to the fine language resources, I was particularly impressed with the "Countries In Perspective" section that provides short, descriptive country studies on about 20 countries.