Attitudes Towards Social Media Non-Users And Some Interesting Privacy Watchdog Sites

I have a team of students (very bright students, of course) who have been taking a hard look at social media and the risks of both being involved and the risks of not being involved.

They have come across lots of data (Key Finding:  It is highly likely that social media people LOVE to talk about social media (High confidence)), but we have not been able to find out one thing:  Do people who use social media sites (like Facebook and Twitter) think that people who don't use them are weird? I don't necessarily mean weird in a pejorative way (though I am certainly interested in that interpretation).  It could be just sort of a reaction, like when someone says, "Oh, I don't have a Facebook account" and someone else would automatically think, "That's weird."

So, before I talk more about it more, answer the Swayable below:


Here's what I think we'll see:  A small but significant percentage of those that answer the question will say, "Yeah, it's weird."  If I could gather details, I would guess that there would be a fairly strong correlation between those that think it is weird and age (with younger people thinking it is weirder, obviously).

What is really weird, though is that we can't seem to find anyone who has asked this question before.

Changing the subject a little (but not much), I also wanted to highlight two sites, one old and one new, that provide an interesting insight into the subject of privacy in the age of social media.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/

The first is the wonderful What They Know courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.  This site lets you explore the privacy settings of some of the most popular apps for IOS and Android phones.  You can see a screen shot of part of the site at the right but you owe it to yourself to visit the interactive and a bit disquieting site.

The other site, Privacyscore (See screenshot below), is new but seems like it would be particularly valuable to anyone who searches the web (i.e. everyone).  The site can tell you, based on its own rating system, on a scale 1-100 (where 1 is very bad and 100 is very good), how private your activities on that site really are.  So, for example, Google.com scores an 85 whereas Bing scores only a 74.   Of particular interest to heavy web users or researchers are the Firefox and Chrome add-ons that will display a site's privacy score in real time as you search.

http://www.privacyscore.com/

Intelligence And Crowdmapping

I realized today that, while I had written in the past about the idea of crowdmapping, I had never actually used that term in a post before.

That was a mistake.

Don't get me wrong, Group editable maps have been around for some time and are quite successful.  We have used CommunityWalk, for example in a number of projects and it has served its purpose excellently.

CommunityWalk Map - North Caucasus Violence Sep-06 to Nov-06



Likewise, automatically edited maps are also quite helpful.  The comprehensive map at RSOE EDIS, for example, just recently got some new competition with Google Public Alerts.

Crowdmapping, though, is something a bit different.  Here, dozens and sometimes hundreds of people are providing information from a variety of sources (including the web, of course, but also through SMS and Twitter) that are then mapped in real time.

Right now, this space is occupied almost exclusively by Crowdmap.com, an offshoot of the much admired Ushahidi project.  It is not too hard to see a time, however, when other companies and organizations will enter this space with competing offerings.

I, along with a small group of intrepid students, have been experimenting with this system for a few months and, while managing the input has proven to be more challenging than expected, the potential (and the relative sophistication of Crowdmap) is enormous.

The best way to get a sense of the value of a crowdmap, however, is to look at them.  Below are three of my favorites:  Syria Tracker (a map tracking eyewitness accounts of missing, killed or arrested people in Syria in English and Arabic), China Strikes (a map tracking instances of labor unrest in China), and Energy Shortage (a map tracking reports of energy related issues worldwide).  You can see all of these maps below (Syria Tracker is live; the other two maps need to be clicked on to get to the live versions).

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)

Mercyhurst College Is Now Mercyhurst University (WOOT!)

For the last several years Mercyhurst has been going through the administrative process of changing our status from a "College" to a "University".  Yesterday, we received notice from the State of Pennsylvania that our application had been approved. 

(Note:  I am going to talk about what I think this means and some of the new things that are likely to emerge as a result but I am also interested in what you have to say. so please leave a comment if you have one!)

This process actually began even before the first piece of paperwork went in.  We changed our Carnegie Classification a number of years ago to better represent the courses, degree programs and research opportunities we offered.

Now that the status issue is resolved, we are all dealing with the inevitable administrative details that result from  such a change, the first of which is our name.  The Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies (MCIIS) is likely to change to the overwhelmingly favored Institute for Intelligence Studies at Mercyhurst University (IIS-MU) at some point.  The institute's website (mciis.org) will likely get an upgrade at about the same time.

More interesting than the administrative details are some of our longer range initiatives.  The University (going to take me awhile to get used to writing that...) intends to pursue doctorate programs in some of our majors, for example.  Our hope is to be one of the first.  I don't think we want to pursue a PhD type program, however, as there are already a number of PhD programs that would allow a student to focus on the academic aspects of studying intelligence.

Rather, I think we should, like MDs and JDs, offer a professional doctorate (DI? ID? InD?).  The focus of  such a degree, if I had my way, would be on application -- the actual doing of intelligence analysis -- rather than just talking about it.  Specifically, I would like us to provide our doctoral students a chance to become better leaders and managers in addition to gaining increased skills as analysts.

We are obviously some distance from this objective but the conversation about the future direction of the intelligence studies program is starting.  Now is the time to chime in!

What Makes An Easy Question Easy? (DAGGRE.org)

For most of last year I have had the privilege of working with the DAGGRE Team on the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity's (IARPA's) Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) Project.  While all the real scientists have been busy exploring research questions involving Bayesian networks and combinatorial markets, this old soldier has been focusing on more mundane things like "What makes an easy question easy?"

(Note:  If you have not had a chance to check out the DAGGRE.org site and its mind-numbingly cool companion blog, Future Perfect, you should.  Three reasons:  First, it is pretty interesting research that could impact the future of the intel community.  Second, you can actually participate in it.  Third (and maybe most important to many of the readers of this blog),  the DAGGRE team has gone the extra mile to make sure your personal data, etc is secure while participating (check out the FAQ page for all the details)).

As I explained in this post, having some way to evaluate and even rank intelligence reqyuirements according to difficulty is important.  Analysts are supposed to be accurate but if you aren't also evaluating the difficulty of the underlying question, two equally accurate analysts could be miles apart in terms of overall quality.  It would be kind of like saying a little leaguer who hits .400 is as good as a major leaguer hitting .400.

While that distinction is easy to see in baseball, it is much more difficult in intelligence analysis.  Questions come in all shapes and sizes and vary in an enormous number of ways.  There is also a psychological, subjective aspect to it:  Questions that seem tough to some analysts may seem very easy to others.  On its face, it appears difficult if not impossible to come up with a system that can reliably evaluate and categorize questions by difficulty level.

Which is why I want to try.

And I may be making some progress.  I think I have figured out how to spot an "easy" question.  DAGGRE, you see, is a predictive market.  This means that people assign probabilities to the outcomes of questions.  Imagine, for example, I asked if Sarkozy would still be the president of France on 1 JUN 2012 (He is running for re-election in April and May).  Now imagine that you thought the odds of Sarkozy's re-election were 80%.  You could establish your position in the market at that "price" and others would be free to do the same (The Iowa Electronic Markets do this for the US election, by the way).

The market would reward people that were right on 1 JUN and would heavily reward those that were right when lots of others were wrong.  Studies have shown that, on average, these types of markets are pretty good at making these kinds of estimates.

Now, imagine if I asked you to estimate the chances that Sarkozy would still be president of France by 1700 tomorrow?  Sarkozy is not sick (at least I hope he is not) and there are no direct, immediate threats to his presidency.  There is no reason to expect that he would not still be president tomorrow. Likewise, successfully predicting that he will still be in office tomorrow is no sign of great analytic ability.  The question is too easy.

Generalizing this pattern, I think it is worth exploring the idea that "easy" questions are those that start and end their run on a predictive market close to either 0% or 100% probability, do not vary much during the course of that run and, finally, resolve in accordance with their probabilities (i.e. they happen if close to 100% and don't happen if close to 0%.  See the picture that accompanies this post for an idea of what such patterns might look like).  Furthermore, I think that these kinds of questions will see much less trading activity than other ("not easy") questions.

Of course, the problem with this definition is that it only identifies easy questions after the fact, after the question has been resolved.  My hope, however, is that by examining the set of questions that we already know are easy (at least under this definition), that we might be able to see other patterns that will allow us to identify easy questions when they are asked rather than only after they are answered.

Our (I say "our" because I am working on this with one of our superb grad students, Brian Manning) first attempt to get at these patterns will be a simple one -- question length.  We hypothesize that, on average, questions that match the "easy" pattern I described above will be shorter than other questions.  When you think about it, it makes some sense.  After all, "What time is it?" seems like an easier question to answer than "What time is it in Nigeria?" 

Brian has found some research that says that, subjectively, people don't perceive longer questions as necessarily more difficult.  The difference, of course, is that we have a definition of "easy" that is based on objective criteria.  Still, I think it best to start with the easiest possible measurement and then go from there.  Not sure where I will end up or if this will be a dead end but I will keep you posted...