 |
||
 |
||
|
|
LINK LIST The Reliability of Social Media Sources, An Amazing Technology Roadmap And Reagan's Visual SFARs
I love having friends and alumni that send me interesting links, and this week contained an extraordinary crop! Here are three of the best things that happened across my desktop: 1. How To Verify Social Media Content: We have known for some time how to evaluate online sources for credibility in a general sense (See Dax Norman's thesis and checklist here. Not only is this a brilliant piece of research, it is also the only document of its kind, designed by an intelligence analyst for use by other intelligence analysts). When it comes to understanding how to evaluate social media sources, however, the question becomes much trickier. Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and previously co-directed Harvard's Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. (If you are not familiar with the crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, stop now and go here.) He has had extensive real-world experience with social media sources in the hundreds of uses of the Ushahidi platform in crises worldwide, and he has translated that experience into an outstanding list of hints and tips for evaluating social media (Twitter specifically). While his insights into evaluating social media are born of this experience rather than more rigorous statistical analyses (like Dax's), his findings ring true and certainly operate as an excellent general purpose checklist until the science catches up.  Some of the Ushahidi Deployments 2. Envisioning Emerging Technology For 2012 And Beyond: Through a series of serendipitous accidents, I have worked on a number of projects looking at technology trends. While I normally start with Gartner on these types of questions, I have just added Michael Zappa and his excellent work at Envisioning Technology to my short list of go-to sources. The technology roadmap he has built is awesome. (You can see the compact version below but I strongly recommend you take a look at the interactive version here.)  http://envisioningtech.com/ 3. Ronald Reagan: Intelligence and the End of the Cold War: Finally, I like to emphasize the importance of production skills for my students with a variety of stories about high-level decision makers who preferred their intelligence in "alternative" formats. For example, John F. Kennedy had the President's Intelligence Checklist (PICL). (Analysts who worked on the product were said to work in the "PICL Factory".) Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, liked to see at least some of his intelligence in the form of short videos. Many have speculated that this was because Reagan was an actor and naturally gravitated to film. Whatever his reason, it is an interesting lesson in the importance of producing intelligence. That is, the ability to fully communicate the results of analysis to the decision maker that the intel unit is supporting. You can see the full report here or watch the videos on the CIA's YouTube channel (!). Note: One of the kinds of analytic report writing we teach at Mercyhurst is generically called the Short Form Analytic Report (SFAR, usually pronounced "Ess-Far.)" When this type of report contains more visual elements than written ones, we call it a visual SFAR, hence the title to this post. http://sourcesandmethods.blogspot.com/2011/11/evaluating-reliability-of-social-media.html About the author Kristan J. Wheaton is an assistant professor of intelligence studies at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Warning Solution: Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information Overload and co-author of Structured Analysis of Competing Hypotheses: Theory and Application. He also teaches and provides materials for short courses in structured analysis of competing hypotheses to the U.S. Department of Defense. He can be reached at kwheaton@mercyhurst.edu.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
© 2011 Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals |