Mar
5
Mosaic Method and SOCMINT
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
The network makes writing more accessible, in that it reduces the barriers to acquisition while similarly diminishing the challenges to contributions. This is why I am celebrating three new books by old friends already this year. Jim McGinty started it with a powerful drama called “Right to Kill; A Brooklyn Tale” (read my review on Amazon). Myer Kutz followed, turning away from heavyweight tomes on materials science and engineering to contribute “In the Grip”, a clever psychodrama with a twist that gave me real pleasure crossing the Atlantic Order these on Amazon! But the book I will put on the shelf and value long after the first two have become TV scripts and earnt their authors untold millions comes from Alfred Rolington (former CEO of Jane’s Publishing and Oxford Analytica) who will never get rich with “Strategic Intelligence for the Twenty First Century: The Mosaic Method” (Oxford University Press, 2013) but who fills a real gap for professionals in this field. Having always assumed that the intelligence community knew more than the rest of us and been disappointed, I see now why they knew less, and why a new way of viewing strategic intelligence is vitally necessary.
Have you read anything about defense intelligence since the great wave of books about Bletchley Park that suggested that any defense intelligence agency anywhere knew enough about the present, let alone the future, to effectively suggest what might happen next? Alfred quotes Christopher Andrew, the Cambridge historian who is the acknowledged authority here to great effect, and I would add a further rider: Andrew’s big MI5 book is depressing on several levels, but one is the reflection that it prompts that the strategic intelligence operatives employed on both sides of the Atlantic were either not the sharpest knives in the box, or were so constrained by the sclerotic selection of pre-ordained intelligence methodologies available to them that they could only report on the views that they were able to take of the scenery, not the whole panorama.
Alfred’s analysis of current working methods in intelligence services bears reading by anyone who thinks that business intelligence is very much better. Why didn’t we predict the Arab Spring? Because we were not reading the blogs and the social media and the network unrest, not only in the countries concerned, but, more importantly, in the Arabic-speaking world as a whole. The answer here is the Mosaic Method – Big Data analytics for the defense industry – which looks at both historical and personal perspectives over time. Being able to to search vast tracts of data to present the evolving views of representative individuals, to see the intelligence picture through the eyes of the other side or the several concerned parties, becomes a vital extra component alongside the very straight-jacketed and traditional methodologies currently used.
So my surprise here was the relatively unsophisticated nature of much defense intelligence work. Helpful techniques which would drive a predictive analysis approach are already widely deployed in industry. I reflect that Lexis Seisint (clue in the last 3 letters) was originally deployed in the Department of Homeland Securities, and that Thomson Reuters’ ClearForest was passed through the fence by the the Israeli defense Agency to allow it to be exploited commercially. In addition few major Big Data software players – Palantir would be a critical example – do not have a large slug of defense related expenditure in their growth graphs.
So our conclusion must be that while huge amounts of data are gathered and sifted, the ability to construct predictive analysis from them is in its infancy. Alfred remarks that SOCMINT, for social media intelligence, is a relatively new coinage. My first thought was that inadequate intelligence might be conducive to world peace, but on reflection I share Alfred’s view that an overhaul is needed, and one which acknowledges that we are living in a networked world. If McDonald’s can be expected by their shareholders to be able to predict from blogs and social media amidst the firestorm on obesity when the optimum point arrives to launch the salt/fat/sugar free VeggieBurger, then we should as mature nations be able to predict the Arab Spring.
And to do that we need to be watching the right things. I respond very much to Alfred’s suggestion that we are not looking at the right countries – BRICS are important, but it may be yet more important to monitor and know more than we do about Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iran (just look at the demographics) or Egypt. Very large countries with high proportions of their populations under the age of 21. They are like Europe in the Fifteenth century. Which leads to the other thing that I like about this book – it at least discusses the primacy of history for prediction. There is a class of intellectual dangerously roaming our universities who seem to believe that history began with Vin Cerf or Bob Kahn or even Tim Berners Lee. The truth is, as I see it, the exact opposite. Because we are moving into the unknown space of a networked society, we need to know more not less about how that society may react to change. Alfred reminds us, in his section on the Dark Web and elsewhere, that we have not yet fully explored what we refer to as the Web. This is the beginning of a story, not an ending.
Meanwhile, the OUP series is to be extended to cover cyber-security and cybercrime and Alfred has been blogging about this on the OUP blog: http://blog.oup.com/2013/02/cyber-attacks/
Here again is a critical area of intelligence, and reading this blog I reflected that by attacking Iranian nuclear installations with trojans the West may, as it has so often, be providing knowledge (in cracking cyber-attacks) which may one day be used against them. Like supplying training and guns to Saddam Hussein? Whatever the outcome, the importance of the subject matter – especially to those of us working on peaceful economic applications – cannot be ignored.
Mar
5
MOOCs Mood
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
I have been rumbling silently about MOOCs for a long time, but it was only when I read a report on the Domain of One’s Own experiments that I realised what it was about Massive Open Online Courses that gave me a sense of disquiet. MOOCs have had huge publicity in the last six months, and as always we seem to be convinced that a single initiative is going to Save education / universities / educational content / publishing / Life on Earth. Yet clearly not all MOOCs are alike. And their shooting to prominence is no accident. If you look up the history then you find that you can relate them to Buckminster Fuller, Douglas Engelbart, the Khan Academy, and a group of Canadian educators (I am now a Canadian Nationalist by Marriage, so underline with pride that the term was created by a faculty member at the University of Prince Edward Island!).
But I cannot claim much else. A whole raft of MOOCs are simply instructional materials online presented much as the Open University did in the UK from the 1960s and its South African equivalent from a decade earlier. OK, techniques have changed a bit and Instructional design has improved a s a workflow model, but this is essentially distance learning as of old. Course members have no connection with each other and while I am delighted to see distance learning updated and to see it re-promoted I am at a loss to find a revolution in what many major universities, and people like Udacity and Coursera, are offering. It is good, in a networked world, to see the internet used as a delivery mechanism, but the pattern of development in a networked society has been for the network to change the way we do things, as well as deliver it more effectively.
We are on safer ground, I feel, when we look at so-called “connectivist” models around MOOCs. Cast your mind back to those early network diagrams, and move away from star network models and one to many thinking. Long term network impact comes when everyone is connected to everyone equally, and in a MOOCs environment this pre-supposes that all learners and instructors are equally so connected. Elsewhere we have learnt about the powerful nature of educational change through collaboration in small groups – as a class or a project group. We know that groupwork styles are no bar to effective assessment, and that for many they speed learning processes. And we know that what we desire are learning outcomes that are reliable and certificated, not the importation of real world learning environments into the network for the sake of it. I see us then as re-iterating the break-out from the school/classroom nexus at very many levels. Second Life was clearly one attempt: in true network fashion it has ceased to be a fad, is being re-absorbed, and virtual reality learning will come back again, perhaps alongside connectivist MOOCs, in a new synthesis before long.
But for all of this to happen something must happen at the learner end of things At present learners have no way of managing their educational experiences online, synthesizing their learning, keeping their own record of what content impacted with them and constantly collecting and reframing successful knowledge breakthroughs. Well, its all on a hard disk somewhere, but it is not educationally or network portable. Just as the Electronic Lab Notebook, as a Cloud service, and developments like Mendeley and ReadCube, will emerge as a vital researcher tools for both productivity and compliance purposes, so the Lifelong Learning Portal will remind you of what suddenly made Pythagoras clear to you, that you can always rehearse that key video on the Theory of Relativity, that the papers you have written and the certificates you hold can be auto-matched with job requirements, that you can allow limited access to recruiters seeking to match job needs, that your qualifications open up these opportunities for you in terms of more specialized education , and that whenever you learn you are sitting next to someone who can help you – as you help them.
So far I have seen nothing quite like this (and may never!) but I was very intrigued by the work of the faculty at Mary Washington University (http://bavatuesdays.com/domain-of-ones-own-faculty-initiative/) who are working on creating a Domain of One’s Own development. So far this seems to be a faculty-only initiative, and so far it is as much about faculty awareness of the need to place themselves in the network as anything else. But I liked the enthusiasm and the phased development of the faculty immersion – an important reminder that while the network nature of our society and economy is what sustains us, there is still the possibility for whole cadres and classes of people to imagine that their daily lives are not network-orientated – and, amazingly, educationalists have been less network orientated than many others. Certainly their students!
« go back — keep looking »