Mark Your Calendars! US Intelligence Community's Virtual Career Fair 16 March! (ICVIRTUALFAIR.com)

The US National Security Intelligence Community (IC) is about to hold a virtual career fair on 16 March, 2010. Nine of the largest agencies within the US IC will be represented and registration is free and open to anyone (though only US citizens can get jobs in the US IC).

Career opportunities in the following fields will be available:

• Cybersecurity/Information Assurance
• Engineering and Physical Science
• Foreign Languages (Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Mandarin, Pashto, Somali, or Urdu are the top choices)

• Information Technology
• Intelligence Analysis
• Law Enforcement
• Many others (though not specified on the Virtual Career Fair website).

Registration is easy. Just go to the registration page and fill in the blanks (Note: When it asks for "Event Login ID" and "Event Password" those are things that you make up, not things you need to get from the event organizers):

There are some browser and plug-in issues so be sure to click on the Computer Requirements link to check out your system. Also don't rely on the text alone. Make sure you click on the System Check link. For example, the text says Firefox 1.5 and above is supported but when I clicked on the Check System link it told me my Firefox 3.5 system was no good.

According to some of the press releases about the Fair, if you can't make it on the 16th, the site will still be up for 90 days after the event but there won't be any recruiters there to chat with.

ONI's New "Hoo-ahh!" Video, Deconstructing Analysis Techniques, The Geography Of Job Loss And The Future Of Shopping (Link List)

Lot's of interesting stuff crossing my desk this week:

• The Office of Naval Intelligence has a new promotional (i.e. "hoo-ahh) video out. It gives a brief overview of the ONI's new organizational structure and mission. Many people don't think about ONI as an intel career option but they actually do some pretty cool stuff. The video is certainly worth 5 minutes of your time (Note: It takes a few minutes to get started (I don't understand why these guys don't just upload these videos to YouTube...). Also, if you are interested, see it quickly as Matchbox Twenty's lawyers may slap a take-down notice on the ONI for unauthorized use of copyrighted material (not even a music credit, ONI? That was cold...).

• My favorite online design magazine, Johnny Holland, continues its excellent (if slow-motion) series of posts on deconstructing analysis techniques. The current entry focuses on transformation or "the act of taking a set of values from a dataset, processing them in some way (depending on the aims of the research) and arriving at a new set of values with the goal of revealing some aspect of the data from a new perspective." The entire series is very good and well worth the read.

• Visualizing information is a powerful way to communicate analysis. A good example of this is Tip Strategies infographic showing job loss and gain in the US from 2004-2009. It is both stunning and depressing but clearly shows the value of a good visual (Sorry, no embed. You will have to go to the site to see it).

• One of the trends I have been tracking now for a number of years is the growth and influence of virtual worlds and augmented reality. Cisco has recently produced an interesting video (via Kzero) that explores the future of shopping (you can see the video below). It sounds mundane but the underlying technical implications are pretty significant to intelligence and become doubly so when you realize that this world is just around the corner.

Interesting Vision Of A Mixed Reality World Courtesy Of MS (YouTube)

Johnny Holland is a pretty cool and very well-written online design magazine. They were the first (that I saw) to pick up on this new vision of a mixed reality courtesy of Microsoft.



I spent a good bit of time last year looking into virtual worlds and thinking about their future. I had a lot of help, of course, from some of the brightest people I know, but, in the end, I came away less convinced that we are about to insert ourselves into the Metaverse than we are headed towards a mixed reality future.

In this vision, lightweight, transparent and mobile devices allow the user to project "overlays" onto the real world in real time. The net effect is a sort of heads-up display that will allow us to optimize our attention. This MS video gives an idea of how this might impact the way we do ordinary activities in a mixed reality world.

Imagine The Intelligence Issues In THIS Technical Environment... (Microsoft via KZero)

Microsoft has just released (and KZero has compiled) a series of videos that imagines a largely visual, computer augmented version of reality as the future of work (See below for the "montage" video from the series). This vision is an outgrowth of another concept, ubiquitous computing, that has been around for some time now.



Critical to the implementation of this vision are a few key technologies. 4G wireless is the most obvious one, in my mind. Without high speed wireless data pipes, none of this visual, interactive stuff gets off the ground. Don't get me wrong, its coming (WiMax and LTE look to be the most obvious candidates for bringing it to us), but it won't be everywhere overnight and it won't be cheap at first.

Another critical technology is batteries. Battery power improvements have not been able to keep up with improvements in processing power. Even if the batteries have the power, they also have to be light so they can work in the mobile devices in these videos.

The display technology is well on its way already. The clunky head-mounted display in the future of manufacturing video in this series are likely to soon be replaced by something like the Vuzix Wrap 920AV (coming out in the fall).

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>None of this technology is that far off, either. Likewise, the intelligence challenges inherent in even one of these technological changes are obviously immense. I have started to ask myself -- almost daily -- "What am I doing to prepare my students for this type of environment?"



(Side Note: I have been playing around with the new Wikipedia feature that allows you to create a "book" out of select Wikipedia articles. To demonstrate this capability, I have taken all of the Wikipedia articles referenced in this post and compiled them into a single "supplement" to this post. You can download this supplement from Wikipedia or directly in PDF format. You can even get the supplement printed, bound and sent to you. The function can work with any MediaWiki product. Very, very cool!)

See The First Open Source Intelligence Brief In A Virtual World! (JustLeapIn.com)

About a week ago, I wrote about the Visual Short Form Analytic Report exercise I run in my intelligence communications class each year. I got a ton of interesting and creative projects this time but two of my students attempted to use the web-based, virtual world construction kit JustLeapIn.com to complete their projects and the results are pretty cool.

One of the worlds got trashed (the whole service is still in beta...) but I will try to show it to you if we get it back up. One, however, by Brian Gabriel, survived and is a quite clever take on the typical intel briefing.

To see what he has done, you will need a broadband connection and will have to load the JustLeapIn plug-in (it takes no time and is no more onerous on system resources than any other plug-in you are currently using). Once you have the plug-in installed you should be able to access the "briefing room" in the window below. You can also see his "research lab", another room that is adjacent, in cyberspace terms, to the briefing room. If there are other people there you can also chat with them (though you can only see them if you have registered with JustLeapIn and created an avatar).



Moving around is easy. The arrow keys control the movement while you can zoom in on an object by double-clicking on it. Hold both mouse keys down and move the mouse to look around without changing position. To get the movie to work (Yep, Brian made a movie too. Can't have a briefing room without a briefing...), zoom in on it and then single click to get it started.

Brian built this on his own, with no training in either the JustLeapIn program or in making movies using Windows Movie Maker. He did it all (including the research for the brief) in about a week. For sophisticated inhabitants of virtual worlds, this is going to seem pretty straightforward -- for the rest of us, it should be eye-opening.

For those of you asking, "What is the briefing about?" Who cares! This is history!

Update: I am continuing to slowly post bits and pieces of my paper on evaluating intel. The most recent post is here (with links to the previous posts). I will be wrapping it up sometime this week.