An excellent article at Knowledge Is Power about using a blog to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about competitors and manage the spin on news about its rivals while usually reporting positively about your own employer.
Another post about Black PR defines this as distinct from a disinformation campaign.
In 1991, Philip Zimmermann developed an encryption technology known as Pretty Good Privacy. Zimmermann, the CEO of PGP Corp., created ZRTP, a technology for encrypting Internet telephone calls. PGP Corp. has just released Zfone, which is ZRTP-enabled Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software that prevents Internet telephone call wiretapping.
Forbes.com spoke with Zimmermann about why his company created Zfone which he offers to the public for free. The article is interesting because Zimmermann points-out the intelligence value of traffic analysis, which I mentioned in a previous article. Zfone makes it nearly impossible to eavesdrop on a conversation, but it does not prevent an intelligence service or police service from conducting traffic analysis.
VON Magazine also interviewed Zimmermann in its January 2007 edition about issues surrounding wiretapping and VoIP.
Researchers at Purdue University are working with the state of Indiana to develop a system that would use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological “dirty bombs” and nuclear weapons.
Such a system could blanket the nation with millions of cell phones equipped with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material. Because cell phones already contain global positioning locators, the network of phones would serve as a tracking system, said physics professor Ephraim Fischbach. Fischbach is working with Jere Jenkins, director of Purdue’s radiation laboratories within the School of Nuclear Engineering…
Tiny solid-state radiation sensors are commercially available. The detection system would require additional circuitry and would not add significant bulk to portable electronic products, Fischbach said.
The mobile telephone has become a modern-day slave bracelet for so many people, now it might also become a national security appliance.
This is something that makes me think, “why didn’t I think of that?”. I found it on the Sources And Methods blog.
Newsroom101.com. This site has a ton of easy to do exercises to improve your grammar, spelling and punctuation. Designed for journalists (with the AP style in mind) the site is almost just as useful to intelligence analysts who have to learn to write in the concise style of a journalist. I also like the way the exercises are put together. If you get the right answer, the site doesn’t bore you with the details. If you get the wrong answer, however, the site lets you know what you did wrong and why immediately.
An article entitled Stalked by a cell phone: Who’s spying on you? warns of the danger of downloading software to your cell phone, connecting to the Internet from a mobile phone, and the dangers of letting it get out of your sight.
Anybody who writes reports should have some books at hand to learn from, and for reference.
My first and best recommendation is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Then a serious study of The Modern Researcher by Jacques Barzun is a must. Barzun may not be pleasant reading, but he has guided untold graduate students successfully through the theses writing process. If you haven’t noticed, good investigation reporting has a lot in common with academic writing.
The Oxford English Dictionary, in some form, and Fowler’s Modern English Usage are absolutely necessary reference works. Fowler’s sorts out questions of usage. For example, when does one use licence instead of license (the first is a noun, while the second is a verb) or when to use iterate, reiterate, and reiterant.
Three more books make my list of required reading in this area:
An article titled THE BOSS CAN’T WRITE by Philip Quinn, appearing in the Financial Post on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, illustrates the difficulties faced by employees and businesses due to poor literacy skills.
I read an article by Craig Courtice in the National Post entitled The Cult of the Moleskine and it got me a thinkin’. What makes a good notebook? Certainly not stories about famous people using it. A notebook is paper, binding, and a cover. Continue reading ‘Paper Versus Binding & Ink Versus Paper’
LONDON (Reuters) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.
“People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they’re not really sure what they are for,” said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.
If this choice morsel of information is any measure, then it seems people are not quite sure what education is for either.
A style is a set of text formats such as fonts, sizes, text alignment, spacing, etc.. A style can then be used to create text or to format existing text.
Styles should form a hierarchy that makes the report look organised and consistent. MS Word is not a typewriter. For instance, the normal style is the paragraph style. It should be set-up to insert the space before and after the paragaraph. The typist does not insert carriage returns to start a new paragraph.
Every document is based upon a template. A template is a collection of document formatting options upon which a new document is based. A template should not have more than 20 styles.
Templates need to be properly managed throughout the company. The templates provide a consistent reporting format and the text that is frequently repeated in each report. To properly maintain the templates they should reside in only one directory on one server. If a change is made it is made by an authorised person and only one template needs to be altered.
In MS Word, a template ends with .dot as in normal.dot. It is not a document that is used over and over again, all the while collecting style after style, until it causes Word to crash because it is creating corrupted documents.
When you install software it frequently adds features you don’t want. One such feature is loading itself, or some part of itself, at startup. This makes the boot process much too long and unnecessarily ties-up memory resources.
To correct this annoyance click on Start then Run. In the dialog box type msconfig and hit enter. Now select the Start-up tab and uncheck the offending programmes and restart your PC.
You will be confronted by a warning message. Read it carefully. Do not check the box to eliminate it just yet. Got to Start/Run and enter msconfig again. Look at the General tab, you will notice some changes but don’t do anything. Use your PC for a day to be sure everything runs OK and then shut it off normally. When you start it the following day, check the box to eliminate the warning message if everything is working properly.
However, if you experienced problems go to Start/Run and enter msconfig and revise your choices in the Start-up tab or select Normal Stat-up in the General tab.
Everyone who uses MS Office needs two little extras that make writing reports easier.
The first is a Windows Clipboard extender called Ditto. This saves every item copied to the normal clipboard for easy access in any application, MS or not.
The next indispensible programme is a Dictionary and Thesaurus called WordWeb. This is the easiest to use of all the similar programmes I have tried. Just click on a word and open WordWeb from the QuickLaunch toolbar.
The best feature of these two programmes is the cost — they are free.
Most people can write 35 words per minute. However, most students after 1 year of instruction can not write 60 words per minute (wpm) using Gregg or Pitman shorthand. After two years of instruction, half will not reach 80 wpm. Now you know why shorthand was the most frequently failed course and is no longer taught in High School. It is not a matter of shorthand being obsolete, especially for the Investigator or Reporter. It relates to the basic failure of these systems to be easily taught, and more importantly, retained.
A usable system based on the roman alphabet, rather than an obscure and entirely different alphabet, shortens the learning curve. It also lets the student instantly write short forms for the 10 most common English words, which make-up about one quarter of all the words we use. In business correspondence, we normally use only 422 words according to some experts.
An alphabetic system that uses very few symbols, and easily understood rules, should get most people to 80 wpm if it concentrates on the most common words. Such a system may be easily transcribed years later as it will follow certain rules and it uses our normal alphabet. Alphabetic shorthand systems fall back on longhand to define an abbreviation or where clarity is important. These two considerations are critical to any type of Investigator. Investigation notes and notebooks must be accurate, complete, legible, and usable years after the investigation has been completed. The system must also be adaptable to the type of notebooks normally used to record the investigation’s progress. Gregg, Pitman and even Teeline shorthand are far less adaptable to the small notebooks used by Investigators.
Don’t resist learning to write this type of shorthand. Unlike traditional symbol-based shorthand, you won’t fail the course. Failure here only means you will improve your note-taking speed by only two times instead of three. This system won’t make you a court reporter or Hansard recorder, but it will make you a better Investigator.
There are a few shorthand systems like this, but the easiest to use and the least expensive to learn (in time and money) is the Quickhand system. At $25.50 from Wiley in Canada or at Amazon on our Book Page.
Quickhand A Self-Teaching Guide
ISBN: 9780471328872
Author: Grossman, Jeremy
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, New York
Author: Grossman, Jeremy
Publication Date: February 1976
Binding: Paperback
Illustrations: Yes
Pages: 152
Dimensions: 9.96×6.74x.38 in. .61 lbs.
A friend who works for a very security conscious government organization surprised me when he asked why I had a plastic cup on my desk containing half a dozen dice cubes. Everybody knows why you keep dice at your desk, don’t they?
Passwords were the cornerstone of data security. It doesn’t matter if you are signing onto the company LAN, starting your laptop, or receiving email, passwords were required to keep out the thieves and brigands. Well today passwords are obsolete! Today you need a passphrase! Continue reading ‘Information Security is a Roll of the Dice Away’
Thoughts on How Lincoln’s Electric Communications Came to Affect Mine
By Tom Wheeler
I began writing Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails based on the thesis that Abraham Lincoln’s telegrams made him the first online president. As I watched Lincoln’s use of the telegraph evolve and read and re-read his messages I began to discover that I was thinking of his t-mails as I wrote my own emails. Here is how Abraham Lincoln’s t-mails ended up having an effect upon how I use email.
Hierarchy of Communications - Electronic messages were Lincoln’s least preferred means of communicating. First on his hierarchy were direct, in person exchanges. Today, however, the ease of email encourages us to use it as a primary means of communication. Worse still, we use email as a way to avoid personal interaction. Such habits are the exact opposite of Lincoln’s behavior. Lincoln sought face-to-face exchanges. Walking among the government agencies to drop in on one person or another, Lincoln could not only deliver a message, but also hear a reply, see the body language, and engage in dialog. Electronic communications became an important part of Lincoln’s leadership, but only in situations where distance was too great and mail or messenger too slow. I have become more aware that emails are not a substitute for walking down the hall or picking up the phone.
I wish everybody who sends me email would read the rest of this article. LINK
