Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Assistant Vice President for Partnerships in Strategic Defense Innnovation and Professor of Communication at Purdue University, Director of the FORCES initiative leads research teams that study the relationship between technological and social systems using big data, simulation, and mapping approaches. He published papers and articles in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information Society, National Interest, and Foreign Policy. He is the author or co-editor of several books. The most recent is Structural differentation in social media. He also co-edited Ethical Reasoning in Big Data,Transparency in social media and Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods (Computational Social Sciences) , all three the product of the NSF funded KredibleNet project. Dr. Matei's teaching portfolio includes technology and strategy, online interaction, and digital media analytics classes. A former BBC World Service journalist, his contributions have been published in Esquire and several leading Romanian newspapers. In Romania, he is known for his books Boierii Mintii (The Mind Boyars), Idolii forului (Idols of the forum), and Idei de schimb (Spare ideas).
I thought you would find this interesting: Larry Summers to Leave: First Reactions – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Larry-Summers-to-Leave-First-Reactions-5115 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
Smitten with its rival magazines app success the Economist muses aloud: Even before the device had a name, media executives knew what they wanted from the iPad. Like the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, it could be used to sell digital issues of newspapers…
In two highly readable books, Bob Woodward first embraced in Bush at War then trounced in State of Denial George Bush’s conduct of the war on terror. In a possible attempt to appear as an equal opportunity offender he got access to…
Will ipads replace laptops? Laptop Sales Are Falling: Blame the iPad? – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Laptop-Sales-Are-Falling-Blame-the-iPad-5074 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
Cover via Amazon The Center for New Media and History at George Mason University announced last month the launch of a new Word Press extension, Anthologize, which will bring academic print and online publishing together. The idea is quite simple. Publish a…
After a short period of happy cohabitation, one of our XP netbooks ceased to print on our networked printer connected to a Windows 7 machine. Reason? Unknown? My hunch: like all created things, after a while computers and gizmo grow old, degenerate,…
GOOD QUESTION!: Why Must We Be the Ones to Save Earth From Asteroids? – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Why-Must-We-Be-the-Ones-to-Save-Earth-From-Asteroids-2057 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
BREAKING RANKS: Medical Advances Aren’t Always Good – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Medical-Advances-Arent-Always-Good-2038 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
Cuba Lays Off 500,000: ‘Major Shift’ to a Free Market? – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Cuba-Lays-Off-500000-Major-Shift-to-a-Free-Market-5018 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
Image via Wikipedia Search Takes a Social Turn By JENNA WORTHAM Sites are trying to make search more helpful by showing what your friends – or other people like you – like. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/technology/13search.html?th&emc=th ……………… F.C.C. Likely to Open Airwaves to Wireless By…
Goolge instant search Image by ursonate via Flickr Although the ruler of search, Google seems to lose ground in terms of “stickiness”, amount of time people spend on the site. An interesting question is how will the new Google instant search feature,…
Image via CrunchBase The first historiography of a Wikipedia entry…. James Bridle founded a Web site called Booktwo in September 2006 to “investigate, analyze, catalog and debate the future of literature and the publishing industry.” Over the years the site has been…
Congo River Image by mpondu via Flickr Great NPR story on the only reasonable and cheap means of transportation in Congo: a river barge that resembles Noah’s Ark. The nearly 3,000-mile Congo River is the backbone of one of Africa’s poorest and…
Image via Wikipedia Excellent NY TIMES coverage of the recent incident in the Gulf. We need more reporting like this, careful with nuances and not eager to hype a situation already bade. Environmental groups quickly issued news releases, arguing that the fire…
Y Fu Tuan, one of my favorite thinkers, on our greatest educational challenge… How might we label ourselves in the 21st century? To risk a broad generalization, I say we are either ethnics or globalists. As ethnics, we hold on to certain…
Foreign Policy: It’s way beyond crop circles, blood-red lakes in Iraq, and half-hidden UFOs. Officials from Greece to New York to Switzerland are using the free satellite images to find tax cheats with undeclared swimming pools and illegal pot plantations. Armchair cartographers…
In one of the two new developments, Rice researchers are reporting in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society, that they have succeeded in building reliable small digital switches that could shrink to a significantly smaller scale than is possible…
The Financial Times reports that Google, having bought YouTube a few years back, is now negotiating with studios to “launch a global pay-per-view video service by the end of 2010.” Look out, iTunes. Here’s the analysis from tech bloggers on the move…
I thought you would find this interesting: Americans Shrug (For Now) at Location-Sharing Apps – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Americans-Shrug-For-Now-at-Location-Sharing-Apps-4857 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
An ambitious Social Netwok Analysis site… The World Wide Web (WWW) has changed how humans interact; for some scholars, we now live in the “Age of the Network”. As online populations grow and the quantity and quality of interactions improve with new…
Nothing seems more random to the naked eye than the babble of online exchanges. Are the posting patterns on Wikipedia user pages or the answers offered to Q&A sites ruled by any discernible configurations? Do users engage in predictable posting/answering behaviors? More…
Academic researchers have deployed in the last decade several innovative approaches to studying social networking and via graph and complexity analysis. Here is a sampler of most intriguing papers: 1. Critical mass and willingness to pay for social networks 2.NodeXL: Network Overview,…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University bySorin Adam Matei Web 2.0 and social media core assumptions The popular concepts of social media and Web 2.0 hinge on the assumption that the…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei INTRODUCTION: Mass media has become a research issue during the 1930s and 1940s. This has imprinted it with an early concern with psychological…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Elihu Katz, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Gabriel Tarde have already said that media are profoundly social. Newspapers have been read at breakfast for almost…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University bySorin Adam Matei Of the couple dozen theories that aim to explain how mass media impact society, how many of them are still valid today, when…
Does the old fashioned newsroom still matter? Image via Wikipedia This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Agenda setting theory was proposed in the early 1970s by Maxwell McCombs and…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Media System Dependency Theory Core principles MSD proposes that media and its audiences co-exist in a state of ecological dependency. They establish relationships…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Social Capital Theory proposes that effective social action and the wellbeing of social groups, from the smallest voluntary organization to entire societies, is…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Identity theories and social media What cultural and intellectual forces account for the social and intellectual ethos that fuels the social media revolution?…
Wikipedia, had in July 2010 over 12 million users and 3.5 million articles ( see latest Wikipedia Stats) and was the 4th most visited website on the planet (see latest data from Google’s AdPlanner). It is at the same time a prototypical…
Social entropy theory and analysis applied to communication This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Social entropy theory is derived from Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication and it proposes that…
Albert Bandura, right Image by psicologiautal via Flickr This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Social cognitive theory main tenets Albert Bandura’s (b. 1925) career spans more than 6 decades,…
According to this paper, programs that are most central in the hiring network (in terms of outdegrees or indegrees?), are the most pretigious. The winners are below…. This research examines the prestige of doctoral degree programs in communication based on a network…
Image via Wikipedia The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network Social networks are of interest to researchers in part because they are thought to mediate the flow of information in communities and organizations. Here we study the temporal dynamics…
How do we predict social behavior on social media? Shepperd and Taylor propose Expectancy Theory… The paper is also interesting for the connection it makes between group and personal expectations. I wonder, however, if the authors thought through the consequence of no…
A very interesting paper on calculating critical mass and predicting explosion of interaction on social media sites. Image via Wikipedia Disagreement surrounds a formal definition of ‘critical mass’ and of the economic willingness to pay for membership in a social network. Our…
Image via Wikipedia What is formula for calculating critical mass in social groups of smaller scales? The problem of collective action is that each member of a group wants other members to make necessary sacrifices while he or she “free rides,” reaping…
Walter Alvarez teaches geology at Berkley and his main contribution to the history of science is the theory that the dinosaur era was brought to an end by a giant asteroid that landed on Yucatan peninsula 60 million years ago. The footprint…
This piece, which is available online, has become an instant classic… Billions of people participate in online social activities. Most users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog posts, or viewers of photos. A fraction of users become contributors of…
Marc Smith, cofounder of ConnectedAction and a former Microsoft Research employee, and a group of academics including Ben Shneiderman and Cody Dune have developed a strong competitor to UCINET, the workhorse of social network analysis. The tool rides on top of Excel…
Of Interest… 6th International Digital Curation Conference “Participation and Practice: Growing the Curation Community through the Data Decade” 6 December, 2010 – 8 December, 2010 Chicago Mart Plaza, Chicago Overview Digital curation manages, maintains, preserves, and adds value to digital data throughout…
John Wilbanks Image via Wikipedia At the Microsoft Faculty Summit John Wilbanks from Creative Commons foundation advocated very, very, very hard for better standards and ontologies and for making sure that everyone follows them. He brought up in his support Berners Lee‘s…
Image via Wikipedia The Dataverse Network is an open-source web application supported by Harvard University, which offers a free and flexible framework for dataset citation, curation, and management. It allows researchers to deposit their datasets and to share them with persistent, unique…
I am in Seattle attending the Microsoft Faculty Summit 2010. It is an awesome gathering of leading researchers and scholars from throughout the world, brought together by the trailblazing Microsoft Research unit. The goal is to inform the academic community about Microsoft’s…
An excellent and mercifuly brief introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Communication Krippendorff, Klaus. “Mathematical Theory of Communication”, In Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, S. W. Littlejohn & K. A. Foss (Eds). Los Angeles: Sage, 2009. pp. 614-618.
Spies lived sedate lives http://nyti.ms/a26kkn
MASON is a fast discrete-event multiagent simulation library core in Java, designed to be the foundation for large custom-purpose Java simulations, and also to provide more than enough functionality for many lightweight simulation needs. MASON contains both a model library and an…
Our second 2d book, Idolii forului – Idols of the Forum, came out a week ago in my native country, Romania. I co-edited this Romanian language book with Mona Momescu, a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Mona and I have each contributed…
Cell phones may seem like a distraction when reading, but our latest project, Ubimark books, can now be paired with novels to link readers to digital resources to create ubitour books. Books open our minds, and now we can use technology to…
Over the last few days my project, Ubimark, which turns print books such as Around the Word in 80 Days into user interfaces for the web through the magic of 2d or QR codes, has been covered by a number of very…
Got a giant list of GPS coordinates, want to see them on a map? How about retrieving address data for your coordinates? Below you can quickly take a list of latitude and longitude coordinates and quickly map them as well as retrieve…