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).
Editing interface on Wikipedia via Wikipedia An interesting paper on the minimalist approach to editing interfaces on Wikipedia. Networked environments, such as wikis, are commonly used to support work, including the collaborative authoring of information and “fact-building.” In networked environments, the activity…
Interesting paper on the social construction of facts on Wikipedia. For years Wikipedia has come to symbolize the potential of Web 2.0 for harnessing the power of mass collaboration and collective intelligence. As wikis continue to develop and move into streams of…
Image via Wikipedia Three Very interesting papers by an interesting team at University of Washington that has done great work in analyzing Wikipedia’s policies. Formalization and Community Investment in Wikipedia’s Regulating Texts: The Role of Essays We presented this poster at the…
A grad student of mine and I were working on a paper when we realized that we have THAT citation management problem on our hands. We needed to cite the specific page number for Raymond’s famous citation “given enough eyeballs, all bugs…
Although not quite the trade-off analysis that it promises, since each scenario starts with different resource allocations, this is a good overview of what things look like in Afghanistan. The most relevant piece of information: there are only 5000 American and Canadian…
A roundup on the University of California fee raises by the New York Times. Although the respondents’ own agendas make the answers at times less than enlightening, they are symptomatic for this day and age. The University of California, which has already…
Image via Wikipedia Armenians come out of their cultural ice age with flamboyance and style (a little tacky, it’s true, but style nonetheless)… YEREVAN, Armenia — Some 20,000 Armenians turned up for the opening of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts last…
Drinking, socializing, a way of life in coed dorms… In the past 30 years, coed college dormitories have gone from rare to routine, with nearly all students who live on campus now sharing housing with members of the opposite sex. But a…
Image via Wikipedia It was great while it lasted… The University of California Board of Regents approved a plan on Thursday to raise undergraduate fees — the equivalent of tuition — 32 percent by next fall, to help make up for steep…
Touchgraph takes a look at your sites and the links between them and it generates a graph like this. What you see here are the sites connecting to this domain, starting from the main page (matei.org). Enjoy…
Image via Wikipedia Some say it’s here, some say it’s not… Augmented reality is embraced by more and more media outlets. Esqiure, a magazine for whose Romanian edition I write from time to time takes the lead. Esquire magazine plans to use…
Image via Wikipedia Business Week takes a critical look at augmented reality applications, pointing the fact that they are as good as the ability of your mobile device to place you very precisely. Related articles by Zemanta Nokia’s Vision of the Future:…
TIME.com: Top Stories via Electric-Vehicle Surge: Where Will Cars Plug In?.
Interesting Journal of Management Development The increasing speed, openness, density and diversity of business raise new challenges related to five fundamental dimensions of management as a system: its actors, concept, context, processes and purpose. This requires developing in managers a set of…
Image by Getty Images via Daylife Berlin, the European palimpsest, gets a face-lift full of political significance. Smack in the middle of eastern Berlin is a grassy lawn measuring nearly five acres. Near it is a huge billboard showing a castle. What…
A smart Russian remix of the famous scifi flick… The Chaplin character alludes to the great comedians appeal behind the Iron Curtain, where he was heavily promoted due to his leftish sympathies. The Marx brothers, for he obvious reasons, never made the…
Image via Wikipedia Google Chrome extensions to come out soon. Watch out firefox. via 15+ great Google Chrome extensions. Related articles by Zemanta A Big Google Chrome Extensions Push Is Imminent (Pictures) (techcrunch.com) Google preparing to launch Chrome Extensions gallery? (downloadsquad.com)
Taking a cue from and fearing the competition of the the recent Wolfram Alpha – Bing – Yahoo alliance Google has probably paid World Bank an arm and a leg to plug their search engine in the newly released WB data API.…
Blood powered on-skin GUIs. Is this really, real? via Digital Tattoo Interface Turns Your Skin Into A Display [This Cyborg Life]. Related articles by Zemanta Tales of Human Upgrades: Magnetic Fingertips [Thiscyborglife] (gizmodo.com)
Just like Gizmodo, I am wondering if this Cirque du Soleil trampoline act is really possible: via I Desperately Want This Video To Be Fake [Image Cache].
Image by Marshall Astor – Food Pornographer via Flickr Kenneth Turan, the LA Times movie critic, gives this absolutely infallible verdict on the 2012 apocalyptic movie, which takes the Mayan calendar vvvvv seriously. (Acording to the Mayans 2012 is the end of…
Image via Wikipedia P2P software used for sharing music is not only a huge problem for copyright holders, but also a gigantic privacy problem for its users. It is an even bigger information security for their employers. Did you know that some…
Image via Wikipedia Dispose of those keyboards and screens… Make the cell phone into a funnel for information…. Mr. Mistry, a 28-year-old research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, demonstrated what one such interface might look like at the…
Image via Wikipedia Here we go again… It turns out the size of the average American’s social circle is smaller today than 20 years ago, as measured by the number of self-reported confidants in a person’s life. Yet contrary to popular opinion,…
Image via Wikipedia Engadget announced earlier in the year significant progress in e-ink technology, currently limited to ridiculously low resolutions (100-200 dpi, compared to hard copy prints, that can go as high as 4000 dpi). The problem is that eve if we…
Image by George L Smyth via Flickr Unsatisfied by e-ink technologies, which replace vibrant paper and wonderful type with murky, mucky grayish backgrounds and pixelated letters? Do you think, just like me, that the convenience/quality trade-off proposed by e-ink is too great…
Image via Wikipedia Face is the mirror of the soul. Or so E A Poe thought, who believed that you can feel what a person thinks just by trying to mimic their facial expression. NYT blogger (and evolutionary psychologist) Olivia Judson takes…
Image via Wikipedia Ever wanted to geocode or georeference (or place on a map) a batch of points on Google maps but never got the nerve to do it via My Maps? Mapalist and Google forms can do the trick for you…
Location Aware application from Loopt to change some things. How much, remains to be seen. “Everybody’s got an eye on the mobile space and location as a central part of the search experience, but I don’t think there is some definitive app,”…
Image via Wikipedia The One New York Times initiative aims to bring the power of quasi open source development to media company that sits on one of the most amazing piles of content in the world. In it’s own words ” You…
Image by Shadi Hijazi via Flickr Google comes closer to proposing a new, improved, exciting charting tool… Google’s next big thing in education might not be Google Wave or Google Apps for education, but a new data-analysis tool they’ve been working on,…
Image via Wikipedia Iran is clearly buying time for a new round of nuclear development and power politics. Things are not looking very rosy. WASHINGTON — Iran told the United Nations nuclear watchdog on Thursday that it would not accept a plan…
Image by luc legay via Flickr The shortest, sweetest summary of the lates Facebook upgrade… The Twitter-like filter-free home page everyone hated a few months back was gone, and the default feed everyone missed so much was back — sort of —…
Image via Wikipedia A distributed system for fighting virus infections. Digital ants could soon be crawling through your computer’s hard drive, but don’t worry, they are there to help. Scientists from Wake Forest University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have created…
Image by Telstar Logistics via Flickr E pluribus unum! As the United States racks up ever higher budget deficits, China has bought ever greater quantities of American debt. Now many observers—including the U.S. and Chinese governments—are concerned about imbalances in the relationship…
[wpaudio http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2009/10/20091026_me_05.mp3?dl=1] Image by sebastien.b via Flickr Anecdotal evidence has been cropping up that video game players live in a world of their own. Even games that replicate real life activities, like guitar hero or the new DJ simulation game, are quite…
Image via Wikipedia NPR Monkey Economics Report Are monkeys just as compelled to value higher rare skills as humans are? Are their actions ruled by the simple logic of supply and demand? Primate ethologist, Dr. Ronald Noe, tested the invisible hand theory…
Image by cocoate.com via Flickr The Economist gives Windows 7 two thumbs up NOT since the launch of Windows 95 more than a decade ago has your correspondent seen such a fuss over a new piece of software. In some cities, people…
“The widespread success of digital reading devices has proven that the world is ready to read books on screens. As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed…
“On Monday, the Internet Archive, which among other things has been working for some time to digitize countless numbers of public domain texts, showed the first public look at its BookServer project, an initiative its dubs, “The future of books.” Internet Archive…
Stanford University physicists have answered the question, and the magic number is: 10^10^16 other realities. via Physicists Calculate Exact Number of Alternate Universes | Popular Science.
Image via Wikipedia Having completed its first phase of digitizing out of print and orphan books. Google is now moving toward enrolling copyright protected authors and books into a new publishing venture. The only question that remains to be asked is what…
New York Times reports that the publishing industry is slowly moving toward more daring e-publishing projects. Even Catch 22 is slated to be published as an e-book… Sixteen months after stepping down as president and chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, Jane…
Poe House and Museum image via Wikipedia Edgar Allan Poe was a notorious imbiber whose death only seemed to confirm to his detractors, which were many, that he was a never do well troublemaker. Seen in retrospect, his accusers appear petty and…
Image by VRider goes Web3D via Flickr Tim Burke, a professor at Swarthmore, defines emergence in these terms… (The article is quite useful for those interested in virtual world and artificial societies. Especially if you heard about Epstein’s work). “Emergence” is a…
The 80/20 rule strikes again and with a vengeance…. When searching online for a new gadget to buy or a movie to rent, many people pay close attention to the number of stars awarded by customer-reviewers on popular websites. But new research…
Is inequality innate in the world or not? How about online w0rlds? I wish to avert a misunderstanding of my research that could arise from the review article, “Artificial Societies and Virtual Violence” by Mark Williams, which appears in the July/August issue…
Summary of Francis Bacon’s New Organon theory of the Four Idols of Knowing In Book I of the New Organon (Aphorisms 39-68), Bacon introduces his famous doctrine of the “idols.” These are characteristic errors, natural tendencies, or defects that beset the mind…
The Syllogistic “Aristotle’s most famous achievement as logician is his theory of inference, traditionally called the syllogistic (though not by Aristotle). That theory is in fact the theory of inferences of a very specific sort: inferences with two premises, each of which…
Image by jurvetson via Flickr Intelligence in Wikipedia “Berners-Lee‘s vision of the Semantic Web is hindered by a chicken-and-egg problem, which can be best solved by a bootstrapping method: creating enough structured data to motivate the development of applications. We believe that…
Image via Wikipedia A tongue in cheek Wired article pokes fun at Wikipedia‘s clumsy way of dealing with its most visible secret: the fact that being the product of many minds it will reflect most of them, sometimes in contradictory terms. I…
Cover via Amazon Are we too connected? Is social networking online changing our behavior? The the worse? USA TODAY believes so…. The changes can be vexing, but there is precedent. The arrival of new and improved media almost always foments behavioral changes.…
Social Media Revolution Did Facebook spread faster than any other medium? Is social media just a fad? Click to watch the video…