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).
FCC Chairman announces Net Neutrality principles on Sept 21 in DC Image by Getty Images via Daylife The Federal Communication Comission has issued today, as promised, a list of principles that in effect will deny the right of any ISP to prioritize…
An Obama campaign promise regarding net neutrality will become reality. The FCC is expected to rule that the largest Internet providers cannot deploy enhanced real time content if these services would meanprioritizing or delaying delivery of some content, such as that of…
An idea launched by Lilly, in our own Indy, makes slow but sure headway and is noticed by The Economist. This is a marketplace of ideas, where any industrial problem will find its maker… InnoCentive: A market for ideas | The Economist:…
Index only the last few posts… This is all Google needs to keep abreast with your blog…
The French blog, too… Here is a sample of one of the top French blogs. How do you say Gizmodo in French? Le Journal du Geek – Feed the Geek Inside: Du 12 au 28 août, nous avons organiser un petit concours…
Estimated Value of Top Blogs Surprisingly Resiliant | UsefulArts.us: 1. + Gawker Media: $170 million. Last year: $150 million. 2. + Huffington Post: $90 million. Last year: $70 million. 3. + The Drudge Report: $48 million. Last year: $10 million. 4. –…
Wikipedia has “hardened” its social structure, a study conducted at Purdue University reveals. After 500 edits, Wikipedia articles become dominated by a small group of editors that control the knowledge production system. This explains why a few percent of Wikipedia users generate…
We like our media in small chunks and diverse, a sort of fruit salad, or so the common wisdom goes. But what adult with a job past 26 years old can handle a thousand loose threads of conversation bombarding him or her…
Twitter says that the content (tweets) belong to you, while the service reserves the right to distribute it freely, including via API applications. Twitter Support :: The Twitter Rules The Twitter Rules Our goal is to provide a service that allows you…
So, what constitutes spamming on Twitter? Here is what Twitter posted on its corporate blog recently regarding the Twitter updated terms of service:
50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom | Smart Teaching: Wikis are an exceptionally useful tool for getting students more involved in curriculum. They’re often appealing and fun for students to use, while at the same time…
The FCC decided to change the way it does business. It has crowdsourced its policy planning process. Well, sort of.. It launched a Digg-like platform (actually a service on demand site, launched by IdeaScalem who wants to do for Digg-like applications what…
How to Move a WordPress Blog From One Domain and Host to Another from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit Moving a blog from one hosting provider to another is not that difficult of a task, but changing…
In May, the Obama administration wrapped up its first major digital democracy initiative. The Citizen’s Briefing Book was produced by collecting data from anyone who cared, had the time, smarts, and technical training to share their policy ideas with the Obama initiative…
ScienceDirect – European Economic Review : Generalized entropy and the measurement of distributional change. Abstract: “The analogy between information theory and income distribution analysis is exploited to derive a number of measures of distributional change. These include not only counterparts of the…
Illustration Wired.com: Leo Espinosa Friday night was for a long time a tv programming slot for nerds. Their monumental attention span could even encompass this time of the day when other people were having fun…
MEJ Newman, one of the most prolific and important researchers in the field of complex networks, has published widely in this field. Here is a list of his papers listed on xarchiv. arXiv.org Search.
Rhia improves upon work done by http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0408187 Community analysis algorithm proposed by Clauset, Newman, and Moore (CNM algorithm) finds community structure in social networks. Unfortunately, CNM algorithm does not scale well and its use is practically limited to networks whose sizes are…
Newman looks at the meaning of power law distributions… When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf’s…
MEJ Newman seems to have not only cracked the tough nut of detecting community structure in large networks but has also written the code to help the research community do it as well… Many kudos…. A. Clauset, M.E.J. Newman and C. Moore,…
Just as the man says, how do you detect communities in networks that are asymetric… We consider the problem of finding communities or modules in directed networks. The most common approach to this problem in the previous literature has been simply to…
Fascinating paper on revealing community structure in networks… Similar to Newman’s work… To comprehend the multipartite organization of large-scale biological and social systems, we introduce a new information theoretic approach that reveals community structure in weighted and directed networks. The method decomposes…
Is this a way of getting at what has become the holly grail of community research, namely detecting structure in any given group? We consider the problem of detecting communities or modules in networks, groups of vertices with a higher-than-average density of…
What is the best way to measure network complexity? Complexity can be defined as presence of a diversity of cliques that are hierarchically connected by a number of central nodes. Thus, the network should have both as many cliques as possible, as…
The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis is dedicated to studying the network structure of the Internet and how it interacts with a variety of factors in shaping our communication processes. Here is an example of such a paper… The worldwide distribution…
Tools, software and a taxonomy of available research and visualization tools made available by The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis. Measurement Taxonomy AutoFocus Beluga cflowd CoralReef iffinder Mantra NeTraMet RTG scamper skitter . Anonymization Tools Topology Tools Workload Tools Performance Tools…
A great tool resource repository for data visualization from our colleagues at Indiana University… This page provides pointers to commonly used data analysis and visualization algorithms. An ‘IVC Software Framework’ was implemented to facilitate the easy integration of diverse software packages and…
Fascinating paper on characterizing complex networks… The conclusion is that really complex networks can be described starting from small building blocks… Network motifs are small building blocks of complex networks, such as gene regulatory networks. The frequent appearance of a motif may…
Op-Ed Contributors – College Advice, From People Who Have Been There Awhile – NYTimes.com Educators give some helpful advice to young adults entering school this fall. The Hunt for a Good TeacherBy STANLEY FISHFind the best teachers and take a writing class.An…
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3,000-year-old butter discovered in Ireland – Discovery.com- msnbc.com 3,000-year-old butter discovered in Ireland Three-foot-long, almost one-foot-wide butter barrel weighs 77 pounds This Iron Age oak barrel was found in Ireland with exceptionally well-preserved butter inside. The contents of the vessel could be…
Wikipedia has become an increasingly organized bureacracy, with rules and norms that are more complex and performance according to studies presented in the last year by Robert Kraut and his students (Taking up the mop, Identifying Future Wikipedian Administrators and Don’t look…
On Wikipedia it matters who you are and how you did it, not what you did. How does large-scale social production coordinate individual behavior to produce public goods? Hardin (1968) denied that the creation of public goods absent markets or the State…
Wikimedia maintains this extensive and valuable list of academic papers dedicated to academic research that focuses on Wikipedia (such as our own Ambiguity and conflict in the Wikipedian knowledge production system Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
At Wikimania I sat on a panel with Ruidiger Glott who presented a paper on the first multilingual survey of Wikipedia contributors which had the full support of Wikimedia, the Foundation that finances Wikipedia. 65% of respondents self-described as readers, and 35%…
How do you follow up a little movie like Titanic? Most directors would probably grab their knees, curl into a fetal ball, and rock back and forth babbling “I’m the king of the world.” But James Cameron is no ordinary director. Granted,…
Sex, animation, buzzed feelings of disembodiment… This is Cameron’s new movie, Avatar, at the half distance between life and imagination… The first reaction is
After screening 20 minutes of his coming sci-fi odyssey “Avatar” at this year’s Comic-Con International and unveiling the trailer for the film on Apple on Thursday, Cameron went above and beyond the call of duty Friday with a free 16-minute sneak peek…
Augmented Reality projects, one of which is Purdue University’s Ubitour (details coming up soon), are all the rage. Mobile devices, such as Iphone and Andorid, are capable with varying degree of success to overlay virtual reality over physical landscapes. Layar has also…
There are timid signs that the Asian economies are coming back to normal, although some doubt China’s overoptimistic statistics. Were the books cooked to make it look good and encourage reinvestment? The four emerging Asian economies which have reported GDP figures for…
Updated 09/19/09 2:23 PM EST: A doctored picture of President Barack Obama depicted as the, shall we say, “surgically” mouth enlarged Joker featured on an imaginary Time magazine cover, has stirred up waves of controversy on the Internet. The picture, distributed through…
Interesting resource… The EoHT wiki home page eoht.info is the central hub and entry portal for the collective beta-stage Encyclopedia of Human Thermodynamics EoHT, launched in December 2007, a small but growing compendium of 1,020+ articles sitemap on the science of human…
Why it takes a world weary European scholar to say it? Despite a lot of chi-chi verbiage about “space” and “spatialization” humanities keep the distance in fact from the true revolution taking place in cartography. see Abstract and paper (requires login) below…
Google Docs Google Groups Catch the Real – Webmonkey Previously, sharing Google Docs and Calendars was limited to two basic options, the entire world (public docs) or individual e-mail addresses added by hand. But what about situations where you want to share…
For some, Maya is that doctrine of Hindu religion that talks about the unbearable illusion of being. Maya is the illusion that what appears to be hard, solid, and real is in fact a fleeting image, a smoky rendition of a more…
Android-supported augmented reality. Wikitude promises a travel guide in each pocket… See clip on next page.
NewsDaily: Vinland Map of America no forgery, expert says The 15th century Vinland Map, the first known map to show part of America before explorer Christopher Columbus landed on the continent, is almost certainly genuine, a Danish expert said Friday. Controversy has…
Some of the most popular online image editing software services. Photoshop beware! Five Best Online Image Editors – Image Editing – Lifehacker. Via Lifehacker Sumo Paint http://www.sumopaint.com/web/ Pixlr http://www.pixlr.com/ Adobe Express https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html Picnik http://www.picnik.com/ Aviary Phoenix http://aviary.com/tools/phoenix The best rated online image…
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Fabulous resource for analyzing Wikipedia data. See what they did with in this paper by Ortega on Wikipedia inequality of contribution.
Aniket Kittur is the author of several very interesting papers about inequality of contribution on Wikipedia. His website hosts a comprehensive list of papers, including one on the rise of bourgeoisie on Wikipedia, which we have used in a number of our…
Map of Omaha Beach German fortifications (blue dropets) laid over the American operational map for June 6, 1944 (misaligned due to Google Maps limitations). Clicking the button “Google Earth” will show the 3d Model of the German fortifications and will correctly align…
A very useful list of citation management tools for the social sciences, humanities crowd. Citation management tools enable researchers to capture bibliographic information about research materials, create bibliographies, add footnotes, and manage research collections. Some citation management tools also make it easy…