Sunday, June 28, 2026 Strategy, technology, media, and social systems

I Think

Sorin Adam Matei

Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.

Author: 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).

Wikis in edcuation

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…

Broadband.gov – by IdeaScale

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…

WordPress moving

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…

President Obama promised a new digital democracy, if we could keep it!

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…

Entropy and Gini: is entropy different from inequality?

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…

In praise of Friday night SciFi programming

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’s papers at xarchiv

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.

Finding Community Structure in Mega-scale Social Networks

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…

Where do power laws come from

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…

Wow: An Algorithm for calculating community structure

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,…

Community structure in directed networks

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…

Maps of random walks on complex networks reveal community structure

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…

Finding community structure in networks using the eigenvectors of matrices

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…

Offdiagonal complexity: measuring network complexity

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…

CAIDA research…

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…

CAIDA : tools

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…

InfoVis CyberInfrastructure- Software

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…

How small are building blocks of complex networks

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…

College Advice, From People Who Have Been There Awhile

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…

My trip to Argentina

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7_nTPxRkvQ[/youtube]

Good butter comes from happy cows, yet happy cows died 3000 years ago in Ireland,

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 becomes more organized, norms activities stricter

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…

Wikitruth Through Wikiorder

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…

Wikipedia in academic studies

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.

Wikipedia contributions, motivations studied by UN University survey

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%…

Will Avatar meet expectations? Cameron is not ready to make a bet yet

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,…

Avatar takes over the world (the trailer, that is)

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

‘Avatar’ fans run through the jungle | Hero Complex | Los Angeles Times

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…

How to create your own Layar. Augmented reality project offers open API.

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…

Asia: An astonishing rebound?

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…

Who is the Joker? Two cartoons test the limits of free speech on the Internet (again)

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…

Encyclopedia of Human thermodynamics

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…

The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship

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 migrate to Google Groups

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…

The power of Maya

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…

Wikitude, the augmented reality browser

Android-supported augmented reality. Wikitude promises a travel guide in each pocket… See clip on next page.

Vinland map real, vikings did indeed find America (maybe)

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…

Editing images online – Top five applications

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…

E-ink + solar power = Digital Billboards in Sahara

Future E-Ink Ads Powered By Solar, Gizmodo.

WikiXRay

Fabulous resource for analyzing Wikipedia data. See what they did with in this paper by Ortega on Wikipedia inequality of contribution.

Wikipedia scholars

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…

Virtual Omaha

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…

What’s new in the world of citation Management?

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…

Get your data out the door!

APE (Ajax Push Engine) :: Real time data streaming APE is a Server for pushing real-time data to Rich Internet Applications, no pull! Data is sent, live, to thousands of clients, in a JavaScript socket fashion. It allows you to write real-time…

Digital Resources for Social Scientists and Humanities Scholars

digitalresearchtools / FrontPage This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or…

Hear Planet – Wikipedia Based Location Aware Application

Lifehacker – HearPlanet is a Free Talking Tour Guide for Your iPhone – Travel iPhone/iPod touch only: Free application HearPlanet plays audio tracks of Wikipedia articles based on points of interest surrounding your current location, turning your iPhone or iPod touch into…

“Readers are friends, not food” new social media rules of behavior at WSJ

Wall Street Journal wants its journalists to be less promiscuous online. The reason is that “openly ‘friending’ sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex”. WSJ is also nervous about leaks and lawsuits, advising its journalists not to “disparage the work of…

The hyper-engineered corporation

Google’s webdesigner Douglas Bowman left the company for Twitter because it found Google’s obsession for pretesting even the smallest design decisions onerous. Google says it will stay the course. Ping – Should Design Be Held Back by a Tyranny of Data? –…

E-pirates target print books

NYT looks into the growing trend of pirated print books. Many of them seem to be rip-offs of existing e-books. Some of them are manually scanned, though. Among the most active sites, Scirbd and Wattpad. With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books…

cloud computing the new ford h…

cloud computing the new ford http://bit.ly/QKl08

Made in China

China makes: Made in China by ~asensi on deviantART

Communication technologies at their funniest

The funniest communication technology related You Tube video clips. My favorite, when books were laptops. Hit the “>” button to see the next clip.

Social Nets: TV Online: Arsena…

Social Nets: TV Online: Arsenal v Man United – Listen LIVE | News Archive …: Build-up, Commentary,.. http://twurl.nl/fnoo53