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).
A gorgeous visualization of the seasonal changes in land cover throughout the northern hemisphere via John Nelson (hat tip, io9.com) Here’s a view looking at one year of seasonal transformations on Earth. Made possible by the tremendous folks of the NASA Visible…
State of the art research and development on online collaborative technologies. An excellent recent summary: We review a representative selection of systems that support the management of collaborative learning interaction, and characterize them within a simple classification framework. The framework distinguishes between…
What is known (and unknown) about computer supported collaborative learning? This chapter summarizes two decades of research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). We first review the key idea that has emerged, namely the fact that collaboration among peers can be “designed”,…
An article about group design and selection collaborative learning. This study investigates whether instructor-formed heterogeneous groups produce a more effective CL environment than student self-selected groups by measuring individual academic performance and perceptions. Results indicate the presence of…
An absolutely fascinating article on how leaders modulate and stimulate learning in online environments. If fits in nicely with the Jigsaw model of teaching and learning. The growth of online learning has exposed fundamental gaps in our knowledge, both theoretical and pragmatic.…
Open Source Software projects that grow strong and well are associated with strong core developer groups, active peripheral communication and high communication interactivity, and external testing groups. In effect, leaders and openness to outside world are the key to success. They are…
An older study by Kumar et al. looking at Flickr and Yahoo 360 noticed not only the typical 80/20 distribution of connections, but also the social importance of the people in the top 20%. These individuals are the “linkers,” the ones that…
Snow on Christmas Day? Only if you live north of Indianapolis, or better yet, Chicago… via Will Your City See Snow on December 25th?.
Suborbital tourism, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few minutes of levitation, is a definite waste of money. The experience is giddy, yet inconsequential, since the tourist does not get anything he or she would not get from a…
The great weakness of location aware mobile apps is precision and location relevance. Mobile apps that are supposed to push to you info about the place you are at rely on GPS signals to pull in information. Even when very precise, they…
Dorris Lessig, once a Nobel Prize laureate, died today leaving behind a passion for exploding myths, especially her own. A former Communist, until 1956, she confessed in 2008: Communists, she now believes, are ‘murderers with a clear conscience’. But it took her…
Best Spots to View a Cape Canaveral Launch Viewing a space rocket launch is a sight never to be forgotten any human should watch at least once in their lifetimes. The launch pads of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station are located next…
An interesting paper on social network of interaction in raw texts… Luo Si might be intrigued by this… This paper introduces the concept of semantic organizing processes as a means of inferring theoretically meaningful behavior from the observation of raw text. Semantic…
Justin Jones: WordPress Security or Why Google Says You Shouldn’t Visit My Church | WordPress.tv.
Crowdsourcing and social media trust emerged to be the most Twitter-discussed topics related to the second Kredible Net workshop on Trust, Authority, and Credibility in social media, which I co-organized at Stanford University. A NodeXL analysis also suggests that the conversation was carried…
On October 18, 2013 I co-organized a workshop in collaboration with MediaX (Martha Russell) and Social Media Research Foundation (Marc Smith) on Trust, Authority, and Credibility at IRISS, on the Stanford campus, in Palo Alto. My co-PIs on the NSF grant that…
Self check-out machines are slower than check out clerks and many think that the race against robots is not lost. Yet, the race is not humans vs. robots, but customers vs. corporations. The argument ignores a simple thing: slower check out “robots”…
? Google and NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab – YouTube. What is Quantum Computing? According to this Google Video Clip, it is computing that relies on the idea that there are multiple universes in which things can exist simultaneously, thus, we can…
Algae-like biological entities were found in outer space in July 2013 by Sheffield University researchers, who collected the little critters on sterile studs of a balloon launched not far from Liverpool, UK. Researchers believe the entities did not originate on Earth. Likely…
Entropy theory used to decipher complexity of animal communication…. Information Theory Reveals Size of Whale and Dolphin Communication Repertoires | MIT Technology Review.
The West Point Group on Network Science proposes a new method for determining the minimum number and the profile of the people in a network that need to be “seeded” with a message such that the message would become viral. In…
Given the current trends, little prince William Jr (until will be named) will have to wait a loooooong time to become king http://www.economist.com/node/21582186?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/dc/kinginwaiting
In the context of the Snowden and Prism scandal, Google released a transparency report, which discloses the number of judicial requests for disclosing information about Google service users by country over a period of three years. Data has been released in the…
According to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency (NSA) leaker, the US government has recruited several major Internet corporations, especially Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, to help it harvest emails, videos, and web traffic from unsuspecting US and foreign citizens through…
LEARN MORE ABOUT NSA, SNOWDEN’s FORMER EMPLOYER The Secret Sentry is an extraordinary book, providing much more information about the activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) then was previously available. Some people will know that the NSA history unit has recently…
Not a billionaire, yet enjoying the limelight… Married for the third time, now to a Londoner, Jimmy Wales enjoys life among the glitterati of the world. A very entertaining and at times informative profile in the New York Times… High-minded or not,…
The Supreme Court decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, rested on the idea that in certain situations states know best. Supreme Court strikes down Defense of Marriage…
CNN announces that as the sales of barnes and Noble ereaders tumbled, the company reconsiders its strategy. Barnes & Noble is starting to have second thoughts about the Nook. After sales of the e-reader and tablet line fell 34% in the company’s…
Mr. Snowden, the former Booz Allen employee and NSA contractor who has released details about a classified data management program has left Hong Kong for Moscow with help from Wikileaks, aiming to take refuge in Ecuador, under the wing of the leftist…
According to Voice of America: “After only two days of voting, Roman Catholic cardinals elected Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the new pope to lead the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. He has chosen the name Francis and is the first pope from…
A method of monitoring copyright infringing P2P traffic meant to notify users in real time that the content they are viewing has been uploaded online illegally has been implemented by five of the most important ISPs in the United States: ATT, Verizon,…
A team of British medieval archaeologists from University of Leicester goaded by a member of the Richard III Society has uncovered the skeletal remains of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England, who was killed at Bosworth and buried in the Grey Friars church…
At approximately 13:15 local time on 1 February 2013, a suicide bomber detonated a bomb at a side entrance to the United States embassy in the Turkish capital, Ankara, killing…
Perusing the Iraqi Sigact files acquired by Wikileaks, I found much to my surprise not only that WMD were found in Iraq, but that there were used at least several times on the battlefield. These typically involved Chemical Improvised Explosive Devices made of 150/2/5…
Several Western workers were taken hostage in Algeria by Islamists, at the Tigantourine gas plant facility raising the specter of the a regional war with Al-Qaeda in Maghred, which seems to be behind the attack. The leader of the movement is Mokhtar Belmokhtar,…
For many moons Facebook has been denying its digital sharecroppers to access all at once the capital that they have brought to the site: their friend list. If you want to send an invitation about a page or event to your entire…
A simple tutorial on how to generate the code needed to embed a Facebook Fan Page Like Widget into your website. The example is customized for a WordPress based side, Kidnect.us. For other sites, simply dump…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Cultivation theory suggests that heavy television exposure generates a world of ideas and mental content that is homogeneous and biased toward “reality” as…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Can social media increase the effect of undesirable social communication processes, such as the echo chamber or spiral of silence?…
As Hurricane Sandy started pummeling New Jersey shore, it is worth looking again at this map, published by The New York City Office for emergency Management, which indicates what New York City are most prone to flooding. The map displays in:…
The black line represents the probable path of the “eye” of the storm, as provided by NOAA. The image below the map represents the probable “impact cone” of the hurricane, where winds will be strong and water surges high or rain intense.…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University bySorin Adam Matei Knowledge gap hypothesis proposes that more information does not always mean a better informed public, or at least that not all members of…
A notable paper about Wikipedia versions and interactions across linguistic boundaries Wikipedia has become one of the primary encyclopaedic in- formation repositories on the World Wide Web. It started in 2001 with a single edition in the English language and has since…
The relative popularity of the contenders in the 2012 US Presidential campaign can be measured not only by traditional polling methods, but also by the buzz the contestants create online and in social media. One efficient tool is Google Trends, which indicates…
Note: This post and the charts will be updated throughout the evening. Come back often for more recent details. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were relatively close in number of Google News searches, which is an indicator of social reach on online…
It’s official: The National Science Foundation hereby awards a grant of $179,594 to Purdue University for support of the project “KredibleNet – Building a research community and proposing a research agenda for the study and modeling of reputation and authority across informal…
io9 makes fun of some awesome, albeit non-standard, Eastern European Sci-Fi posters from the 1970s and 1980s. Some of them, especially the Polish ones, are truly artistic… They were produced by Polish or Czech graphic artists of the first rank who were…
This article, which discusses the Ringelmann effect (the larger the team, the smaller the individual effort), dovetails very nicely with our own work on Visible Effort. In fact, our work is a variation on the Köhler effect: top team collaborators try harder as…
What is computational social science? It is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of vast, intact social networks and “big data” projects made possible by social media. Nature synthesizes the latest advances in this review article… Our own contributions in mining Wikipedia to decipher…
Neil Armstrong died on August 25 of heart failure following surgery. A former military pilot, he landed the moon landing module with only 16 seconds of fuel left. A Purdue undergraduate student (as was the last man on the moon, ) and…
Mars Rover Curiosity has landed at 4.59S / 137.44 E coordinates, in Gale crater, not far from a ridge, on a smooth flat plain. It landed just like it was expected within an elipsis just a few kilometers wide. This photograph released…
The Olympics bring together people from around the globe and sometimes it ends in love. That’s what happened to Katy and Matt Emmons, both Olympic rifle shooters who met at the 2004 Athens Games. Matt Emmons talks about the Olympic love story…
Microsoft Surface tablet prices swing widely between $599 and $1000… Microsoft can’t realistically sell it over $999 and in fact needs to go under, somewhere around $499… More At the Surface unveiling, Microsoft announced that the tablets would be “priced competitively” with…