Saturday, June 27, 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).

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive — http://www.archive.org/ , including the WayBackMachine, is a site to behold. Check out their movie section… Sorin

Howard’s input on the Kurzweil singularity issue

Howard’s input on the Kurzweil singularity issue See below…. Sorin… we might consider adding this link about Singularity to our class;  H

Bloggers like us…

I am listing here, for all to visit and for myself for future reference, a number of blogs who seem to be concerned with the same kinds of issues as the ones we will discuss on this blog… Briefhistory Discourse.net The End…

Ray Kurzweil Interview

Some of you may know Ray Kurweil‘s work. He’s most famous for his invention of speech recognition machines, as well as authoring the book “The Age of Spiritual Machines”. He recently released a new book: “The Singularity is Near” which develops the…

The Silicon Valley Templars

The Economist remarks on the religious dimension of the Google project and leaves us pondering about the importance of irrational ideals in moving technology ahead (a topic in dire need of studying and discussion). One visitor to the company’s “Googleplex” in Silicon…

Court Dismisses Yahoo Free Speech Suit – Yahoo! News

The potential ground-breaking lawsuit France vs. Yahoo! will soldier on in the American justice system for an undetermined period of time. After the French courts imposed a 15 million dollar fine on Yahoo! for not taking down Nazi paraphernalia from a US-based…

You will be able to have a PC and a Mac on the same machine (but not yet)

says Engadget No XP on Intel Macs, but Vista is good to go – Engadget If you’ve been counting on being able to run Windows on those new Intel-based Macs, Apple’s not about to make it easy for you — at least…

A Mac/PC desktop

Apple’s switch to Intel chips raises the possibility of running both Mac OS X (the mac operating system) and Windows on the same computer. Basically you can choose, at boot up, what do you want your computer to be today, a Mac…

Connectedness: The Economy of Prestige

On my way to work I listened to Menand’s (The New Yorker) review of a new and hip book, the Economy of prestige, about literary prizes. It discusses the mechanisms by which fame is created and propagated (literary awards are the negative…

Writing Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace (Alertbox)

Nielsen made the point a while back (1996) that writing on the web should be chunky, a thing that is generally known, but he added, a thing we are only dimly aware of, that the inverted pyramid convention still applies to this…

“amazoning the news”

The web is for stories, says Hypergene, but not for individuals stories. It is for networked stories. They propose an “Amazon-style” storytelling process, where the articles are embedded in the flow of similar stories that surround them and are displayed according to…

Sony Reader targets book lovers

Did Sony really find the holly grail of e-publishing? We’ve been hearing of e-ink for some time, now Sony launces a paperback size reading tablet that uses e-ink as underlying technology (basically a reconfigurable plastic sheet with tiny balls embedded in it,…

Perpetuum Mobile

The never-stopping wheel of commerce and the media hunger for stories: a couple the gnostic snake Ouroboros, eternally eating its own tail, would perfectly symbolize. Take young brit Alex Tew (21), just about to start college, pondering how to make a few…

Ubuntu!

After my third attempt in the last three years and a day wasted on scouring the web forums, UBUNTU rules. I installed the latest addition to the Linux universe on my personal desktop. Despite a harebrained installation glitch (you are asked to…

Semi-Bogus Tech Trends to Watch in 2006 – Yahoo! News

It is for visions like some of those found in this article (see excerpt below) that “I Think” deserves a spot under the sun. The article, syndicated by Yahoo!, and originally published by Extreme Tech, makes in its first prediction (we want…

Modern Cartographers Vital in Digital Age – Yahoo! News

Mapping is becoming more and more a web-based killer app. Modern Cartographers Vital in Digital Age – Yahoo! News

The buzz exchange

In the context of our generalized enthusiasm for prediction markets, Yahoo! has been running for some time a Buzz Game. Essentially a fame stock exchange for communication technologies, players are allowed to invest 10,000 virtual dollars in the fates and fortunes of…

The magic of experiments

John Henry makes the very persuasive point that magic thinking is at the very core of the modern experimental method. Francis Bacon, the inventor of the experimental and inductive methods was seriously committed to a research program inspired by magic. In the…