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).
As if free mp3 downloading wasn’t aggravation enough for the music industry… Preloaded iPods prompt legal ponderings By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY A blossoming trade in Apple iPods and other digital devices pre-loaded with movies, TV shows and thousands of songs is…
Slate in on the Google-China debacle. A treat! Great Firewall of China By Michael Weiss Posted Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006, at 6:28 PM ET Bloggers are overwhelmingly horrified by Google’s decision to censor search queries in China. They’re also less than thrilled…
The Pixel that Jobs built got a pair of wiskers! FOXNews.com – Business News – Disney to Buy Pixar for $7.4B LOS ANGELES — The Walt Disney Co. (DIS) said Tuesday it is buying longtime partner Pixar Animation Studios Inc. (PIXR) for…
It’s official, in exchange for better acess to the Chinese market Google agrees to censor the searches requested by Chinese users. FOXNews.com – Technology News – China’s Google Search Engine to Be Censored SAN FRANCISCO — Online search engine leader Google Inc.…
Is this a form of business discrimination/monopolistic behavior, or just an attempt to make the Internet a little bit more efficient? But the nation’s largest telephone companies have a new business plan, and if it comes to pass you may one day…
Since none of our guests specializes in policy issues, especially in an international context, I would like to suggest the following story as a subject of online (via this blog) debate. This is one of the several topics I will propose between…
Steve’s Powerpoint presentation can now be found on the web.
I posted the talk on the web. For optimal viewing first download the file (preferrably through a campus computer). The file is very large (110MB), so be patient. Also, the quality of the slides is not very good. I asked Steve to…
A warm “Welcome!” to Steve Jones, who gave us a wonderful intro the the big Whys? related to Communication Technology. I am looking forward to his talk tomorrow, on the impact of New New Communication technologies. As you start posting your stuff…
A piece of news I plucked from the Purdue News Service stream made my heart leap with joy. Two of my Purdue colleagues have won the Microsoft competition for designing the computer of the future. Their design slaughters the desktop computer to…
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 See below…. Sorin… we might consider adding this link about Singularity to our class; H
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Mapping is becoming more and more a web-based killer app. Modern Cartographers Vital in Digital Age – Yahoo! News
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…
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…