Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
When Jeff Bezos announced that he would build a 50,000-satellite space data center, Musk immediately plussed with a million-satellite call. The space cowboy drama aside, the prize is real. Data-in-space may finally give the space economy its first real reason to exist,…
In the digital era, “discourse power” is real power. Disinformation has become a preferred method of confounding the adversary and winning supporters. How does this work at the level of great power competition and conflict? Why is this question relevant today? Here…
A potential favoring factor for the invasion of Ukraine and the threats made of China to occupy Taiwan could be that International trade clusters cut across political-military alliances. In a study I conducted with Nagisha Ishinabe and published in The National Interest…
What can we surmise about China’s intentions in the South China Sea? Although I have no crystal ball, in this National Interest article I offer some hard geographic, military, and economic facts. Analyzing what configurations of power projection and claim China has…
The results of the French elections are in and the two front runners in the polls did indeed come up as predicted by traditional methods. Marine Le Pen and Emanuelle Macron will be the two contenders of the second round of elections.…
What does the social media crystal ball say about the biggest global event of the day, the French presidential campaign? On social media, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon seemed to be the favorites, running neck in neck on Twitter the day before…
Donald Trump’s social media campaign is known for its virulence, but relatively less was said about its virality. Trump had a larger base of followers on Twitter. By the end of the campaign, he had 15 million followers to Hillary Clinton’s 11.1.…
Hillary Clinton did a very good job during the debates, as she was expected to, while Donald Trump had a hard time trying to decide if his open glove style is appropriate or not in the given circumstances (it was not and…
The rhetorical struggle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not only about issues, actions and change, but also about who will ultimately be responsible for everything said. Donald Trump affirms that the agent of change is himself and this is reflected…
Google Trends analysis shows that Donald Trump has been dominating and dominates Google Searches by a large margin. This is a good predictor for public interest and can lead to future changes in intentions to vote. In the last 90 days, the volume of searches…
On the quiet Saturday morning of July 23rd, just after the Republic National Convention, Donald Trump was getting about 7500 Tweets per hour. Hillary somewhere around 5500. The interesting part was that while Hillary got quite a bit of traction from the usual…
Donald Trump rip-roars his way through social media, keeping Hillary Clinton’s Campaign in a tight spot. An average official Trump Facebook page [1] post published after August 1st 2015, when the primary campaigning began, attracts on average a staggering 72,058 likes. An…
I dipped the R cup in the Twitter font of wisdom and here is what I found… For the period April 15-July 16 Trump’s campaign leads Hillary Clintons’ on Twitter by a factor of about 2. Trump’s campaign put out a couple…
Donald Trump has an obsession: Donald Trump. But so does Hillary Clinton. This might give the Donald an extra umpf in the final presidential race. This is one of the conclusions of my analysis of the 2176 tweets put out by the…
The issue if and how much is Trump’s celebrity influenced by a so-called “media obsession” with his persona and ideas has been much discussed during the 2016 nomination campaign. Here are some opinions… The Media’s Not Being Honest About Its Trump Obsession…
On the Super Tuesday (March 1, 2016) Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Bernard Sanders et al. will do the most important battle of the primary season. Two heavyweight communicators, one American (Alex Heffner) and the other French (Joseph Daniel), will discuss…
Hostages, victims of shootout and explosions reported near the Bataclan concert venue, Stade de France in Paris, France… The French police assaulted the concert hall, where the attackers took over a hundred hostages. Terrorist acts resulted in over 60 dead… #FranceUnderAttack Tweets
Paris, France was hit by one of the most horrendous terrorist incidents of the post-2001 era. An ISIS inspired killing squad raked with machine gun fire and maimed and killed with suicide vest explosions several restaurants and a concert venue on November…
View image | gettyimages.com Reuters reports that at least 18 people were killed in shootouts and explosions near a soccer stadium in Paris. This is a developing story. Please return for updated information.
[tminus t=”14-03-2015 21:26:53″/] Today is 3/14/15 and at 9:26:53 the date/time corresponds with the first 10 digits of the famous number. The value is, as it is known, indeterminate, as the diameter of the circle does not fit neatly in its circumference.…
You probably knew that the Internet is inherently unsecure. And you probably knew that 80% of email is spam. But did you know that any appliance that is connected to the net and is running some sort of OS, can be taken…
View image | gettyimages.com At approximately 17:15, January 9, the police assaulted the Dammartin-en-Goële printing shop where the two brothers were holed up. They were both killed and their hostage freed according to AP. At the same time, the police assaulted a…
The two brothers allegedly responsible for the killing of 12 people in a deadly attack against the editorial team of the satyric magazine Charlie Hebdo are holed down and surrounded in a printing plant in Dammartin en Goelle, 25 miles north east…
Dorothea Lange is a wonderful classic photographer just as talented as Ansel Adams. She criss crossed the United States during the 1930s documenting the poverty of the Depression in the rural South and California. Her migrant pictures are the visual companion of Steinbeck’s Fruits…
The preference of some Chinese sites to use numbers over letters in their domain names has something to do, as you might imagine, with the complexity of translating Chinese characters into latin characters. There is, however, a little bit more to it than…
Lethally funny mock-ups of newspaper front pages inspired by the Game of Throne series. Humor and parody at its best. http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/if-the-media-reported-the-events-of-game-of-thrones [amazon template=banner easy&chan=default&asin=0345535529,B00C8CQTJY]
The location of flight MH370 sinking is under dispute, but in the last few days of March 2014 the search focused around an area the size of Alaska about 1400 miles west of Perth, Australia. Yet, despite much debate and hypothesizing, the…
The extent of the ice cap in 2014 was not much larger than the mean for the last 30 years, despite a long, bitter winter in North America. Surface-wise was only 1 standard deviation under the mean for the past 30 years.…
Australian rescue authorities boosted worldwide hopes that MH370 will be eventually found announcing that some debris was identified on FOUR DAYS OLD satellite pictures in an area off the west coast of Australia over Naturaliste Plateau, much further south to the last known…
A credible sighting verified from several sources in Maldive Islands of a large jumbo jet crossing the Indian Ocean at low altitude where no jets usually come might shed a possible light on the ultimate fate of…
A sea debris field at 5°39’08.0″N 98°50’38.0″E north of the tiny granite outcropping Pulau Perak is being examined on the crowdsourced site TomNod as a potential location for the crash of lost flight MH370. The debris field was reported by a Twitter…
The map below and the KMZ file of Lost Flight MH370 , summarize in real time the story of the search and hopefully eventual finding of lost flight MH370. Come back often or bookmark this page to get the latest geographic news. Or…
The disappearance of flight MH370 two hours into its journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 continues to baffle the world. Objects spotted in the water by the Vietnamese navy at the closing of the day on March 9, could…
LATEST UPDATES ON MH370 DISAPPEARANCE KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA – MARCH 09: Malaysian Air Force Chief Tan Ssri Rozali briefs the media about Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on March 9, 2014 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing…
It should be no secret to anyone that Chavez’s populist campaigns ruined the economy by spending money it did not have. Inflation is always the result of spending more than you make. One year ago, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced the death…
While the news flow focuses on what the US or EU leaders did or did not do to prevent the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the crisis suddenly deepened with the Crimean Parliament’s announcement that this autonomous province of Ukraine will join the Russian Federation.…
The great lakes are about the beat the 1973 record of winter time ice coverage. Currently over 91% of lake surface is frozen solid, only 3% under the 1973 record. The record might be beat, however, as the cold pattern might continue…
A balanced view on net neutrality… To make sure consumers benefit, we need to solve the network capacity problem. Yes, we need to ensure broadband providers can’t do something nefarious to kill off new services. But we also need to ensure content…
The brunt of the big winter storm of February 04-08 2014 will fall on upstate New York, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Chicago, northern Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will also be significantly affected. This storm should be watched carefully. The map…
A redditor atrubetskoy cobbled together this map of amount of snow needed to trigger school cancellations. Green – Any amount of snow is reason for school cancellation…. Methodology described here
A new concept, practice capital, which extends the concept of social capital to collaborative projects is proposed in my chapter to the upcoming volume on the research significance of the C-Span Video Archive. I should mention that the archive is hosted in…
One of the most daring attempts to restore the industrial era as a heaven for post-modern architecture. A cement factory was turned by this imaginative architect into a post-post-apocalyptic Hogwarts. The author: Ricardo Bofill. In 1973 Ricardo Bofill found a disused cement…
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…
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…
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…
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”…
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…
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…