Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Foreign Policy: It’s way beyond crop circles, blood-red lakes in Iraq, and half-hidden UFOs. Officials from Greece to New York to Switzerland are using the free satellite images to find tax cheats with undeclared swimming pools and illegal pot plantations. Armchair cartographers…
Of Interest… 6th International Digital Curation Conference “Participation and Practice: Growing the Curation Community through the Data Decade” 6 December, 2010 – 8 December, 2010 Chicago Mart Plaza, Chicago Overview Digital curation manages, maintains, preserves, and adds value to digital data throughout…
Spies lived sedate lives http://nyti.ms/a26kkn
Our second 2d book, Idolii forului – Idols of the Forum, came out a week ago in my native country, Romania. I co-edited this Romanian language book with Mona Momescu, a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Mona and I have each contributed…
Cell phones may seem like a distraction when reading, but our latest project, Ubimark books, can now be paired with novels to link readers to digital resources to create ubitour books. Books open our minds, and now we can use technology to…
Over the last few days my project, Ubimark, which turns print books such as Around the Word in 80 Days into user interfaces for the web through the magic of 2d or QR codes, has been covered by a number of very…
Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video via Flickr The end of a planet captured by Hubble… The hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy may also be its shortest-lived world. The doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star,…
Image via Wikipedia Longer range M-1 style rifles to return to the Afghan battlefield? The U.S. military’s workhorse rifle — used in battle for the last 40 years — is proving less effective in Afghanistan against the Taliban’s more primitive but longer…
J Craig Venter Image via Wikipedia Designer cell created on computer is launched. One day we will design cells for steak and grafts alike… The genome pioneer J. Craig Venter has taken another step in his quest to create synthetic life, by…
My cell phone suddenly rang during a meeting with a grad student the other day. The device is set to a traditional, 1940s plain ring. It is the loudest I could find. I am either getting old and hard of hearing or…
World War 3 will probably be televised. Most recruits will watch it from the comfort of their coaches or prison cots, too fat or in trouble with the law to serve. The latest Army statistics show a stunning 75 percent of military-age…
From the trenches of undergrad education: LSU veteran professor suspended for tough grading policy. Dominique G. Homberger won’t apologize for setting high expectations for her students. The biology professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge gives brief quizzes at the beginning…
China tightens control over social media, promotes “clean” sites, including official party newspaper site. Chinese officials consider tools like social networking, microblogging and video-sharing sites a major vulnerability. In the past year, they have been forced to block access in China of…
An Irish judge asks legal systems everywhere to implement intellectual laws and to reject online piracy. He reprimands those who believe that cyberspace is an autonomous territory with its own copyright laws. “The Internet is only a means of communication,” he wrote.…
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski (R) te… Image by Getty Images via Daylife The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down a recent FCC regulation that would’ve forced Internet providers to treat all Internet traffic, including…
A new logo for the Italian Justice System? Image via Wikipedia An Italian court decided that anyone who does anything, anywhere in the world that an Italian court can interpret as an infringement of Italian law can be prosecuted, tried, and convicted.…
The New York Times returns to the site of the first future commercial spaceport and finds a project that is very much alive despite economic woes throughout the world: Past a ranch that used to be a stage stop on an ancient…
The FTC Logo, Image via Wikipedia Facebook is on the hook. Privacy advocates complained to the FTC that Facebook’s decision to make most of your actions public by default is a form of deceptive practices. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a…
The CBS television show 60 minutes reports that criminals steal around 60 billion dollars from the Federal coffers each year. The method is simple. Hire or bribe a pharmacist or medical supply company with a legitimate medical practice license, buy or steal…
Mosul image via Wikipedia The Iraq War, now in it’s sixth year, has produced its own literature. Brian Turner was focused on staying alive, not poetry, when he served as an infantry team leader in Iraq. But he quickly saw that his…
The White House is these days literally white, as this picture provided by the presidential administration shows.
Gang Signs on the Web creative commons image by JL! via Flickr Gang members use social media to organize payback missions or to snuff out snitches. A Washington Post article cited by Gawker and dugg 172 times reports that gangs regularly use…
A most powerful medium, of unknown abode and origin, summoned through dark arts the spirit of the Evil One himself, the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, to ponder on iPad’s fate. This is what he had to say: Related articles by Zemanta The Meme…
A feature article published in Scientific American reveals the most probable use of what some consider to be the first complex computing device on record. According to Shawn Groetzen: Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500…
Image via Wikipedia Slate leads the uprising against the idea of taxing soda and fat (on people). In my last column “Let Them Drink Water!”, I suggested that a tax on sweetened soft drinks would move the nation toward an apartheid of…
Image via Wikipedia The inside view of how Wikipedia works This article presents an interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. All three are leading Wikipedia practitioners in the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and related projects. The interview focuses…
Image via Wikipedia “The conscious, brain-based memories that we humans set so much store by are not the only memories out there.” Think of our immune system for a minute… And then, get ready to learn about plant memories. Truly poetic… via…
University of Illinois has only received 7% of its state budget allocation and the interim president announces that its professors will be furloughed (a form of salary cut or partial unemployment). It is a move on a par to UC’s catastrophic budget…
The Wall Street Journal announces that US pilotless drones patrolling the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan beam down their video feeds in clear. They use no encryption and anyone can just point their dish at the transponding satellite to “grab” the feed.…
Warming trends over the past 400000 years indicate periodinc cooling and warming periods Image via Wikipedia What if there was a way to make happy all those involved in the global warming debate? McKitrick, who wrote Taken By Storm, a book that…
The past is not always a foreign country. It is the the same country, only a little different. This collection of pictures, taken by the historian Patrick Elie, illustrates how little has changed in Normandy since 1944. This wonderful photo gallery complete…
Image via Wikipedia The total amount raised by Barack Obama online represents a majority of his 2008 electoral funds. Time to take stock of this reality and think about it for the next electoral cycle. Barack Obama raised half a billion dollars…
Image via Wikipedia European Union has developed a number of socially conscious frameworks for spurring on adoption and implementation of information technologies in all fields of life. This is especially important as Europe is extremely diverse, covering IT landscapes as diverse as…
The Economist has published its best books of 2009 list. Here they are: Amazon.com Widgets
Image by melancholic optimist via Flickr A very interesting list of beliefs people commonly hold about energy. # Myth: Most of our energy comes from oil. Reality: Oil represents less than 40 percent of our energy use. # Myth: Most of our…
On December 7 we remember the surprise Japanese attack that turned World War 2 into the greatest military conflagration of all time. On this day it is worth remembering Walter Lord’s wonderful book, Day of Infamy. View Larger Map
Image by Getty Images via Daylife The New York Times just launched a new way to read the paper’s stories online. With Times Skimmer, which first launched as a prototype application earlier this year, the New York Times is trying to bring…
Will it fly? Are magazine articles worth anything outside the glossy covers of their publications? A consortium of magazine publishers including Time Inc. and Condé Nast plan to jointly build an online newsstand for publications in multiple digital formats, according to people…
How good is your (kid’s) musical education? For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to…
Although not quite the trade-off analysis that it promises, since each scenario starts with different resource allocations, this is a good overview of what things look like in Afghanistan. The most relevant piece of information: there are only 5000 American and Canadian…