Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Topical news on social media, web culture, digital humanities
I thought you would find this interesting: Quote of the Day: How Hot Peppers Make Us Human – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Quote-of-the-Day-How-Hot-Peppers-Make-Us-Human-5110 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
I thought you would find this interesting: Larry Summers to Leave: First Reactions – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Larry-Summers-to-Leave-First-Reactions-5115 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
Smitten with its rival magazines app success the Economist muses aloud: Even before the device had a name, media executives knew what they wanted from the iPad. Like the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, it could be used to sell digital issues of newspapers…
In two highly readable books, Bob Woodward first embraced in Bush at War then trounced in State of Denial George Bush’s conduct of the war on terror. In a possible attempt to appear as an equal opportunity offender he got access to…
Will ipads replace laptops? Laptop Sales Are Falling: Blame the iPad? – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Laptop-Sales-Are-Falling-Blame-the-iPad-5074 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
Cover via Amazon The Center for New Media and History at George Mason University announced last month the launch of a new Word Press extension, Anthologize, which will bring academic print and online publishing together. The idea is quite simple. Publish a…
After a short period of happy cohabitation, one of our XP netbooks ceased to print on our networked printer connected to a Windows 7 machine. Reason? Unknown? My hunch: like all created things, after a while computers and gizmo grow old, degenerate,…
GOOD QUESTION!: Why Must We Be the Ones to Save Earth From Asteroids? – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Why-Must-We-Be-the-Ones-to-Save-Earth-From-Asteroids-2057 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
BREAKING RANKS: Medical Advances Aren’t Always Good – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Medical-Advances-Arent-Always-Good-2038 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
Cuba Lays Off 500,000: ‘Major Shift’ to a Free Market? – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Cuba-Lays-Off-500000-Major-Shift-to-a-Free-Market-5018 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
Image via Wikipedia Search Takes a Social Turn By JENNA WORTHAM Sites are trying to make search more helpful by showing what your friends – or other people like you – like. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/technology/13search.html?th&emc=th ……………… F.C.C. Likely to Open Airwaves to Wireless By…
Goolge instant search Image by ursonate via Flickr Although the ruler of search, Google seems to lose ground in terms of “stickiness”, amount of time people spend on the site. An interesting question is how will the new Google instant search feature,…
Image via CrunchBase The first historiography of a Wikipedia entry…. James Bridle founded a Web site called Booktwo in September 2006 to “investigate, analyze, catalog and debate the future of literature and the publishing industry.” Over the years the site has been…
Y Fu Tuan, one of my favorite thinkers, on our greatest educational challenge… How might we label ourselves in the 21st century? To risk a broad generalization, I say we are either ethnics or globalists. As ethnics, we hold on to certain…
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…
In one of the two new developments, Rice researchers are reporting in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society, that they have succeeded in building reliable small digital switches that could shrink to a significantly smaller scale than is possible…
I thought you would find this interesting: Americans Shrug (For Now) at Location-Sharing Apps – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Americans-Shrug-For-Now-at-Location-Sharing-Apps-4857 Shared from AtlanticWire, an iPhone app made with www.AppMakr.com
Academic researchers have deployed in the last decade several innovative approaches to studying social networking and via graph and complexity analysis. Here is a sampler of most intriguing papers: 1. Critical mass and willingness to pay for social networks 2.NodeXL: Network Overview,…
Does the old fashioned newsroom still matter? Image via Wikipedia This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Agenda setting theory was proposed in the early 1970s by Maxwell McCombs and…
Image via Wikipedia What is formula for calculating critical mass in social groups of smaller scales? The problem of collective action is that each member of a group wants other members to make necessary sacrifices while he or she “free rides,” reaping…
Walter Alvarez teaches geology at Berkley and his main contribution to the history of science is the theory that the dinosaur era was brought to an end by a giant asteroid that landed on Yucatan peninsula 60 million years ago. The footprint…
This piece, which is available online, has become an instant classic… Billions of people participate in online social activities. Most users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog posts, or viewers of photos. A fraction of users become contributors of…
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…
Image via Wikipedia The Dataverse Network is an open-source web application supported by Harvard University, which offers a free and flexible framework for dataset citation, curation, and management. It allows researchers to deposit their datasets and to share them with persistent, unique…
I am in Seattle attending the Microsoft Faculty Summit 2010. It is an awesome gathering of leading researchers and scholars from throughout the world, brought together by the trailblazing Microsoft Research unit. The goal is to inform the academic community about Microsoft’s…
An excellent and mercifuly brief introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Communication Krippendorff, Klaus. “Mathematical Theory of Communication”, In Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, S. W. Littlejohn & K. A. Foss (Eds). Los Angeles: Sage, 2009. pp. 614-618.
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…
I will never forget what William Dutton, now of Oxford Internet Institute Fame, one of my Annenberg School, USC professors, told me when I mentioned to him my belief that one day the set top cable box will be a computer and…
In an article that’s wondering why despite fierce competition Microsoft Word still dominates the world of productivity suites, I picked up this little tid bit about Google’s revenue potential compared to Microsoft’s. $19 billion. That’s about how much Microsoft made last year…
A while back I talked about “no password” website login systems where websites can use sites like Facebook or Twitter to authenticate their users. Since then, Facebook’s login system “Facebook Connect” has been deprecated and replaced by OAuth, an open login system…
Karma: Image via Wikipedia After a semi critical article in Popular Science, which accused Fisker Automotive, the producer of the much vaunted electric Karma car of exaggerated secrecy, a quasi release date for the elusive car is announced today by New York…
Justified debates in Europe about dogmatic interpretation of net neutrality. BERLIN — With the majority of Internet traffic expected to shift to congestion-prone mobile networks, there is growing debate on both sides of the Atlantic about whether operators of the networks should…
While I doubt that passwords would have been one of the top things that John Lennon would have liked to see the world without, I am sure that he wouldn’t mind the effort to eradicate this new menace of the internet. As…
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…
In a recent article by Mashable.com, writer Jamie O’Dell discusses ways in which social media has the ability to help others. O’Dell highlights 9 specific websites that contribute to good causes, some of which are free for users to participate in. Some examples of…
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.…
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Those with a focus on design now have a social networking site geared to their interests. Dribbble, a site by and for designers, came out of its private beta mode this past weekend. The service allowed members (or “players” as the site…
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…
iphone Image via CrunchBase On my last trip to Chicago I noticed that data connections for iPhone were plain abysmal. If you live in a large metropolitan area, the iPhone can be a liability, not an asset, when it comes to data…
The ongoing social media revolution has given us many new ways to communicate with each other. I would like to highlight one of these new avenues of discourse, Twitter, and talk about how its extensibility is it’s greatest feature. This property of…
AwayFind announced it is offering a new 2.0 form of its service, which allows users to get away from the computer and not worry about missing an important e-mail or message. In its original, 1.0 service, users were given an AwayFind page…
Viv Magazine believes it is, as this NYTIMES article suggests. According to its website, VIVmag offers insight, advice and authentic stories to inspire and motivate women in their quest for a balanced and healthy lifestyle. Smart and vital, VIVmag readers know the…
Yesterday, a new site launched a beta version with the aim of helping users plan informal gatherings. Go Tribal allows users to sign up, identify what days they are free and what they might like to do with friends, and then create plans…
Abstract A theoretically-grounded learning feedback tool suite, the Visible Effort (VE) Mediawiki extension, is proposed for optimizing online group learning activities by measuring the amount of equality and the emergence of social structure in groups that participate in Computer-Mediated Collaboration (CMC). Building…
In a larger lecture classroom, it can be impossible to facilitate participation with even a few students – and infinitely more impossible to get an entire class of a couple hundred to chime in as well. And if you have students who may be…
Honda took the unusual step of featuring some of its advertising faux-documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival. The living with robots flick featured below is super slick and slippery. Luminary after luminary and robot researcher after robot researcher is prompted to say…
One clip shows a girl interpreting math terms as dance moves. Another features a guy flying a small remote-controlled elephant helicopter that he made around his backyard. Are these just random YouTube videos? Not quite. These videos are actually submissions students made…
Earlier this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook announced a new version of its web site for mobile media users that will be available in coming weeks. Unlike its Internet counterparts, Facebook and Facebook Lite, the new “Facebook Zero”…