Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Topical news on social media, web culture, digital humanities
Image via Wikipedia James Cameron‘s career is profiled by Wired in expectation of his latest release, Avatar. The movie has the ambition to be the best and most photorealistic 3d digital animation movie of the 21st century. It follows in Beowulf‘s footsteps,…
Hear, hear…. PRESIDENT OBAMA’S recent trip to China reflects a symbiotic relationship at the heart of the global economy: China uses American spending power to enlarge its private sector, while America uses Chinese lending power to expand its public sector. Yet this…
View Larger Map Dredged up from the murky depths of the Rhône River, beneath a heap of wrecked cars, rotting tires and more than 20 centuries of silt, the statue’s white marble visage was plain as day. “My God, it’s Caesar!” Luc…
What is augmented reality? Diagram by Gary Hayes via Flickr One of the original augmented reality pioneers is Blair MacIntyre, whose work needs to be more widely known… He works at the Augmented Environments Lab (AEL), a research group in the GVU…
Diplomatic reports indicate that Russia and China move toward putting more pressure on Iran. An encouraging sign. Hopefully the pirce tag will not be prohibitive or increase in value over time. Russia and China Endorse Agency’s Rebuke of Iran By HELENE COOPER…
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…
NYT makes “deletionst”–as in “someone who deletes Wikipedia article on a daily basis”-a notable phrase… In the Wall Street Journal, Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler reported on a dramatic decline in the number of Wikipedia editors (down by more than 49,000…
Democracy and E-Rulemaking: Web-Based Technologies, Participation, and the Potential for Deliberation David Schlosberg Stephen Zavestoski Stuart W. Shulman ABSTRACT. Deliberative democratic theorists and public participation scholars have become increasingly interested in institutionalized forms of citizen discourse with the state, including those facilitated…
A grad student of mine and I were working on a paper when we realized that we have THAT citation management problem on our hands. We needed to cite the specific page number for Raymond’s famous citation “given enough eyeballs, all bugs…
A roundup on the University of California fee raises by the New York Times. Although the respondents’ own agendas make the answers at times less than enlightening, they are symptomatic for this day and age. The University of California, which has already…
Image via Wikipedia Armenians come out of their cultural ice age with flamboyance and style (a little tacky, it’s true, but style nonetheless)… YEREVAN, Armenia — Some 20,000 Armenians turned up for the opening of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts last…
Drinking, socializing, a way of life in coed dorms… In the past 30 years, coed college dormitories have gone from rare to routine, with nearly all students who live on campus now sharing housing with members of the opposite sex. But a…
Image via Wikipedia It was great while it lasted… The University of California Board of Regents approved a plan on Thursday to raise undergraduate fees — the equivalent of tuition — 32 percent by next fall, to help make up for steep…
Touchgraph takes a look at your sites and the links between them and it generates a graph like this. What you see here are the sites connecting to this domain, starting from the main page (matei.org). Enjoy…
TIME.com: Top Stories via Electric-Vehicle Surge: Where Will Cars Plug In?.
Interesting Journal of Management Development The increasing speed, openness, density and diversity of business raise new challenges related to five fundamental dimensions of management as a system: its actors, concept, context, processes and purpose. This requires developing in managers a set of…
Image by Getty Images via Daylife Berlin, the European palimpsest, gets a face-lift full of political significance. Smack in the middle of eastern Berlin is a grassy lawn measuring nearly five acres. Near it is a huge billboard showing a castle. What…
A smart Russian remix of the famous scifi flick… The Chaplin character alludes to the great comedians appeal behind the Iron Curtain, where he was heavily promoted due to his leftish sympathies. The Marx brothers, for he obvious reasons, never made the…
Taking a cue from and fearing the competition of the the recent Wolfram Alpha – Bing – Yahoo alliance Google has probably paid World Bank an arm and a leg to plug their search engine in the newly released WB data API.…
Blood powered on-skin GUIs. Is this really, real? via Digital Tattoo Interface Turns Your Skin Into A Display [This Cyborg Life]. Related articles by Zemanta Tales of Human Upgrades: Magnetic Fingertips [Thiscyborglife] (gizmodo.com)
Just like Gizmodo, I am wondering if this Cirque du Soleil trampoline act is really possible: via I Desperately Want This Video To Be Fake [Image Cache].
Image via Wikipedia P2P software used for sharing music is not only a huge problem for copyright holders, but also a gigantic privacy problem for its users. It is an even bigger information security for their employers. Did you know that some…
Image via Wikipedia Dispose of those keyboards and screens… Make the cell phone into a funnel for information…. Mr. Mistry, a 28-year-old research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, demonstrated what one such interface might look like at the…
Image via Wikipedia Here we go again… It turns out the size of the average American’s social circle is smaller today than 20 years ago, as measured by the number of self-reported confidants in a person’s life. Yet contrary to popular opinion,…
Image via Wikipedia Engadget announced earlier in the year significant progress in e-ink technology, currently limited to ridiculously low resolutions (100-200 dpi, compared to hard copy prints, that can go as high as 4000 dpi). The problem is that eve if we…
Image by George L Smyth via Flickr Unsatisfied by e-ink technologies, which replace vibrant paper and wonderful type with murky, mucky grayish backgrounds and pixelated letters? Do you think, just like me, that the convenience/quality trade-off proposed by e-ink is too great…
Image via Wikipedia Face is the mirror of the soul. Or so E A Poe thought, who believed that you can feel what a person thinks just by trying to mimic their facial expression. NYT blogger (and evolutionary psychologist) Olivia Judson takes…
Image via Wikipedia Ever wanted to geocode or georeference (or place on a map) a batch of points on Google maps but never got the nerve to do it via My Maps? Mapalist and Google forms can do the trick for you…
Location Aware application from Loopt to change some things. How much, remains to be seen. “Everybody’s got an eye on the mobile space and location as a central part of the search experience, but I don’t think there is some definitive app,”…
Image via Wikipedia The One New York Times initiative aims to bring the power of quasi open source development to media company that sits on one of the most amazing piles of content in the world. In it’s own words ” You…
Image via Wikipedia Iran is clearly buying time for a new round of nuclear development and power politics. Things are not looking very rosy. WASHINGTON — Iran told the United Nations nuclear watchdog on Thursday that it would not accept a plan…
Image by luc legay via Flickr The shortest, sweetest summary of the lates Facebook upgrade… The Twitter-like filter-free home page everyone hated a few months back was gone, and the default feed everyone missed so much was back — sort of —…
Image by Telstar Logistics via Flickr E pluribus unum! As the United States racks up ever higher budget deficits, China has bought ever greater quantities of American debt. Now many observers—including the U.S. and Chinese governments—are concerned about imbalances in the relationship…
[wpaudio http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2009/10/20091026_me_05.mp3?dl=1] Image by sebastien.b via Flickr Anecdotal evidence has been cropping up that video game players live in a world of their own. Even games that replicate real life activities, like guitar hero or the new DJ simulation game, are quite…
Image via Wikipedia NPR Monkey Economics Report Are monkeys just as compelled to value higher rare skills as humans are? Are their actions ruled by the simple logic of supply and demand? Primate ethologist, Dr. Ronald Noe, tested the invisible hand theory…
Image by cocoate.com via Flickr The Economist gives Windows 7 two thumbs up NOT since the launch of Windows 95 more than a decade ago has your correspondent seen such a fuss over a new piece of software. In some cities, people…
“The widespread success of digital reading devices has proven that the world is ready to read books on screens. As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed…
“On Monday, the Internet Archive, which among other things has been working for some time to digitize countless numbers of public domain texts, showed the first public look at its BookServer project, an initiative its dubs, “The future of books.” Internet Archive…
Stanford University physicists have answered the question, and the magic number is: 10^10^16 other realities. via Physicists Calculate Exact Number of Alternate Universes | Popular Science.
Image via Wikipedia Having completed its first phase of digitizing out of print and orphan books. Google is now moving toward enrolling copyright protected authors and books into a new publishing venture. The only question that remains to be asked is what…
New York Times reports that the publishing industry is slowly moving toward more daring e-publishing projects. Even Catch 22 is slated to be published as an e-book… Sixteen months after stepping down as president and chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, Jane…
Poe House and Museum image via Wikipedia Edgar Allan Poe was a notorious imbiber whose death only seemed to confirm to his detractors, which were many, that he was a never do well troublemaker. Seen in retrospect, his accusers appear petty and…
Image by VRider goes Web3D via Flickr Tim Burke, a professor at Swarthmore, defines emergence in these terms… (The article is quite useful for those interested in virtual world and artificial societies. Especially if you heard about Epstein’s work). “Emergence” is a…
Image by jurvetson via Flickr Intelligence in Wikipedia “Berners-Lee‘s vision of the Semantic Web is hindered by a chicken-and-egg problem, which can be best solved by a bootstrapping method: creating enough structured data to motivate the development of applications. We believe that…
Image via Wikipedia A tongue in cheek Wired article pokes fun at Wikipedia‘s clumsy way of dealing with its most visible secret: the fact that being the product of many minds it will reflect most of them, sometimes in contradictory terms. I…
Cover via Amazon Are we too connected? Is social networking online changing our behavior? The the worse? USA TODAY believes so…. The changes can be vexing, but there is precedent. The arrival of new and improved media almost always foments behavioral changes.…
Social Media Revolution Did Facebook spread faster than any other medium? Is social media just a fad? Click to watch the video…
FCC Chairman announces Net Neutrality principles on Sept 21 in DC Image by Getty Images via Daylife The Federal Communication Comission has issued today, as promised, a list of principles that in effect will deny the right of any ISP to prioritize…
An Obama campaign promise regarding net neutrality will become reality. The FCC is expected to rule that the largest Internet providers cannot deploy enhanced real time content if these services would meanprioritizing or delaying delivery of some content, such as that of…
An idea launched by Lilly, in our own Indy, makes slow but sure headway and is noticed by The Economist. This is a marketplace of ideas, where any industrial problem will find its maker… InnoCentive: A market for ideas | The Economist:…
The French blog, too… Here is a sample of one of the top French blogs. How do you say Gizmodo in French? Le Journal du Geek – Feed the Geek Inside: Du 12 au 28 août, nous avons organiser un petit concours…
Estimated Value of Top Blogs Surprisingly Resiliant | UsefulArts.us: 1. + Gawker Media: $170 million. Last year: $150 million. 2. + Huffington Post: $90 million. Last year: $70 million. 3. + The Drudge Report: $48 million. Last year: $10 million. 4. –…
Wikipedia has “hardened” its social structure, a study conducted at Purdue University reveals. After 500 edits, Wikipedia articles become dominated by a small group of editors that control the knowledge production system. This explains why a few percent of Wikipedia users generate…