Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
How do you convert a MediaWiki xml dump (using Special:Export) into a human readable file? First, I expected to find a simple, Microsoft Word import filter. What I initially found, namely Wandora, was interesting enough, but it only gave me repeated headaches,…
Big Bang experiment has Purdue connection – News- msnbc.com West Lafayette – Physicists in Switzerland have officially started an experiment that scientists say could change the way we see the universe. It’s not rocket science. It’s bigger than that, and it’s got…
[youtube]nLu-Yb4EIsQ[/youtube] Norman, the psychologist of POET fame (Psychology of Everyday Things) who gave the world the concept of device affordance, shot one of its last shells across the bow in his “Invisible: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So…
This amazing robotic mule is more than I personally expected to see coming out of the much overhyped field of robotics and artificial intelligence. Also featured, a couple of quite scary automatic killing machines.
Cosmic Log : Google funds $30 million moon prize Google is bankrolling a $30 million race for privately funded moon rovers – an endeavor that takes the X Prize to new heights. The Google Lunar X Prize, announced today by the search-engine…
At their most sinister networks are seen as fishnets, entangaling, suffocating and all seeing. A network that watches you actively is usually called something else. The Matrix. Feature – Working the Camera Feature – Working the Camera: Real-Time Grid-Powered Surveillance The inside…
This series of Business Week articles maps out more than a year of high hopes and incredile public mood swings related to the newly minted Second Life 3D virtual reality environment (Update April 19: The Business Week search engine seems to be…
An educator’s perspective Students love Wikipedia. Convenience and deadlines remembered at the last minute conspire with immense success in making undergraduate students avid consumers of web content. Professors fight their pupils’ addiction with stern grading policies bolded, underlined or italicized in the…
My 435 students came up with a number of ways of improving the Purdue website. The ideas run the gamut, from cloning YouTube to, well, to “Less is more”. Enjoy
Authority and expertise has changed. Weinberger’s chapter on “The Hyperlinked Organization†in The Cluetrain Manifesto (2004) and his chapter on “Knowledge†in Small Pieces Loosely Connected (2002) both talk about how authority no longer means what it used to mean. There are…
It seems, we need (or at least greatly benefit) from the tension between community and individual as manifested on the Web, at least according to Weinberger’s chapter on “Togetherness” in Small Pieces Loosely Joined (2002). If one extrapolates from his argument, one…
Is this another example of “storks bring babies” spurious relationships? Where you live linked to life expectancy – Yahoo! News WASHINGTON – Where you live, combined with race and income, plays a huge role in the nation’s health disparities, differences so stark…
China has bought all that was for sale in the famed Russian science town, Akademogorsk. Formely the brain behind the Soviet military-industrial complex, the city, just outside Nobosibirsk, in Siberia, has for many post-communist years languished in poverty and despair. Chinese cash…
Have you ever thought about the Internet as a giant piece of flypaper? Or as a bottomless La Brea Tar Pit? No? Maybe you should… The Exponent – Purdue’s Independent Student Newspaper Web cam use requires caution By Sarah Michalos Campus Editor…
It is often said that modern communication technology levels the playing field. Rich or poor, educated or not, Indian, Chinese or American, all can now own or use a cell phone or a computer. Furthermore, the expectation is that the more pervasive…
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…
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…