Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
In my role as an Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Purdue University, I partnered with two colleagues with solid experience in military strategy research and education to propose a new methodology for training strategic thinkers and doers. David Benson,…
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…
In Spring 2015, together with my colleagues, Michael Smith, Abrar Hammoud, and Davin Huston I developed a multidisciplinary learning experience whose main goal is to help students acquire competencies related to problem formulation, design thinking, ethical and critical thinking, advanced persuasive speaking,…
“It’s theoretical” or “it’s soooo theoretical” or “this is just theory”… Theory and knowledge sought for their own sake are often seen as less than real, not quite true, and a waste of time. Considering the past of human knowledge adventure, which is…
If New York City never lacked for something, those are the immensely talented, greatly gifted writers, whose words flow from the keyboards like milk and honey and whose voices whisper in your ear things no one wants to pay attention to. There…
Agree or disagree? The Value of Admitting What We Don’t Know – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Educationhttp://chronicle.com/article/The-Value-of-Admitting-What-We/147983/All dialects are equal linguistically, in that they are regular, rule-governed, and just as effective at communicating as is standard English. They are not,…
Articles published in the same journals, resubmitted for review. Almost 1 in 10 articles rejected by 9 out of 10 reviewers. Only 8% o the editors recognized the re-submission… Cambridge Journals Online – Behavioral and Brain Sciences – Abstract – Peer-review practices…
Most important highlights of the latest Pew Internet Study – 18-24 year olds compared to 30 year olds are almost twice as likely to have smartphones 20% less likely to read newspapers 100% more likely to use Twitter Younger Americans’ Reading Habits…
I tried to watch the Apple launch with my Purdue Polytech students to show them how to introduce a product with a livcast… What we got out of the experience was how not to sell a product with an online livecast. First off,…
The next revolution in the digital world will not be on a desktop or in your pocket. It will be in your car… Maybe… The rise of the “connected” car. This is the coming together of communications technologies, information systems and safety…
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…
Big data is seen by many as a panacea, while many are skeptical of its ability to solve our most pressing problems. What is the real problem with big data? Blind empiricism. All…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The great weakness of location aware mobile apps is precision and location relevance. Mobile apps that are supposed to push to you info about the place you are at rely on GPS signals to pull in information. Even when very precise, they…
Entropy theory used to decipher complexity of animal communication…. Information Theory Reveals Size of Whale and Dolphin Communication Repertoires | MIT Technology Review.
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…
Not a billionaire, yet enjoying the limelight… Married for the third time, now to a Londoner, Jimmy Wales enjoys life among the glitterati of the world. A very entertaining and at times informative profile in the New York Times… High-minded or not,…
A method of monitoring copyright infringing P2P traffic meant to notify users in real time that the content they are viewing has been uploaded online illegally has been implemented by five of the most important ISPs in the United States: ATT, Verizon,…
At approximately 13:15 local time on 1 February 2013, a suicide bomber detonated a bomb at a side entrance to the United States embassy in the Turkish capital, Ankara, killing…
Perusing the Iraqi Sigact files acquired by Wikileaks, I found much to my surprise not only that WMD were found in Iraq, but that there were used at least several times on the battlefield. These typically involved Chemical Improvised Explosive Devices made of 150/2/5…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University bySorin Adam Matei Knowledge gap hypothesis proposes that more information does not always mean a better informed public, or at least that not all members of…
A wonderful list of Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tools collated by Twittersentiment.appspot.com… Twitter Analysis Tools look at the meaning of the tweets and divides them into negative and positive communication items. Since the original list missed some sites, feel free to add yours…
The first 10 years of Chinese membership in WTO and of trade with the US at almost no import/export tarrifs: Chinese rural poverty rate declined from 10 to 3% US families could spend an extra $600 a year on cheaper goods US…
Digital Humanities Showcase: Walter Lord’s Day of Infamy mapped Walter Lord’s meticulously documented book “Day of Infamy” recounts the trivia of every day life at Pearl Harbor on that last morning of peace, December 7, 1941, when the Japanese planes attacked the…
The Altantic Monthly publishes a terrifyingly insightful article about Pakistan’s nuclear shell game. According to it, what keeps the Pakistani leaders up at night is a highly unlikely US air strike, not a predictable (by past incidents) Jihadi suicide rush on the…
88 percent of women, versus 84 percent of men appreciate their college education… Apud Resource Shelf and Pew Internet. Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year college give the U.S. higher education system excellent or good marks for the…
UPDATE: NYC Evacuation and Hurricane Irene Possible Landfall Map NOAA predicts that even if it remains an intensity 1 or 2, hurricane Irene might flood a good part of lower Manhattan, including Battery Park and Ground Zero (World Trade Center). The later,…
The Libyan Civil War battle for Tripoli continued on August 23. Gaddafi loyalist troops were reduced to smaller pockets around or near the former center of power. A dangerous situation has developed around Rixos Hotel, which has been occupied by Gaddafi’s elite…
The girl walks down the street defiantly, clutching her shawl. Young, and not so young, men stare, catcall, and grab their crotch. The place is Florence, the year is 1951, the photographer Ruth Orkin, and the mood is of budding feminism fighting…
The federal gas tax, which amounts to about 18.4 cents a gallon, is set to expire and it needs a special act of Congress to be renewed. The tax was created to fund the Federal Highway Administration and to maintain the inter-state…
Japan tried desperately to pump billions upon billions of yen into its economy during the 1990 to jump start an economy ailing after a terrible real estate bubble that popped at the end of the 1980s. Twenty years later, Japan has a…
An US intelligence official confirmed to Financial Times that Pakistan shared with China samples of material and photographs of the US stealth helicopter that crashed during the raid on Osama bin Laden. The helicopter seems to be engineered to avoid radar detection.…
If convicted, Anders Behring Breivik, the Norvegian accused of killing over 70 adolescents and adults in a series of terrorist attactk, will probably serve a limited sentence (20-30 years) term. He might even end up in Halden prison, where the inmates cook…
Bryan Pijanowski, the head of the Soundscape Ecology Project at Purdue University, and Sorin Adam Matei, the author of this blog and the founder of the Ubimark publishing initiatives have set up a mapping site, http://Ubimark.info, to collect and map everyday sounds…
Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn, III announced on July 14, 2011 that in the wake of a massive hacking incident that resulted in the loss of over 24,000 sensitive files from a Department of Defense contractor internal network, any major…
Lech Walesa had this word of wisdom for the Tunisians: Lech Walesa chuckles as he recounts a conversation he had in April with reformers in Tunisia, cradle of the Arab Spring. “They told me they want to purge everybody linked to the…
The New York times announces that Pakistani secret services seem to take revenge on those that helped US’s raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Pakistan’s top military spy agency has arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central…
Italy’s deeper troubles magisterially analyzed by the Economist…. Italy is indulgent towards its children in some ways—it is not unusual for them to live at home until they are in their 30s—but hard on them in others. “A typical Italian family these…
Despite the controversies that surround continued public support for the NPR/CPB there is much talk in Washington nowadays about creating a public funded, yet potentially politically controlled national Internet wireless network. The network will be funded from allocating some of the proceeds…
With the recently passed April 14 anniversary of the Fort Sumter occupation by the Confederates we have entered a period of four years of remembering the 150th anniversary of the many and bloody Civil War battles. The memory of the 600,000 dead…
Ilyaas Kashmiri, a Pakistani terrorist at times associated with the Pakistani secret services was killed in a drone attack in the tribal region (South Waziristan Agency area) of Pakistan. It is quite possible the he was turned in by his former handlers…
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared the May 22 tornado that scythed a path through Joplin, MO “devastating” assigning it the maximum level of intensity EF-5. It is the deadliest since 1950, when modern record keeping started, and 8th in recorded…
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy The unexpected tornadoes that landed in Springfield, Massachusetts on June 1, 2011, one of which sucked water from a local river and was declared an EF-3 (on a scale of 5),…
“No, you can’t!” A semi-funny non-verbal communication situation that might or might not convey the meaning of the situation. At the Pittsburgh Summit, 2009 President Obama introduces his wife to Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK), who at the time was still the director…
The devastating series of tornadoes, of which the F-5 (maximum intensity) event that hit Joplin, Missouri left in its wake over 130 dead was the most terrifying, raise the question if tornadoes are becoming more destructive and if 2011 is a record-breaking…
NBC report on what the French think about the IMF head arrest. What is missing from this report is the question: why didn’t the scandal occur earlier and why not in France? The fact that the scandal took place in the US…
The latest Pew Poll on religious life in America announces that religious affiliation in America has become a choice, not a consequence of birth circumstances. According to the report “roughly 44% of Americans now profess a religious affiliation that is different…