Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani vigorously rejected accusations that Osama bin Laden was protected in his Abbottabad mansion by local army or security services. It is disingenuous for anyone to blame Pakistan or State institutions of Pakistan including the ISI and…
CBS interviewed President Obama as early as Wednesday, May 4 on how the mission to catch and kill Osama Bin Laden emerged and was completed: On Wednesday, May 4, 2011 – three days after he announced that American troops had killed Osama…
According to Pakistani military sources, Osama Bin Laden lived in Pakistan for almost 8 years. One of his wives, who was captured in Abbottabad, told her Pakistani interrogators that Osama lived for many years in fairly large urban centers in Northern…
White House spokesman John Carney told the White House press corps at a regular briefing that Osama was not armed when killed. Other details, according to AP: Unexpectedly high temperatures caused a lumbering helicopter carrying elite commandos to make a hard…
ABC News published footage from Osama bin Laden mansion and released dramatic pictures of the bedroom where the final stand took place. Blood covers the ground and the bed. The inside of the building is nicely furnished. Electronic devices and appliances are…
The latest news from Gaddafi’s compound Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Of the two dozen residences Muammar Gaddafi calls home, the most known and recognizable is the Bab el-Aziza compound, located right in the heart…
Defensive measures at the Fukushima Nuclear plant are called by Michio Kaku, a Japanese physicist teaching in the US, “like squirting a gun at a forest fire.” He would opt for the Russian solution, entomb the reactor in sand, boric acid and…
As the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant becomes darker by the day (see Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant Update) and the risk of a major meltdown increases, people all over the world ask themselves how great is the danger of a major…
What you say if you got a $1.5 BILLION grant? Samuel Ting (Nobel Prize laureate, 1974, MIT professor) got precisely this amount over 10 years to put a new experimental device in space. The device was meant to detect anti-matter. Although intriguing,…
A part, and an important one, of the “wise crowds” mystery seems to have been solved. All “smart mobs” need to meet two pre-requisites, which seem to be at odds with each other. While members need to be ignorant of the overall…
Chevrolet Volt Image via Wikipedia Despite the enthusiasm the surrounds the newly arrived electric vehicles (EV), such as the Volt or Leaf, on the US market and president Obama’s call for putting 1 million electric cars on the roads in the US…
Body Mass index by state. > 25% overweight, >30 obese. Image via Wikipedia It is not just that humans have become heavier in the last decades, but also some species of animals, including completely wild species. The problem of obesity isn’t confined…
Image via Wikipedia Worrying news, via Die Welt, from Venezuela. Copying a page from the book of his mentor, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez closes ranks with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards by allowing an Iranian manned missile base in South America. It is…
Congo River Image by mpondu via Flickr Great NPR story on the only reasonable and cheap means of transportation in Congo: a river barge that resembles Noah’s Ark. The nearly 3,000-mile Congo River is the backbone of one of Africa’s poorest and…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Elihu Katz, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Gabriel Tarde have already said that media are profoundly social. Newspapers have been read at breakfast for almost…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University bySorin Adam Matei Of the couple dozen theories that aim to explain how mass media impact society, how many of them are still valid today, when…
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…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Social Capital Theory proposes that effective social action and the wellbeing of social groups, from the smallest voluntary organization to entire societies, is…
According to this paper, programs that are most central in the hiring network (in terms of outdegrees or indegrees?), are the most pretigious. The winners are below…. This research examines the prestige of doctoral degree programs in communication based on a network…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Google’s announced plans to build 1 Gigabyte broadband networks seem to play the same role as Google‘s threats of yesteryear to bid for WiMax frequencies. The FCC is planning to propose a new national broadband plan, which would make accessible to most…
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…
After being overtaken by Google in the later part of 2008, Yahoo now is passed by Facebook. During the last year Facebook doubled its traffic, while Yahoo remained largely stationary. 133 million unique visitors in Jan 2010. From Mashable: Facebook is now…
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…
Image by dewfall via Flickr New York Times reflects on an emergent turn toward higher emphasis on “skills” in American colleges. Is this desirable? Should we abandon philosophy departments? How about math? THOMAS COLLEGE, a liberal arts school in Maine, advertises itself…
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.…
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…
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…
Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference 2009 tags: no_tag Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), more than one-half of…
A very good reference work on the social aspects of Information Technology. The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies Danny Quah, Roger Silverstone, Robin Mansell and Chrisanthi Avgerou ISBN13: 9780199266234 ISBN10: 0199266239 Hardback, 752 pages Apr 2007, Not Yet Published due…
Front Porches and Public Spaces: Planned Communities Online Susan Huelsing Sarapin Comm. 632: Online Interaction Professor: Dr. Sorin Matei November 19, 2006 Introduction Where else today but in the cost-effective frontier of cyberspace can the average person construct a community?1 With widespread…
Submitted by: Scott Sanders to the Online Interaction Seminar, COM 632Y, Spring 2006, Dr. Sorin A. Matei, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907. Summary: Social categorization, which is at the heart of SIDE theory, may often prove to be an incredibly powerful…
The metaphor of organization-as-networks directs attention to the dynamic nature of the process of organization as an emergent, evolving, and dynamic. At a global level, theorists have engaged with different forms of interdependencies, whether social, political or economic, as exemplified by Castells’…
The chapter “The Sad Irons†in Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power illustrates not only the interplay between culture and technology but also the consequences of lacking connection to a technological network (Caro, 1982). Due to geographical…