July 2010
1 post
An in-depth longitudinal analysis of assortative...
Authors: Alberto Pepe, Marko A. Rodriguez
Title: Collaboration in sensor network research: an in-depth longitudinal analysis of assortative mixing patterns
Venue: Scientometrics. Volume 84, Number 3. September, 2010
Abstract: Many investigations of scientific collaboration are based on statistical analyses of large networks constructed from bibliographic repositories. These investigations often...
June 2010
3 posts
chase
Chase is an installation by Liz Magic Laser on display at Derek Eller Gallery (615 West 27th Street, New York) from May 21 to June 26, 2010. With chase, Liz Magic Laser reinterprets Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 play Man equals Man. The project includes a feature-length video, an installation of ephemera from the production of chase as well as a theatrical set that serves as a backdrop for a live...
The dilated triple
Authors: Marko A. Rodriguez, Alberto Pepe, Joshua Shinavier
Title: The dilated triple
Venue: Emergent Web Intelligence: Advanced Semantic Technologies, Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing series, pages 3-16, ISBN:978-1-84996-076-2, Springer-Verlag, 2010
Abstract: The basic unit of meaning on the Semantic Web is the RDF statement, or triple, which combines a distinct subject, predicate...
PhD dissertation
I filed my Ph.D. dissertation on May 27, 2010. You can find it on SSRN (Social Science Research Network) at this link (you may have to click on “One-Click Download” to download it as a PDF).
Here are some details.
Title: Structure and Evolution of Scientific Collaboration Networks in a Modern Research Collaboratory
Abstract: This dissertation is a study of scientific collaboration...
February 2010
1 post
Faith in the Algorithm, Part 1
Authors: Marko A. Rodriguez, Alberto Pepe
Title: Faith in the Algorithm, Part 1: Beyond the Turing Test
Venue: Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy, The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, Edinburgh, Scotland. 2009.
Abstract: Since the Turing test was first proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, the primary goal of artificial...
December 2009
3 posts
Twitflick: visualizing the rhythm and narrative of...
Authors: Alberto Pepe, Sasank Reddy, Lilly Nguyen, Mark Hansen
Title: Twitflick: visualizing the rhythm and narrative of micro-blogging activity
Venue: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference 2009
Abstract: Micro-blogging is a form of online communication by which users broadcast brief text updates, or tweets. This article explores the temporal component of micro-blogging...
Political protest Italian-style
Authors: Alberto Pepe, Corinna di Gennaro
Title: Political protest Italian–style: The blogosphere and mainstream media in the promotion and coverage of Beppe Grillo’s V–day
Venue: First Monday. Volume 14, Number 12. 7 December 2009
Abstract: We analyze the organization, promotion and public perception of “V–day”, a political rally that took place on 8 September 2007, to protest against...
July 2009
2 posts
Reinventing airspace: spectatorship, fluidity,...
Author: Alberto Pepe Gentile
Title: Reinventing airspace: spectatorship, fluidity, intimacy at PEK T3
Venue: ACE: Journal of Architecture, City & Environment. Year IV, Issue 10. Pages 9-19. 2009.
Abstract: In this article, I explore the contemporary practice of air travel conceptualizing airports as socio-technical mobilities. Drawing both from the notion of “space” posited by Michel de...
April 2009
1 post
“Probably they don’t think, the trees; […] But if trees did think, my...”
– Luigi Pirandello. One, No One, One Hundred Thousand. Book Two (XI. Re-entering the city)
March 2009
2 posts
epistemological deliverance
or: how to disable the News Feed on the Facebook
The Facebook recently unveiled a new home page design. One of the new features* is the real time stream:
The stream lets you know what’s happening right now in your world by showing you everything your friends and other connections, such as celebrities, athletes and politicians, are sharing. **
But what if you don’t want to know...
“The text of pleasure is not necessarily the text that recounts pleasures; the...”
– Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Definitions: 1. Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. 2. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text...
February 2009
4 posts
“The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot”
– Werner Herzog. Discussion and Film Concert at Royce Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles. 20 February 2009
Lazy webs
My friend Karen Van Godtsenhoven asked me some questions about the semantic web (and how it is related to laziness), for the latest issue of The Word Magazine. To read the article, go to the online issue (January-February 2009). The article is on pages 44-47. Alternatively you can download a PDF of the article. You can also find The Word in print, in Belgium and in good bookstores worldwide.
“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”
– A man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool. (From Harper’s Notebook, February 2009)
Review: "Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from...
This week, I had the pleasure to read a manuscript titled “Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a Collective Decision Making Systems Perspective”, recently authored by my friends and colleagues Marko A. Rodriguez and Jennifer H. Watkins at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The authors present agent-based simulations of two collective decision making systems that can be used for...
January 2009
4 posts
“The first protons were circulated around the Large Hadron Collider. Designed to...”
– The Economist. January 3, 2009.
A Clustering-Based Semi-Automated Technique to...
Authors: Ramesh Srinivasan, Alberto Pepe, Marko A. Rodriguez
Title: A Clustering-Based Semi-Automated Technique to Build Cultural Ontologies
Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Volume 60, Number 2, Pages 1-13. 2009.
Abstract: This article presents and validates a clustering-based method for creating cultural ontologies for community-oriented...
A Grateful Dead Analysis
Authors: Marko A. Rodriguez, Vadas Gintautas, Alberto Pepe
Title: A Grateful Dead Analysis: The Relationship Between Concert and Listening Behavior
Venue: First Monday, volume 14, number 1, 2009.
Abstract: The Grateful Dead were an American band that was born out of the San Francisco, California psychedelic movement of the 1960s. The band played music together from 1965 to 1995 and is well...
December 2008
1 post
“The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit...”
– Ayn Rand, “For the New Intellectual”
November 2008
3 posts
“Regardless of how the next four years go, this is a moment of rupture in the way...”
– Talar Chahinian. On the election of Barack Hussein Obama. Private communication.
“marriage is gay”
– Author unknown. On Proposition 8, the 2008 state constitutional amendment to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California. Seen somewhere on Facebook.
October 2008
1 post
why I am vegetarian
“Why are you vegetarian?” I get asked this question a lot. Like many, I am vegetarian for a number of reasons: moral, ethical, political, economical, environmental. However, every time I try to explain my rationale, I often get mixed, and somehow disappointing, reactions. “What about eggplants and carrots? Don’t you care for their suffering?”. Aargh. Many people I...
September 2008
1 post
“I believe that making “nigger” the dirtiest word in America has had...”
– John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Private communication
Social web anxiety
Social anxiety is “an experience of anxiety (emotional discomfort, fear, apprehension or worry) regarding social situations and being evaluated by other people”. Sounds familiar?
As popularity and use of social websites magnify, social anxiety is shifting to the social web. Wired’s how-to-wiki has even come up with a detailed set of Facebook etiquette rules. These include:
One...
August 2008
2 posts
“Students exposed to subliminal Apple logos were found to answer questions more...”
– Harper’s Magazine. Findings. June 2008. Originally from Fitzsimons et al., Journal of Consumer Research, Vol 35. 2008.
June 2008
7 posts
priority lines
“Ryanair operates an unassigned seating policy, so specific seats cannot be pre-booked. However, we operate a Priority Boarding system (fees apply unless using Online Check-In) which allows you to choose your own seat on board.”
The new Ryanair Priority Boarding system is creating novel dynamics of air travel. Most people check-in online so they get free priority boarding. I have...
“The knowledge society is not an immaterial society, but a new phase in the...”
– Christian Fuchs. Towards a Global Sustainable Information Society. tripleC. Vol. 4 No.1
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treehugging RIP
My old website (treehugging.org) and my blogger (albertopepe.blogspot.com) now redirect here.
Please subscribe to the new rss.
guess who?
Here’s a fun game. I collected some usage statistics (audience reports) from Quantcast for the following websites: hillaryclinton.com johnmccain.com barackobama.com (here listed in no particular order). For each website, I present below selected demographics of the average website users for the month of April 2008. The graphs for each website are (from left to right) gender, age and...
April 2008
2 posts
On the relationship between the structural and...
Authors: Marko A. Rodriguez, Alberto Pepe
Title: On the relationship between the structural and socioacademic communities of a coauthorship network.
Abstract: This article presents a study that compares detected structural communities in a coauthorship network to the socioacademic characteristics of the scholars that compose the network. The coauthorship network was created from the...
5 tags
AAAI Symposium 2008
Last week I attended the AAAI Spring Symposium - a conference on Artificial Intelligence, held at Stanford University. My paper with Johan Bollen on future mood assessment was in the Emotion, Personality and Social Behavior track. For some reason, the organizers kept each track separate from all others, and made it difficult for attendees to see talks in other tracks. Still, I managed to see some...
March 2008
1 post
6 tags
data loss: a modern tragedy
On March 23, 2008, the hard drive on my MacBook “failed”, i.e. all its data disappeared. Initially I felt despair. A data tragedy. Then I learned to stop worrying. I have now developed emotional detachment from data.
February 2008
2 posts
redefining community
Yesterday morning, I was sitting in traffic on the 10/405 freeway interchange, on my way to UCLA. As usual, I was listening to KPCC - Southern California’s Public Radio. KPCC is supported by the public - so, from time to time, radio hosts remind listeners that they need listener contributions in order to survive. On AirTalk, Larry Mantle had a point: listeners should support KPCC not only...
7 tags
more conjectures
Along the lines of previous work with emails to the future, this is a visual summary of a) two specific public mood indicators towards the future: happiness and depression, b) excerpts from hand-selected conjecture- and memento-charged emails, c) future predicted and scheduled events retrieved from wikipedia. It covers a 20-year period: 2015-2035. It is part of my ongoing project with Johan...
January 2008
4 posts
7 tags
Between conjecture and memento: shaping a...
Authors: Alberto Pepe, Johan Bollen Title: Between conjecture and memento: shaping a collective emotional perception of the future Abstract: Large scale surveys of public mood are costly and often impractical to perform. However, the web is awash with material indicative of public mood such as blogs, emails, and web queries. Inexpensive content analysis on such extensive corpora can be used to...
7 tags
Newton & Helen Mayer Harrison
Newton & Helen Mayer Harrison have worked for over thirty years with biologists, ecologists and urban planners to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development. They just gave a talk at UC Irvine (also broadcasted at UCLA) as part of a biweekly seminar I am part of on human complex systems. Their talk was titled...
September 2007
2 posts
advice from a tree
Stand Tall and Proud Sink your roots deeply into the Earth Reflect the light of a greater source Think long term Go out on a limb Remember your place among all living beings Embrace with joy the changing seasons For each yields its own abundance The Energy and Birth of Spring The Growth and Contentment of Summer The Wisdom to let go of leaves in the Fall The Rest and Quiet Renewal of Winter...
google hands
The Google Book Library Project keeps attracting more and more academic libraries: Cornell, Harvard, NYPL, Princeton, Stanford, Ghent, the UCs… like it or not - they are gonna get everyone. Clearly, there are some issues with the information model proposed by Google. In the “web world” (cf. with Karl Popper’s World III), Google gets a lot of criticism for having imposed...
August 2007
1 post
2008: a myspace odissey
Myspace has recently launched impact, an online space for U.S. presidential candidates to show how web-savvy and socially connected they are. Most candidates (15 as of today) have created their myspace profiles and quickly started accumulating “friends”. Clinton, for example, has 132,191 friends, McCain 40,890 and Obama a record 167,175. Giuliani has a private profile: you have to...
July 2007
2 posts
catching colds and missing planes
do you like tragic travel stories? i’ve got a fresh one just for you. it all started in charlottesville, va. i got there last saturday, to attend and present at a conference on visual media. as i flew in from europe, i landed at washington dulles airport and then rented a car to get to charlottesville, which is about 2 hours away. the conference was at UVa. it was hot and humid outside,...
Review: Understanding knowledge as a commons:...
A book review I recently wrote for UCLA’s Interactions Journal. It can be found here.
Understanding knowledge as a commons: From theory to practice edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. 320 pp. ISBN 0-262-08357-4.
In Binta y la Gran Idea (Manso, 2004), a warmhearted short film nominated at the 79th Academy Awards, the main character, Agnile, a local...