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- I sort of want to try this.January 5
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- Search Engine Competition in ChinaJanuary 5
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Chi-Chu Tschang’s article on Baidu illuminates how an unscrupulous search engine can exert a great deal of power once it attains dominance. Baidu has over 60% of the market in China, and can make or break an online business:
Salespeople working for Baidu drop sites from results to bully companies into buying sponsored links, say some who have been approached. Former clients say their rankings fall precipitously after they stop buying search-related ads from Baidu. At least one Baidu salesperson acknowledges they’re right. “The key is whether a company buys Baidu’s sponsored links,” says Zhong Hongjun, a salesman from a company that represents Baidu in the central city of Wuhan. “If they don’t, the search engine won’t find them. If they do, they’ll be in there.”
Some hope that consumers will punish Baidu for manipulating search results–a result that may mollify the concerns of Bracha and I in our article Federal Search Commission. It appears that Baidu is also getting into trouble for not managing its search results enough:
Peter Lu, managing partner at China IntelliConsulting . . . says Google’s traffic surged in November after the mainland’s largest TV network, CCTV, ran an exposé about a patient getting fleeced by an unlicensed
- How to ScholarJanuary 5
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As thousands of law professors prepare to descend on San Diego this coming weekend for the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), the lawprof blogosphere is again gurgling with advice for junior scholars. Gordon Smith framed the conversation with a great post about scholarship from the point of view of someone who writes tenure review letters. Dan Solove endorsed Gordon’s comments, and one in particular, as did Paul Caron - though Paul’s emphasis differed from Dan’s.
I like most of Gordon’s points, but I differ in places. Most important, as someone who has written my own share of letters recently (and read my share as well), it’s important to recognize out loud that tenure letters, like almost anything that academics write about the academy, reflect as much on the interests, ego, character, and background of the writer as they comment on the person and work under review. As a Research Dean, I find myself giving lots of both formal and informal advice to junior colleagues, and necessarily what I say reflects my own tastes as well as my read of the academic environment. Of course, law professors don’t have a monopoly on any of this; wannabe law profs and appointm
- The Great Grimmelmann Rants About Copyright FormalitiesJanuary 4
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Here. Technically it is an “informal” rant to feel free to make yourself comfy before you read it.
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- Towards Responsible Use of Cognition-Dulling DrugsJanuary 4
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In a recent editorial in Nature entitled Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy, distinguished contributors have endorsed a “presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.” Against various Luddites who worry about the rat races such drug use could spark, the editorialists argue that cognitive enhancement is here to stay: “From assembly line workers to surgeons, many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it, yet they may also need protection from the pressure to enhance.” Instead of the regulation encouraged by Francis Fukuyama, they would have us rely on robust professional standards to guide “appropriate prescribing of cognitive enhancers.”
The most promising aspect of the editorial is the thin and unspecified concept of enhancement that it endorses. As Carl Elliott notes, relentless focus on