Unlike Siva and Philipp Lenssen, I can’t manage to blog full-time on all things Google. But I do try to keep tabs on the search giant. After the break, I’ll share a few interesting things that have recently come across my screen.  (Updated: (2/4/08))
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From the Department of Aren’t There More Pressing Issues in the World:
Yale alumni are rallying to save the Yankee Doodle.  From the Yale Daily News:
Yankee Doodle may come back to town, riding on support from University students and alumni.
Since the restaurant closed Monday, citing “economic considerations” — and provoking sadness and shock among Yalies past […]

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The PR about this conference is going out way late, so I volunteered to multiply the message a bit:
Next Friday, February 8, Pitt Law is hosting a terrific one-day symposium titled “The 21st Century Brain: Why It Matters for the Academic and Political Worlds.”  If you’re in the area, please try to stop by.
The keynote […]

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The cyber-yenta is thriving:
Once upon a time, finding a mate was considered too important to be entrusted to people under the influence of raging hormones. Their parents, sometimes assisted by astrologers and matchmakers, supervised courtship until customs changed in the West because of what was called the Romeo and Juliet revolution. Grown-ups, leave the […]

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The Yankee Doodle, a New Haven institution, closed for good today after 58 years in business, a victim of the rising economic tide in the Broadway area near the Yale campus.   Tyco, the Doodle’s neighbor and owner of the building, raised the rent.
Story in the New Haven Independent
Story at the Yale Alumni Magazine site
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Facebook really took off because of the “apps” offered online–especially games like “Scrabulous,” a spitting image of the word game Scrabble. Hasbro and Mattel have now warned both Facebook and the app’s creators (Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla) that they’re infringing the Scrabble owners’ IP rights. The Agarwallas are now making about 25K per […]

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Mark Schultz and others have been kind enough to indulge me with tips about giving a talk. Mark not surprisingly noted that Mike Madison offers great advice on the topic via links. From Mike’s links (at the bottom of his page on student writing guidelines) I went to PresentationZen (a cool name in general and […]

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But John Havelock thinks it should:
For a generation, Alaska has been the only state that does not maintain at least one law school. Considering the force of Alaska’s identity as an exceptional, independent state with a unique economy and social structure, this is strange.
But Alaska does have a law review.  Why is it at Duke?
The […]

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Brett’s insightful work on infrastructure has conditioned me to think carefully about stories that invoke the term in the news. Here’s one on Transportation Secretary Mary Peters’ apparent effort to push down transportation infrastructure costs to individual users:
[Peters’] main objective seems to be blocking any increase of public contributions to the public infrastructure. […]

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Somewhere between conceptions of the firm as proprietary, hierarchical production mechanism and the firm as distributed, commons- and peer-based institution lies an emerging class of virtual firms that mix and match sensibilities: some peer-based, some hierarchical; some commons-based, some proprietary.  My hunch is that these sorts of organisms are going to be the most interesting […]

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Query: Do those who rely heavily on error cost analysis also account for accuracy benefits? Should they?
Error costs are the costs of making a mistake. We generally would like to minimize them. But how do we minimize them? We might be more careful and invest more time or other resources […]

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Andrea Foster at the Chron reports on a pair of law students who are defending fellow university students sued by RIAA. Though I know of great IP defense work by groups like EFF and EPIC, I don’t believe law school clinics generally have been too involved in this particular area. The students argue
[T]hat the […]

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James Grimmelmann has about about law faculty blogs that I noticed via Michael Froomkin (Ann Bartow comments here).  His comments are addressed to possible conflicts of interest faced by academic bloggers who accept ads.  The point that caught my eye was this one:
Similarly, the drive to monetize readers encourages blogs to keep a close hold […]

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Vanessa O’Connell at the WSJ has described a disturbing trend:
Teen and adolescent girls have long used fashion as a social weapon. . . . But today, guidance counselors and psychologists say, fashion bullying is reaching a new level of intensity as more designers launch collections targeted at kids.
Dorothy Espelage, a professor of educational psychology […]

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Danielle Citron is giving a talk today at Harvard’s Berkman Center on “Open Code Governance”–the growing movement to render automated processes of judgment more transparent. Here are some interesting targets for reform that she mentioned in a pre-talk interview:
Systems reflect the biases of their programmers. For instance, Helen Nissenbaum studied an automated […]

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So Radiohead’s album In Rainbows debuted at number one on the U.S. charts (somehow I still hear Casey Kasem saying “And now for our number one”). The album sold 122,000 copies. Some point out that this number “falls well short of Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail To The Thief, which made its debut in the US […]

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I’ve just posted an essay on ssrn that explores the economics of speech and the First Amendment. (The abstract is below the fold.) The essay is meant to be a work in progress, an exploratory essay, and potentially a seed for future work. [Do people still use ssrn for rough works in […]

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Last month, Clive Thompson wrote in the New York Times about the Gömböc, which
leans off to one side, rocks to and fro as if gathering strength and then, presto, tips itself back into a “standing” position as if by magic. It doesn’t have a hidden counterweight inside that helps it perform this trick, like an […]

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With all the discussion about law schools and teaching I thought I would share something that I tried last year and plan on trying again in my trademark class. Near the end of the semester, I called a partner at my old firm and asked for the cease and desist letter, complaint, and summary judgment […]

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Oscar Pistorius is back in the news, as the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) prepares to rule that the South African known as “Blade Runner,” for the leg extensions that he relies on to motor around a track, is ineligible for Olympic competition.  Born without fibulas, Pistorius had both legs amputated below the knee […]

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