Saturday, April 26, 2003

Draft of a privacy policy for weblog sites hosted at blogs.law.harvard.edu, and users of those sites, written by Harvard Law student Eva Chan. [Scripting News] 6:29:12 PM    comment []

Performance-based salaries don't always pay off. Paying your employees more for hitting specific targets may sound like a great idea. But new research from Harvard suggests that the practice of connecting pay to performance is far trickier than it at first appears. [CNET News.com] 6:28:08 PM    comment []

Doc on Relationshipping. Britt Blaser: The Flip Side. One sample: Openness trumps legality, PR, accounting, advertising, good intentions, pricing, litigation and every other mechanism that convinces us it's a good idea to buy over-hyped commodities and sell an hour of our time for $20 so the company can resell it for $60. A single email may be enough openness to bring bankers down who once would have moved quietly on to another firm to do it all over again. When reputation data is too broadly distributed to be hidden and too obvious to be spun, we'll have recaptured the User Interface enjoyed by generations of traders in the stalls of Chaldea, relating to generations of customers, teaching the world how to serve the customer and the bottom line. It reads like the chapter of a book that needs to be written. Dig it. 6:23:40 PM    comment []

A Taut, Last-Minute Stretch to Save an Airline. What happened at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas last Wednesday ultimately pulled American back from the brink of bankruptcy. By Edward Wong and Micheline Maynard. [New York Times: Business] 6:22:01 PM    comment []

Provocative Economist at Chicago Awarded Prize. Steven D. Levitt, a professor at the University of Chicago, was awarded the John Bates Clark medal by the American Economic Association. By Daniel Altman. [New York Times: Science] 7:12:47 AM    comment []

Dave has posted the Abstract for his May 9 talk at Dartmouth. 7:10:35 AM    comment []

Canada Increases Pressure on W.H.O. to Lift Travel Advisory. Canada ratcheted up the pressure to persuade the World Health Organization to reverse its advisory to travelers to avoid Toronto because of SARS. By Clifford Krauss. [New York Times: Business] 7:08:50 AM    comment []

The ''American guy in Japan'' is talking about Japanese efforts to police their language against gairaigo, or words loaned from other languages. In the fashion of L'Académie française, (institution créée en1635, est chargée de définir la langue française par l'élaboration de sondictionnaire qui fixe l'usage), the National Institute for Japanese Language has now presented a list of 59 English or English-like words and expressions to be dropped from official government usage. Some initially targeted are to be kept for lack of native equivalent, as well. Vince has some good commentary on the whole thing. 7:05:02 AM    comment []

Entertainment Industry Loses in Web Case. A federal judge in Los Angeles ruled in favor of two online services that allow people to share digital files freely over the Internet. By Matt Richtel. [New York Times: Technology] Gotta like the headline. 6:58:15 AM    comment []

Online Anonymity Comes Under Fire. Verizon's loss in a court battle to keep an ISP customer's identity out of the music industry's hands will make it harder for people to stay anonymous online, privacy advocates say. By Katie Dean. [Wired News] I've been worrying about this. Talked about it yesterday with a friend in the context of fighting spam, too. The future of anonymity is a worthy topic to ponder. 6:54:42 AM    comment []