Law and Development Review- another Special Issue

The 3rd of the 'Specials' of this series (see my posts on the previous first and second special issues here and here respectively), the 2011 Law and Development Review Special Issue is devoted to the Law and Development Institute Inaugural Conference entitled, “Future of Law and Development, International Trade and Economic Development”, which was held in Sydney, Australia, on the 16th of October, 2010. Articles:

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Introduction
Yong-Shik Lee

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Export Promotion Policies, Export Composition and Economic Development of Korea
Jai S. Mah

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WTO Rules and Agricultural Development Cooperation between Developed and Developing Countries
Won-Mog Choi

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International Trade and Development Law: A Legal Cultural Critique
Colin Picker

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Special and Differential Treatment, Trade and Sustainable Development
Maureen Irish

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International Development Disputes
Tomer Broude

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Law and Development in the Islamic World: New Possibilities
Salim Farrar

You can also access the all the (Special and Regular) issues here: 

Volume 4 (2011)
Number 1
Number 2:

Special Issue (2011): The Law and Development Institute 2010 Inaugural Conference

Volume 3 (2010)
Number 1
Number 2:

Special Issue (2010): New Voices from Emerging Powers - Brazil and India

Volume 2 (2009)
Number 1

Volume 1 (2008)
Number 1:

Special Inaugural Issue (2008)

Berkman Event- Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Self-Branding in Web 2.0

Tuesday, March 29, 12:30 pmBerkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

In the mid-2000s, journalists and businesspeople heralded “Web 2.0” technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook as signs of a new participatory era that would democratize journalism, entertainment, and politics. By the decade’s end, this idealism had been replaced by a gold-rush mentality focusing on status and promotion. While the rhetoric of Web 2.0 as democratic and revolutionary persists, I will contend that a primary use of social media is to boost user status and popularity, maintaining hierarchy rather than diminishing it. This talk focuses on three status-seeking techniques that emerged with social media: micro-celebrity, self-branding, and life-streaming. I examine interactions between social media and social life in the San Francisco “tech scene” to show that Web 2.0 has become a key aspect of social hierarchy in technologically mediated communities. About Alice
Alice Marwick is a postdoctoral researcher in social media at Microsoft Research New England and a research affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Her work looks at online identity and consumer culture through lenses of privacy, surveillance, consumption, and celebrity. Alice has a PhD from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, a MA from the University of Washington and a BA from Wellesley College. She has published in New Media and Society, Convergence, First Monday, Critical Studies in Media Communication and Information, Communication & Society. Marwick is a frequent presenter at academic and industry conferences and has appeared in The New York Times, The American Prospect, The Guardian, BusinessWeek and Wired Magazine. Her dissertation, "Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Self-Branding in Web 2.0" is available at her blog, http://www.tiara.org/blog.

Berkman Event: An Optimization-Based Framework for Automated Market-Making

I am thinking of ways that this might be used for the delivery of legal services:

CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, March 21, 2011
Time: 11:30am – 1:-00pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

While computers have automated the operation of most financial markets, the underlying mechanism was designed for people to operate it. It is simple, not necessarily efficient, and has room for improvement. This work is an endeavor to design efficient automated market-making mechanisms that take into consideration of the logical relationships of securities.

We propose a general framework for the design of securities markets over combinatorial or infinite state spaces. The framework enables the design of computationally efficient markets tailored to an arbitrary, yet relatively small, space of securities with bounded payoff. We prove that any market satisfying a set of intuitive conditions must price securities via a convex cost function, which is constructed via conjugate duality. Rather than dealing with an exponentially large or infinite outcome space directly, our framework only requires optimization over a convex hull. By reducing the problem of automated market-making to convex optimization, where many efficient algorithms exist, we arrive at a range of new polynomial-time pricing mechanisms for various problems. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework with the design of some particular markets. We also show that by relaxing the convex hull we can gain computational tractability without compromising the market institution’s bounded budget.

This talk is based on joint work with Jacob Abernethy and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan.
Bio: Yiling Chen is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Information Sciences and Technology from the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to working at Harvard, she spent two years at the Microeconomic and Social Systems group of Yahoo! Research in New York City. Her current research focuses on topics in the intersection of computer science and economics. She is interested in designing and analyzing social computing systems according to both computational and economic objectives. Chen received an ACM EC outstanding paper award and an NSF Career award, and was selected by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of “AI’s 10 to Watch” in 2011.