2010-03-11T03:50:00.000-08:00

What is the law?

The Federal Trade Commission published a recommendation that companies who promote their product through word-of-mouth marketing must disclose these relationships. The recommendation applies explicitly to blogging, meaning that bloggers must disclose the fact that they are being paid to promote or review a product whenever that is the case.

PayPerPost and ReviewMe are websites that link advertisers up with bloggers that want to earn money for writing about their products. In light of the FTC recommendation, PayPerPost and ReviewMe bloggers are now required to disclose the fact that they are being paid for their endorsement. But beyond these two sites, there is a much larger industry of “Buzz Advertising” which takes place through informal emails and payments between bloggers. The letter of the FTC recommendation includes these informal payments as well, meaning that even under the table reviews must be disclosed. But considering that to date no blogger has been prosecuted for violating the FTC’s recommendation, it isn’t yet clear how strict the FTC is going to be or the punishments that will be imposed.

How to stay out of trouble

1. NEVER claim that you are an objective, unbiased source if you are being paid to provide information.
2. ALWAYS make it easy for your readers to distinguish between advertising and editorial content.
3. CONSIDER that even though the FTC’s paid review disclosure recommendation doesn’t appear to apply to links, meaning that webmasters aren’t required to “NoFollow” the paid links they give as of now, scholars at the University of Chicago Law School are currently discussing this as a future development for e-commerce law.

Is Deep Linking Legal

One of the biggest advantages that blogging has over traditional media is the convention to include links in an article which connect the reader directly with the source. The links could direct the reader to a file, a different page on the same site or to a new site altogether. Despite the generally helpful nature of linking and the internet’s open platform, however, linking is not free from US government regulation.

What is the law?

Currently, there is no law that explicitly bans all deep linking to content you do not own. However, courts have declared that individual deep links are in violation of state law if they are not cited correctly. Thus, it is clear that passing off someone else’s work as your own by linking to a site in a manner in which it appears that the linked to content is a part of your site, is considered copyright infringement and it violates state laws that govern competitive business practices. But, it also appears that if you make it clear that the deep link you are providing isn’t to your own site then you are in the clear. The leading case in this area is Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc. where TicketMaster argued that a deep link by Tickets.com to a TicketMaster actual ticket purchase page was a copyright infringement because traffic was routed through the back door of the site. Thus far, however, no court has found that deep linking by a blogger is a copyright infringement or trespass.

How to stay out of trouble

1. NEVER claim that a page or site is your work unless it actually is.
2. ALWAYS clearly distinguish between your work and someone else’s.
3. CONSIDER that deep linking is a pretty well-established blogging practice, so if you’re deep linking to other bloggers or newspapers, you’re probably fine. But that doesn’t mean that every other blogger knows the law, so you’re likely to get an occasional angry email. If you want to play it ultrasafe, consider emailing the webmaster for permission and including a front page link next to your deep link.

Lawyer and Attorney Theme

Virginia Divorce Lawyers Goal My goal is to help others easily share their legal knowledge in an appealing style. While my primary site is focused on Virginia divorce lawyers, any law firm can easily utilize this blog to create their own standalone website or use it simply for blogging purposes. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or issues. Also, comments are certainly appreciated; hopefully positive (wink)! However in all sincerity please do add your feedback regarding the law theme therefore and I will attempt to make improvements that are desired. Thank you and all others who visit and utilize this legal theme.

Top 10 education news and trends of 2010

1. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced Race to the Top program that will distribute a total of $4.35 billion to states with the best school reform proposals. Educators hope that the program would help states shape and implement wide-ranging reform measures in their public schools.

2. NAEP scores stagnate and disappoint educators, raising fears that the U.S. will not meet achievement goals set by President Bush and No Child Left Behind. Racial achievement gap also appears to be firmly in place.

3. The economic downturn drive students away from 4-year private colleges in 2009 while community colleges experienced the highest enrollment in years. Some become so crowded that administrators devise creative ways to accommodate students, such as 2 a.m. classes.

4. Congress considered reform to student loans but wavers on more decisive and drastic changes to the existing structure.

5. Hard-hit by the economy, states across the nation cut educational funding. Universities respond by freezing salaries, implementing hiring caps, halting construction projects, cutting services, laying off staff, and raising tuition.

6. In a year where the courts showed much judicial restraint and deferred to the school board on education issues, the Supreme Court decided in Safford v. Redding that the strip search of a 13-year-old girl on suspicion that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen violated the Fourth Amendment.

7. Education schools came under criticism, including from Education Secretary Arne Duncan, for lack of standards and rigorous methodology.

8. Chicago and other school districts around the country begin to use socio-economic data instead of race in an effort to integrate their public schools after a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that prohibited schools from using race as a factor in school assignment.

9. “Merit pay” and “accountability” are the buzzwords once again as state legislatures rush to eliminate barriers to link student performance and teacher evaluation in order to comply with requirements for the Race to the Top funding.

10. New technological innovations such as e-textbooks, tutoring software, virtual schools and distance learning, and student performance-tracking programs are helping students learn better and changing the dynamics of the student-teacher relationship. Their widespread use, however, still lie in the future.

Idea of the day: using e-books to learn about learning

Amazon.com tells me that the Kindle is the hottest holiday gift this holiday season. And not long ago, several law professors had a lively discussion of law e-textbooks on a prominent law blog. It seems that, ready or not, widespread use of e-textbooks are just around the corner.

To be sure, traditional paper textbooks will not disappear immediately, but e-textbooks will surely gain more popularity as prices for e-readers fall, technologies become perfected, and more publishers make textbooks available electronically.

I must admit that I am not yet enamored by e-readers, and do not own one. I prefer the texture, the weight, the craftsmanship of real books. I love certain publishers just because I like the designs of their paperbacks, and a beautiful book cover always sends a little shiver of pleasure down my spine. To think that a new generation of children will be weaned on a screen and never know the loveliness of paper makes me a bit sad.

Nonetheless, lately I have gotten more excited about the prospect of e-textbooks when I realized that e-readers might be used — indeed, is probably already being used — to track the reading habits of its readers and to generate data and trends.

To average adult readers reading for pleasure, the idea that their reading habits may be meticulously tracked by a machine might seem like an enormous invasion of privacy. But collecting such data may be indispensable to educators who are trying to understand effective learning behavior.

Most of the data that we collect about education measures the output of the learning process. We test student knowledge in standardized, nationwide or state-wide exams that are given periodically, and then analyze the test scores generated by these exams to determine how well the learning process has succeeded. But e-readers and similar devices can generate enormous amount of data about the learning process itself.

What type of data might be collected? The possibilities are virtually endless. The e-device might track how much time a student spends per day reading, what he reads, the speed at which he reads, the amount of time he spends reading particular pages, etc. If, as I believe would inevitably happen, such devices would come equipped with quizzes and problem sets and exams, students can also be tracked based on how long they spend doing a particular problems and, of course, their score.

There is a bonanza of information that researchers could use to study learning behavior. But the tracking could be used not only for academic purposes, but also as a way for schools and teachers to ensure that students are completing their homework. Many employers already do a form of this type of tracking by, for example, requiring their employees to take an on-line training program that consists of powerpoint slides with periodical questions to ensure that the content of the slides are being read and understood.

There are a few well-known problems in education that researchers have long puzzled over. Take, for example, the problem of the racial achievement gap. Why do children of different races perform differently in standardized exams even when one accounts for other factors, such as socio-economic background? Elsewhere in this blog, I have argued that we have an unhealthy focus on race, and that other, even wider achievement gaps should trouble us more. But it is undeniable that the racial achievement gaps exist. Learning more about children’s learning habits might give us insights into this and other puzzles.

Of course, understanding how students learn is not the only or even the most important goal. Through better understanding of how people learn, educators can figure out ways to improve the way students learn and the way teachers teach.

Does all of this sound Big Brother-esque? Perhaps. But like it or not, retailers, advertisers, and website developers already do very similar things in order to understand and track consumer behavior. Information about the amount of time a shopper spends on a webpage, the types of links that he clicks, the search criteria that brought him there, are all meticulously tracked and then fed into sophisticated programs. It is time that our educators take advantage of these tools, for the sake of our students.

Why learning should be less fun

In his speech addressing the nation today, President Obama mentioned, once again, the well-known fact that that the math and science scores of U.S. students lag behind the students of many other industrialized countries, including China, Finland, and Singapore. The weak scores have long been the worry for American educators. They are partly what the Race to the Top funding is supposed to address.

So far, many prominent voices in education have assumed that the reason for the lag is some essential problem with American schools. Some, such as the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, point to the lack of “good math and science teachers” and calls for higher teacher salaries to attract more and better teachers in those areas. Others, like Paul Peterson at Education Next , believe that technological innovation “is our best and final hope for saving high-quality math and science education.” Peterson hopes that online education could compete with traditional models of teaching and educate better students.

But few people seem to be asking a rather obvious question: if U.S. students are lagging behind other countries, how do these other countries teach their children? Do China, Finland, Estonia, Sinagpore, Japan, etc. have more talented teachers? Do they have more effective teaching methods arrived at via a more decentralized teaching market?

In future posts, I would like to explore the school systems of these other countries. But this post will be a more personal one. Having experienced one of these other education systems first-hand, I can tell you that neither of those propositions was true.

I went to an elementary school on the outskirts of Beijing that was considered very mediocre. Some of my teachers were compassionate and interesting. Most failed to make an impression on me. A couple were downright horrible. Corporal punishment was normal behavior. So was verbal denigration of students.

School was not fun. Hours were long — in elementary school we arrived in class around 8:30 am and usually stayed until 6 or 7 pm (with a 1.5 hour break for lunch in between). High school hours were even longer. We went to school 6 days a week, and usually had a couple of hours of homework each day, which mostly consisted of math and verbal drills and problem sets. I did not like school very much.

And yet… I learned. Lots and lots of math and science. By 7th grade my classmates and I were solving complex quadratic equations with multiple variables. By 7th grade, we were learning biology, chemistry, and physics, all in the same year. All 3 science courses were mandatory courses to be taken concurrently for the six years of middle and high school.

So imagine my surprise when I came to the States and discovered that children in 7th grade were still reviewing how to add and subtract fractions. Imagine my surprise to learn that students only enrolled in one science class each grade, alternating among biology, physics, and chemistry, that school let out at 2:30, that homework was nearly nonexistent.

Needless to say, for the next three or four year or so, I sailed through my math and science classes with excellent grades. My Chinese education, as much as I disliked it at the time, gave someone like me, by no means a math or science genius, a huge boost. This is something that many immigrant children I know experienced.

Why did the Chinese school teach me so much more? Did I learn because I loved school, because my teachers were fascinating, because I had tools unavailable to my American peers? No, no, and no. I learned because of the excruciatingly long hours, the constant drills, the obviously high expectations, the pressures from the teachers and from my own parents.

School in China was not expected to be fun, and no one pretended that it was. Learning certain subjects, especially math and science, was work. Work that was sometimes grueling. Work that required discipline, just like learning a musical instrument or becoming good at a sport.

Some children find such discipline easy. Those children are often high achievers from a very young age. But for most, including me, discipline was difficult and required external motivation. It sometimes required fear, including fear of being punished. As a whole, my Chinese school, for all its shortcomings, was very effective at instilling this discipline.

Even for someone as young as me, it was clear that the emphasis of my American public schools was not on discipline. It was on something like “creativity,” or “individuality.” Much of it was focused on “fun.” This was reflected in the short hours of school, in the light volume of homework, on the long summers, on the gentle and easy-going way in which teacher treated us, on such filler classes such as “study hall.”

No doubt, certain students thrive in the more fluid and flexible American system, which allows for those at the top to develop their talent more spectacularly than the stratified Chinese system could ever allow. Time spent outside of school could be used to accomplish some amazing things, just take a look at the spectacular entries each year for the Westinghouse competition. But as a society, our concerns are not merely with the success of the top students, but also the average students whose lagging scores trouble us so much.

Do I believe that American schools should adopt all of the tactics of my Chinese school? Not at all. Even the Chinese schools themselves have reformed and eliminated many of the harsh authoritarian measures. But I do believe that to improve the math and science scores, American schools do not necessarily need better teachers or more innovative methods. It needs more of a culture of discipline. It needs, for instance, longer school days, and more teacher authority.

Most of all, it needs the realization, from students, parents, teachers, and administrators, that mastering basic academic skills, just like athletic drills or music practice, is often not fun. Perhaps we put too much emphasis on looking for ways to make it so. Perhaps we should instead look for ways to effectively teach our students the discipline they need to learn.

Religious speech in school: religion or speech?

My previous post discusses the tension between the Establishment Clause and the Free-Exercise Clause in the First Amendment. In the school context, much of the tension centers on what public school educators can or cannot do. But a couple of recent cases involving religious speech demonstrate that the tension exists for students as well.

Unlike with teachers, who are state employees, student religious speech normally does not trigger the Establishment Clause concern that the state is endorsing an official religion. Nonetheless, in recent years, controversies and lawsuits have sprung up around the country concerning whether schools may prevent students from reciting prayers, singing religious hymns, or offering other expressions of religion at school-sponsored events. In nearly all of these cases, courts have upheld the powers of the schools to regulate student conduct.

Some of the cases seem almost comically petty. A Wisconsin student who planned to sing a hymn at graduation was told, for example, that she would have to use “he,” “him,” or “his,” instead of “God” in the lyrics. A New Jersey school district banned religious music entirely at the school holiday concert, a decision challenged by parents but upheld by the 3rd circuit.

A pair of cases about graduation speeches have received a lot of media attention, and both were recently denied cert by the Supreme Court. In McComb v. Crehan, a Las Vegas high school valedictorian sought to use her valedictory speech to discuss how her christian faith helped her to succeed in school. The school nixed portions of her draft speech as “proselytizing.” Brittany McComb decided to deliver the speech anyway, and the school turned off her microphone at graduation. McComb then brought suit against the school district, alleging a violation of her First Amendment rights.

A district court in Nevada denied the school’s motion to dismiss the case based on the pleadings, essentially ruling that McComb could go forward on her suit. But the 9th Circuit reversed and upheld the school’s actions.

In a similar case, Colorado valedictorian Erica Corder also veered from her prepared text into proselytization of her Christian faith. She actually succeeded in delivering the entire speech. But the school principal refused to grant her diploma until she wrote a letter acknowledging that the speech was her personal view. Corder’s suit against the school district, therefore, dealt not only with unlawfully censored speech but also unlawfully compelled speech. The suit has been similarly dismissed by the 10th Circuit.

Although the two circuit courts reached the same results, they rested their reasoning on different grounds: one primarily on religion, and the other primarily on speech. This highlights a problem with student religious speech in school — should it be analyzed under the Establishment Clause rubric, or the Free Speech Clause?

In the 9th Circuit, the issue was analyzed as one of religion, perhaps in part because there is clear caselaw that students have no right to proselytize in a school-sponsored event. Neither party disputed that the school officials had the power to control and censor student speech in such a setting. The main issues were factual: whether the student speech was in fact proselytizing and whether the school official retained primary control over the graduation speech.

The 10th Circuit, however, did not have such clear precedents, and instead rested its ruling on an analysis of prior Supreme Court student free-speech cases. In doing so, the 10th Circuit ruling nearly completely ignores the “religion” aspect of the case and treats the student’s religious speech as any other types of speech.

Although the 10th Circuit arrives at the same conclusion as the 9th Circuit, such an approach has its risks. Student speech cases typically rely on a kind of in loco parentis authority that the school has to regulate behavior of the students in order to satisfy educational and disciplinary goals. In its opinion, the 10th Circuit strained to explain what type of “educational” goals the school achieved by censoring religious speech.

The fact of the matter is, a school’s decision to censor religious speech is not the same as its decision to censor sexual, or lewd, or incendiary speech. It should not rest on a discretionary judgment about the consequences of the speech, but should stem from a legitimate concern that such speech may be seen as endorsed by the school in violation of the Establishment Clause.

Thus, prohibiting this type of speech, at least in a school-sponsored event where schools retain primary control of the content, is not optional and a judgment call, it is constitutionally required. Religious speech in school is not just speech, it is religion.

law systems of various countries

Law of the United States
When we talk about the Law of the United States we see that it is derived from common law systems of English law which was in force at the time of revolutionary war. The four main sources from which the Law of the United States is derived are constitutional law, administrative law, statutory law and common law. How does everything work in Law of the United States? online background check. This question has a very big answer which cannot be covered in few lines. You can get high quality information about personal injury lawyer toronto here.

Law of Australia
When it comes to law of Australia we see that it consist of the Australian common law (which is based on the English common law). In Australia all the states and territories are self governing and are separate jurisdictions, and have their won system of courts and parliaments. If you are looking for more details about the law of Australia then you need to explore the world of web or go through books of law.

Law of China
Law of China is the oldest legal tradition and is quite interesting as well, as it has been a complex mix of traditional Chinese approaches and western. Explore the world of web and get a clear idea about the law of china.

The web is the best source to get more detailed information about law and its related topics. Make sure you go through the authentic websites so that you get authentic information as a result. The best way to get the most authentic result is to use search engines with appropriate and specific keywords

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Commencement of classes: August 03, 2010

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