Spreading the Oprah Effect: The Diffusion of Demand Shocks in a Recommendation Network

We study the magnitude and persistence of the diffusion of exogenous demand shocks on an ecommerce recommendation network. The demand shocks are generated by book reviews on the Oprah Winfrey Show and in the NYTimes, and the recommendation network is generated by Amazon’s copurchase network. We find a strikingly high level of diffusion of exogenous shock through such networks. Neighboring books experience a dramatic increase in their demand levels, even though they are not actually featured on the review. An average of 40% of neighbors, even 4 clicks away see a statistically significant increase in their demand levels; this effect is indicative of the depth of contagion in online recommendation networks following exogenous shocks. We also document how clustered networks “trap” a higher fraction of the contagion closer to the reviewed book, and we provide summaries of the persistence and relative magnitude of the demand inflation of the neighborhood

Five Quirky Blogs to Check Out

A few blogs we’ve stumbled across in recent weeks that, depending on your interests, may merit your further attention: 1. “China Book Reviews” runs (as you might expect) reviews of an unusual selection of China books, including a few we’ve mentioned or reviewed ourselves, like Jeff Wasserstrom’s Brave New World and Mobo Gao’s The Battle for China’s Past (which Kate Merkel-Hess reviewed for TLS last spring). 2. Anna Greenspan wrote a piece for China in 2008 about the tainted milk scandal in China last fall. Now she is keeping her own blog about her experiment with placing her three-year old in local Chinese preschool rather than sending him to international school. 3. Mark Anthony Jones has become one of our most regular commenters, but he also has his own website, where he has just started a blog with some great images from his visits to his students’ dorms. 4. Crystal Mo keeps an entertaining food in Shanghai blog at City Weekend. 5. Chinese historian Jim Millward keeps his own blog called “The World on a String,” that includes musings on everything from the history of the pipa to the Jonas Brothers

Five Quirky Blogs to Check Out

A few blogs we’ve stumbled across in recent weeks that, depending on your interests, may merit your further attention: 1. “China Book Reviews” runs (as you might expect) reviews of an unusual selection of China books, including a few we’ve mentioned or reviewed ourselves, like Jeff Wasserstrom’s Brave New World and Mobo Gao’s The Battle for China’s Past (which Kate Merkel-Hess reviewed for TLS last spring). 2. Anna Greenspan wrote a piece for China in 2008 about the tainted milk scandal in China last fall. Now she is keeping her own blog about her experiment with placing her three-year old in local Chinese preschool rather than sending him to international school. 3. Mark Anthony Jones has become one of our most regular commenters, but he also has his own website, where he has just started a blog with some great images from his visits to his students’ dorms. 4. Crystal Mo keeps an entertaining food in Shanghai blog at City Weekend. 5. Chinese historian Jim Millward keeps his own blog called “The World on a String,” that includes musings on everything from the history of the pipa to the Jonas Brothers

Big science, internationalisation, professionnalisation et fonction sociale de la science à travers l’analyse diachronique des recensions d’ouvrage.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of some ecdotical variables in an academic genre that has so far received little attention, viz, book reviews (BR). Toward that end, we analyzed 100 BR written in French and published in 2 different time periods: between 1890 and 1900 (Block A) and between 1990 and 2000 (Block B). The variable we studied were: 1) the book reviewed (its length, genre and original language), 2) the book author (a single author, an editor or a co-editor and the way his credentials are presented), 3) the BR itself (its length, the frequency of courtesy markers and of bibliographical references) and 4) the BR author (anonymat vs. identification). Quantitative results were analyzed by means of the Chi square. Our most salient results show that in both Blocks the most frequent book type is the monographie, followed by the traité and the manuel in Bloc A, and by congress proceedings in Bloc B (a genre non-extant in Bloc A). In Block A, BR are 4 times longer than those of Block B (p = .0001). The great majority of the books reviewed in this Bloc are single-authored books (p = .0001 when comparing their frequency to that of multi-authored books) written in French (p = .0001 when comparing their frequency to that of books written in other languages). The BR author very frequently remains “almost-anonymous” (his initials only are mentioned), and courtesy markers are a rhetorical hallmark of these end-of-19th century BR. Conversely, in Block B most books reviewed are multi-authored/edited books (p = .0001 and p = .0047 when comparing their frequency to that registered in Bloc A) written in English (p= .0001 when comparing their frequency with that recorded in Block A). Contrary to what was observed in Block A, most books reviewed in Block B are then collaborative works. Finally, the name of the publishing company is a routine feature of BR in Bloc B, whereas it not so in Bloc A. These quantitative results are explained from a socioconstructivist standpoint. We conclude that they underline the hyper specialization, professionalization and internationalization of today’s science and reflect the increasing social … and commercial concern of today’s scientific enterprise

More than Decisions: Reviews of American Law Reports in the Pre-West Era

In the early nineteenth century, both general literary periodicals and the first American legal journals often featured reviews of new volumes of U.S. Supreme Court and state court opinions, suggesting their importance not only to lawyers seeking the latest cases, but to members of the public. The reviews contributed to public discourse through comments on issues raised in the cases and the quality of the reporting, and were valued as forums for commentary on the law and its role in American society, particularly during debates on codification and the future of the common law in the 1820s. James Kent saw the reports as worthy of study by scholars of taste and literature, or to be read for their drama and displays of great feeling. By the 1840s fewer lengthy reviews of reports were published in the journals, but shorter reviews continued in the years prior to and after the Civil War; they largely disappeared with the emergence of West’s National Reporter System and other privately published reporters in the 1880s. This paper examines role and influences of the reviews in earlier decades of the century

Creating a Comprehensive Review of the Literature

Research normally begins by doing a “review of the literature” to see what has already been written and to determine “gaps” in the literature for further research. This handout reviews ways to search for books, scholarly articles, dissertations, and grey literature on any topic using our library subscription resources

Special Libraries, February 1946

Volume 37, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1946/1001/thumbnail.jp

Download It While It\u27s Hot: Open Access and Legal Scholarship

This article analyzes the shift of legal scholarship from the old world of law reviews to today\u27s world of peer reviews to tomorrow\u27s world of open access legal blogs. This shift is occurring in three dimensions. First, legal scholarship is moving from the long form (treatises and law review articles) to the short form (very short articles, blog posts, and online collaborations). Second, a regime of exclusive rights is giving way to a regime of open access. Third, intermediaries (law school editorial boards, peer-reviewed journals) are being supplemented by disintermediated forms (papers on the Internet, blogs). Blogs and internet conversations between academics are expanding interdisciplinary legal scholarship and increasing the avenues of communication among legal scholars, practitioners and a wide array of interested laypersons worldwide