HEADOFCONTRACT

Baidu advances a bad idea, the mass migration of prostitutes, and OKGo borrows elbow grease from Mars Rover engineers.

I read lots of news and articles so here is some more recent topics which have caught my attention.

While Google has threatened to pull out of China because of hacking allegations and content censorship, the rival Chinese-centered search engine Baidu with 62.1% popularity ratings among the Chinese, would seem to make Google’s announcement of pulling out of China to the locals more or less irrelevant, Google’s third-party departure would recede their efforts to push forward their stance on human rights violations by China by leaving the profitable dumpload on search engine Baidu and Yahoo!. Baidu being an all-Chinese search engine suffers from even more censorship and political favoritism, even to the extent of Chinese government officials stationed inside Baidu’s offices. The outcome in the more recent past has resulted in unacceptable information distribution.
It’s like a black market trying to concealing itself within a grey area, only visible with suspicion and consequences.

“In November 2008, China Central Television said Baidu’s paid search service, which let Web sites pay to be listed higher among search results, highlighted links to unlicensed companies that offered medical products or services. CCTV said the sites sold treatments — many of them fake, useless or unlicensed — for cancer, sexually transmitted diseases and other ailments. CCTV also said that consumers were more likely to purchase such products because it wasn’t clear that the product placement had been purchased. Despite such setbacks, Baidu continues to make gains. It earned $72.2 million in the third quarter last year. Big advertisers include Nike, Intel and other Fortune 500 companies.”

“Baidu has its critics. Many of them think that the company’s ardor for money prompted it to accept payments in return for deleting negative reports. When the Sanlu Group was found to have sold dairy products containing kidney-damaging melamine, critics alleged that Baidu had agreed to filter out relevant pages from its search results, citing a document purporting to describe an agreement between Sanlu and Baidu. Baidu denied the accusations, but the incident damaged the company’s reputation and for a time drove traffic to other sites, according to one competitor.”
Read quoted article


International sporting events like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup bring incentives for countries of all economic statuses to participate in the playing field and assert their unity in the competing global market. South Africa being the chosen host nation for FIFA’s 2010 World Cup (if you’re unfamiliar, it is an international 4 year soccer event) probably has not seen such major events since the imprisonment, then un-imprisonment, then presidency, of Nelson Mandela and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I’m a FIFA fan all the way, soccer is a great sport, unlike hockey which has turned into a hybrid of schizo wrestling on ice, soccer remains a no-contact deep-thinking fast-playing physically vigorous sport. But, unlike most major event hosting nations South Africa has had it’s share of downs and downs, it is in these situations where a phenomenon occurs called prostitution and less-so phenomenal child smuggling worthy of it’s own documentary, suggestively titled Black Light District 9. If you like sporting events there is just that chance that you might return home as a concerned dead luger or positively HIV positive audience member. The hype spent on promotion around sporting events just might lack the enthusiasm of responsibility and the un-enthusiasm of a South African child at gunpoint who was wandering the streets during the day on school holidays.


If you were left amused and geek-smitten by a band named OKGo you probably don’t give a flying-f about until they released a video called “This Too Shall Pass” which completes all your grade school science class fantasies of building the most epic Rube Goldberg machine, you would be happy to know it was probably worth your moment of attention, the project took 5 months to complete with the work of 60 engineers including NASA’s Mars Rover team. I feel inspired that the foreign world of science and engineering found it’s worth of weight in time for 3 minutes of music.
Read full Gizmodo interview