digital thoughts

How much the online Jobs sites are worth? $206 million in China.

Chinese online jobs site Zhaopin.com has received a big $110 million round of mezzanine funding. This is the largest ever investment in the online jobs sector in China in recent years. According to the company CEO Hao Liu, Zhaopin.com, this will be the company’s final round of financing before a planned IPO in 2010.

The latest purchases value Zhaopin—which translates as “help wanted”—at $206 million. The website is not making any profits. Insiders say it may be two years before Zhaopin breaks even. For the 2006-07 year it lost $13 million. Zhaopin is rapidly catching China’s largest job ads company, the Nasdaq-listed 51job.

Coca-Cola Company said it opened a research center in Beijing that will partner with a Chinese research center to develop drinks based on Chinese herbal ingredients and formulas.

Japanese and Chinese live healthier and longer lives than any other people in the world. One of the main reasons is their use of rejuvenating herbs. Centuries ago, India was the leader in medicines too. Our ancestors’ medical knowledge is respected and followed by many Asian countries.

Chinese and Japanese developed their own medicines using the local herbs. Ginseng is one of the best examples.

Many of today’s wonder drugs are derived from Japanese, Chinese and Indian herbs. China has been perfecting the herbs for more than 5000 years. It is no wonder Coca-Cola decided to partner with China for medical research.

The Coca-Cola Research Center for Chinese Medicine opened within the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. The academy is the national center for research, health care and education in traditional Chinese medicine according to Coca-Cola.

Related Link: Can Ancient Herbs Treat Cancer? | Simple Blood Test Spots Lung Cancer 

A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said yesterday.

The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted by the Beijing News as saying.

“Police have ruled out the possibility of suicide,” the newspaper said, adding that exhaustion was the most likely cause of death. It did not say what game he was playing.

China, worried about the spread of pornography and politically incorrect content, has banned the opening of new cybercafes this year and issued orders limiting the time Internet users can spend playing online.

Online games are just another form of addiction, it’s proven again that addiction can kill.

Asian-Americans constitute only about 4.5% of the U.S. population. Still, they typically account for anywhere from 10% to 30% of students at many of the nation’s elite colleges.

Even so, based on their outstanding grades and test scores, Asian-Americans increasingly say their enrollment should be much higher — a contention backed by a growing body of evidence.

Whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake is becoming a big concern in college-admissions offices. Federal civil-rights officials are investigating charges by a top Chinese-American student that he was rejected by Princeton University because of his race and national origin.

A study, by the Center for Equal Opportunity, in Virginia, found that Asian applicants admitted to the University of Michigan in 2005 had a median SAT score of 1400 on the 400-1600 scale then in use. That was 50 points higher than the median score of white students who were accepted, 140 points higher than that of Hispanics and 240 points higher than that of blacks.

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, said universities are “legally vulnerable” to challenges from rejected Asian-American applicants.

Princeton, where Asian-Americans constitute about 13% of the student body, faces such a challenge. A spokesman for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it is investigating a complaint filed by Jian Li, now a 17-year-old freshman at Yale University. Despite racking up the maximum 2400 score on the SAT and 2390 on SAT2 subject tests in physics, chemistry and calculus, Jian Li was spurned by three Ivy League universities, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Office for Civil Rights initially rejected Jian’s complaint due to “insufficient” evidence. Jian appealed, citing a white high-school classmate admitted to Princeton despite lower test scores and grades. The office notified him that it would look into the case.

Li, who emigrated to the U.S. from China as a 4-year-old and graduated from a public high school in Livingston, N.J., said he hopes his action will set a precedent for other Asian-American students. He wants to “send a message to the admissions committee to be more cognizant of possible bias, and that the way they’re conducting admissions is not really equitable,” he said.

In 1990, a federal investigation concluded that Harvard University admitted Asian-American applicants at a lower rate than white students despite the Asians’ slightly stronger test scores and grades. Federal investigators also found that Harvard admissions staff had stereotyped Asian-American candidates as quiet, shy and oriented toward math and science.

The U.S. government didn’t bring charges because it concluded it was Harvard’s preferences for athletes and alumni children — few of whom were Asian — that accounted for the admissions gap.

The University of California came under similar scrutiny at about the same time. In 1989, as the federal government was investigating alleged Asian-American quotas at UC’s Berkeley campus, Berkeley’s chancellor apologized for a drop in Asian enrollment. The next year, federal investigators found that the mathematics department at UCLA had discriminated against Asian-American graduate school applicants. In 1992, Berkeley’s law school agreed under federal pressure to drop a policy that limited Asian enrollment by comparing Asian applicants against each other rather than the entire applicant pool.
Asian-American enrollment at Berkeley has increased since California voters banned affirmative action in college admissions.

Precise figures of Asian-American representation at the nation’s top schools are hard to come by. Don Joe, an attorney and activist who runs Asian-American Politics, an Internet site that tracks enrollment, puts the average proportion of Asian-Americans at 25 top colleges at 15.9% in 2005, up from 10% in 1992.

till, he said, he is hearing more complaints “from Asian-American parents about how their children have excellent grades and scores but are being rejected by the most selective colleges. It appears to be an open secret.”

Jian Li was in the top 1% of his high-school class. Along with Yale, he won admission to the California Institute of Technology, Rutgers University and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He said four schools — Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania — placed him on their waiting lists before rejecting him. “I was very close to being accepted at these schools,” he said. “I was thinking, had my ethnicity been different, it would have put me over the top. Even if race had just a marginal effect, it may have disadvantaged me.”

Jian ultimately focused his complaint against Princeton after reading a 2004 study by three Princeton researchers concluding that an Asian-American applicant needed to score 50 points higher on the SAT than other applicants to have the same change of admission to an elite university.

In terms of discrimination, Americans are far better than Europeans especially British. Still, Asian-Americans face discrimination in every day life. That’s the open secret.  Law suits like this could solve some of the problems. Let us wait and see how this case turns out.