This is probably the least important topic in the history of our blog.

I have this old post, Teaching materials now available for Llaudet and Imai’s Data Analysis for Social Science!, which recently received the following comment from Shriram Krishnamurthi:

For whatever strange reason, the Website link (for “tons of materials”) now redirects to an unrelated(?) professor’s vanity site. The link one wants is here:
https://ellaudet.github.io/dss_instructor_resources/

I checked and Shriram is right, so I fixed the link.

But here’s the weird part.

The old link (now removed from the earlier post) was: https://scholar.harvard.edu/ellaudet/dss-instructor-materials

I get that Llaudet is no longer at Harvard and they might want to keep their website clean by removing links to former affiliates. So it makes sense that the link “https://scholar.harvard.edu/ellaudet/dss-instructor-materials” would no longer work.

But here’s the weird thing. Go to that url and it bumps you over to a website called “https://k-froot.com,” which looks like this:

It’s the homepage of a retired Harvard professor of business administration. I tried plain old “https://scholar.harvard.edu/ellaudet” and this also takes us to k-froot.com.

And then I tried “https://scholar.harvard.edu/abc” and, you guessed it . . . it takes us to k-froot.

Did Froot make some sort of arrangement with his employer so that all non-working links at https://scholar.harvard.edu go to his webpage? This would seem a bit bizarre, as it’s not like he’s getting anything from these links (in case you’re wondering, if you click through to his C.V. you’ll learn various random things such as that in 2016 he received the “Crowell Second Paper Prize, PanAgora Asset Management”).

Or maybe it’s a glitch on the Harvard website, that these nonworking links all get sent to k-froot.com because some accidental bit of code ended up in their html? I have no idea. Nonworking links at the regular Harvard site (e.g., https://www.harvard.edu/abc) just go to your standard 404 page (not the one linked here, unfortunately). Does anyone have any idea?

P.S. I just checked the links and that Froot thing is no longer happening. Maybe it was some temporary glitch that they fixed. Weird. Anyway, I changed “is” to “was” in the title of this post.