#AcademicRunPlaylist - 1/30/25

It was incredibly cold today, but since I had to take the car to the shop again (😡) while I was waiting I bundled up and went for good run while listening to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great discussion on the productivity trends in the UK's devolved nations with Graeme Roy (Scotland), John Turner (Northern Ireland), and Melanie Jones (Wales) on the Productivity Puzzles podcast https://pod.co/productivity-puzzles/a-productivity-agenda-for-the-devolved-nations

Next was an interesting talk by David Atienza on accelerator-centric lower power AI architectures at The Athena AI Institute. This is NSF funded BTW, and given how essential this administration thinks AI is you'd think they wouldn't want to torpedo work like this by not paying researcher salaries, as they did today... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOl5xompTnQ

Next was an amazing talk by Vishakh Padmakumar on the side effects of using LLMs in workflows at Ai2. This is exceptional research, with Padmakumar first introducing a study that demonstrates high levels of content homogenization when people use LLMs for writing and following it up with a study on professional creative writers showing how LLMs output less than useless, cliched content for their work. Any economist or practitioner making productivity predictions about AI has to watch this. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACWxtLvSvaA

Next was a nice talk by Max Bazerman on the changing nature of different types of negotiation at The Program on Negotiation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkoQLEZGGPc

Next was "The Oxford Handbook of IPOs," edited by Douglas Cumming and Sofia Johan. This book is an excellent collection of academic papers on a variety of IPO related topics. The first half of the book mostly covers various predictors of IPO outcomes from an economics perspective, but starting at chapter 14 (an amazing piece by Sébastien Dereeper and Armin Schwienbacher on the structure and the role of underwriting syndicates) the papers start focusing more on the legal framework of IPOs and international comparisons of different regulatory regimes. This is an incredibly thorough book on IPOs, and while it's quite long you'll come out with a much better understanding of this important area of business and markets. Highly recommend https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34671

Last was "The Book of Tea" by Kakuzo Okakura. Written in 1906 in English to introduce foreigners to Japanese (and more broadly East Asian) aesthetic philosophy, with a few problematic exceptions this short book remains surprisingly modern. Tying historical developments around aesthetic practices in the region to their modern descendants, Okakura provides a rich, thought-provoking philosophical view of beauty and life with strong counterpoints to traditional Western approaches. Highly recommend https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/769