#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/4/24

It definitely started to feel like winter in Boston today, and while I shuffled along quickly outside I also listened to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a fantastic conversation between friends of the playlist Ann Lipton and Michael Levin on the evolving jurisprudence of the Caremark doctrine and the interesting role of Broadridge in the shareholder voting sector on the Shareholder Primacy podcast. I loved Ann's analysis of how the Marchand case influences Caremark claims (incredibly important for people analytics folks IMO), and Mike's review of the compelling treasure trove of shareholder data that Broadridge provides gave me tons of ideas 😉. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfCUo51D2l0

Next were a pair of talks by Nabeel Seedat (context-aware testing) and Paulius Rauba (self-healing machine learning), along with an excellent panel with Jessica Schrouff and Girmaw Abebe Tadesse at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgAclhlWK38

Last was "The Rise of English" by Rosemary Salomone. This book provides a fascinating analysis of the factors that are driving the growing dominance of English as the lingua franca of the world, from the desire of smaller countries to maintain competitive businesses and academic institutions, to anti-colonial currents in Africa, to navigating the challenges of a wide variety of local languages in India. There's a lot of time here spent on Europe, and the efforts of France in particular to reclaim the mantle its language formerly held.

Importantly this book is highly focused on the last few decades, and so starts at a point where English is already fairly dominant. I would have liked more on its earlier rise starting at the turn of the 20th century, but to be fair this book already covers a ton of ground. Highly recommend https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-of-english-9780190625610?cc=us&lang=en&