We had little flurries in Boston today, and while taking in the lovely landscape during a good run I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Poorna Mysoor on conceptualizing copyright as personal property at the Cambridge Faculty of Law https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLpeQU6nFiM

Next was an excellent talk by Daniel Solove on the misguided current approach to privacy law and how to reconceptualize it. Solove points out the fundamental flaws with individual control as the focal point of privacy law, and for good measure dispenses with the myths of technology neutrality and regulation impeding innovation. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV8ctAuZOTQ

Next was an amazing talk by Preston Culbertson on the need to account for randomness and errors in robotic control and optimization systems at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). Culbertson clearly details the limitations of relying solely on sim to real methods or collecting tons of data to train models for robotic systems, instead showing how using relatively straightforward models as a base combined with online optimization leads to systems that actually work in the real world. This should be required viewing for everyone who thinks large models can easily port to physical systems. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LnZ3-_jc28

Next was a compelling conversation with Tamar Kushnir on imagination and social cognition in childhood and beyond on the Stanford Psychology Podcast. Kushnir discusses a number of fascinating studies, and explains how acquired knowledge influences imagination. Highly recommend https://www.stanfordpsychologypodcast.com/episodes/episode/7d2d3849/169-tamar-kushnir-the-power-of-imagination

Last was “The Bosses' Union” by Vilja Hulden. This is an incredible book, with Hulden zooming in on the formative decades of the labor movement to illuminate how employer organizations, principally led by the infamous NAM, worked to deny worker rights. While these efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, this book shows their tight integration with political networks to delay gains for organized labor for decades, engaging in astroturfing campaigns and coordinated advertising boycotts of pro-labor newspapers to warp the public narrative. Hulden even uses word embeddings to illustrate how the usage of certain terms changed over time, one of the best uses of computational linguistics I've seen in a historical work. This is an essential book for understanding the legal and social roots of the structural scaffolding of organized labor in the US, and further convinced me that the NAM is the most corrosive organization of the 20th century that most people haven't heard of. Highly recommend https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p086922