#AcademicRunPlaylist - 4/5/24

There was still a bit of snow on the ground in Boston, but I enjoyed a decent Friday run with talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an excellent talk by Mari Kawakatsu on the emergence of hierarchy in networked endorsement dynamics at the Women in Network Science (WiNS) seminar. Kawakatsu builds on empirical findings documenting hierarchical emergence in systems as diverse as parakeets, dating, and college professor recruiting to develop a model that can reliably recreate these dynamics and predict when they will/won't occur.
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUCfC0Dg_Hg
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmJYlMTi9Es

Next was an intriguing talk by Sarah Shugars on the network structure of written reasoning at the WiNS seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2dn1VODPTg

Next was a wide-ranging talk by Joseph Stiglitz on the need to redefine the economic and legal approach to antitrust at the New York University School of Law. Best quote: "No one takes the Second Welfare Theorem seriously outside of Chicago." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGOk6RP5YkQ

Next was an informative recap of the March BLS jobs report by Gregory Brown at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. I would've liked more time spent on the implications of this historic run of job growth for workers, but it was helpful to hear about how this will influence Fed policy in the near term https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqfViy7NWEs

Next was a great talk by Jennifer Hill on liability for seriously flawed corporate cultures at the Cambridge Faculty of Law https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBkZgE9G4VY

Next was a nice talk by Nema Dean on automatic architecture selection for hierarchical mixture of experts models at the Royal Statistical Society https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E56WIPYcaA&t=8s

Next was an interesting talk by Ozlem Ayduk on the implications of self-distancing language for emotion regulations and self-control at the University of California, Berkeley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EvyFeOnMAA

Next was a fascinating talk by Elizabeth Farrell Helbling on autonomy for insect-scale robots (!) at Northwestern University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFDa3776YDM

Last was a fiery talk by Adam Reich on community and conflict in the Walmart workforce at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. There's important, deep qualitative work here on the complex relationship between low wage retail employees and their jobs and the challenges for collective action in this sector in the US https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr9E-ejbkdo