#AcademicRunPlaylist - 7/15/25

I had a great day with the folks at METI yesterday, and while shuffling around Tokyo I also listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an intriguing talk by Yuejiang Liu on robot learning without action chunking at Stanford University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa_lfHZ8qic

Next was a pair of talks by Enghin Atalay (modeling manufacturing productivity) and Jay Stewart (relationship between job tasks, skills, and firm productivity) at the National Bureau of Economic Research https://www.youtube.com/live/NmnWxj6ODbA?si=YwgLZs8gaxIAEaPb&t=6403

Next was an interesting talk by Wenlong Huang on using large models for task generalization in robots at Stanford https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFvWfFZAyWg 

Next was the NBER entrepreneurship symposium. I highly recommend the whole event, but I especially liked the talks by Josh Feng (entrepreneur backgrounds and hiring), Laura Chioda (entrepreneurship training effects), and Aleksandar Andonov (development financial institutions and VC investments) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjw9HF0ei34

Last was “Father Time” by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. The meat of this book is a wide-ranging tour of parental behavior in the animal kingdom, then pivoting to our closest living relatives and finally humans. I would've liked more historical examination of parental practices, but there's still good review of broad trends up to the present day. There's a lot of personal narrative here, and some gets a bit grating (I get that your son-in-law is a great dad, does it have to come up in nearly every chapter?), and there are lightly researched sections on neuroscience that aren't great. Overall, however, this book nicely demonstrates how it is extremely natural, and normal, for men to be major or even primary caregivers for babies and children. Highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691238777/father-time