#AcademicRunPlaylist - 8/15/24

I ran my age in miles again today, which gave me lots of time to listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Izumi Fukunaga on the neural mechanisms underlying smell at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYHeqHyL0cQ

Next was an excellent talk by Fabian Stephany on the complementary benefits of learning new skills at PLAMADISO – Platforms, Markets, and the Digital Society. Using data from Upwork, Stephany investigates the contextual nature of the payoffs of learning a new skill for different types of workers with different existing skillsets, revealing a more nuanced view of skill acquisition benefits. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_KmSnpIV_0

Next was a compelling talk by Mog Stapleton on a body-first approach to cognitive science at OIST https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mtBMUTf4Ik

Next was a fascinating talk by David Bellhouse on the life and work of William Playfair, a statistician and inventor of data visualization methods such as the bar chart and pie chart, at the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). In addition to his visualization creativity, he was apparently terrible with money and was not averse to cherry-picking statistics to please wealthy benefactors. Also despite not being a spy, apparently Wikipedia editors are preventing this from being removed from his bio? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFrr7NBwuXU

Next was a symposium on measuring stakeholder value and CSR more broadly at OIST with Trista Bridges, Philip Sugai, Haruko Satoh, Toshiya Hoshino, Masato Yamazaki, and Yoshie Sugai. FYI some of this is in Japanese (and it's a really good talk), and I particularly liked Sugai's overview of historical Japanese approaches to management and capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7aG-rPnpig

Next was an enlightening conversation with Dina H. Srinivasan on the antitrust case against Google's advertising business at the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. Srinivasan clearly explains the online ad market that Google is accused of unlawfully dominating, the anticompetitive history behind the current state of the online ad market, and shoots down many common criticisms of the case. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJlbTD3Bu0U&t=3s

Next was an interesting talk by Timothy O'Leary on feedback control and variability in the nervous system at OIST https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6tddDJCQQs&t=1s

Next was a pair of talks at the RSS by Piotr Fryzlewicz (change point detection in time series data using machine learning) and Joe Benton (from denoising diffusions to denoising markov models) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVQZ6AadCPk

Last was an intriguing talk by Takashi Ikegami on building and characterizing systems of algorithmic/chemical agents at OIST https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFGzM02yRfs