#AcademicRunPlaylist - 2/6/25

Today was pretty gross out (pic was from my late but brutally cold run yesterday), but I was still able to fit in some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an intriguing talk by Orla Lynskey on why the EU data protection regime should be viewed more as internal small regulatory "fiefdoms" rather than a unified empire at the Cambridge Faculty of Law https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI9SSfF7Q-w

Next was a great talk by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi on how to make work fair and debunking myths around fairness at the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e78t50LbUWI

Next was a fantastic talk by Daphne Ippolito on different issues with training data for large language models at the Carnegie Mellon University - School of Computer Science - Language Technologies Institute. Ippolito demonstrates how using data from different time periods yields significantly different results, effects of filtering pre-training data, and more. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8Kp5OjyLI8

Next was an interesting talk by Alondra Nelson on the state of the AI field and how to govern it moving forward at Brown University (FYI the livestream goes out for a bit in the middle) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GCmd1970MY

Next was "Reconstruction" by Eric Foner, who has penned a masterpiece, compiling voluminous evidence to vividly illustrate the heady days of the early Reconstruction period in the South, its complements in the North, and its unceremonious collapse and failure. That many of the initial reforms implemented during Reconstruction, such as the illegality of vagrancy laws due to their inherent racism, are still a problem in the modern US is a glaring indictment of the failures of our country to grapple with the roots of our problems and the strong hold racism still has on the country. The strange and shifting alliances that eventually led to the demise of Reconstruction was also fascinating/depressing, with the outsized role of labor contract structure and public debt to fuel railroad speculation standing out. For anyone who lives in the US, works with anyone from here, or simply wants to understand how systematic racism reconfigures, this is an essential book. Highly recommend https://www.harpercollins.com/products/reconstruction-updated-edition-eric-foner

Last was "They Were Her Property" by Stephanie Jones-Rogers. This book examines an extremely troubling and understudied aspect of US slavery - the role of white women as slave owners. Simultaneously going against many gender norms and reinforcing racist ones, Jones-Rogers combines first hand accounts, newspaper advertisements, and other written records to systematically document the role white women played in profiting from and strengthening slavery in the US south. Legal questions come up often, as without legal planning it was extremely challenging for women to own and profit from property, including slaves, and the inhumanity and cruelty that slaveholders exhibited is clearly shown to be gender blind. Highly recommend https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300251838/they-were-her-property/