#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/2/24

I was able to go on a decent run yesterday, successfully finding ~20 kilos of chicken of the woods mushrooms (seriously, I'll be eating them for at least a week even after giving a bunch away). My productive run also included talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a fascinating talk by Robert Katzschmann on robotic systems that incorporate biological living cells into their design (!) at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oekvlVFGpk

Next was an interesting talk by Kenneth Joseph on measuring identity and attitude through online self-presentation at the Carnegie Mellon University Software and Societal Systems Department https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK4n-jUGIw4

Next was an intriguing talk by Damiano Argan on the relationship between Italian TV access in Albania and brain drain at the Economics of Migration seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJHwuDj0Bio

Next was a thought-provoking talk by Blake Bordelon on infinite limits and scaling laws for deep neural networks at Harvard CMSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0998FJhPdj8

Next was another incredible conversation between Michael Levin and Ann Lipton on the complexity of drawing limits for section 10b claims and on the shady Tesla board of directors compensation settlement that you might not have heard of on the Shareholder Primacy podcast. As always the discussion is entertaining and enlightening, and this time Michael goes above and beyond - he actually filed an objection to the Tesla settlement and appeared before the Delaware chancery court! Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=992x4IFvSzE

Next was a nice talk by Antonio Sclocchi on using diffusion models to understand the hierarchical structure of data at Harvard CMSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7LPDDYZn94

Last was "Race for Profit" by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who digs into a tumultuous ~4 year period in US residential real estate - 1968 to 1972, showing how the promise of the Civil Rights and Great Society era became compromised and then thoroughly reversed by Richard Nixon and George Romney through mismanagement and eventually active sabotage. The tragedy is in how close the US came to making real progress on segregation, only to see it disintegrate and the explicitly racist language of the pre-civil rights era morph into coded terms but with the same effect.

By combining harrowing individual stories with macro statistics, Taylor conveys the costs of this failure on society. Whether it's mental and physical health, education, wealth, or economic opportunity, this era is littered with systemic oppression and sets the stage for the decades that follow. My one minor gripe is that I wish the title of the book was clearer about its time period focus.

Overall this book powerfully lays out the roots of many systems that have endured and expanded throughout the US to the modern day, not just in housing but also in affirmative action programs more broadly. Given the recent Supreme Court decision, one can only hope that future generations will take the lessons of this book to heart. Highly recommend

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469663883/race-for-profit/