#AcademicRunPlaylist - 3/18/25

Today was a bit hectic, but luckily during my various comings and goings I was able to listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great discussion with Raffaella Sadun on digital reskilling (and nicely refuses to take the bait on a bunch of leading AI questions) at the MIT Sloan Management Review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSdgRkP2Xw

Next was an interesting talk by Yun William Yu on medical and genomic data privacy at the Carnegie Mellon University Software and Societal Systems Department https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giBH7WhVSCw

Next was a whole slate of talks/panels at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference:

Building a Modern NBA Team - Dean Oliver, Monte McNair, Shane Battier, Ariana Andonian, and John Hollinger - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giBH7WhVSCw

The Next Frontier of Hockey Analytics - Philippe Desaulniers, Meghan Chayka, Jeremy Rogalski, and Arda Ocal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlJFYby_vbE 

Valorant Performance Analytics - Shaun Meredith - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQJddK-OB3A

Cross-Disciplinary Lessons about Tracking Data - Margaret Cunniff - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuPpLCimUds

Evaluating Player Actions in Pro Counter Strike - Patrik Peter Szmida - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOX8lCLkRQw

Using Psychological Metrics to Forecast NBA Longevity - Sean Farrell, PhD - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovPH4mzO-kI

Advancing Olympics Analytics - Dan Webb - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Inn3nN4lstM

Computer Vision to Enhance Performance - Emelie Eldracher (wearing her Olympic outfit in a huge flex) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyawxwUeUdU

Modeling Injury Risk at the Tennessee Titans - Sarah Bailey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2zr5kmoFJU

Cash Wasted Metric for the NFL - Joel Shapiro - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G9AKDKHVlA

Last was “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. This book would be more accurately titled "A Communist History of the United States," since much of the analysis is explicitly Marxist. That's not to say it's a bad history - I especially appreciated the focus on US labor history, and the critical examination of US history overall is interesting. Still the analysis can get grating, veering extremely far into long discredited communist tropes. Beyond that, the history starts to degrade as we approach the modern era - saying that the US was no different than Nazi Germany was particularly egregious. Zinn also doesn't show his work, reaching conclusions based on single anecdotes without any evidence that these were broader trends. Similarly frustrating are when numbers are thrown out without context (e.g. $1.35 per day salary in 1863, 28 sailors out of 800 dead from disease on a one month voyage).

Despite all of this, overall the book stands as a useful counterpoint to claims of American exceptionalism which are easily refuted, as well as showing how shockingly consistent the US's policies have been over the centuries. Highly recommend https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/peoples-history-of-the-united-states