Tech Refactored

The episode you’re about to hear is being hosted by our student fellows. Our Student Fellows are a diverse and interdisciplinary group, representing colleges and specializations across the University of Nebraska. Paige Ross (Law), Ece Baskol (Business), and Alicia Christensen (Law) spent the academic year examining Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally provides immunity for website platforms for third-party posted content. They spoke with Mailyn Fidler who works on is...

Brian L. Frye joins us on the podcast to discuss, among many things, law professorship, legal scholarship, and the need for making nuanced academic material more accessible and understandable for the everyday person. Gus and Brian also explore the idea of what it looks like when conceptual art and legal scholarship overlap. Brian L. Frye is the Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law, as well as a filmmaker, and artist.

The episode you’re about to hear is being hosted by two of our student fellows. Our Student Fellows are a diverse and interdisciplinary group, representing colleges and specializations across the University of Nebraska. Our fellows, Josh Lee and Garrett Wirka invited professor William H. Widen on the show to explore the topic of self-driving cars, hazards and the law. Widen is a Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, where he currently teaches commercial law, contrac...

The episode you’re about to hear is being hosted by two of our student fellows. Our Student Fellows are a diverse and interdisciplinary group, representing colleges and specializations across the University of Nebraska. Our fellows, Izu Mbaraonye and David Ornelas invited professor Mirzo Abdurakhmonov on the show to explore the topic of lobbying. Abdurakhmonov is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Nebraska college of business, where he conducts research ...

How do cities and states decide what roads have rails or barriers? Who designs those? What roadside factors lead to crashes? The researchers who are asking these questions are technologists, engineers, and quite literally life savers. Cody Stolle is a research professor in the Department of Mechanical & Materials Engineering at the University of Nebraska. He is also a researcher with the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility, part of the Mid-America Transportation Center. He studies, among oth...

Penn Law Professor Anita L. Allen joins us on the podcast to talk to Gus about race and privacy in the past, present and future. Anita also discusses her latest paper, Dismantling the “Black Opticon”: Privacy, Race, Equity, and Online Data-Protection Reform, which touches on the ongoing bias and discrimination African-Americans have faced, and continue to face, as it relates to discriminatory oversurveillance, discriminatory exclusion, and discriminatory predation.

Valerie Jones is founder of the Public Insight Lab, she's also a fellow and grantee at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center. She sits down with Gus to talk about this new interdisciplinary research lab, which will fuel social media research on campus using state-of-the-art social and digital media analytics software. Faculty affiliated with the lab engage with researchers across campus to enhance existing and future research projects with social and digital media analysis.

Researchers interested in engaging in the Public Insight Lab user group, working with the lab on current projects, or including the lab in project proposals can contact the Public Insight Lab at [email protected].

Most professionals will tell you, career paths are rarely a straight line. On this episode guest co-hosts Elana Zeide and Elsbeth Magilton welcome our advisory board member, Sue Glueck. Glueck is the Senior Director of Academic Relations for Microsoft Corporation’s legal department where she works on AI and ethics, the future of work, privacy, and a myriad of other topics. In March 2022 she met group of law and graduate students at Nebraska about figuring out “Life After Graduation.” She spoke with us about her journey and her current interests at Microsoft - including quantum computing!

Sue provided some additional links for listeners! Check them out here:

The book I mentioned on Quantum Policy is Law and Policy for the Quantum Age (cambridge.org) co-authored by Professor Chris Hoofnagle at Berkeley Law and Simson L. Garfinkel.

I mentioned misinformation/disinformation and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (https://www.cip.uw.edu) - specifically a class created by two of the professors titled “Calling Bullshit.” Now it’s a book! Calling Bullshit by Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West: 9780525509202 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.

Microsoft has a website that features the tech policy work of over 170 scholars - it’s a great way to get to know the latest in tech policy - Technology | Academics | Policy - / (techpolicy.com). You can follow on Twitter at TAP (@TAPolicy) / Twitter.

Here’s an article about AI I didn’t mention but think everyone interested in AI policy should read: Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human-Robot Interaction (pre-print) by Madeleine Clare Elish

Every day it seems cybersecurity is in the news. From data breaches to ransomware to national security, these incidents have become a feature of every day life. And they affect everything from individuals and small businesses to nation-state actors. On this episode we’re joined by Asaf Lubin to help us understand the challenges of cybersecurity generally and, in particular, the role of cybersecurity insurance in addressing some of these concerns.

Asaf is an Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a Fellow at IU’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. His research includes the regulation of cybersecurity harms, liabilities, and insurance as well as policy design around governmental and corporate surveillance, data protection, and internet governance.

In this episode Gus talks to Rezaul Mahmood, a professor at the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is also an applied climatologist and the director of the High Plains Regional Climate Center.

In 2021, Dr. Mahmood received a supplemental grant from the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, a program designed to provide supplemental research funding to teams that are already engaged in active internally or externally funded research at the University of Nebraska. These grants encourage researchers developing new technologies to consider potential policy aspects of their research and are meant, in the longer term, to facilitate new interdisciplinary collaborations.

Dr. Mahmood’s research conducted in conjunction with his NGTC funding “will comprehensively identify and review academic and industry literature examining connections between policies and impact on land use land cover change LULCC, with a focus on how agricultural policies, RFS and trade agreements may influence LULCC in the agricultural sector of Nebraska.

Episode Notes:

The Great Plains Irrigation Experiment