Week 14/2021 Finds - Aquiles Newsletter

These are some articles and podcasts I’ve read and found interesting in the past week. I don’t focus on breaking news, simply things that were worth my time.

Let’s start with a great write up of the story of a hacker who went from criminal to single-handedly defeating one of the worst cyber attacks the world has seen.

Although measuring is the first step to understanding, when we discuss management, measuring performance can have a negative result. This article discusses the ideas started in 1956 by Ridgway. My notes on the original paper start here.

Last week I shared a paper discussing gender roles and equality in hunter-gatherer societies. This time it is an article about 6000 year old mass graves found through Europe.

In the quest for transitioning to renewable energies, solar panels are becoming ubiquitous. From residential to mass-scale facilities, the projection is that by 2050 there’ll be more than 108 (that is 100 million) tonnes of accumulated waste derived from solar panels.

Recycling them is therefore of great importance to achieving a circular economy, which is one of the 10 actions we should undertake regarding climate change. However, silicon-based solar panels are complex products designed to last around 30 years, which poses several challenges on how to extract the most value from the components.

This perspective paper does not give specific answers but it stresses the need to develop a long-term research agenda focused on improving the recycling processes associated with solar panels. There is a lot of room for improvement along the value chain of silicon, and many of the components used in the manufacture (such as tin, lead, silver, and copper).

En este podcast de Radio Ambulante se discute el efecto que tendrá la legalización de la Marihuana en México. Probablemente no acabe con el narcotráfico y la violencia, pero sin dudas puede ayudar a proteger a los pequeños productores. Además tendrá un efecto en la super-población de cárceles, debida en muchos casos a condenas por posesión.