Things warmed up a bit today in Boston, and while navigating the neighborhood ice skating rink (also known as a "sidewalk") I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great conversation with Stratos Pahis on a nuanced view of investor-state dispute resolution on the Business Scholarship Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRliAoMvb-U

Next was an engaging panel on using various incentives to help drive economic cooperation and integration at the Asian Development Bank Institute with Shiro Armstrong, Peter Drysdale, Carlos Kuriyama, Lin Yang, and Shamshad Akhtar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4ewd8-uPaM

Next was a fantastic talk by Alaa Eldin Abdelaal on human skill augmentation in robot-assisted surgery at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). This is a great example of the gains that can come by reimagining the types of work people do by leveraging technological affordances rather than myopically trying to automate what they already do. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnDNGHCquzs

Next was an excellent talk by Frank Elavsky on designing tools and their inherently socio-technical nature at DDD Brisbane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9LDW-t09oY

Last was "Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash" by Susan Strasser. While it draws from many of the same sources as in Strasser's other work, this is a unique work of scholarship that examines both the way people thought of reuse and disposability over the centuries and the genesis of the waste disposal and recycling industries. All of this gets tangled up in changing consumer culture, business models, and world events that interact in ways that profoundly alter older habits of material scarcity and non-existent waste removal infrastructure. Highly recommend https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805065121/wasteandwant/