Alfred McCoy, How America will collapse (by 2025), Salon, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link 

• Four scenarios that could spell the end of the United States as we know it -- in the very near future.

John Norstad, Investing in Total Markets, j.norstad, 2002

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Financial academics and other experts often recommend that investors should use index mutual funds to invest in entire markets. This advice is common with both stocks and bonds and with both domestic and international investing. Why do we so often hear this advice? When is it appropriate for an individual investor to not follow it or to use it as a starting point but deviate from it?

The Fall of Niagara Falls, BusinessWeek, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link 

• Decades of decay, corruption, and failed get-rich-quick schemes have made the city one of the most intractable disasters in the U.S.

Neil Brown, Ghosts of Unix Past, LinuxWeeklyNews, 2010

Rating: 4/5

• Ghosts of Unix Past: a historical search for design patterns
• Ghosts of Unix past, part 2: Conflated designs
• Ghosts of Unix past, part 3: Unfixable designs
• Ghosts of Unix past, part 4: High-maintenance designs
• For this series we try to look for patterns which become visible only over an extended time period. As development of a system proceeds, early decisions can have consequences that were not fully appreciated when they were made. If we can find patterns relating these decisions to their outcomes, it might be hoped that a review of these patterns while making new decisions will help to avoid old mistakes or to leverage established successes.

Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Deadly Medicine, Vanity Fair, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link 

• The globalization of the pharmaceutical industry.

Tony Judt, The Glory of the Rails, The New York Review of Books, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity.

William H. Gross, Investment Outlook: Allentown, PIMCO, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Unless developed economies learn to compete the old-fashioned way - by making more goods and making them better - the smart money will continue to move offshore to Asia, Brazil and their developing economy counterparts, both in asset and in currency space.

The euro crisis: A contagious Irish disease?, The Economist, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• The proposed Irish bail-out has not calmed the financial markets. And now their attention is moving on to new victims in the Iberian peninsula.

Neil Brown, Linux kernel design patterns, LinuxWeeklyNews, 2009

Rating: 4/5 Link1 Link2 Link3

• Design patterns in the Linux kernel that have been found to be effective.

John Cheese, 12 Things You'll Wish You'd Never Seen Under a Microscope, cracked.com, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• If you shrink yourself down to microscopic size, you're suddenly living in a completely alien world.
  

Matthew L. Wald, Giant Holes in the Ground, Technology Review, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link1 Link2

• An expected nuclear renaissance has failed to materialize as plans for new plants are scrapped or delayed. What happened?

John Cassidy, What Good Is Wall Street?, The New Yorker, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless.
  

Katie Roiphe, Modern Parenting, Slate, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• If we try to engineer perfect children, will they grow up to be unbearable?

C.A. Waldspurger and W.E. Weihl, Lottery Scheduling: Flexible Proportional-Share Resource Management, OSDI 94, 1994

Rating: 4/5 Link

• A novel randomized resource allocation mechanism.

Michael J. Hanson and Dylan J. McNamee, Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology, 2000

Rating: 4/5 Link

• This brochure provides an approach to help you read scientific papers efficiently and effectively.
  

J.Q. Wilson and G.L. Kelling, Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety, Atlantic Magazine, 1982

Rating: 4/5 Link

• The broken windows theory states that monitoring and maintaining urban environments in a well-ordered condition may prevent further vandalism as well as an escalation into more serious crime.

Warren E. Buffett, Pretty Good for Government Work, NYTimes, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Thanks are in order for an economic meltdown averted.

Gregor Mendel, Experiments on Plant Hybridization, Proceedings of the Nature Research Society of Brünn, 1866

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Introduced the concepts of dominant and recessive “factors”.
• Postulates two laws of heredity.
• The Law of Segregation. Even though an organism inherits two factors from its parents, it contributes only one of them to its offspring.
• The Law of Independent Assortment. The factors for different traits are sorted separately from one another.

Douglas Comer, The Ubiquitous B-Tree, ACM, 1979

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Reviews B-trees and shows why they have been so successful.
• Discusses the major variations of the B-tree, especially the B+-tree.

J.L. Borkowitz and R.J. Horrocks, Allocating to Asia, IMCA, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• With the growing prominence of Asian financial markets, we often are asked, "How much should I allocate to Asia?" Thoughts on how Asia fits within a globally diversified portfolio.

Kaushik Basu, The Traveler's Dilemma, Scientific American, 2007

Rating: 4/5 Link

• When playing this simple non-zero-sum game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reward--an outcome that demands a new kind of formal reasoning.

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, Horizon, 1946

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Criticizes "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English.

Michael Schuman, Asia's Latest Miracle, Time, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• South Korea.
  

C. J. Chivers, How the AK-47 Rewrote the Rules of Modern Warfare, Wired, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• From its unheralded beginning, the Soviet Union’s modest little gun, dubbed the Avtomat Kalashnikova-47, would become one of the most recognizable artifacts of the 20th century.

Andrew Baumann et al, The Multikernel: A New OS Architecture for Scalable Multicore Systems, SOSP, 2009

Rating: 4/5 Link

• We argue that the challenge of future multicore hardware is best met by embracing the networked nature of the machine, rethinking OS architecture using ideas from distributed systems. We investigate a new OS structure, the multikernel, that treats the machine as a network of independent cores, assumes no inter-core sharing at the lowest level, and moves traditional OS functionality to a distributed system of processes that communicate via message-passing.

Steve Coll, Leaks, The New Yorker, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• WikiLeaks on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  
• The ethics of Julian Assange and his organization.
  

Bobbie Johnson, The Web Is Reborn, Technology Review, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• A small group of Web rivals join forces to save it.

William H. Gross, Run Turkey, Run, PIMCO Investment Outlook, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• The Fed’s announcement of a renewed commitment to Quantitative Easing has been well telegraphed and the market’s reaction is likely to be subdued.
• We are in a “liquidity trap,” where interest rates or trillions in asset purchases may not stimulate borrowing or lending because consumer demand is just not there.
• The Fed’s announcement will likely signify the end of a great 30-year bull market in bonds and the necessity for bond managers and, yes, equity managers to adjust to a new environment.

Arthur E. Berman, Shale Gas - Abundance or Mirage? Why The Marcellus Shale Will Disappoint Expectations, The Oil Drum, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link1 Link2

• Shale gas plays in the United States are commercial failures and shareholders in public exploration and production (E&P) companies are the losers.

David A Patterson, Garth Gibson, and Randy H Katz, A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), ACM SIGMOD, 1988

Rating: 4/5 Link

• RAID based on the magnetic disk technology developed for personal computers, offers an attractive alternative to SLED, promising improvements of an order of magnitude in performance, reliability, power consumption, and scalability.

Dave Donaldson, Railroads and the Raj: Estimating the Economic Impact of Transportation Infrastructure, NBER, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• The economic impact of the construction of colonial India's railroad network from 1861-1930.
  

Marianne Lavelle, The Great Shale Gas Rush, National Geographic, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Pennsylvania sits atop one of the world’s largest natural gas reservoirs, promising clean energy and new jobs. But can this resource be extracted sustainably?
• U.S. energy industry innovators unlocked the natural gas found in deep shale rock by combining and super-charging old oil industry techniques.
• Hopes are high that jobs will flow as fast as the natural gas in the energy boom that has hit Pennsylvania.
• The shale gas industry maintains that it safeguards the environment, but accidents have sown mistrust as the industry has moved into rural communities.

James Surowiecki, Later, The New Yorker, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?
  

Patterson, D. A. and Ditzel, D. R., The case for the reduced instruction set computing, ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, 1980

Rating: 4/5 Link1 Link2

• RISC vs. CISC
  

H. Scott Gordon, The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery, The Journal of Political Economy, 1954

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Economic theory of natural resource utilization.
  

Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 1968

Rating: 4/5 Link

• The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.

Jared Diamond, HOW TO GET RICH, Edge, 1999

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich.
• Really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside.
• You don't want excessive unity and you don't want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other.

E.M. Purcell, Life at Low Reynolds Number, American Journal of Physics, 1977

Rating: 4/5 Link1 Link2 Link3

• Reynolds number: ratio of inertial forces to viscous forces.
  
• Motion in an inertia-less world.
• Scallop theorem.

Lyudmila N. Trut, Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment, American Scientist, 1999

Rating: 4/5 Link1 Link2

• Foxes bred for tamability in a 40-year experiment exhibit remarkable transformations that suggest an interplay between behavioral genetics and development.

• Horizon: The Secret Life of the Dog (2010)
  

Demographic Dynamics: A Case Study for Equity Investors, Goldman Sachs, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Retiring Baby Boomers.
• The expanding global middle class.
• Generational waves after the Baby Boom.
  

Michael Lewis, Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, Vanity Fair, October 1, 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link1 Link2

• The causes of the 2010 Greek financial crisis.

David Patterson, The Trouble With Multicore, IEEE Spectrum, July 2010

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Thoughts about multicore CPUs for the next decade.
• Will we get dependable parallel software that works efficiently as the number of cores increases?

Fast Userlevel Locking in Linux

• futex - fast userspace mutex.
• Used to implement basic locking, or as a building block for higher-level locking abstractions like POSIX mutexes, semaphores or condition variables.
  

• futex(7)
• futex(2)
  
• Fuss, Futexes and Furwocks: Fast Userlevel Locking in Linux
• Futexes Are Tricky
• Robust futexes
• Priority Inheritance Futexes

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, Computer Magazine, April 1987

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Why there is no silver bullet that slays the software productivity monster.
• Why the very nature of software makes it unlikely that there will be any silver bullets in future. No inventions that will do for software productivity, reliability, and simplicity what electronics, transistors, and large-scale integration did for computer hardware.
• Accidental and essential complexity. Advocates addressing the essential parts of the software process. Believes that a series of innovations attacking essential complexity could lead to significant improvements.

Emily Oster, Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2004

Rating: 4/5 Link

• First published in Winter 2004.
• Why witchcraft trials in renaissance Europe were practiced on a large-scale violence and scapegoating prompted by deterioration in economic conditions.
• Details of data collected for trails and weather showing systematic evidence of a relation between witch trials, weather and economic growth. Within the renaissance cultural framework witches became targets for blame.

George A. Akerlof, The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1970

Rating: 4/5 Link

• A 1970 economics paper that discusses information asymmetry, which occurs when the seller knows more about a product than the buyer.
• Uses the market for used cars as an example of the problem of quality uncertainty.
• Writing the "The Market for 'Lemons'": A Personal and Interpretive Essay
  

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population 6th Edition, John Murray (London), 1826

Rating: 4/5 Link Link2

• First published in 1798.
• Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.
• Views on populations past and present effects on human happiness. An enquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which population occasions.

Craig Partridge, Things I Wish I’d Been Told, Stanford, 1999

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Based on lecture at Stanford in 1999.
  
• Sub-title: Tips For Students with a Bachelors in Computer Science.
• On a related note: Matt Dillon (DragonFlyBSD) has some investing tips here.
  

Richard Hamming, You and Your Research, Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar, 1986

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Talk date: March 7, 1986.
• Hamming's observations and research on "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run ?". What Hamming has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.

Jeff Bonwick, Jonathan Adams, Magazines and Vmem: Extending the Slab Allocator to Many CPUs and Arbitrary Resources, USENIX, 2001

Rating: 4/5 Link

• Magazines: A per-CPU caching scheme called the magazine layer that provides linear scaling to any number of CPUs.
• Vmem: A general resource allocator, vmem, that can satisfy allocations and frees of any size in guaranteed constant time. The allocator can manage arbitrary sets of integers (not just virtual memory). Linear scalability to any number of CPUs. Low fragmentation.
  
• Slab allocator improvements: Object caching for any vmem arena. Reclaim callbacks to notify clients when the arena's resources are running low.
• The importance of excellent core services.