In the economy of the 21st century, economic and technical innovation is increasingly based on developments that don't rely on economic incentive or public provision. Unlike 20th century innovation, the most important developments in innovation have been driven not by research funded by governments or developed by corporations but by the collaborative interactions of individuals. In most cases, this modality of innovation has not been motivated by economic concerns or the prospect of profit. This raises the possibility of a world in which some of the sectors of the economy particularly the ones dealing with innovation and creativity are driven by social interactions of various kinds, rather than by profit-oriented investment. This Article examines the development of this amateur modality of creative production, and explains how it came to exist. It then deals with why this modality is different from and potentially inconsistent with the typical modalities of production that are at the heart of modern views of innovation policy. It provides a number of policy prescriptions that should be used by governments to recognize the significance of amateur innovation, and to further the development of amateur productivity.

Money Ruins Everything

David Remnick:

While finishing “Bird-Watcher,” a Profile of the jazz broadcaster and expert Phil Schaap, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of a hundred essential jazz albums, more as a guide for the uninitiated than as a source of quarrelling for the collector.

100 Essential Jazz Albums

This qref is written for a semi-knowledgable UNIX user who has just come up against a problem and has been advised to use awk to solve it. Perhaps one of the examples can be quickly modified for immediate use.

Getting Started with awk

Computer science research results in new technology that can outperform standard microprocessors up to 1,000 times.

Research Leads to Self-Improving Chips with Speed ‘Warping’

Let’s check our common-sense understanding of the word social. It’s mostly about people talking to one another. Sometimes it’s about dancing, bowling or doing other stuff with people.

This gets lost in the meaning-destroying repetition of the word by a bunch of Internet companies.

Steering Between Unsocial Networks and Social Spam

A special program about the housing crisis produced in a special collaboration with NPR news. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall street? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money.

This American Life 355: The Giant Pool of Money

I was sure I'd recommended this before ...

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.

Structured Procrastination

GPUs continue to evolve rapidly, but toward what?

Future Graphics Architectures

The idea that journalism is not “literature” is such a deeply entrenched prejudice that even writers and editors who have spent their lives in journalism and have achieved literary distinction as journalists sometimes speak as if what they write and edit is not literature. This prejudice can be viewed as a cultural successor to the one that despised novels—a prejudice current in Jane Austen’s lifetime and one she scoffs at in both her letters and her novels.

Reading almost any twenty consecutive pages of A. J. Liebling’s Second World War reportage offers an excellent demonstration of just how specious the distinction between journalism and literature can be, but it is a distinction that has helped to prevent Liebling from being recognized as the major American writer he is.

Liebling’s War

FOR the last seven years, I’ve lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than 10 houses. I chose the place because next to the 15th-century house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some 30,000 books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.

A 30,000-Volume Window on the World