New York Times (February 24)
The Obama administration is drawing up plans for research to create an “activity map that would show in unprecedented detail the workings of the human brain, the most complex organ in the body.” This would be “a breathtaking goal.” Few scientific programs, including the space race and the human genome projects, “were as daunting as the brain project…. The brain project will have to create new tools to explore an organ that is the seat of human cognition and behavior. A task of that magnitude can truly capture the imagination.”
Tags: Activity map, Brain, Human genome, Imagination, Obama, Space
The Economist (February 23)
“With short-term interest rates still stuck near zero and their balance-sheets stuffed with government bonds, the central banks of America, Britain and Japan are experimenting with a shift in approach: coupling monetary action with commitments designed to alter the public’s expectations of interest rates, inflation and the economy…. A more doveish stance would entail tolerating higher inflation, at least temporarily, in pursuit of higher output.” But there is “a question-mark over what this wave of central-bank experimentation can achieve: since bond yields are already so low, the marginal return to coaxing them even lower may be scant. For now, though, buoyant stockmarkets are giving the activists the thumbs-up.”
Tags: Bonds, Central banks, Inflation, Interest rates, Japan, Output, Stockmarkets, U.S., UK, Yields
