The Fed and ECB have started the process of withdrawing life support from the economy. This is the trail balloon, talk down, stage where they merely talk about withdrawing support and see how that affects economic decisions. It nonetheless is a milestone of progress.
It is interesting to note that the ECB has already raised rates, I think there is a coordinated effort on the part of the FED and ECB to keep the US Dollar relatively depressed for the foreseeable future. This is good for US manufacturers (an aside, and for global economic resilience) and as a result, for those employed by them.
ST. LOUIS (Reuters) - Top U.S. and European central bank officials agreed on Wednesday their institutions must withdraw some of the extraordinary support they provided to help their economies recover from a deep crisis.
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Nevertheless, the views of Bullard, seen at the center of the spectrum of opinions on the Fed, suggest that pressure is building within the institution to tighten financial conditions. |
An interesting experiment comes out with interesting results wrt global temperatures. Seems that the new global temperature data set shows warming like the others do. Here’s the short version of the reason why: a new and methodologically interesting study, carried out by people some of whom might have been expected to take a somewhat sceptical view on the issue, seems essentially to have confirmed the results of earlier work on the rate at which the earth’s temperature is rising. This makes suggestions that this rise is an artefact of bad measurement, or indeed a conspiracy of climatologists, even less credible than they were before. |
Years of attacks on funding and the science itself. Watching the slow suicide of America is sad.
But we'll all have degrees from Glen Beck University. Ha! That will show them liberals. China is on course to overtake America in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 - far earlier than expected. |
An animated GIF of indicators of a warming world
404:
Enemy Camp 2010
Originally aired 04.02.2010
Living behind enemy lines, among the enemy, it's sometimes hard to remember why you're fighting in the first place.
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Prologue.
Behind enemy lines, sometimes people get confused about whose side they're on...and how to fight the enemy. (2 minutes) |
Act Three. As The Worm Turns. |
InterpretationDaily aspirin reduced deaths due to several common cancers during and after the trials. Benefit increased with duration of treatment and was consistent across the different study populations. These findings have implications for guidelines on use of aspirin and for understanding of carcinogenesis and its susceptibility to drug intervention. |
A discussion of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and health. An interesting discussion about how the MDGs were formed (along sectoral lines) and how there is a need to step back and do more inter-sector communication.
From BBC 4's "In Our Time" Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' by William James. |
The American novelist Henry James famously made London his home and himself more English than the English. In contrast, his psychologist brother, William, was deeply immersed in his American heritage. |
He had been invited to deliver a series of prestigious public lectures in Edinburgh. |
In them, he attempted a daringly original intellectual project. |
For the first time, here was a close-up examination of religion not as a body of beliefs, but as an intimate personal experience. |
They laid the ground for a whole new area of study - the psychology of religion - and influenced figures from the psychiatrist Carl Jung to the novelist Aldous Huxley. |
Second part of the 2 part series on the history of cities. This one explores how modern transport transformed how people used and lived in cities. George Stephenson invented rail transport in the north-east of England in the 1820s, but it was not until over twenty years later that rail networks began to spring up to ferry workers in and out of the centre of British cities. When they did, this had a vast, transforming effect on the whole nature of cities - taking the pressure off dense, overcrowded central areas, but helping cities like London explode outwards. |
An interesting exploration of the history of cities and their value in human society. BBC 4's Melvyn Bragg can sound a bit pompous - bypassing that though is worth the effort. Melvyn Bragg presents the first of a two-part discussion about the history of the city. With Peter Hall, Julia Merritt and Greg Woolf. |
early in the first millenium AD, the world saw its first million-strong city: Rome. Maintaining a population of this size required stupendous feats of organisation and ingenuity. Read more at www.bbc.co.uk |
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