The envenomation of general physiology throughout the last century.

Toxins are the poisonous products of organisms. Toxins serve vital defensive and offensive functions for those that harbor them: stinging scorpions, pesticidal plants, sanguinary snakes, fearless frogs, sliming snails, noxious newts, and smarting spiders. For physiologists, toxins are integral chemical tools that hijack life's fundamental processes with remarkable molecular specificity. Our understanding of electrophysiological phenomena has been transformed time and time again with the help of some terrifying toxins. For this reason, studies of toxin mechanism are an important and enduring facet of The Journal of General Physiology (JGP). This Milestone in Physiology reflects on toxins studied in JGP over its first 100 years, what they have taught us, and what they have yet to reveal

Parametric Constructive Kripke-Semantics for Standard Multi-Agent Belief and Knowledge (Knowledge As Unbiased Belief)

We propose parametric constructive Kripke-semantics for multi-agent KD45-belief and S5-knowledge in terms of elementary set-theoretic constructions of two basic functional building blocks, namely bias (or viewpoint) and visibility, functioning also as the parameters of the doxastic and epistemic accessibility relation. The doxastic accessibility relates two possible worlds whenever the application of the composition of bias with visibility to the first world is equal to the application of visibility to the second world. The epistemic accessibility is the transitive closure of the union of our doxastic accessibility and its converse. Therefrom, accessibility relations for common and distributed belief and knowledge can be constructed in a standard way. As a result, we obtain a general definition of knowledge in terms of belief that enables us to view S5-knowledge as accurate (unbiased and thus true) KD45-belief, negation-complete belief and knowledge as exact KD45-belief and S5-knowledge, respectively, and perfect S5-knowledge as precise (exact and accurate) KD45-belief, and all this generically for arbitrary functions of bias and visibility. Our results can be seen as a semantic complement to previous foundational results by Halpern et al. about the (un)definability and (non-)reducibility of knowledge in terms of and to belief, respectively

Noisy Macroeconomic Announcements, Monetary Policy, and Asset Prices

The current literature has provided a number of important insights about the effects of macroeconomic data releases on monetary policy expectations and asset prices. However, one puzzling aspect of that literature is that the estimated responses are quite small. Indeed, these studies typically find that the major economic releases, taken together, account for only a small amount of the variation in asset prices%u2014even those closely tied to near-term policy expectations. In this paper we argue that this apparent detachment arises in part from the difficulties associated with measuring macroeconomic news. We propose two new econometric approaches that allow us to account for the noise in measured data surprises. Using these estimators, we find that asset prices and monetary policy expectations are much more responsive to incoming news than previously believed. Our results also clarify the set of facts that should be captured by any model attempting to understand the interactions between economic data, monetary policy, and asset prices.

The Economic Consequences of Disappearing Government Debt

Economic Consequences, Disappearing Government Debt, Government Debt, macroeconomics