From left, Tom Neely, Ward Schumaker and Esther Watson
Post-Bubble Portraits The great housing-fueled market bubble couldn’t burst, could it? The best Wall Street minds and their best risk-management tools failed to see the crash coming.

By JOE NOCERA

‘The story that I have to tell is marked all the way through by a persistent tension between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, determined by the patterns of the past, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. This is a controversy that has never been resolved.’

By MARK LEIBOVICH and GRANT BARRETT

WASHINGTON — Politics without buzzwords is like sports without clichés, math without numbers or Blago without bleeps. Tough to imagine, in other words, especially in such a game-changer of a campaign year in which buzzwords were flying like shoes.

Buzzwords are what political wiseguys use to sound all important and knowing in a profession whose prime currency is the illusion of being both. They are like secret passwords for the chattering class, the verbal equivalent of a terrorist fist jab.

By Amy Norton

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older adults might want to take an interest in their grandchildren’s’ video games, if early research on the brain benefits of gaming is correct.

In a study of 40 adults in their 60s and 70s, researchers found that those who learned to play a strategy-heavy video game improved their scores on a number of tests of cognitive function.

Men and women who trained in the game for about a month showed gains in tests of memory, reasoning and the ability to “multi-task.”
The findings suggest that video games that keep players “on their toes” might help older adults keep their brains sharp, the researchers report in the journal Psychology and Aging.

A new poem written for Review by Carol Ann Duffy. Illustrated by Posy Simmonds

Carol Ann Duffy

Microsoft is rushing out a software update for its Internet Explorer web browser, after security experts warned that millions of computer users could have their PCs ‘hijacked’ by hackers.

By Claudine Beaumont

Opera, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Flock are five alternative web browsers to Internet Explorer

It’s as traditional as tinsel and mistletoe and never loses its popularity at this time of year, so that’s why tartan has again filtered from our catwalks into our stores, says Hilary Alexander.