Toughening Financial Sanctions on Russia: Enforcing Energy Sanctions and Reducing Shadow Reserves Effectively

Financial sanctions are key in enforcing restrictions on Russian energy exports - in particular the G7/EU oil price cap regime -, due to financial institutions' critical role in cross-border transactions. While the energy sanctions regime is having an impact on export earnings and budget revenues, evidence for potentially widespread violations is also emerging. Moreover, favorable external dynamics have allowed Russia to accumulate substantial assets abroad - "shadow reserves" -, which need to be kept out of reach of the regime

Neural mediators of changes of mind about perceptual decisions

Changing one's mind on the basis of new evidence is a hallmark of cognitive flexibility. To revise our confidence in a previous decision, we should use new evidence to update beliefs about choice accuracy. How this process unfolds in the human brain, however, remains unknown. Here we manipulated whether additional sensory evidence supports or negates a previous motion direction discrimination judgment while recording markers of neural activity in the human brain using fMRI. A signature of post-decision evidence (change in log-odds correct) was selectively observed in the activity of posterior medial frontal cortex. In contrast, distinct activity profiles in anterior prefrontal cortex mediated the impact of post-decision evidence on subjective confidence, independently of changes in decision value. Together our findings reveal candidate neural mediators of post-decisional changes of mind in the human brain and indicate possible targets for ameliorating deficits in cognitive flexibility

A Guideline: Using or Creating Incident Databases for Natural Gas Transmission Pipelines by Achim Hilgenstock; Strategic Insights, v. 7, issue 1 (February 2008)

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.7, issue 1 (February 2008)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited