The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) is carrying out a survey as part of an international collaboration to image the northe, at a common resolution, in emission from all major constituents of the interstellar medium; the neutral atomic gas, the molecular gas, the ionised gas, dust and relativistic plasma. For many of these constituents the angular resolution of the images (1 arcmin) will be more than a factor of 10 better than any previous studies. The aim is to produce a publicly-available database of high resolution, high-dynamic range images of the Galaxy for multi-phase studies of the physical states and processes in the interstellar medium. We will sketch the main scientific motivations as well as describe some preliminary results from the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey/Releve Canadien du Plan Galactique (CGPS/RCPG).

Leon H. Keyserling (1908–1987) participated in almost all of the major macroeconomic debates in the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1970s. From 1933 until 1937 he served as a key aide to Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) and drafted pathbreaking labor and housing legislation. As general counsel of the United States Housing Authority from 1937 to 1945 he played a central role in formulating and implementing New Deal housing policy. Keyserling was a founding member of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) in 1946 and was appointed chairman in 1950. After his term on the CEA ended in 1953, he became a private consultant, wrote frequently for major newspapers and magazines, and testified regularly before Congressional committees.

In the 1970s Robert Lucas's research revolutionized the study of business cycles, and in 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for this work. However, in 1985 he had already decided that, “I did not look forward to the prospect of spending the latter half of my career trying to hang on to what I had done in the first half” (p. 2). Thus, he embarked on a new task: understanding economic growth.

This book collects Lucas's writing (from 1985 to 1997) on economic growth. In his words, its “general theme … is the attempt to adapt modern growth theory, originally developed to describe the behavior of the industrialized economies, to obtain a unified understanding of rich and poor economies alike in a world of vast income and growth rate differences” (p. 1). This theme is carried through an introduction and five chapters, four of which have been published previously as journal articles.