This article extends recent insights from new institutional economics to explore the relevance of the concept of meso-institutions. It does so through the exploration of the case of the Brazilian Forest Code, pointing out how and why meso-institutions play a key role in making public policies effective. More specifically, our study shows how crucial is the complete fulfilling of the functions characterising meso-institutions – namely translation, monitoring, and enforcement, to implement regulations and determine their effectiveness. Lessons are drawn regarding the complexities inherent in the creation, implementation, and operationalisation of rules across a multilayered institutional environment.

Efficient local trajectory optimization of the coordinated manipulator is a bottleneck task in the narrow feeding scenario. To optimize the trajectory locally and generate collision-free trajectories with local support performance, the analytical reinforcement method is proposed. Firstly, multiple coordinated machines operating in the narrow space are transformed into decentralized dynamic constraints for the target manipulator. Combined with the circle envelope method in the dynamic constraint, the collision-free gradient optimization function determines the support region of the local optimal trajectory. Based on the forward kinematics and inverse kinematics method, the collision-prone pose of the target manipulator outside the support region is analytically optimized. And chi-square distribution further ensures the smooth interpolation of the variable-period trajectory outside the fixed-period support region. For the emergency collision avoidance of the coordinated manipulator in the flexible stamping line, the analytical reinforcement method is successfully verified by generating the collision-free and smooth trajectory. It provides an optimization direction for rapidly improving the work efficiency of multi-machine coordination in the narrow feeding scenario.

Language mixing is a common phenomenon in the language input of bilingual children. However, the relation between the frequency of parental language mixing and children’s language development remains unclear. The present study investigates the relation between language mixing as observed in daylong audio recordings (LENA) and as reported by parents in the questionnaire for Quantifying Bilingual Experience (Q-BEx) and children’s language outcomes in the majority and minority language. Participants were 52 3-to-5-year-old Polish-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch children in the Netherlands and Bayesian informative hypothesis evaluations were applied. In 14 out of 15 regression analyses, the LENA and Q-BEx measures yielded similar associations with children’s language outcomes. Parental language mixing was not related to majority language outcomes, but a negative relation was found with expressive vocabulary in the minority language. Longitudinal studies are needed to pinpoint the directionality of this negative relation.

This paper presents a pedagogical experiment in the form of a fictional podcast episode that “aired” in January 2025, featuring Tim Winton’s climate fiction novel Juice (2024). Emerging from a dialogical reading collaboration between three interdisciplinary “scholars, resisters and ordinary grafters” (Winton, 2024, p.116) — Rumen Rachev, Jo Pollitt, and Emma Nicoletti — the paper and podcast operate together through a method we term papercast, centring on three key themes: clouds, atmospheric frictions, and the significance of critically engaging with climate fiction, specifically Juice, amid ongoing climate instability. Simultaneously paper and podcast (papercast), we invite the reader to “listen” visually to the printed material that follows. Through discussion and excerpts from Clouds Running Out of Juice, a creative non-fiction episode of the fictional Ecosophic Generator podcast, the work incorporates AI-generated responses from “listeners” who inhabit the liminal space between present imaginings and future realities. This papercast emerged through asynchronous reading practices and collaborative dialogue, culminating in a three-way conversation that traverses multiple theoretical terrains. Rachev’s investigation as an atmospheric economist into the future-proofing of clouds, Pollitt’s choreographic exploration of everyday weather and experiences of weathering instability, and Nicoletti’s examination of human-atmospheric binaries collectively generate productive tensions between scientific knowledge and creative uncertainty.

A well-documented pattern of bank lending during crises is allocating credit to insolvent firms at the expense of productive firms, leading to inefficient resource allocation at the macro level. I investigate the role of bank CEOs in influencing such distortions during crises, using the strictly enforced age-based retirement policy of Indian government-controlled banks. I find that banks experiencing a CEO turnover in a crisis are less likely to bail out insolvent borrowers, as the new CEO has a lower incentive to do so. Consequently, the efficiency of credit allocation improves, and the zombification of the economy decreases.

As governments prepare for the decisive round of negotiations for the global plastics treaty in August 2025, trade remains a largely overlooked yet indispensable element in shaping an effective and equitable agreement. We argue that trade, spanning plastic feedstocks, resins, products, and waste, forms the connective tissue of the plastics economy and that it must be embedded in the treaty’s architecture. Drawing on global trade data, country cases, and precedent from multilateral environmental agreements, we demonstrate how trade both drives plastic pollution and can serve as a lever for circularity and sustainability. We outline the asymmetries in global plastics trade and their implications for equity and implementation, especially for small and import-dependent states. The article proposes a suite of actionable recommendations for INC-5.2, including trade-related transparency, WTO-aligned treaty provisions, and dedicated capacity-building support. By integrating trade governance into the plastics treaty, negotiators can build an agreement that is both environmentally ambitious and structurally sound.

Are political activists driven by instrumental motives such as making a career in politics or mobilizing voters? We implement two natural field experiments in which party activists are randomly informed that canvassing is i) effective at mobilizing voters, or ii) effective for enhancing activists’ political careers. We find no effect of the treatments on activists’ intended and actual canvassing behaviour. The null finding holds despite a successful manipulation check and replication study, high statistical power, a natural field setting, and an unobtrusive measurement strategy. Using an expert survey, we show that the null finding shifted Bayesian posterior beliefs about the treatment’s effectiveness toward zero. The evidence thus casts doubt on two popular hypothesized instrumental drivers of political activism – voter persuasion and career concerns – and points toward expressive benefits as more plausible motives.

Plastics and climate change are inseparable issues, both materially and geopolitically. Plastics are derived almost entirely from fossil fuels and have an enormous greenhouse gas footprint. Aligning with the Paris Agreement requires rapid, dramatic decreases in plastic production, contravening the industry’s plans to continue expanding production. The oil, gas and petrochemical industry wields substantial power in both the climate and plastics treaty negotiations and has used that power to stymie progress in both. Rather than repeat the failures of the climate negotiations, plastics negotiators should seek to create a “plastics club” for ambitious action.

A theoretical framework has been established to investigate the modulational instability of electromagnetic waves in magnetized electron–positron plasmas. The framework is capable of analyzing electromagnetic waves of any intensity and plasmas at any temperature. A fully relativistic hydrodynamic model, incorporating relativistic velocities and thermal effects, is used to describe the relativistic dynamics of particles in plasmas. Under the weakly magnetized approximation, a modified nonlinear Schrödinger equation, governing the dynamics of the envelope of electromagnetic waves in plasmas, is obtained. The growth rate of the modulational instability is then given both theoretically and numerically. By analyzing the dependence of the growth rate on some key physical parameters, the coupled interplay of relativistic effects, ponderomotive forces, thermal effects and magnetic fields on electromagnetic waves can be clarified. The findings demonstrate that specific combinations of physical parameters can significantly enhance modulational instability, providing a theoretical basis for controlling the propagation of electromagnetic waves in plasmas. This framework has broad applicability to most current laser–plasma experiments and high-energy radiation phenomena from stellar surfaces.

We reprise some common statistical models for actuarial mortality analysis using grouped counts. We then discuss the benefits of building mortality models from the most elementary items. This has two facets. First, models are better based on the mortality of individuals, rather than groups. Second, models are better defined in continuous time, rather than over fixed intervals like a year. We show how Poisson-like likelihoods at the “macro” level are built up by product integration of sequences of infinitesimal Bernoulli trials at the “micro” level. Observed data is represented through a stochastic mortality hazard rate, and counting processes provide the natural notation for left-truncated and right-censored actuarial data, individual or age-grouped. Together these explain the “pseudo-Poisson” behaviour of survival model likelihoods.