In the Philippines, bans on the use of plastic bags have been enacted in 489 cities and towns as a means of stemming waste, while proposed legislation for a nationwide prohibition has been pending for several years. The national single-use plastic (SUP) ban is a significant step forward in mitigating plastic pollution and climate change, but it will have economic and employment impacts on firms and workers. This study fills in a gap by estimating the employment impact of a national ban using firm-level data from official surveys. An exploratory labour-centric methodology interrogates workers’ perceptions of a ban through interviews with unionists. The study finds the employment effect to be significant, as 32,000 workers in almost 500 SUP firms will be directly affected, and another 9.000 workers in the midstream plastic industry will be indirectly impacted. Workers have a range of opinions regarding a proposed ban – from opposition because of the expected layoffs to acceptance as a necessary solution to plastic pollution. However, support for a SUP ban is predicated on the existence of alternative employment for affected workers. The study reveals that workers are receptive to a message that integrates both environmental concerns and labour standards. However, there is a serious lack of information dissemination from plastic firms and government agencies about the proposed SUP ban and the necessary adaptation measures to prepare workers for a transition. The economic, sociocultural, and institutional barriers to an effective just transition for SUP workers are substantial but not insurmountable.

Project a Black Planet: Art and Culture of Panafrica was co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) and MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, in collaboration with KANAL-Centre Pompidou Bruxelles. The exhibition, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, ran from December 15, 2024 to March 30, 2025 and was curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky. It was partly funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a relevant detail within the context of my viewing.

This article investigates the direct impact of energy prices (Crude Oil and Natural Gas) on agricultural markets (wheat, maize, soybeans) and the indirect effect through fertilizers using monthly data covering the period from January 1990 to February 2021. Additionally, the analysis is further extended up to 2024. The conditional covariances of energy and fertilizer prices capture the spikes in the 2008 crisis and the volatile time after, and the deterministic nonlinear Fourier trends eliminate the unit root problem. The results show that agricultural prices are affected directly by changes in energy prices and indirectly through fertilizer prices.

Johnsongrass [Sorghum halepense (L.) Pers.] is a highly invasive, persistent, and problematic perennial weed in Australian cropping systems; however, its germination ecology has largely been inferred from studies conducted outside eastern Australia, where environmental conditions differ markedly. This limits accurate prediction of emergence timing and optimization of management strategies. The objectives of this study were to characterize seed dormancy mechanisms and to quantify the germination and emergence response of two populations of S. halepense from central Queensland to temperature, light, salinity, osmotic stress, and burial depth under controlled conditions. Seeds from both populations exhibited strong primary dormancy, which was partially alleviated by sodium hypochlorite immersion and more effectively by mechanical scarification using sandpaper, indicating that seed coat-related dormancy is the principal barrier to germination. Temperature significantly influenced germination, with no germination at 15/5 C and high germination (> 90%) at 25/15 C to 35/25 C under both light/dark and dark conditions, demonstrating that warm temperatures largely override light requirements. Germination declined steadily with increasing sodium chloride (NaCl) concentrations, and the NaCl concentration required to reduce maximum germination by 50% was approximately 173 mM. Moderate water stress −0.2 to −0.4 MPa had less germination in comparison to the control, while −0.8 MPa greatly inhibited germination (11%). Emergence was highest from shallow burial depths of 1 to 4 cm and declined sharply beyond 8 cm. These results demonstrate that S. halepense recruitment occurs in a range of environmental conditions; however, environmental stresses or deep soil burial may help manage this weed. This study provides regionally relevant information to enhance emergence prediction and inform integrated weed management strategies in eastern Australian cropping systems.

Past research has indicated that the covariance of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) error done via minibatching plays a critical role in determining its regularization and escape from low potential points. Motivated by some new research in this area, we prove universality results by showing that noise classes that have the same mean and covariance structure of SGD via minibatching have similar properties. We mainly consider the SGD algorithm, with multiplicative noise, introduced in previous work (Wu et al (2016) Int. Conf. on Machine Learning, PMLR, pp. 10367–10376), which has a much more general noise class than the SGD algorithm done via minibatching. We establish non-asymptotic bounds for the multiplicative SGD algorithm in the Wasserstein distance. We also show that the error term for the algorithm is approximately a scaled Gaussian distribution with mean 0 at any fixed point.

Urbanization is one of the most enduring transformations in land use, resulting in often irreversible habitat loss and fragmentation, which are key drivers of defaunation. However, the impact of urbanization varies depending on the native vegetation remaining within urban areas. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, urbanization has led to biodiversity loss but the city still has a significant coverage of green areas and remnants of Atlantic Forest. This includes the Tijuca National Park, which has been the focus of reintroduction projects to restore native fauna. The first of these was of the Ariel toucan Ramphastos ariel in 1970, which has established well. Flocks are now often seen in the city’s green spaces but no monitoring has been carried out since the reintroduction. Here, we seek to understand how the reintroduced population is utilizing urban green areas for feeding and reproduction, which are key indicators of reintroduction success. We characterized frugivory in the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden over 290 weeks during 2017–2023, using the feeding bouts method. We recorded 850 observations of toucans feeding on the fruits of 91 plant species. We also assessed reproductive success during two breeding seasons, monitoring 29 fledglings in 10 nests. Nests in tree cavities were re-used in both breeding seasons, by different nesting birds. We conclude that this urban green area provides breeding sites for the R. ariel population and food resources year-round. Our results corroborate the potential of urban green areas to support biodiversity and contribute to the success of reintroduction projects in cities.

This paper analyzes the 2024 Mellichamp Mind and Machine Initiative at UCSB, a pioneering AI-inclusive literary competition accepting human, AI, and hybrid works. As Head Judge, I explore key questions confronting the panel: Will AI render human writing obsolete? Can machine-generated literature exhibit creativity or remain mechanical? Are AI and human writing distinguishable? What does authorship mean in an era of AI collaboration? The paper examines judges’ interpretive frameworks, biases, and expectations, contrasting them with outcomes observed in submissions. It also considers how AI challenges traditional notions of the author and fosters new creative possibilities.

Chile’s pension privatization represents one of the most radical neoliberal experiments in social security reform, reshaping welfare from a collective right into a market-driven, property-based entitlement. This Article examines how the constitutionalization of pension privatization entrenched inequalities, shielding the system from democratic contestation and embedding a logic of over-propertization, where private property rights supersede social rights. Drawing on a Law and Political Economy (LPE) approach, explicitly concerned with the distributional consequences of legal design, this study traces how, during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90), Chile’s 1980 Constitution, and Decree Law 3500 institutionalized financialization and individual responsibility, transforming social security into an asset class managed by private pension fund administrators (AFPs). By legally structuring private capitalization accounts as financial assets with attributes such as ownership, transferability, and enforceability, these frameworks granted private actors control over investment management and risk distribution. The analysis highlights challenges to reversing this model, as judicial claims, pension fund withdrawals during COVID-19, and two failed constitution-making processes reveal legal and political constraints on reform. It examines legislative efforts, judicial interpretations, and collective mobilizations—such as the No+AFP campaign—seeking to restore solidarity. It also explores legitimation strategies, including the discourse of “popular capitalism” and the institutional entrenchment of AFPs within Chile’s political economy. By framing pension privatization as a constitutional and legal project rather than mere economic policy, this Article underscores the global consequences of over-propertization and the urgency of reimagining social rights. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of LPE scholarship that treats constitutions as terrains of economic power, exposing how legal frameworks both encode and contest neoliberal orders.

The study of political agenda setting is a cornerstone in political science. Within this literature, political parties are implicitly portrayed as being capable of proactively initiating discussions. However, this fundamental notion of party agency deserves further theoretical and empirical attention. In response, this article crafts a new model (the Issue Initiation Model) that opens the window into parties’ efforts to set an agenda and traces how they initiate and elevate their agenda. The model is tested on an original dataset covering more than 5.5-million tweets by political parties and MPs, coupled with over 750,000 news articles and 419,000 parliamentary questions in the United Kingdom and Denmark from 2015 to 2022. Results show how parties and their MPs can proactively redirect the attention of other actors through strategic planning and orchestrated actions. By theorizing and empirically testing the implicit notion that parties can proactively initiate discussions, this article has important implications for political agenda setting.

There are several examples of best animal husbandry practices that are not adopted, leading to animal welfare compromises. Bridging this gap between advice and human behaviour is crucial in helping drive improvements in animal welfare. Inappropriate feeding of pregnant cows is common and associated with compromised health and welfare. Obesity and leanness can cause calving difficulty and reduce the vigour of newborn calves. One way to offset the problems associated with body condition extremes is to adopt body condition scoring (BCS) by hand. Knowing each animal’s condition helps the farmer identify ‘at risk’ cows leading to better feeding decisions and improved health and welfare. Despite the significant benefits of BCS, very few farmers routinely adopt this practice, relying more upon a visual assessment of condition. Some farmers also report that they do not BCS by hand, or by eye. The current study identified the key barriers and drivers of BCS by hand to develop an evidence-based intervention designed to encourage more adoption. We propose that human behaviour change frameworks, such as the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW), present the opportunity to address other animal welfare issues where best management practices are rarely adopted. We also recommend that an interdisciplinary team of animal welfare and social scientists are best positioned to develop human behaviour change interventions that will more likely lead to tangible, persistent and positive change.

Violations of the assumption of local independence are a fundamental issue in item response theory as they threaten model validity and bias the parameter estimates. For such a reason, a plethora of tests and approaches has been devised in the last 40 years to detect or to model such violations. Nonetheless, local dependence (LD) remains an open problem, with somewhat blurred boundaries due to the lack of a general framework for dealing with the different notions of dependence that have been suggested in the literature. The present contribution has a two-fold aim: On the one hand, to review and collect some of the approaches available in the literature; on the other hand, by following a unified perspective on assessment models introduced by Noventa et al. (2024, Journal of Mathematical Psychology 122, 102872) to suggest a possible systematization of some existing and some new approaches to LD. As a result, deterministic and probabilistic modeling mechanisms of LD are formalized and discussed.

Ocean plastic pollution is a global issue, but many small island states lack relevant research studies and data. Microplastics are a major concern due to their persistence, entry into food chains and potential to transfer pollutants. Fish gastrointestinal tracts are easy to sample and provide a useful indicator of pollution levels. In 2024, we sampled 201 reef fish spanning 44 species from Funafuti Atoll, Tuvalu, to provide the first baseline microplastic data from this island nation. In total, 75 individuals (37.3%) contained microplastics. The mean occurrence was 0.72 ± 1.16 (mean ± SD) particles per fish, with a maximum of 5 particles per fish found in individuals of four species: Aphareus rutilans, Mulloidichthys flavolineatus, Mulloidichthys vanicolensis and Sargocentron spiniferum. When focusing analyses on seven species with 10 or more individual samples, generalized linear models found no significant differences among species, but revealed fish had significantly more microplastics close to the most populous islet Fongafale (0.95 ± 1.26 particles per individual), compared to rural islets Papaelise and Funafala (0.28 ± 0.77 particles per individual). Fibers were the most common microplastic, and polypropylene was the dominant polymer. This study confirms microplastic presence within the gastrointestinal tracts of key food fish from Funafuti lagoon, emphasizing the need for further research.

This article presents the results of the first diachronic study of obsidian procurement patterns in the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific coast of Central America; it sheds light on the integration of the region in long-distance exchange systems. This study is based on portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (pXRF) analysis of all 713 obsidian artifacts collected from Terminal Classic and Postclassic contexts on Tigre Island, Honduras, and of 54 additional obsidian artifacts from two sites on the south coast of Honduras that are housed in museum collections. Analysis of obsidian artifacts collected in the excavation of the earlier occupation of the site of La Tigüilotada (AD 800–1200) on Tigre Island revealed the predominance of Ixtepeque obsidian and the lesser presence of Güinope obsidian. Obsidian artifacts from excavations of the reoccupation of La Tigüilotada (AD 1300–1500) and of the site of Gualorita (AD 1400–1550) relied almost exclusively on La Esperanza obsidian. Least-cost path analysis shows likely riverine routes connecting all three sources to the Gulf. We contextualize these results within prior obsidian sourcing studies from the region and conclude that precolonial island settlements took part in different transference networks from their mainland counterparts.

We describe the behavior of a free reduced plane projective curve with respect to the addition, respectively, deletion, of a smooth conic. These results apply in particular to conic-line arrangements. We present some obstructions to the geometry and combinatorics of a free reduced curve, generalizing results known a priori only for free projective line arrangements.