While reformulation policies are commonly used to incentivise manufacturers to improve the nutrient profile of the foods and beverages they produce, only a few countries have implemented mandatory reformulation policies. This paper aimed to review evidence on the design, implementation challenges and effectiveness of mandatory reformulation policies and compare them to voluntary reformulation policies. The systematic search retrieved seventy-one studies including twelve on mandatory reformulation policies. Most mandatory reformulation policies were aimed at reducing trans-fatty acids or sodium in foods. Overall, mandatory reformulation policies were found to be more effective than voluntary ones in improving dietary intakes. Mandatory policies were implemented when voluntary policies either failed or were found to be insufficient to improve the composition of foods. Typical features of mandatory policies could also improve the design of voluntary policies. Examples include strict but attainable targets and a tight monitoring of compliance.

This article documents a trend of declining flexibility in share repurchase policies over the last 4 decades. We show that repurchases have become particularly sticky for firms with repurchase programs in place. We also exploit the additional inflexibility within existing repurchase programs to show that repurchase stickiness can have real effects for firms. Using the 2008 financial crisis as a shock to firms’ ability to raise capital, we find that firms with ongoing share repurchase programs ending after Dec. 2007 reduced investment, employment, and R&D spending by more than similar firms with programs ending before the onset of the crisis.

Founded a century ago upon the initiative of three European men, each with links to colonial administration or mission, the International African Institute subsequently developed in directions that could hardly have been predicted. Most of those directly involved in the first two decades were from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, including a growing number of academics. In addition to promoting creative writing in Africa and a common orthography for African languages, the Institute secured private American funding for a big research programme involving social anthropological fieldwork. After 1945, with decolonization on the horizon, the focus was on systematically producing ethnographic and linguistic handbooks. From the 1960s onwards the Institute endeavoured to shake off its remaining links to colonialism and – to a modest degree – to africanize itself. Its successes lay in organizing a series of International African Seminars, held at newly emerging African universities, and in continuing to produce the journal Africa, as well as several series of monographs.

The marketing of unhealthy foods has been implicated in poor diet and rising levels of obesity. Rapid developments in the digital food marketing ecosystem and associated research mean that contemporary review of the evidence is warranted. This preregistered (CRD420212337091)1 systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to provide an updated synthesis of the evidence for behavioural and health impacts of food marketing on both children and adults, using the 4Ps framework (Promotion, Product, Price, Place). Ten databases were searched from 2014 to 2021 for primary data articles of quantitative or mixed design, reporting on one or more outcome of interest following food marketing exposure compared with a relevant control. Reviews, abstracts, letters/editorials and qualitative studies were excluded. Eighty-two studies were included in the narrative review and twenty-three in the meta-analyses. Study quality (RoB2/Newcastle–Ottawa scale) was mixed. Studies examined ‘promotion’ (n 55), ‘product’ (n 17), ‘price’ (n 15) and ‘place’ (n 2) (some > 1 category). There is evidence of impacts of food marketing in multiple media and settings on outcomes, including increased purchase intention, purchase requests, purchase, preference, choice, and consumption in children and adults. Meta-analysis demonstrated a significant impact of food marketing on increased choice of unhealthy foods (OR = 2·45 (95 % CI 1·41, 4·27), Z = 3·18, P = 0·002, I2 = 93·1 %) and increased food consumption (standardised mean difference = 0·311 (95 % CI 0·185, 0·437), Z = 4·83, P < 0·001, I2 = 53·0 %). Evidence gaps were identified for the impact of brand-only and outdoor streetscape food marketing, and for data on the extent to which food marketing may contribute to health inequalities which, if available, would support UK and international public health policy development.

Recent years have seen many cases where the moral transgressions of public figures have led to widespread disengagement from their work, such as no longer watching their shows or reading their books. In the academic context, this can manifest as not inviting an academic to speak, no longer citing or teaching their work, or even ending professional relationships. This paper aims to explore the question of whether there could be purely epistemic reasons that could underwrite such practices of disengagement; bracketing social, moral, or political concerns. In doing so, it addresses a common criticism: an academic’s moral transgression need not give us epistemic reasons to doubt the quality of their work, making disengaging unjustified. The main part of the paper investigates whether this criticism can be countered by viewing an academic’s moral transgressions as a defeater. After dismissing the option of undercutting defeat, it proposes a template argument for when there could be purely epistemic reasons for disengaging, namely if it takes place in areas where the moral transgression that motivates disengagement also functions as a higher order defeater.

Americans living in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and China's treaty ports encountered a contradiction. The British dominated elite foreign society, their political, social, and cultural agendas often setting the pace for life within the community. But as citizens of a country that had recently wrested its independence from its one-time imperial overlord, Americans arriving in China were ostensibly averse to imperialism and the culture of empire. They maintained a belief that theirs was a benevolent republic that championed international amity and self-determination. Still, as Elisa Tamarkin notes, if Americans were wary of the British Empire, many found the spectacle of it appealing—a tendency evident in Hong Kong and the foreign enclaves along China's coast. Americans eager to enter elite foreign society proclaimed newfound sympathies for British belligerence in China, in turn developing increasingly prejudiced opinions about their Chinese neighbours and staff. Their derisive expressions of racial difference reinforced efforts to reconcile Anglo-American cultural incongruities. Such sentiments reflect the entangled processes through which extraimperial groups such as Americans fashioned themselves as members of the colonial elite. I argue that through such processes, the British and Americans subordinated national rivalry in the interest of entrenching racial divisions between white and non-white communities.

This article provides the first comprehensive evidence that the return extrapolation behavior of investors leads to biases in the expectations of volatility. Lower past returns are associated with higher expectations of volatility when using the physical, risk-neutral, and survey measures to estimate volatility expectations. Consistent with the return extrapolation framework, recent past returns have a larger impact than distant past returns on volatility expectations. Biases in volatility expectations are i) distinct from extrapolating past realized volatility, ii) asymmetrically induced by recent past negative returns, and iii) lead investors to pay more to insure against the perceived higher expected volatility.

When the world’s leading human rights advocates violate international norms, how does this affect support for those norms around the world? Rather than diffusing norm breaking across borders, I argue that authoritarian states’ propaganda about liberal states’ violations may increase the salience of human rights norms in places where those norms are normally censored. Focusing on American racial discrimination, I find that the Chinese Communist Party publicizes American human rights violations on to its citizens for strategic political reasons. Through two survey experiments I show that while exposure to news about American discrimination does provide substantial propaganda benefits to the regime, it also makes Chinese respondents more supportive of minority rights and more critical of their own country’s respect for those rights. The study shows how prominent violations of international norms may be an underappreciated means of strengthening global public support for those norms.

The UK’s Health and Care Act (2022; paused until 2025) includes a globally novel ban on paid-for online advertising of food and beverage products high in saturated fat, salt and sugar (HFSS), to address growing concerns about the scale of digital marketing and its impact in particular on children’s food and beverage preferences, purchases and consumption. This study aimed to understand the potential impact of the novel ban (as proposed in 2020) on specified forms of online HFSS advertising, through the lens of interdisciplinary expertise. We conducted semi-structured interviews via videoconference with eight purposively selected UK and global digital marketing, food and privacy experts. We identified deductive and inductive themes addressing the policy’s scope, design, implementation, monitoring and enforcement through iterative, consensual thematic analyses. Experts felt this novel ‘breakthrough’ policy has potential to substantially impact global marketing by establishing the principle of no HFSS advertising online to consumers of all ages, but they also identified substantive limitations that could potentially render it ‘entirely ineffective’, for example, the exclusion of common forms of digital marketing, especially brand marketing and marketing integrated within entertainment content; virtual/augmented reality, and ‘advertainment’ as particularly likely spaces for rapid growth of digital food marketing; and technical digital media issues that raise significant barriers to effective monitoring and compliance. Experts recommended well-defined regulations with strong enforcement mechanisms. These findings contribute insights for effective design and implementation of global initiatives to limit online HFSS food marketing, including the need for government regulations in place of voluntary industry restrictions.

Deep neural networks and other modern machine learning models are often susceptible to adversarial attacks. Indeed, an adversary may often be able to change a model’s prediction through a small, directed perturbation of the model’s input – an issue in safety-critical applications. Adversarially robust machine learning is usually based on a minmax optimisation problem that minimises the machine learning loss under maximisation-based adversarial attacks. In this work, we study adversaries that determine their attack using a Bayesian statistical approach rather than maximisation. The resulting Bayesian adversarial robustness problem is a relaxation of the usual minmax problem. To solve this problem, we propose Abram – a continuous-time particle system that shall approximate the gradient flow corresponding to the underlying learning problem. We show that Abram approximates a McKean–Vlasov process and justify the use of Abram by giving assumptions under which the McKean–Vlasov process finds the minimiser of the Bayesian adversarial robustness problem. We discuss two ways to discretise Abram and show its suitability in benchmark adversarial deep learning experiments.

This study utilizes U.S. Patent Office data to explore potential improvements in the patent examination process through machine learning. It shows that integrating machine learning with human expertise can increase patent citations by up to 26%. Using machine learning predictions as benchmarks, I find that the early expiration rate of granted patents positively correlates with examiners’ false acceptance rates. These errors negatively impact public companies’ operational performance and reduce successful IPO or M&A exits for private firms. Overall, this study highlights significant social and economic benefits of incorporating machine learning as a robo-advisor in patent screening.

We measured brain activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm and conducted a whole-brain analysis while healthy adult Democrats and Republicans made non-hypothetical food choices. While the food purchase decisions were not significantly different, we found that brain activation during decision-making differs according to the participant’s party affiliation. Models of partisanship based on left insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, superior frontal gyrus, or premotor/supplementary motor area activations achieve better than expected accuracy. Understanding the differential function of neural systems that lead to indistinguishable choices may provide leverage in explaining the broader mechanisms of partisanship.

Observaremos la manera en que el extractivismo económico y otras de sus formas aparecen en la obra Los pasos perdidos de Alejo Carpentier: El protagonista anónimo expresa formas de pensar y de actuar que pueden entenderse como construcciones culturales de cuño extractivo. Analizaremos el uso narrativo del presente, pues se relaciona de manera explícita con las reflexiones del protagonista sobre el mundo contemporáneo y sus descubrimientos. Se examinará la manera en que las descripciones de los paisajes se relacionan con el presente, y permiten analizar el lenguaje usado para hacerlas. Por último, presentaremos algunas conclusiones acerca de las relaciones entre el modelo económico extractivo y el lenguaje en la obra: el protagonista intenta reconstruir —inútilmente— un vínculo sacro entre la realidad y la palabra.

This study explores lexical borrowing and loanword nativization from a neuro-cognitive perspective testing bi-dialectal speakers of Standard Chinese and Shanghainese Chinese. We created holistic and morpheme-based cross-dialectal loanwords for auditory sentence processing and compared them with Shanghainese-specific words, code-switches, and pre-existing etymologically related words. Participants rated their acceptance of each word, indicating Shanghainese-specific lexical nativeness. GAM analysis of EEG signals revealed that reduced acceptance correlated with frontal positive shifts in ERPs. Holistic loanwords triggered P300-like shifts associated with form-mismatch, whereas morpheme-based loanwords produced LPC-like shifts, suggesting sentence-level re-analysis, and N400-like early frontal negative shifts, indicating lexical integration challenges. Our results indicate that both lexical acceptance and adaptation strategies are pivotal in the cognitive integration of loanwords, revealing distinct neuropsychological stages and pathways in loanword nativization.

We define a local homomorphism $(Q,k)\to (R,\ell )$ to be Koszul if its derived fiber $R\otimes ^{\mathsf {L}}_Q k$ is formal, and if $\operatorname {Tor}^{Q}(R,k)$ is Koszul in the classical sense. This recovers the classical definition when Q is a field, and more generally includes all flat deformations of Koszul algebras. The non-flat case is significantly more interesting, and there is no need for examples to be quadratic: all complete intersection and all Golod quotients are Koszul homomorphisms. We show that the class of Koszul homomorphisms enjoys excellent homological properties, and we give many more examples, especially various monomial and Gorenstein examples. We then study Koszul homomorphisms from the perspective of $\mathrm {A}_{\infty }$-structures on resolutions. We use this machinery to construct universal free resolutions of R-modules by generalizing a classical construction of Priddy. The resulting (infinite) free resolution of an R-module M is often minimal and can be described by a finite amount of data whenever M and R have finite projective dimension over Q. Our construction simultaneously recovers the resolutions of Shamash and Eisenbud over a complete intersection ring, and the bar resolutions of Iyengar and Burke over a Golod ring, and produces analogous resolutions for various other classes of local rings.

Over the last decade, the USA experienced an unprecedented opioid crisis. While there are myriad causes for this crisis, here we examine how social capital shapes the public’s demand for opioids and the government’s responses to the crisis. First, we posit that communities with higher levels of social capital are associated with lower rates of opioid use/abuse. Second, we posit that higher levels of social capital will be associated with a more robust public response in providing necessary resources to address substance abuse resulting in lower rates of drug-related deaths. Using county-level data from the USA, we find support for an indirect relationship where social capital is associated with higher levels of community support for drug treatment, which, in turn, is associated with lower drug-related deaths and deaths of despair.