Environmental impacts of food systems have stimulated research to examine how to create healthy diets that will be more sustainable while meeting nutrient requirements. Increasing compliance with existing food-based dietary guidelines in most jurisdictions could be a first step to improve health and reduce environmental impact. MyPlanetDiet was an all-Ireland 12-week randomised controlled trial designed to inform sustainable healthy dietary guidelines. Healthy adults (n 355) aged 18–64 years with moderate-to-high greenhouse gas emitting (GHGE) diets were recruited from three study sites on the island of Ireland. The aim of this research is to assess the relationship between dietary intakes, diet-related environmental impacts and metabolic health using baseline data collected during the MyPlanetDiet study. Dietary assessments collected using Foodbook24 were used to calculate diet-related GHGE, adherence to healthy eating guidelines (HEG) and healthy eating index (HEI) score. Anthropometrics and metabolic health markers (e.g. lipids, glucose and insulin) were included. Overall HEG adherence was low, with 43 % meeting zero or one HEG food group recommendations. Adherence to 4 + HEG food group targets was associated with 31 % lower diet-related GHGE compared with those with lowest adherence. Higher HEG adherence was associated with lower BMI and waist circumference and higher HEI scores. While our findings suggest HEG adherence is associated with positive health and environmental impacts, substantial behaviour change will be needed to meet existing HEG. Further research is needed to assess response and acceptability to HEG. However, adherence to HEG may be an important first step to reducing the environmental impact of food consumption.

We use experimental methods to evaluate a simplified interbank market. The design is a laboratory adaptation of the analysis of interbank market fragility by Allen and Gale (J Eur Econ Assoc 2:1015–1048), and features symmetric banks who allocate deposit endowments between cash and illiquid assets prior to the incidence of a shock. Following the shock liquidity-deficient banks trade assets for cash. Treatments include variations in the shock type, as well as alterations in the range of permissible asset prices. Consistent with Allen and Gale, we find that while interbank trading substantially increases investment activity, the markets are frequently characterized by price variability and a stochastic distribution of investment outcomes.

Many researchers have demonstrated that fixed, exogenously chosen weights can be useful alternatives to Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation within the linear model (e.g., Dawes, Am. Psychol. 34:571–582, 1979; Einhorn & Hogarth, Org. Behav. Human Perform. 13:171–192, 1975; Wainer, Psychol. Bull. 83:213-217, 1976). Generalizing the approach of Davis-Stober, Dana, and Budescu (Psychometrika 75:521–541, 2010b), I present an analytic method to determine when a choice of fixed weights will incur less mean squared error than OLS as a function of sample size, error variance, and model predictability. Geometrically, I solve for the region of population β that favors a choice of fixed weights over OLS. I derive closed-form upper and lower bounds on the volume of this region, giving tight bounds on the proportion of population β favoring a choice of fixed weights. I illustrate this methodology with several examples and provide a MATLAB© (The MathWorks, Matlab software, version 2009b, 2010) programming implementation of the major results.

In Sri Lanka all public signs are required by law to be in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. This article investigates the multiple, clashing ways that Sri Lankan Tamil speakers (Tamils and Muslims) living in-country and abroad interpret Tamil signage blunders in relation to the position of ethnic minorities in the postwar nation. I incorporate ethnographic interviews to examine how three Tamil speakers made sense of a signboard, displayed in several government buses in Colombo, in which the Tamil portion read “reserved for pregnant dogs” instead of “reserved for pregnant mothers.” I situate their responses in an account of the circulation of Tamil signage errors on Facebook. I argue that Tamil speakers’ disparate interpretations reflect contrasting semiotic ideologies concerning the intentionality of the blunders and the relationship between the posted signboard images and lived sociolinguistic practices (Keane 2003, 2018), which have implications for imagined postwar futures and transnational Tamil political activism.

This essay introduces a collection of six articles that analyze the political economy of language and script in relation to the emergence and contestation of identities and publics in contemporary India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Asian diasporas. Social media and the virtual forums that they enable have inspired new representational practices and discursive possibilities that are in dialogue with older ways of ordering difference. Rather than making a hard-and-fast distinction between new and old media, this issue draws on the rich visual tapestries of South Asia to examine implicit and explicit debates over codes, scripts, and sign language systems in relation to different forms of print and digital media, from street signs to social media posts. We demonstrate the centrality of visual semiotic systems in processes of political, economic, and sociocultural change in contemporary South Asia.

“Improper linear models” (see Dawes, Am. Psychol. 34:571–582, 1979), such as equal weighting, have garnered interest as alternatives to standard regression models. We analyze the general circumstances under which these models perform well by recasting a class of “improper” linear models as “proper” statistical models with a single predictor. We derive the upper bound on the mean squared error of this estimator and demonstrate that it has less variance than ordinary least squares estimates. We examine common choices of the weighting vector used in the literature, e.g., single variable heuristics and equal weighting, and illustrate their performance in various test cases.

Mixing describes the process by which solutes evolve from an initial heterogeneous state to uniformity under the stirring action of a fluid flow. Fluid stretching forms thin scalar lamellae that coalesce due to molecular diffusion. Owing to the linearity of the advection–diffusion equation, coalescence can be envisioned as an aggregation process. Here, we demonstrate that in smooth two-dimensional chaotic flows, mixing obeys a correlated aggregation process, where the spatial distribution of the number of lamellae in aggregates is highly correlated with their elongation, and is set by the fractal properties of the advected material lines. We show that the presence of correlations makes mixing less efficient than a completely random aggregation process because lamellae with similar elongations and scalar levels tend to remain isolated from each other. We show that correlated aggregation is uniquely determined by a single exponent that quantifies the effective number of random aggregation events. These findings expand aggregation theories to a larger class of systems, which have relevance to various fundamental and applied mixing problems.

Populations of Pasteuria penetrans isolated from root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne spp.) and cyst nematodes (Heterodera spp.) were tested for their ability to adhere to a limited selection of sheathed and exsheathed animal parasitic nematodes, free living nematodes, including Caenorhabditis elegans wild type and several srf mutants, and plant parasitic nematodes. The attachment of spores of Pasteuria was restricted and no spores were observed adhering to any of the animal parasitic nematodes either with or without their sheath or to any of the free living nematodes including C. elegans and the srf mutants. All spore attachment was restricted to plant parasitic nematodes; however, spores isolated from cyst nematodes showed the ability to adhere to other genera of plant parasitic nematodes which was not the case with spores isolated from root-knot nematodes. The results are discussed in relationship to cuticular heterogeneity.

Despite the Supreme Court’s lack of direct electoral accountability, voters may factor its outputs into their voting decisions because elected representatives can affect the Court’s powers and composition. In this paper, we uncover an ironic predicament that faces candidates running on reforming this institution. Citizens who possess higher levels of diffuse support for the Court are more likely to rank it as an important factor in their voting logic. But because this diffuse support has sorted along partisan lines, candidate messaging about reform may not motivate partisans who have lost support for the Court because they view it as less important than other pressing issues. Thus, although Democrats are sympathetic to reform, Democratic candidates may have weak incentives to promote reform given low levels of diffuse support among their constituents. This dynamic mitigates against the possibility of a public or congressional backlash against the Court, preserving the status quo.

While sociologists have focused on the national adoption of public-sphere women’s rights such as the right to vote in elections or participate fully in economic matters, less work has examined the diffusion of private-sphere women’s rights, rights of women in the home. We address this gap by examining the cross-national adoption of laws that criminalize marital rape. Building on prior research that finds that women’s rights organizations and women’s rights focused treaties, we explore the cross-national determinants of the criminalization of marital rape. Using an event history analysis covering 131 countries from 1979 to 2013, we find support for the global institutionalist framework that contends that socialization into the global system and direct advocacy efforts of global organizations contribute to faster rates of criminalization of marital rape. Further, we suggest that these global institutionalist processes become amplified when they are focused by events that set the agenda for international organizations. Implications for world-society scholarship on the global adoption of women’s rights are further discussed.