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It would indeed be pleasant to be able to begin this paper with the relation of many striking and significant advances made since I last spoke on the topic to Aslib, at the 1965 Annual Conference at the University of Keele. Such, alas, is not possible; it would not be too much to say, of the social sciences as a whole, what R. B. Joynson has recently said of Psychology: ‘The present sub‐divisions of Psychology are not, for the most part, the fruit of any agreed and deliberate analysis. They are historical flotsam—a haphazard collection of topics … brashly inflated by a hand‐to‐mouth empiricism into one great blooming buzzing confusion.’ Although there are a few bright patches of orderliness, I fear that much of our subject presents something of the same confusion; while I am certain that the same hand‐to‐mouth empiricism is earnestly providing classification and indexing with more than its fair share of historical flotsam.

Suddenly speech technology looks viable for many real world applications, as Jack Hollingum explains.

The authors introduce non-Ricardian (“hand-to-mouth”) myopic agents into an otherwise standard real-business-cycle (RBC) setup augmented with a detailed government sector. The authors investigate the quantitative importance of the presence of nonoptimizing households for cyclical fluctuations in Bulgaria.

The authors calibrate the RBC model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999–2018).

The authors find that the inclusion of such non-Ricardian households improves model performance along several dimensions and generally provides a better match vis-a-vis data, as compared to the standard model populated with Ricardian agents only.

This is a novel finding in the macroeconomic studies on Bulgaria using modern quantitative methods.

Before exploring the political implications of the emerging middle class, best to begin by defining the term. The economists who herald the growth of the middle class in the developing world today largely construe the term solely as an income category. This is in stark contrast to Marx, who defined class in terms of a social group's relation to the means of production, and it is in stark contrast to Weber, who defined class in terms of a group's pattern of consumption. But even if economists agree to conceive of the middle class as an income category, they differ on how to define this category – whether in relative or absolute terms.³ Some, like Lester Thurow, define middle class relationally. People are middle class if their income falls between 75% and 125% of the median income in a given society. Others define middle class in absolute terms. In the case of Milanovic and Yitzhaki, the boundaries of the contemporary global middle class are set between the average income levels that currently prevail in Brazil and Italy (threshold and ceiling, respectively).⁴ Still others like Diana Farrell define middle class in terms of relative access to discretionary spending. For Farrell, the middle class is distinguished from the poor in that it does not live “hand to mouth.” Members of the middle class are defined as those who have roughly a third of their income left over for discretionary spending after covering the basic cost of food and shelter.

The present research study aims to explore the impact of renewable energy (RE) on investors willing to invest. This current study also investigates the mediation role of perceived benefit (PB) and living creature’s development (LCD) among RE and investors willing to invest.

Pakistani per capita income level is low; usually, the population lives hand to mouth. Only 10% to 15% of the population has been saving and is willing to invest in different sectors. To meet the aim of this study, data were collected from 300 individuals with a 40% response rate investors, equity fund managers and Pakistani stock exchanges using a nonprobability convenient sampling approach. The partial least square structural equation modeling technique and Smart partial least squares 3.0 were used to determine the primary and medicating effects of the variables.

The analysis shows that RE and investor willing to invest strongly linked each other directly and indirectly. PB and LCD significantly partial mediate the connection among RE and investor willing to invest. Hence, the results suggest that RE has more sustainable development goals with using and accessing affordable green and reliable energy.

The present study narrows the research gap by examining the effect of RE on investor willing to invest via PB and LCD. Also, it provides essential information for effective energy policies contributed to the sustainable development goals and gives valuable suggestions for policymaker and government.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the benefits of alternative, business‐based approaches to tackling the trade in counterfeit goods.

The findings in the paper are based on over six years of personal experience in the brand protection business, on top of over 20 years operational experience dealing with organized crime topics. The conclusions are also based on assessments drawing on a large body of intelligence on the operations, business practices, and vulnerabilities of counterfeiters and the relative impact of anti‐counterfeiting programs.

A careful understanding of the trade in counterfeits reveals a number of vulnerabilities in the business model that can be exploited to disrupt or deter the counterfeiters. In particular, sales brokers often see the smallest profit margins, survive hand to mouth, and put themselves at risk by directly touting sales of counterfeits to persons they do not know over the internet and in face‐to‐face meetings. They offer a natural entry point to the business for both intelligence collection and targeted seizures and influence campaigns. These campaigns can and should exploit both the lack of means to mitigate counter‐party risk and the natural distrust seen among participants in criminal businesses. Raising the perception of costs and risks only slightly can prompt counterfeiters to move away from certain brands and industries, sometimes permanently. A means to measure the effectiveness of such influence campaigns for a company is possible using a metric that takes into account the impact of disruption and targeted seizures leading to an estimate of recovered potential sales.

The approach detailed in the paper is unique and has not been successfully pursued and fully exploited by any firm or organization charged with tackling the trade in counterfeits.

Memories of Christmas, inevitable overeating and the discomfort of satiation have sufficiently receded to be able to discuss briefly that occasional concomitant of food, mentioned discreetly, usually behind hand to mouth and then only to close intimates—indigestion! It may accompany only certain foods, or if one has attained its crown of martyrdom, most foods, but before coming to our purpose in mentioning the subject at all, we would sound a few words of caution against blindly accepting all statistical evaluations which appear to confirm logically unacceptable viewpoints, which bestow success to improbabilities and simplicity to imponderables and unaccountably obtain superior results from placebo treatment, or in other words, confirm the therapeutic value of doing nothing! There are probably fallacies in these statistical efforts, but the ordinary down‐to‐earth individual cannot detect them. Perhaps it needs on the setting‐a‐thief‐to‐catch‐a‐thief principle, another statistician to find them.

Georg Simmel described how a person can be a stranger, a member of two cultures but belong to neither (1950). Being a stranger though, goes beyond belonging. Strangeness goes to the soul of who we truly are: it defines our beliefs, delimits our practices, and gives depth to our everyday lives. Strangeness allows and sometimes forces us to cross the borders from the safe confines of our normal lives into the murkiness of the unknown social reality beyond it.

Children living in agricultural areas are exposed to pesticides in their living areas and through activities of daily living. These exposures may lead to adverse health effects. The purpose of this paper is to investigate household environmental and behavioural factors associated with chlorpyrifos exposure and resultant adverse health effects in children living in an agricultural community.

A cross-sectional study was conducted including 65 toddlers (age of 12–36 months) and their parents were face-to-face interviewed from January to February 2016. Toddler’s hands and feet, toys and floors were wiped for chlorpyrifos residue analysis. The wipes were extracted and analysed by gas chromatography with a flame photometric detector, and blood cholinesterase activity was measured by the EQM Test-mate (model 400).

The average age (± standard deviation) of children was 19.9 (±5.9) months. Chlorpyrifos detections were 61.5 per cent (hands), 57.1 per cent (toys), 53.8 per cent (floors) and 30.8 per cent (feet). The highest chlorpyrifos residue concentration was detected on toy surface (3.022 µg/m²). Chlorpyrifos residues on hands and feet were positively correlated with concentrations on floors and toys (Spearman’s ρ, p<0.01). Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that more frequent hand washing (β=−0.236, p=0.067) and showering (β=−0.240, p=0.056) was negatively associated with chlorpyrifos residue on children’s body. House cleaning frequency was significantly associated with an increase in haemoglobin-adjusted erythrocyte cholinesterase (β=0.251, p<0.05).

Chlorpyrifos exposures found in the children household area through their activities and behaviours can cause several adverse health effects. The circumstances associated with chlorpyrifos exposure should be mitigated and reduced to improve the household environment of children living agricultural areas.