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ELECTRONIC wallets, ELECTRONIC services, BUSINESSPEOPLE, LOYALTY, and BUSINESS enterprises

AGRICULTURE, FARMS, FOOD relief, FARM produce, FOOD crops, MONOCULTURE agriculture, and PROCESSED foods

Since then, the Farm Bill has grown immensely to include programs such as soil conservation, crop insurance, forest and wetland protection, nutrition and food assistance, and most recently climate change. Approximately every 5 years the Congress of the United States goes through the challenging process of setting national policy for agriculture that determines funding priorities and programs for the following 5 years. To do this, farmers must be encouraged to shift to practices that build healthy soils that hold water, resist erosion, and keep carbon in the ground. [Extracted from the article]

SYSTEM identification, RISK assessment, DRUG analysis, PREGNANCY outcomes, MEDICATION safety, and MEDICAL equipment

Congress mandated the creation of a postmarket Active Risk Identification and Analysis (ARIA) system containing data on 100 million individuals for monitoring risks associated with drug and biologic products using data from disparate sources to complement the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) existing postmarket capabilities. We report on the first 6 years of ARIA utilization in the Sentinel System (2016–2021). The FDA has used the ARIA system to evaluate 133 safety concerns; 54 of these evaluations have closed with regulatory determinations, whereas the rest remain in progress. If the ARIA system and the FDA's Adverse Event Reporting System are deemed insufficient to address a safety concern, then the FDA may issue a postmarket requirement to a product's manufacturer. One hundred ninety‐seven ARIA insufficiency determinations have been made. The most common situation for which ARIA was found to be insufficient is the evaluation of adverse pregnancy and fetal outcomes following in utero drug exposure, followed by neoplasms and death. ARIA was most likely to be sufficient for thromboembolic events, which have high positive predictive value in claims data alone and do not require supplemental clinical data. The lessons learned from this experience illustrate the continued challenges using administrative claims data, especially to define novel clinical outcomes. This analysis can help to identify where more granular clinical data are needed to fill gaps to improve the use of real‐world data for drug safety analyses and provide insights into what is needed to efficiently generate high‐quality real‐world evidence for efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LEGAL judgments, MONOTONIC functions, APPELLATE courts, CONSTITUTIONAL courts, and MODELS & modelmaking

Standard methods for measuring latent traits from categorical data assume that response functions are monotonic. This assumption is violated when individuals from both extremes respond identically, but for conflicting reasons. Two survey respondents may "disagree" with a statement for opposing motivations, liberal and conservative justices may dissent from the same Supreme Court decision but provide ideologically contradictory rationales, and in legislative settings, ideological opposites may join together to oppose moderate legislation in pursuit of antithetical goals. In this article, we introduce a scaling model that accommodates ends against the middle responses and provide a novel estimation approach that improves upon existing routines. We apply this method to survey data, voting data from the U.S. Supreme Court, and the 116th Congress, and show that it outperforms standard methods in terms of both congruence with qualitative insights and model fit. This suggests that our proposed method may offer improved one-dimensional estimates of latent traits in many important settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FEDERAL government, REFORMS, and VOTING

Federal systems tend to have two venues of representation to ensure that both the people as a whole and the constituent units are represented at the federal level. While this double representation is put forward as a basic (normative) feature of federal systems, little to no empirical research has been conducted on this issue. This contribution therefore studies the representation of the people as a whole and of the constituent units in the Belgian House of Representatives by means of a representative claims analysis of 4,757 oral parliamentary questions. As federal systems tend to be dynamic, the analysis is based on six periods of federal reform through which Belgium decentralized. Our findings show that, over time, the representation of the constituent units increased and exceeded the representation of the people, providing unique empirical input for the debate about the idea that federalism is by definition beneficial for democracy. We problematize our results from a democratic point of view, as—despite being able to vote—the people as a whole are hardly any more represented by the House. Going beyond the Belgian case, we argue that processes of federalization should address the adequate representation of both the constituent units and the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]