The goal of this paper is to systematically review the literature on United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecast evaluation and critically assess their methods and findings. The fundamental characteristics of optimal forecasts are bias, accuracy and efficiency as well as encompassing and informativeness. This review revealed that the findings of these studies can be very different based on the forecasts examined, commodity, sample period, and methodology. Some forecasts performed very well, while others were not very reliable, resulting in forecast specific optimality record. We discuss methodological and empirical contributions of these studies as well as their shortcomings and potential opportunities for future work.

I propose an analysis of lying with uninformative speech acts. The orthodox view states that lying is restricted to assertions. However, the growing case for non-assertoric lies made by presuppositions or conventional implicatures challenges this orthodoxy. So far, the only presuppositions to have been considered as lies were informative presuppositions. In fact, uninformative lies were not discussed in the philosophical literature. However, limiting the possibility of lying to informative speech acts is too restrictive. Firstly, I show that standard, uninformative presuppositions can also be lies. Secondly, I extend this picture into uninformative lies made by declarative statements. To implement my proposal, I do not need a new definition of lying. Recently popular commitment-based definitions of lying are able to properly handle uninformative lies.

The current study evaluated the separate and combined effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on informativeness and definiteness marking of referential expressions. Hebrew-speaking monolingual children (21 with ASD and 28 with typical language development) and Russian–Hebrew-speaking bilingual children (13 with ASD and 30 with typical language development) aged 4–9 years participated. Informativeness, indexed by referential contrasts, was affected by ASD, but not by bilingualism. Definiteness use was non-target-like in children with ASD and in bilingual children, and it was mainly predicted by children’s morpho-syntactic abilities in Hebrew. Language-universal and language-specific properties of referential use are discussed.