Interventions to reduce suicides at suicide hotspots: a systematic review

Background: 'Suicide hotspots' include tall structures (for example, bridges and cliffs), railway tracks, and isolated locations (for example, rural car parks) which offer direct means for suicide or seclusion that prevents intervention. Methods. We searched Medline for studies that could inform the following question: 'What interventions are available to reduce suicides at hotspots, and are they effective?'. Results: There are four main approaches: (a) restricting access to means (through installation of physical barriers); (b) encouraging help-seeking (by placement of signs and telephones); (c) increasing the likelihood of intervention by a third party (through surveillance and staff training); and (d) encouraging responsible media reporting of suicide (through guidelines for journalists). There is relatively strong evidence that reducing access to means can avert suicides at hotspots without substitution effects. The evidence is weaker for the other approaches, although they show promise. Conclusions: More well-designed intervention studies are needed to strengthen this evidence base. © 2013 Cox et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.published_or_final_versio

A Reader Guide to T.S. Eliot: a poem by poem analysis

248hal.;21c

Rich TV. Poor TV: Work, Leisure and the Construction of "Deserved Inequality" in Contemporary Britain.

In January 2017, the UK ITV show This Morning featured a woman, Deborah Hodge, who had recently appeared on the Channel 5 reality TV show On Benefits. Phillip Schofield, one of the show’s presenters, told Hodge that it “quite frankly got my back up” that she had spent £10 on two bottles of Prosecco (fizzy Italian wine) at Christmas and was filmed saying “cheers to the taxpayer for my gift.” The incident was widely reported as Schofield losing his temper, with headlines including “Schofield blasts This Morning guest” and “Schofield hits out at mum” (Minn, 2017). The story and its wider amplification in the media worked on a number of discursive levels. It concertedly stoked pre-existing debate and moral panic about “benefits scroungers.” The arrival of this motif on a show previously distanced from such moral condemnation was itself an event marking the further encroaching of such discourse into the mainstream. Meanwhile, left commentatorsrelatively marginalized in the UK media landscape-pointed out that such “fauxrage” enabled moral posturing about the fecklessness of the poor. In the memorable words of Guardian columnist Phil McDuff, “even if they hung old sacks at their window in lieu of curtains and ate cold beans by the light of recycled candles” to save money, any pleasurable consumption would be considered frivolous waste. Such indignation, he writes, “is a vicious reaction against the poor’s presumptuous insistence on experiencing life as if they were as fully human as the rest of us” (McDuff, 2017). It was also pointed out that while the presenter Philip Schofield was castigating the unemployed about how they spent ten pounds, he was being paid a two-million-pound salary by ITV and had a private net worth valued at twelve million pounds (Singh, 2009; The Richest, 2017)

Artificial intelligence in plant and agricultural research

This is the author accepted manuscriptThis chapter lays out the prospects of AI within plant and agricultural research, and their role in addressing the existential challenges posed by climate change and food production in the immediate future. It focuses on the three key sets of demands within this realm: the need to tackle diverse biological phenomena which are highly susceptible to changing environmental conditions; the requirement to organise and coordinate the various stakeholders of relevance to agricultural development, including both public and private sectors, to ensure appropriate use of the technology; and the challenges posed by the vast ecosystem of data types and infrastructures relevant to crop science. It concludes that AI is transforming existing understandings of what is meant by agricultural development and how technology can best support it; and argues that for such a transformation to have a positive impact on planetary health, AI development and application need to be informed by meaningful and sustained transdisciplinary collaborations.Alan Turing InstituteEuropean Research Counci