Investing in Healthy, Sustainable Places Through Urban Agriculture

The purpose of this paper is to provide funders with an overview of urban agriculture and its benefits; its connections to the community-based food system; and how foundations are supporting and encouraging urban agriculture as a public health, social enterprise, environmental stewardship, and/or economic development strategy. With bibliographical references

How the timing of police evidence disclosure impacts custodial legal advice

Presently, the police in England and Wales disclose their evidence at different points during the arrest and detention of a suspect. While the courts have not objected to this, past field research suggests that lawyers can only advise their clients accurately when the police disclose their evidence before the police interview. To examine this from a law – psychology perspective, we recruited 100 criminal defence lawyers to participate in an online study. Lawyers read fictional scenarios and provided custodial legal advice to a hypothetical client (Christopher) when given either pre-interview disclosure or disclosure at various points during the police interview (early, gradually, or late). Lawyers given pre-interview disclosure provided considerably more informed legal advice compared to those who were only provided with disclosure during the hypothetical police interview. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper provides further evidence that pre-interview disclosure is essential for lawyers to deliver case-specific legal advice to suspects

Truth-tellers stand the test of time and contradict evidence less than liars, even months after a crime

When deceptive suspects are unaware of the evidence the police hold against them, they contradict that evidence more than truthful suspects do – a useful cue to deception. But given that, over time, truthful suspects might forget the past and also contradict the evidence, how effective are lie detection techniques that rely on such inconsistencies when suspects are questioned months after a crime? In Experiment 1, people committed a theft (liars) or a benign activity (truth-tellers) in a university bookshop. Shortly after or two months later, we questioned them about their bookshop visit without informing them of the evidence implicating them in the theft. Though truth-tellers contradicted some evidence after both time delays, liars always contradicted the evidence more than did truth-tellers. In Experiment 2, we presented the mock suspects’ responses to an independent group of laypeople and asked them to rate how deceptive the suspects were. Laypeople rated liars as more deceptive than truth-tellers after both time delays, but also rated truth-tellers questioned two months after the crime as more deceptive than truth-tellers questioned shortly after the crime. These findings suggest that liars’ tendency to distance themselves from a crime might outweigh any memory decay that truth-tellers experience in the two months following a crime. As a result, the extent of a suspect’s contradictions with the evidence could still be diagnostic of deception even after an extended time delay

Strategic disclosure of evidence : perspectives from psychology and law

The police frequently present their evidence to suspects in investigative interviews. Accordingly, psychologists have developed strategic ways in which the police may present evidence to catch suspects lying or to elicit more information from suspects. While research in psychology continues to illustrate the effectiveness of strategic evidence disclosure tactics in lie detection, lawyers and legal research challenge these very tactics as undermining fair trial defense rights. Legal research is alive to the problems associated with strategically disclosing evidence to a suspect, such as preventing lawyers from advising the suspect effectively, increasing custodial pressure for the suspect, and worsening working relations between lawyers and police. This paper brings together the opposing research and arguments from the two disciplines of psychology and law, and suggests a new way forward for future research and policy on how the police should disclose evidence

Behind closed doors : live observations of current police station disclosure practices and lawyer-client consultations

Drawing on recent observational fieldwork as well as existing research studies in the fields of law and of psychology, this article examines the nature of police practices in the disclosure of evidence before and during custodial interviews of legally represented suspects. Whilst police pre-interview disclosure to lawyers was a fixed practice, the format of disclosure varied and lawyers were rarely permitted to inspect the evidence, relying instead on the officer’s account. Disclosure was sometimes provided in stages, either as a deliberate tactic or when evidence was lacking. Officers occasionally exaggerated the strength of their case to suspects and resisted providing more detail to lawyers – an approach that seemed designed to elicit an admission from the suspect. In line with past research, lawyers relied on the evidence that police disclosed when advising clients before the interview and occasionally argued with the police for more disclosure. Taken together, these findings suggest that police are complying with the minimum disclosure requirements set out by legislation, and that police may be more open with lawyers than previous research suggests. Some of our findings warrant concern, however, and raise questions about risks to vulnerable suspects in custody and risks to suspects without legal representation

Testing the benefits of conservation set-asides for improved habitat connectivity in tropical agricultural landscapes

Habitat connectivity is important for tropical biodiversity conservation. Expansion of commodity crops, such as oil palm, fragments natural habitat areas, and strategies are needed to improve habitat connectivity in agricultural landscapes. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) voluntary certification system requires that growers identify and conserve forest patches identified as High Conservation Value Areas (HCVAs) before oil palm plantations can be certified as sustainable. We assessed the potential benefits of these conservation set-asides for forest connectivity. We mapped HCVAs and quantified their forest cover in 2015. To assess their contribution to forest connectivity, we modelled range expansion of forest-dependent populations with five dispersal abilities spanning those representative of poor dispersers (e.g. flightless insects) to more mobile species (e.g. large birds or bats) across 70 plantation landscapes in Borneo. Because only 21% of HCVA area was forested in 2015, these conservation set-asides currently provide few connectivity benefits. Compared to a scenario where HCVAs contain no forest (i.e. a no-RSPO scenario), current HCVAs improved connectivity by ~3% across all dispersal abilities. However, if HCVAs were fully reforested, then overall landscape connectivity could improve by ~16%. Reforestation of HCVAs had the greatest benefit for poor to intermediate dispersers (0.5–3 km per generation), generating landscapes that were up to 2.7 times better connected than landscapes without HCVAs. By contrast, connectivity benefits of HCVAs were low for highly mobile populations under current and reforestation scenarios, because range expansion of these populations was generally successful regardless of the amount of forest cover. Synthesis and applications. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) requires that High Conservation Value Areas (HCVAs) be set aside to conserve biodiversity, but HCVAs currently provide few connectivity benefits because they contain relatively little forest. However, reforested HCVAs have the potential to improve landscape connectivity for some forest species (e.g. winged insects), and we recommend active management by plantation companies to improve forest quality of degraded HCVAs (e.g. by enrichment planting). Future revisions to the RSPO's Principles and Criteria should also ensure that large (i.e. with a core area >2 km 2) HCVAs are reconnected to continuous tracts of forest to maximize their connectivity benefits

Increasing follow-up questionnaire response rates in a randomized controlled trial of telehealth for depression: three embedded controlled studies

Background: Attrition is problematic in trials, and may be exacerbated in longer studies, telehealth trials and participants with depression – three features of The Healthlines Study. Advance notification, including a photograph and using action-oriented email subject lines might increase response rates, but require further investigation. We examined the effectiveness of these interventions in three embedded Healthlines studies. Methods: Based in different trial sites, participants with depression were alternately allocated to be pre-called or not ahead of the 8-month follow-up questionnaire (Study 1), randomized to receive a research team photograph or not with their 12-month questionnaire (Study 2), and randomized to receive an action-oriented (‘ACTION REQUIRED’) or standard (‘Questionnaire reminder’) 12-month email reminder (Study 3). Participants could complete online or postal questionnaires, and received up to five questionnaire reminders. The primary outcome was completion of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). Secondary outcome measures were the number of reminders and time to questionnaire completion. Results: Of a total of 609 Healthlines depression participants, 190, 251 and 231 participants were included in Studies 1–3 (intervention: 95, 126 and 115), respectively. Outcome completion was ≥90 % across studies, with no differences between trial arms (Study 1: OR 0.38, 95 % CI 0.07–2.10; Study 2: OR 0.84, 95 % CI 0.26–2.66; Study 3: OR 0.53 95 % CI 0.19–1.49). Pre-called participants were less likely to require a reminder (48.4 % vs 62.1 %, OR 0.41, 95 % CI 0.21–0.78), required fewer reminders (adjusted difference in means −0.67, 95 % CI −1.13 to −0.20), and completed follow-up quicker (median 8 vs 15 days, HR 1.35, 95 % CI 1.00–1.82) than control subjects. There were no significant between-group differences in Studies 2 or 3. Conclusions: Eventual response rates in this trial were high, with no further improvement from these interventions. While the photograph and email interventions were ineffective, pre-calling participants reduced time to completion. This strategy might be helpful when the timing of study completion is important. Researchers perceived a substantial benefit from the reduction in reminders with pre-calling, despite no overall decrease in net effort after accounting for pre-notification