Algorithmic Food Justice

How do we engage with the threat of social and environmental degradation while creating and maintaining liveable and just worlds? Researchers from diverse backgrounds unpack this question through a series of original and committed contributions to this wide-ranging volume. The authors explore practices of repairing damaged ecologies across different locations and geographies and offer innovative insights for the conservation, mending, care and empowerment of human and nonhuman ecologies. This ground-breaking collection establishes ecological reparation as an urgent and essential topic of public and scholarly debate.</p

Sounds of the underground

The research involved using specialised piezo microphones with audio recording devices to record the sounds of the soil. The aim was to generate acoustic indices to assess the health of soil. Data were analysed in R, Python and Wildlife Acoustics Kaleidoscope Pro. </p

RTD2015 24 A Pixel is Not a Pixel: Simple Data Charting Made Physical

<p>The humble pie chart, the basic line graph: we are used to these and other forms of basic graphs. These have become commonplace and they can blend into the background, another plot on the screen real estate that accompanies our lives. To stand out, screen based data visualizations have become ever more beautiful, intricate and bespoke, but in so doing their legibility can suffer.</p> <p>In a project on community data, run in collaboration with residents of Tenison Road in Cambridge, we have been exploring how to present data to the community that will be accessible to as many local people as possible. We chose to use our highly visible window-frontage, visible from Tenison Road itself. As a technology company, our street facing window is full of screens, which could easily have been used for our purposes. Instead we have designed and built physical visualizations of a pie chart and a line graph. These are simple in the sense that they are easy to read and make playful use of some readily available material (like retractable tape measures). Their design is sensitive to the need for readability and spectacle.</p> <p> </p

More-than-Human Computer Interaction for Urban Food Governance

The Routledge Handbook of Urban Food Governance is the first collection to reflect on and compile the currently dispersed histories, concepts and practices involved in the increasingly popular field of urban food governance. Unpacking the power of urban food governance and its capacity to affect lives through the transformation of cities and the global food system, the Handbook is structured into five parts. The first part focuses on histories of urban food governance to trace the historical roots of current dynamics and provide an impetus for the critical lens on urban food governance threaded through the Handbook. The second part presents a broad overview of the different frames, theories and concepts that have informed urban food governance scholarship. Drawing on the previous parts, part three engages with the practice of urban food governance by analysing plans, policies and programmes implemented in different contexts. Part four presents current knowledge on how urban food governance involves different agencies that operate across scales and sectors. The final part asks key figures in this field what the future holds for urban food governance in the midst of pressing societal and environmental challenges. Containing chapters written by emerging and established scholars, as well as practitioners, the Handbook provides a state of the art, global and diverse examination of the role of cities in delivering sustainable and secure food outcomes, as well as providing refreshed theoretical and practical tools to understand and transform urban food governance to enact more sustainable and just futures. The Routledge Handbook of Urban Food Governance will be essential reading for students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers interested in food governance, urban studies, sustainable food andagriculture, and sustainable living more broadly.</p

Social influences on delayed gratification in New Caledonian crows and Eurasian jays

Self-control underlies goal-directed behaviour in humans and other animals. Delayed gratification ‐ a measure of self-control ‐ requires the ability to tolerate delays and/or invest more effort to obtain a reward of higher value over one of lower value, such as food or mates. Social context, in particular, the presence of competitors, may influence delayed gratification. We adapted the ‘rotating-tray’ paradigm, where subjects need to forgo an immediate, lower-quality (i.e. less preferred) reward for a delayed, higher-quality (i.e. more preferred) one, to test social influences on delayed gratification in two corvid species: New Caledonian crows and Eurasian jays. We compared choices for immediate vs. delayed rewards while alone, in the presence of a competitive conspecific and in the presence of a non-competitive conspecific. We predicted that, given the increased risk of losing a reward with a competitor present, both species would similarly, flexibly alter their choices in the presence of a conspecific compared to when alone. We found that species differed: jays were more likely to select the immediate, less preferred reward than the crows. We also found that jays were more likely to select the immediate, less preferred reward when a competitor or non-competitor was present than when alone, or when a competitor was present compared to a non-competitor, while the crows selected the delayed, highly preferred reward irrespective of social presence. We discuss our findings in relation to species differences in socio-ecological factors related to adult sociality and food-caching (storing). New Caledonian crows are more socially tolerant and moderate cachers, while Eurasian jays are highly territorial and intense cachers that may have evolved under the social context of cache pilfering and cache protection strategies. Therefore, flexibility (or inflexibility) in delay of gratification under different social contexts may relate to the species’ social tolerance and related risk of competition.</p

summary of ethnographic observations and interviews conducted.

<p>summary of ethnographic observations and interviews conducted.</p

Medicines management at home during the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study exploring the UK patient/carer perspective

Objectives To explore home medicine practices and safety for people shielding and/or over the age of 70 during the COVID-19 pandemic and to create guidance, from the patient/carer perspective, for enabling safe medicine practices for this population. Methods Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 50 UK participants who were shielding and/or over the age of 70 and who used medicines for a long-term condition, using telephone or video conferencing. Participants were recruited through personal/professional networks and through patient/carer organisations. Participants were asked about their experiences of managing medicines during the pandemic and how this differed from previous practices. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Key findings Patients’ and their families’ experiences of managing medicines safely during the pandemic varied greatly. Analysis suggests that this was based on the patient’s own agency, the functioning of their medicines system pre-pandemic and their relationships with family, friends, community networks and pharmacy staff. Medicine safety issues reported included omitted doses and less-effective formulations being used. Participants also described experiencing high levels of anxiety related to obtaining medicines, monitoring medicines and feeling at risk of contracting COVID-19 while accessing healthcare services for medicine-related issues. Effects of the pandemic on medicines adherence were reported to be positive by some and negative by others. Conclusions Pharmacy staff have a key role to play by establishing good relationships with patients and their families, working with prescribers to ensure medicines systems are as joined up as possible, and signposting to community networks that can help with medicines collection

Flow chart of participants.

<p>Flow chart of participants.</p

British Gynaecological Cancer Society (BGCS) Uterine Cancer Guidelines: Recommendations for Practice

The remit of this guideline is to collate and propose evidence-based guidelines for the diagnosis and management of uterine cancer. This document covers all uterine cancers of any histological type