Around the world, agricultural landscapes are increasingly seen as “multi-functional” spaces, expected to deliver food supplies while improving rural livelihoods and protecting and restoring healthy ecosystems. To support this array of functions and benefits, governments and civil society in many regions are now promoting integrated farm- and landscape-scale management strategies, in lieu of fragmented management strategies. While rural producers are fundamental to achieving multi-functional landscapes, they are frequently viewed as targets of, or barriers to, landscape-oriented initiatives, rather than as leading (...) agents of change. In reality, however, rural producers in many areas have embraced elements of multi-functional land management. In this paper, we explore the role and recent evolution of producer movements in influencing multi-functional farm and landscape management. We explore these roles through six case studies, including a land reform movement in Brazil, indigenous territorial development in Bolivia, conservation agriculture associations in Canada, environmental cooperatives in the Netherlands, indigenous and biocultural heritage associations in Peru, and Landcare groups in the Philippines. These experiences suggest that producer movements are playing pivotal roles in supporting landscape multi-functionality, not only through agroecological farming practices but also through off-farm efforts to conserve ecosystems and support multi-stakeholder landscape planning. On the other hand, interests of producer movements are not always fully aligned with multi-functional landscape management approaches. The contribution of producer movements to multi-functional landscapes depends on these movements including farm and landscape stewardship in their values and goals, and having the political support and capacity to engage meaningfully in multi-stakeholder processes. (shrink)

Introduction: Screen-based and mobile technology has grown at an unprecedented rate. However, little is understood about whether increased screen-use affects executive functioning, the range of mental processes that aid goal attainment and facilitate the selection of appropriate behaviors. To examine this, a systematic review was conducted.Method: This systematic review is reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses statement. A comprehensive literature search was conducted using Web of Science, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and Scopus databases to identify (...) articles published between 2007 and March 2020, examining the use of mobile technologies on aspects of EF in healthy adults aged 18–35 years. In total 6079 articles were screened by title, and 39 screened by full text. Eight eligible papers were identified for inclusion. Our methods were pre-registered on the PROSPERO international prospective register of systematic reviews.Results: A total of 438 participants were included across the eight studies. Five of the eight studies examined more than one EF. Five studies measured inhibition, and four studies measured decision-making. Smartphone use was negatively associated with inhibition and decision-making. Working memory performance was found to be improved by increased time engaging in video games and by refraining from smartphone use prior to bedtime. Quality assessments indicated high risk of methodological biases across the studies and a low quality of evidence for determining the relationship between technology use and executive functioning.Conclusions: This review highlights the scarcity of the literature in this area. It presents a call for rigorous and objective research to further our understanding of the impact of mobile technology on different aspects of executive function. (shrink)

BackgroundThere has been media coverage surrounding the dangers of heavy drinking and benefits of moderation, with TV and radio presenter, Adrian Chiles, documenting his experience of moderating alcohol consumption in an online article for the Guardian. By analysing the comments in response to Chiles’ article, this study aimed to explore posters’ attitudes or beliefs toward moderating alcohol and posters’ experiences of moderating or abstaining from alcohol.MethodA secondary qualitative analysis of online comments in response to an article about moderating alcohol consumption. (...) Main outcome measures: Comments in response to a United Kingdom online news article about moderating alcohol consumption were extracted and inductive thematic analysis was used.ResultsFor aim one, two themes were developed; “general attitudes toward drinking” and “general attitudes toward reducing consumption”. These themes reflect negative perceptions of alcohol and issues around changing attitudes. For aim two, three themes were developed: “moderation vs. abstention”, “reflection on past drinking behaviours”, and “current drinking behaviours”. These themes represent posters’ experiences and implications changing their drinking habits.ConclusionOur analysis provides a novel insight into perceptions and experiences of moderating or abstaining from alcohol. Alcohol is embedded within United Kingdom culture, creating difficulties for those who choose to moderate or abstain from alcohol. Our analysis highlights the need for public health to focus on shifting the current drinking culture, through clearer drinking guidelines and a wider availability of alcohol-free alternatives. (shrink)

The potential to instrumentalize drug use based upon the detection of very many different drug states undoubtedly exists, and such states may play a role in psychiatric and many other drug uses. Nevertheless, nonaddictive drug use is potentially more parsimoniously explained in terms of sensation seeking/impulsivity and drug expectations. Cultural factors also play a major role in nonaddictive drug use.

An inordinate number of low wage workers in essential industries are Black, Hispanic, or Latino, immigrants or refugees — groups beset by centuries of discrimination and burdened with disproportionate but preventable harms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meat is a multi-billion-dollar industry that relies on people performing risky physical work inside meat-processing facilities over long shifts in close proximity. These workers are socially disempowered, and many are members of groups beset by historic and ongoing structural discrimination. The combination of working conditions and worker characteristics facilitate the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Workers have been expected to put their health and lives at risk during the pandemic because of government and industry pressures to keep (...) this “essential industry” producing. Numerous interventions can significantly reduce the risks to workers and their communities; however, the industry’s implementation has been sporadic and inconsistent. With a focus on the U.S. context, this paper offers an ethical framework for infection prevention and control recommendations grounded in public health values of health and safety, interdependence and solidarity, and health equity and justice, with particular attention to considerations of reciprocity, equitable burden sharing, harm reduction, and health promotion. Meat-processing workers are owed an approach that protects their health relative to the risks of harms to them, their families, and their communities. Sacrifices from businesses benefitting financially from essential industry status are ethically warranted and should acknowledge the risks assumed by workers in the context of existing structural inequities. (shrink)

Canadian and American population-based research concerning sexual and/or gender minority populations provides evidence of persistent breast and gynecologic cancer-related health disparities and knowledge divides. The Cancer's Margins research investigates the complex intersections of sexual and/or gender marginality and incommensurabilities and improvisation in engagements with biographical and biomedical cancer knowledge. The study examines how sexuality and gender are intersectionally constitutive of complex biopolitical mappings of cancer health knowledge that shape knowledge access and its mobilization in health and treatment decision-making. Interviews were (...) conducted with a diverse group of sexual and/or gender minority breast or gynecologic cancer patients. The LGBQ//T2 cancer patient narratives we have analyzed document in fine grain detail how it is that sexual and/or gender minority cancer patients punctuate the otherwise lockstep assemblage of their cancer treatment decision-making with a persistent engagement in creative attempts to resist, thwart and otherwise manage the possibility of discrimination and likewise, the probability of institutional erasure in care settings. Our findings illustrate the demands that cancer places on LGBQ//T2 patients to choreograph access to, and mobilization of knowledge and care, across significantly distinct and sometimes incommensurable systems of knowledge. (shrink)

In this study, we replicated what is known about the relative importance of dealbreakers and dealmakers in romantic and sexual relationships and extended it to an examination of self-reports of mate value, self-esteem, and loneliness. In two experiments we manipulated the information people were told about potential partners and asked them about their intentions to have sex again with or go on a second date with opposite sex targets. People were less interested in partners after learning dealbreakers, effects which operated (...) more strongly in the long-term than short-term context, but similarly in men and women. People who reported less self-esteem or more loneliness were more receptive to people with dealbreakers. People who thought they had more mate value, more self-esteem, or less loneliness were more receptive to dealmakers. Results are discussed using sociometer, prospect, and sexual strategies theories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by HerselfGail K. Hart (bio)Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by Herself. Translated and introduced by Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene. New York: MLA, 2009. xliii + 196 pp. $12.95.Confessions of a Poisoner is an epistolary, autobiographical novel, first published anonymously in German as Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin in 1803. Lurid accounts of sex, incest, murder, and other crimes contributed to its status as (...) a sensational document in its day, especially in light of the illicit activities of the Countess Charlotte Ursinus, who was arrested and prosecuted for multiple poisonings allegedly committed between 1779 and 1803. Readers were eager for details of the countess's affairs and crimes, and the novel can indeed be read as an account, perhaps her account, of a very busy life of iniquity.The book is extremely engaging, and absorbing because our autobiographical narrator has unusually acute insight into human affairs and human character. From early youth, she finds pleasure in the art of seeming and she is proud of the skill with which she reads those who have something to offer her. Indeed the book could double as a seminar in social manipulation as the narrator negotiates her culture's obstacles to women's self-fulfillment. One is often reminded of George Lillo's murderous Millwood from The London Merchant, who in 1731 made the observation:It is a general maxim among the knowing part of mankind that a woman without virtue, like a man without honor or honesty, is capable of any action, though never [End Page 68] so vile. And yet what pains will they not take, what arts not use, to seduce us from our innocence and make us contemptible and wicked, even in their own opinions?(I:3)The narrator of Poisoner, though she might agree with Millwood, sees her part in the vile actions as both determined and chosen. The early steps of corruption were abetted by passion (incited with some calculation by early lovers) but also by the education she received, which she describes as being more masculine than feminine. Her father's failure to guide and restrain her thirst for knowledge has apparently left her with the ambitions of a conquerer and the social duties of an aristocratic woman—and, as Countess Orsina would have it, where men use daggers, women use poison. Yet she also accepts responsibility for all that she has done, quite convinced that most of it was wrong. The moral philosophy of the piece is somewhat peculiar, but she strives in the space of the one long letter that makes up the book to give an honest account of her duplicitous deeds.This intriguing life story also has significant scholarly value, and the editors/translators, Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene, have appended an excellent introduction that examines the poisoner's confessions as a document of its time. Our narrator is both wise and well-educated, and she discourses frequently on contemporary literature and philosophy, inserting herself into a variety of cultural debates. For example, her opinions on the value of Richardson's novels for the education and protection of young woman—that Richardson's ideals of virtue are delusional and therefore dangerous—run counter to prevailing wisdom on what young ladies should read. Her struggles with Kant and critical philosophy, which, she claims, diminished her pulchritude, are also instructive. Additionally, the editors make a very convincing case for the authorship of Friederike Helene Unger, whose husband was the publisher, and whose other works bear certain strong resemblances to the prose and the ideas of Poisoner.All of this excitement and knowledge comes to us in a supremely lucid and readable translation. I rarely read fiction in translation without being regularly reminded in some way of the translator. One sees an odd word, puzzles out a sentence and thinks about how one might have done that differently—and one gets distracted. That is not the case with this text, and this is especially surprising because the original German is that "of an era both culturally and historically distant" (xxvii). Whitinger and Spokiene have done a superb job of resurrecting a forgotten German text, embedding it in... (shrink)

Misophonia has been characterized as intense negative reactions to specific trigger sounds. However, recent research suggests high-level, contextual, and multisensory factors are also involved. We recently demonstrated that neurotypicals’ negative reactions to aversive sounds are attenuated when the sounds are synced with positive attributable video sources. To assess whether this effect generalizes to misophonic triggers, we developed a Sound-Swapped Video database for use in misophonia research. In Study 1, we created a set of 39 video clips depicting common trigger sounds (...) and a corresponding set of 39 PAVS temporally synchronized with the OVS videos. In Study 2, participants rated the 39 PAVS videos for their audiovisual match and pleasantness. We selected the 20 PAVS videos with best match scores for use in Study 3. In Study 3, a new group of participants observed the 20 selected PAVS and 20 corresponding OVS and judged the pleasantness or unpleasantness of each sound in the two contexts accompanying each video. Afterward, participants completed the Misophonia Questionnaire. The results of Study 3 show a robust attenuating effect of PAVS videos on the reported unpleasantness of trigger sounds: trigger sounds were rated as significantly less unpleasant when paired with PAVS with than OVS. Moreover, this attenuating effect was present in nearly every participant regardless of their score on the MQ. In fact, we found a moderate positive correlation between the PAVS-OVS difference and misophonia severity scores. Overall our results provide validation that the SSV database is a useful stimulus database to study how misophonic responses can be modulated by visual contexts. Here, we release the SSV database with the best 18 PAVS and 18 OVS videos used in Study 3 along with aggregate ratings of audio-video match and pleasantness. We also provide detailed instructions on how to produce these videos, with the hope that this database grows and improves through collaborations with the community of misophonia researchers. (shrink)

Legal, medical, and public health professionals have been complicit in creating and maintaining systems that drive health inequities. To ameliorate this, current and future leaders in law, medicine, and public health must learn about racism and its impact along the life course trajectory and how to engage in antiracist practice and health equity work.

This book offers both theoretical overviews and practical approaches for educators, academics, education students and parents who are interested in transforming schools. It encourages reinvigorating approaches to learning and teaching that can easily be integrated into both public and private K-12 school classrooms, with many ideas also applicable to higher education. It supports an educational system based on the beliefs that heart and spirit are intertwined with mind and intellect, and that inner peace, wisdom, compassion, and conscience can be developed (...) together with academic content and skills. (shrink)

K. E. Boxer explores moral responsibility, and whether it is compatible with causal determinism. She suggests that to answer this question we must focus on responsibility in the sense of liability, and that an incompatibilist view may only be preserved on an understanding of the moral desert of punishment that many find morally problematic.

This chapter contains sections titled: Intellectual Biography Influences Art and Aesthetics Professional Neglect.