The routines and rituals that surround food - shopping, preparing, cooking, serving, cleaning up - are important parts of our lives, yet often we fail to recognise their symbolic or hidden meanings.

Food for Thought is an ESRC-funded project led by Ruth Emond, Samantha Punch and Ian McIntosh of the University of Stirling. A website of resources has been launched today as part of the project, which includes food-based training, assessment and intervention tools for carers of looked after young people.

Busy modern life can make it difficult to remember everything. And there always seems to be quite a lot to remember, not only in our daily working lives, but also in our private lives. It can be an endless stream of paper to-do lists, notes and ideas tucked into bags, coat pockets, on desks - anywhere to make it easier to remember! However, a web tool that can help put paper lists to bed is Evernote. Evernote provides an easy and effective way to manage notes and ideas using one tool.

The Social Care (Self-directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013 goes live on the 1st April 2014 and the implementation of the National Strategy is well underway across Scotland. Pilotlight is contributing to these preparations.

We are working with co-design teams of people who use and deliver services across Scotland to design pathways to self-directed support. Using a design approach, the project is demonstrating how to implement support for seldom heard groups, provide more personalised and appropriate services and increase the marketplace of support providers.

For the last four years, Iriss has been involved in creating a daily social services news feed and email newsletter. We like to keep up to date with what's new in social media and are very open to using it to improve how we do things. And our news service has evolved over time. Until Google killed it off in July 2013 were using Google Reader, a tool for reading news feeds (or RSS as it is often called).

The Life Changes Trust (LCT) has been founded to transform the life chances of:

Learning with Care, published by by HM Inspectors of Schools and the Social Work Service Inspectorate in 2001, highlighted the importance of improving the learning and development opportunities for those working with looked after children and care leavers. The Learning with Care training materials were developed and launched in 2003.

Fire can have a devastating effect on people's lives, yet most fires are preventable. In 2009, a report [1] from the Scotland's Fire and Rescue Services [2] highlighted the groups most at risk from fire:

According to Alzheimer Scotland figures, there are approximately 86,000 people who have dementia in Scotland, and around 3,200 of these people are under the age of 65. Access to information on the disease - what is is, how it manifests, how it can be treated, and what supports are available - is therefore crucial to ensure best possible care and support.

Radio is a great way of sharing stories, research and experience. It's almost a year since Iriss launched Iriss.FM, an internet radio station for the social services in Scotland, and we now air a regular schedule of varied programmes: Foetal Alcohol Disorder Syndrome; young people's safety on the internet; bi-polar disorder; women's imprisonment. Able Radio is another example of how effective this medium can be.