Canadian jobs amid a pandemic : examining the relationship between professional industry and salary to regional key performance indicators

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to massive rates of unemployment and greater uncertainty in the job market. There is a growing need for data-driven tools and analyses to better inform the public on trends within the job market. In particular, obtaining a “snapshot” of available employment opportunities mid-pandemic promises insights to inform policy and support retraining programs. In this work, we combine data scraped from the Canadian Job Bank and Numbeo globally crowd-sourced repository to explore the relationship between job postings during a global pandemic and Key Performance Indicators (e.g. quality of life index, cost of living) for major cities across Canada. This analysis aims to help Canadians make informed career decisions, collect a “snapshot” of the Canadian employment opportunities amid a pandemic, and inform job seekers in identifying the correct fit between the desired lifestyle of a city and their career. We collected a new high-quality dataset of job postings from jobbank.gc.ca obtained with the use of ethical web scraping and performed exploratory data analysis on this dataset to identify job opportunity trends. When optimizing for average salary of job openings with quality of life, affordability, cost of living, and traffic indices, it was found that Edmonton, AB consistently scores higher than the mean, and is therefore an attractive place to move. Furthermore, we identified optimal provinces to relocate to with respect to individual skill levels. It was determined that Ajax, Marathon, and Chapleau, ON are each attractive cities for IT professionals, construction workers, and healthcare workers respectively when maximizing average salary. Finally, we publicly release our scraped dataset as a mid-pandemic snapshot of Canadian employment opportunities and present a public web application that provides an interactive visual interface that summarizes our findings for the general public and the broader research community

Perspectives on management learning in the digital economy

The digital economy, which was once considered as a panacea, is becoming increasingly viewed as a grand societal challenge – a problem that not only presents significant barriers to many people but is also so complex that it cannot be tackled by any one single organization. Mangers influence how the components of the global digital infrastructure, such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotics impact society. However, mitigating the broad-gauged impacts of the digital economy, like its impact on the nature of work, would benefit from new ideas about manger’s roles in the digital economy. Framed in a management learning perspective, this study collates what we know, and what we need to know, about management and the digital economy. Overall, this paper suggests that managers need to learn new habits of thought to build a more balanced, equitable, and sustainable version of digital economy. Perspectives on how to design management learning environments to help managers think of, then implement, a digital ecosystem rather than a digital economy will contribute to ongoing debates about management learning that will advance positive transformations of the nature of work

The Canada Learning Bond, financial capability and tax-filing: Results from an online survey of low and modest income parents

Previous research has identified several likely causes of eligible non-participation in the Canada Learning Bond (CLB), including awareness, financial exclusion, and administrative barriers. This study expands on that research, with a particular focus on the role of tax-filing as an administrative obstacle to accessing the CLB. I present results from an online survey of low and modest income parents (n=466) conducted in 2021. We find that, even among parents reporting they have received the CLB (46%), a majority (51%) report low confidence in their familiarity with the program, and more than one in six (17%) are unaware of the need to file tax returns to maintain eligibility for annual CLB payments. Self-reported regular tax-filing is associated with a 59% increase in the probability of accessing the CLB, even when controlling for a range of parental characteristics. This study confirms previous work by Harding and colleagues (2019) that non-filing may explain some share of eligible non-participation in education savings incentives. Tax-filing services may be an important pathway to improve CLB access. Low and modest income parents show substantial diversity in their preferred filing methods and outreach efforts cannot be concentrated in only one avenue if they are to be successful. The study also tests a small ‘nudge’ to address gaps in awareness and finds that information-only approaches to outreach are likely to have limited success, even with motivated populations

Modulation of the intestinal barrier adaptive functions in red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans) invading brackish waters

Globally, the increase in sea levels is leading to salinization of freshwater, which might influence the freshwater organisms such as red-eared slider, Trachemys scripta elegans. The turtle can invade brackish water environments, in which it must deal with elevated salinity in the gastrointestinal tract that could impact the intestinal function. The intestinal barrier provides a front-line of organismal defense against the chemical and biological environmental insults. In this study, the adaptive functions of the intestinal barrier including intestinal histomorphology, genes involved in intestinal barrier functions, and the intestinal micro-ecosystem were analyzed in the turtles exposed to freshwater (S0), 5‰ salinity (S5) and 15‰ salinity (S15) water for 30 days. The results showed that the intestine of T. s. elegans maintained normal histomorphological structure in the S5 group, whereas the villus height, crypt depth and the number of goblet cells in the S15 group were lower than that in the S5 and S0 groups. In addition, the relative expression levels of epithelial tight junction-related genes and intestinal immune-related genes in the gut were significantly upregulated in the S15 group, compared to the freshwater group. Mucin-2 gene expression was downregulated, but mucin-1 transcript levels were upregulated in salinity-treated groups. Furthermore, the abundances of phylum Proteobacteria, and genera Morganella and Aeromonas in the intestine were particularly enhanced in the S15 group than the S0 and S5 groups. Taken together, these results indicate that the intestinal barrier plays a protective role in T. s. elegans adaptation to brackish water environments. Our results provide a perspective on the evolution of salinity tolerance and help to evaluate the potential danger of the turtle to other species, and understand the challenges that other species must meet with rising sea levels

An improved construction for spanners of disks

Let D be a set of n pairwise disjoint disks in the plane. Consider the metric space in which the distance between any two disks D and D′ in D is the length of the shortest line segment that connects D and D′. For any real number ε>0, we show how to obtain a (1+ε)-spanner for this metric space that has at most (2π/ε)⋅n edges. The previously best known result is by Bose et al. (2011) [1]. Their (1+ε)-spanner is a variant of the Yao graph and has at most (8π/ε)⋅n edges. Our new spanner is also a variant of the Yao graph