Open data-set of seven Canadian Cities

Open data has attracted huge attention for the construction of smart city in terms of delivering useful city information to citizens and interacting with citizens from the city council perspective. In this paper, we present an overview of the current status and issues of open data opened by different seven Canadian cities. We start by presenting the characters of open data, followed by data format conclusion and detailed dataset explaination for each Canadian city (e.g., Calgary, Halifax, Surrey, Waterloo, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Toronto), including the different data catalogues and their detailed characteristics. Next, we discuss the state-of-the-art of the tools and applications developed over each city's open data. Here, we not only illustrate the most successful examples, but particularly consider the potential issues due to the characters of the city datasets. This paper is not only beneficial for a government, which can compare its open data status with that of the Canadian cities but also quite useful for users or companies interested in tool development over open city data

Globalization and the health of Canadians: ‘Having a job is the most important thing’

Background Globalization describes processes of greater integration of the world economy through increased flows goods, services, capital and people. Globalization has undergone significant transformation since the 1970s, entrenching neoliberal economics as the dominant model of global market integration. Although this transformation has generated some health gains, since the 1990s it has also increased health disparities. Methods As part of a larger project examining how contemporary globalization was affecting the health of Canadians, we undertook semi-structured interviews with 147 families living in low-income neighbourhoods in Canada’s three largest cities (Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver). Many of the families were recent immigrants, which was another focus of the study. Drawing on research syntheses undertaken by the Globalization Knowledge Network of the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health, we examined respondents’ experiences of three globalization-related pathways known to influence health: labour markets (and the rise of precarious employment), housing markets (speculative investments and affordability) and social protection measures (changes in scope and redistributive aspects of social spending and taxation). Interviews took place between April 2009 and November 2011. Results Families experienced an erosion of labour markets (employment) attributed to outsourcing, discrimination in employment experienced by new immigrants, increased precarious employment, and high levels of stress and poor mental health; costly and poor quality housing, especially for new immigrants; and, despite evidence of declining social protection spending, appreciation for state-provided benefits, notably for new immigrants arriving as refugees. Job insecurity was the greatest worry for respondents and their families. Questions concerning the impact of these experiences on health and living standards produced mixed results, with a majority expressing greater difficulty ‘making ends meet,’ some experiencing deterioration in health and yet many also reporting improved living standards. We speculate on reasons for these counter-intuitive results. Conclusions Current trends in the three globalization-related pathways in Canada are likely to worsen the health of families similar to those who participated in our study

Price Cycles and Price Leadership in Gasoline Markets: New Evidence from Canada

This paper studies the determinants of Edgeworth Cycles, price leadership and coordination in retail gasoline markets using daily station-level price data for 110 markets in Ontario, Canada for 2007-2008. We find an “inverse-U” relationship between markets’ propensity to exhibit price cycles and their size. More concentrated markets are less likely to exhibits cycles and we highlight regional clustering among cycling and non-cycling markets. Within cycling markets, we find brands’ stations (Esso, Shell,Petro-Canada, Sunoco) lead price jumps and coordinate market prices, while independents (Ultramar, Pioneer, Olco, MacEwen) aggressively undercut prices over the cycle.Retail gasoline prices; Edgeworth Cycles; Price leadership; Coordination

Immigration, the University, and the Tolerant Second-Tier City

BackgroundThe ongoing geographical shift in immigrant settlement patterns and the related settlement experiences of immigrants outside of the largest national cities continues to be of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and researchers alike. This paper explores recent immigration to Kitchener- Waterloo (K-W), a second-tier city (STC) in Ontario, through the conceptual lens of the creative community and the role of the university. PurposeQualitative research on immigrant settlement in Kitchener-Waterloo (K-W), Ontario has revealed the important role played by the region’s universities in attracting immigrants, but also in creating the feeling of a safe and welcoming space. This paper explores these findings in light of recent scholarship on the links between social diversity, the creative city, and economic development, and applies it specifically to the context of immigration to STCs. MethodsBetween 2004 and 2006 semi-structured interviews were conducted with visible-minority and European non-English-mother-tongue immigrants. Questions were asked of participants concerning their reasons for settling in the area, their experiences with regard to service delivery and other municipal functions, and their general perspectives on the nature of the community. In all, 21 immigrant couples were interviewed, with the majority being of South Asian origin (N =42). Two focus groups were held with European and non-European women (13 respondents). In addition, seven service providers and municipal and regional government officials were interviewed, In total, 62 respondents were included in 30 interviews/focus group sessions. Key Findings and DiscussionThe paper argues that greater qualitative assessment of the specific nature of STC communities, their community qualities, and the resources present can complement more abstract quantitative indices. Such attributes can, in fact, be used to highlight the specific roles played by key actors in the community, in this case universities. In the case of Kitchener-Waterloo, its universities attract immigrants to the region, and assist in their subsequent integration by creating spaces that are perceived as being safe and free from discrimination. The findings hint at some interesting strategies that are being used by skilled international workers, such as applying simultaneously for student and permanent immigration visas. This strategy should be seen as a method being employed by some immigrants in order to overcome international credential devaluation. RecommendationsPolicy implications are offered in relation to how universities, and, by extension, international students, factor into how Canada’s immigration policy is evolving in response to the demand for skilled immigrants. The recommendations are: Expand the reach of universities and colleges in second tier cities; Develop further means to integrate international students into the immigrant regionalization model; and Critically examine the use of international students as a talent pool while simultaneously advancing a neoliberal education funding regime that under invests in higher education

Some Personal Recollections of Army Operations Research on Radar in World War II

Operational Research had its origin at the beginning of the Second World War, and made important early contributions to many aspects of the Air Defence of Great Britain, an activity of monumental significance in the war. Air defence depended for its success on the development of a command, control, communication and information system on a scale that had never been approached before. It also depended on other types of technology, such as high performance aircraft, air-to-air weapons and anti-aircraft artillery, and, most critically, on the new science of radar. All of these offered opportunities for applications of operational research, as did the study of tactics for individual engagements and of strategy for the optimum allocation of dangerously scarce resources. Of the many technological developments that made advances throughout the course of World War II, radar was the one which saw the greatest improvement in capabilities and had the most significant influence on operations. The contributions of radar to fire control of weapons, and the direction and navigation of aircraft and ships, called for systematic studies of the technical design and performance of the radar, of the weapons depending on its information, of the capabilities of the human operators, and of the design and effectiveness of the entire system of which the radar was one vital part. This provided a glorious opportunity for operational research. There was an atmosphere of extreme urgency. There were no worries about budgets. There was no time for extensive instrumented field trials or operational evaluation-new equipment was rushed into service. The data on effectiveness under field conditions was obtained from real operations. In earlier years it was possible to find people who held senior positions in organizations conducting important military operations, and could therefore give a first hand account of the critical decisions and results as seen “top down” from the highest level. But if one wants to go back as far as World War II, where operational research was born, it is getting increasingly difficult to find survivors who held senior appointments in the early 1940s. I am not one of these. However, I was fortunate enough to have been able to participate in operational research during World War II at a junior level, and to have spent most of the half century since then in the study and practice of military OR. I am going to describe a few incidents which occurred in the life of a junior army officer engaged in military operational research on the applications of radar to air defence, during an extremely active period. So what you are going to receive is a bottom up worm’s eye view of operational research during its interesting pioneer period fifty years ago

Special Libraries, May-June 1927

Volume 18, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1927/1004/thumbnail.jp

Learning from the World: Good Practices in Navigating Cultural Diversity. Bertelsmann Stiftung Study 2018

The Reinhard Mohn Prize 2018 “Living Diversity – Shaping Society” focuses on diversity in German society, that is the plurality of cultural, religious and linguistic identities found among the people who live in the country. With this focus, the RMP 2018 highlights a variety of successful strategies for living peacefully in diversity. In historical terms, cultural diversity is nothing new or unique for Germany. In fact, though we are often unaware of it, cultural diversity has been a feature of our daily life for a long time. Indeed, religious differences have shaped German society since the Reformation. And Judaism has always been present in the area we now call Germany

Design of temperature insurance index and risk zonation for single-season rice in response to high-temperature and low-temperature damage: a case study of Jiangsu Province, China.

Disaster insurance is an important tool for achieving sustainable development in modern agriculture. However, in China, the design of such insurance indexes is far from sufficient. In this paper, the single-season rice in Jiangsu Province of China is taken as an example to design the high-temperature damage index in summer and the low-temperature damage index in autumn to constructtheformulacalculatingtheweatheroutputandsingle-seasonriceyieldreduction. Thedaily highest, lowest and average temperatures between 1999 and 2015 are selected as main variables for the temperature disaster index to quantitatively analyze the relationship between the temperature indexandtheyieldreductionrateofthesingle-seasonrice. Thetemperaturedisasterindexcanbeput into the relevant model to obtain the yield reduction rate of the year and determine whether to pay the indemnity. Then, the burn analysis is used to determine the insurance premium rate for all cities in Jiangsu Province under four-level deductibles, and the insurance premium rate can be used for the risk division of the Province. The research provides some insights for the design of agricultural weather insurance products, and the empirical results provide a reference for the design of similar single-season rice temperature index insurance products