Aggregate Measures of Income and Output in Canada and the United States: Implications for Productivity and Living Standards

The objectives of this article are to clarify definitions and to produce estimates of the eight aggregate measures of income and product (gross domestic product, gross domestic income, gross national product, gross national income, net domestic product, net domestic income, net national product and net national income) for Canada and the United States over the 1980-2008 period. The article also discusses the implications of the eight measures for productivity and living standards analysis. It concludes that GDP and NDP are the most appropriate measures of output for productivity analysis, while NNI is the most appropriate measure of income for the analysis of living standards because it captures the impact on real income of terms of trade changes, net income received from abroad, and the sustainability of the capital stock.gross domestic product, gross domestic income, gross national product, gross national income, net domestic product, net domestic income,net national product, net national income, productivity, living standards

A Synthesis of the CSLS Provincial Productivity Reports, 1997-2007

This report, based on the CSLS Provincial Productivity Database, provides a portrait of the productivity performance of the ten Canadian provinces over the 1997-2007 period. Level and growth rate estimates of labour and multifactor productivity are presented and discussed, with an emphasis on the provinces’ market sector. Two-digit NAICS industry level estimates are also presented. Capitalintensity and labour quality figures are also provided, and a standard growth accounting framework is used to determine the sources of labour productivity growth, as well as the sources of labour productivity level gaps between Canada and the provinces.labour productivity, multifactor productivity, capital intensity, labour quality, Canadian provinces, growth accounting

Smooth Transitioning Between Augmented and Virtual Reality

This disclosure describes techniques that enable a user to start in an augmented reality (AR) environment (where virtual objects can be observed in their physical surroundings) and move to a virtual reality (VR) environment (where virtual objects alone can be examined from various perspectives in detail or from a distance). The user can make the reverse VR-to-AR journey as well. The AR↔VR transitioning and the examination of objects from various perspectives is made possible by smooth transformations of scale and of rotation between the coordinates of the world (e.g., the scene) and the object

A Detailed Analysis of the Productivity Performance of the Canadian Food Manufacturing Subsector

This report analyzes labour productivity, multifactor productivity and input trends in Canadian food manufacturing since 1961, with a focus on the entire time period and developments since 2000. It is found that the subsector experienced labour productivity growth stronger than the business sector over both the long and short term, but has outperformed manufacturing only in the more recent period. Labour productivity growth is decomposed into capital intensity and multifactor productivity growth, which are found to have contributed to growth almost equally, and labour composition growth accounted for less than 15 per cent over the 1961-2007 period. Underlying drivers of growth are identified and trends in technology, capacity utilization, human capital, economies of scale, machinery and equipment, international trade, and regulation are explored. Policy implications for fostering labour productivity growth based on the drivers are outlined. Finally, a conclusion summarizes the key findings of the paper.labour productivity, multifactor productivity, input trends, food manufacturing, capital intensity, multifactor productivity growth, labour composition

Managing and Sharing the Risks of Drought in Australia

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

RowHammer: Reliability Analysis and Security Implications

As process technology scales down to smaller dimensions, DRAM chips become more vulnerable to disturbance, a phenomenon in which different DRAM cells interfere with each other's operation. For the first time in academic literature, our ISCA paper exposes the existence of disturbance errors in commodity DRAM chips that are sold and used today. We show that repeatedly reading from the same address could corrupt data in nearby addresses. More specifically: When a DRAM row is opened (i.e., activated) and closed (i.e., precharged) repeatedly (i.e., hammered), it can induce disturbance errors in adjacent DRAM rows. This failure mode is popularly called RowHammer. We tested 129 DRAM modules manufactured within the past six years (2008-2014) and found 110 of them to exhibit RowHammer disturbance errors, the earliest of which dates back to 2010. In particular, all modules from the past two years (2012-2013) were vulnerable, which implies that the errors are a recent phenomenon affecting more advanced generations of process technology. Importantly, disturbance errors pose an easily-exploitable security threat since they are a breach of memory protection, wherein accesses to one page (mapped to one row) modifies the data stored in another page (mapped to an adjacent row).Comment: This is the summary of the paper titled "Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them: An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors" which appeared in ISCA in June 201

Children's perceptions of environment and health in two Scottish neighbourhoods

This article explores children's understanding of the role that neighbourhood plays in their health and well-being. Whilst evidence exists on the relationship between the environment and children's health, we have little knowledge of this from the perspective of children themselves. Children's experiences are all too frequently researched through the eyes of adults. Following a Rights of the Child framework, respecting children's views and giving them due weight, this paper reports from a project that worked with children from two relatively deprived urban neighbourhoods in Scotland. Using this framework, the children themselves were the researchers who designed the themes, decided upon the methods, conducted the research and analysed the resulting data. Using focus groups, visual mapping and community walks the children explored their local neighbourhoods and the findings reveal features of the environment that the children perceive as important for their health and well-being. The children selected three themes to explore in the research: safety, littering, and family and friends, through which they elicit their experiences, feelings and attitudes towards the environment and their well-being. The paper reveals that not only do the children have a deep understanding of the link between environment and health, but that they also understand how aspects of disadvantage, including place-based stigma, can limit their social participation and inclusion in society. We conclude with recommendations made by the children themselves, ranging from access to affordable activities, improved open spaces, ‘support not stigma’ and the need to be heard in local decision making

Weapon-Carrying Among Young Men in Glasgow: Street Scripts and Signals in Uncertain Social Spaces

Our work contributes through a cultural criminological perspective to a contextualised knowledge of street violence and its constructed meanings; uncertainty, familiarity and strangeness in spaces of urban disadvantage as perceived by Scottish white youths are examined. Youth criminal and anti-social behaviour associated with knife-carrying is widely reported and structures political and media discourses which classify street culture. In our article we argue that a particular symbolic construction of social space, as experienced and constructed by weapon-carrying young white men in Glasgow, informs the landscape of violence judged in terms of official statistics and fear of crime. Signal crime theory as a particular type of cultural criminology affords insights about why weapons are carried. Links with a hierarchical codification of consumer culture inform the findings and resonate with the penetration of capitalism in the lives of the marginalised street youth