Labour Market Statistics - Plugging the Gaps

Official statistics have not kept pace with the deregulation of the labour market in the 1990s. Beginning in 1992 with the Rose Review' there have been several assessments of the gaps and what is required to plug them. The report of the Prime Ministerial Task Force on Employment in 1994 and the 1996 work of an interdepartmental working group reached similar conclusions about the needs. In the last two years some important advances have occurred. The 1996 Census of Population extended the coverage of education and training topics. Central government funding was obtained for Household Labour Force Survey supplements on education and training (once only) and income (annually). Results from all three supplements will be available in 1997. Feasibility studies, funded by a group of Government agencies, have been done on employer's training practices and expenditure. Statistics New Zealand has developed new classifications for levels of educational attainment and field of educational study. There are still a number of unmet needs, particularly in the areas of labour market dynamics, workplace industrial relations, employment-related business statistics and Maori labour force involvement. Options for funding these have been explored in 1996 with no positive outcomes yet

Climate Change and Asian Agriculture

Asian and global agriculture will be under significant pressure to meet the demands of rising populations, using finite and often degraded soil and water resources that are predicted to be further stressed by the impacts of climate change. In addition, agriculture and land use change are prominent sources of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Fertilizer application, livestock rearing, and land management affect levels of GHG in the atmosphere and the amount of carbon storage and sequestration potential. Therefore, while some impending climatic changes will have negative effects on agricultural production in parts of Asia, and especially on resource-poor farmers, the sector also presents opportunities for emission reductions. Warming across the Asian continent will be unevenly distributed, but will certainly lead to crop yield losses in much of the region and subsequent impacts on prices, trade, and food security—disproportionately affecting poor people. Most projections indicate that agriculture in South, Central, and West Asia will be hardest hit.

Labour Market Statistics - Plugging the Gaps

Official statistics have not kept pace with the deregulation of the labour market in the 1990s. Beginning in 1992 with the Rose Review' there have been several assessments of the gaps and what is required to plug them. The report of the Prime Ministerial Task Force on Employment in 1994 and the 1996 work of an interdepartmental working group reached similar conclusions about the needs. In the last two years some important advances have occurred. The 1996 Census of Population extended the coverage of education and training topics. Central government funding was obtained for Household Labour Force Survey supplements on education and training (once only) and income (annually). Results from all three supplements will be available in 1997. Feasibility studies, funded by a group of Government agencies, have been done on employer's training practices and expenditure. Statistics New Zealand has developed new classifications for levels of educational attainment and field of educational study. There are still a number of unmet needs, particularly in the areas of labour market dynamics, workplace industrial relations, employment-related business statistics and Maori labour force involvement. Options for funding these have been explored in 1996 with no positive outcomes yet

Mapping the multi-step mechanism of a photoredox catalyzed atom-transfer radical polymerization reaction by direct observation of the reactive intermediates

The rapid development of new applications of photoredox catalysis has so far outpaced the mechanistic studies important for rational design of new classes of catalysts. Here, we report the use of ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopic methods to reveal both mechanistic and kinetic details of multiple sequential steps involved in an organocatalyzed atom transfer radical polymerization reaction. The polymerization system studied involves a N,N-diaryl dihydrophenazine photocatalyst, a radical initiator (methyl 2-bromopropionate) and a monomer (isoprene). Time-resolved spectroscopic measurements spanning sub-picosecond to microseconds (i.e., almost 8 orders of magnitude of time) track the formation and loss of key reactive intermediates. These measurements identify both the excited state of the photocatalyst responsible for electron transfer and the radical intermediates participating in propagation reactions, as well as quantifying their lifetimes. The outcomes connect the properties of N,N-diaryl dihydrophenazine organic photocatalysts with the rates of sequential steps in the catalytic cycle

New constraints on equatorial temperatures during a Late Neoproterozoic snowball Earth glaciation

Intense glaciation during the end of Cryogenian time (∼635 million years ago) marks the coldest climate state in Earth history – a time when glacial deposits accumulated at low, tropical paleolatitudes. The leading idea to explain these deposits, the snowball Earth hypothesis, predicts globally frozen surface conditions and subfreezing temperatures, with global climate models placing surface temperatures in the tropics between −20 °C and −60 °C. However, precise paleosurface temperatures based upon geologic constraints have remained elusive and the global severity of the glaciation undetermined. Here we make new geologic observations of tropical periglacial, aeolian and fluvial sedimentary structures formed during the end-Cryogenian, Marinoan glaciation in South Australia; these observations allow us to constrain ancient surface temperatures. We find periglacial sand wedges and associated deformation suggest that ground temperatures were sufficiently warm to allow for ductile deformation of a sandy regolith. The wide range of deformation structures likely indicate the presence of a paleoactive layer that penetrated 2–4 m below the ground surface. These observations, paired with a model of ground temperature forced by solar insolation, constrain the local mean annual surface temperature to within a few degrees of freezing. This temperature constraint matches well with our observations of fluvial deposits, which require temperatures sufficiently warm for surface runoff. Although this estimate coincides with one of the coldest near sea-level tropical temperatures in Earth history, if these structures represent peak Marinaon glacial conditions, they do not support the persistent deep freeze of the snowball Earth hypothesis. Rather, surface temperatures near 0 °C allow for regions of seasonal surface melting, atmosphere–ocean coupling and possible tropical refugia for early metazoans. If instead these structures formed during glacial onset or deglaciation, then they have implications for the timescale and character for the transition into or out of a snowball state

A comprehensive collection of chicken cDNAs

AbstractBirds have played a central role in many biological disciplines, particularly ecology, evolution, and behavior. The chicken, as a model vertebrate, also represents an important experimental system for developmental biologists, immunologists, cell biologists, and geneticists. However, genomic resources for the chicken have lagged behind those for other model organisms, with only 1845 nonredundant full-length chicken cDNA sequences currently deposited in the EMBL databank. We describe a large-scale expressed-sequence-tag (EST) project aimed at gene discovery in chickens (http://www.chick.umist.ac.uk). In total, 339,314 ESTs have been sequenced from 64 cDNA libraries generated from 21 different embryonic and adult tissues. These were clustered and assembled into 85,486 contiguous sequences (contigs). We find that a minimum of 38% of the contigs have orthologs in other organisms and define an upper limit of 13,000 new chicken genes. The remaining contigs may include novel avian specific or rapidly evolving genes. Comparison of the contigs with known chicken genes and orthologs indicates that 30% include cDNAs that contain the start codon and 20% of the contigs represent full-length cDNA sequences. Using this dataset, we estimate that chickens have approximately 35,000 genes in total, suggesting that this number may be a characteristic feature of vertebrates