Immigration and labor in tourism: The case of Canada

Canada has relied on a steady flow of immigrants throughout its modern existence, and that influx keeps growing. According to Tourism HR Canada, the increase in tourism demand leads to new jobs being created, especially in metropolitan areas. However, the current Canadian population is not able to fill the demand, and immigrants as a source of labor will become increasingly needed in the tourism and hospitality sector. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the importance of immigration on the Canadian labor tourism market and its role in the tourism sector. Labor challenges are a threat to the destination competitiveness. This study relies on secondary data that were collected by Stats Canada. Increased immigration has a mitigating impact on shortages. Evidence strongly supports that immigration may be one of the major determinants to the successful growth of Canada’s tourism

Quantifying the impact of mathematics support on the performance of undergraduate engineering and computing students

The School of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment at Glasgow Caledonian University has provided mathematics support for all students in the school since 2012/13. This paper compares the performance of two groups of undergraduate students; those who engaged with mathematics support, through attending targeted lectures, and those who chose not to engage. Data collected over the five years from 2013/14 to 2017/18 for 4,690 engaging and non-engaging students, enrolled on modules with a substantial mathematical content, were analysed. Module marks achieved at first diet for the two groups of students, at all undergraduate levels, were selected as a measure of how mathematics support impacts on student performance. The study showed that there was a substantial and significant difference between the marks achieved by students that engaged with support and those that did not. Students who engaged on average showed an 8% increase in their module mark compared with those who did not engage

The impact of the lung environment on macrophage development, activation and function:diversity in the face of adversity

The last decade has been somewhat of a renaissance period for the field of macrophage biology. This renewed interest, combined with the advent of new technologies and development of novel model systems to assess different facets of macrophage biology, has led to major advances in our understanding of the diverse roles macrophages play in health, inflammation, infection and repair, and the dominance of tissue environments in influencing all of these areas. Here, we discuss recent developments in our understanding of lung macrophage heterogeneity, ontogeny, metabolism and function in the context of health and disease, and highlight core conceptual advances and key unanswered questions that we believe should be focus of work in the coming years

Searches for supersymmetry in final states containing b-tagged jets with the ATLAS detector

Supersymmetry is one of the most theoretically studied subjects in modern particle physics; so far no direct experimental proof of its existence has been observed. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a machine designed to create high energy particle collisions, which are analysed by multiple experiments, probing the substructure and fundamental properties of matter. The experiment ATLAS is used in this thesis in searches for the signatures supersymmetric particles as they decay. A detailed overview of two signature searches for third generation supersymmetry in events with b-tagged jets is the main focus of this thesis. A data-driven technique for estimating the Multi-jet background in zero lepton final state signatures is additionally presented. The firrst search used a dataset with an integrated luminosity of 3.2 fb−1 collected in 2015 during Run-II of the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The analysis was optimised for a simplified signal model in which only the supersymmetric partners of the bottom quark are pair-produced in LHC collisions. No significant excess above the Standard Model background was observed, setting 95% CL limits on the masses of the scalar bottom quark and lightest neutralino. Many sophisticated techniques for estimating the Standard Model backgrounds were employed using Monte-Carlo simulation and data-driven techniques, which are applicable to many hadron collider analyses. The prospects of future discovery of scalar bottom quarks were studied, resolving a 5σ discovery potential above 1 TeV at the High Luminosity LHC for low mass neutralinos. The second search was performed at the end of Run-I of the LHC using a dataset corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb−1 at 8 TeV. The analysis focused on a unique search for the pair-production of scalar top and bottom quarks decaying asymmetrically to neutralinos and charginos in a more complex and arguably more realistic model scenario. The models targeted were inspired by a natural pMSSM scenario with low mass supersymmetry partner of the third generation quarks. Again, no significant deviation from the Standard Model background was observed setting 95% CL limits on the masses of the third generation supersymmetric quarks. The results of the analysis were interpreted in the context of a full pMSSM scan together with many other ATLAS analyses to provide the theoretical community with a more meaningful summary of the exclusion limit on supersymmetric particles set by ATLAS

Guidance for MSS Attendees 2020

Guidance for MSS Attendees 202

CaRROT-CDM:An Open-Source Tool for Transforming Data for Federated Discovery in Health Research

Health Data are collected or repurposed for research in many organisations across the UK. These data are held in many formats and at many scales. Such data can contain information on biometric measurements, medical conditions, medical procedures, demographics, and prescribed medications with several coding systems in use. For GDPR compliance, data are stored securely and de-identified prior to use in research making sharing and standardisation more difficult. The Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) program’s Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) provides standard data objects and coding for health data.   CaRROT-CDM  Open-Source tools were developed to define mappings and transform data from numerous disparate organisations (the Data Partners) to the OMOP standard to allow federated data queries via the Health Data Research UK (HDR-UK) gateway. These tools are CaRROT-Mapper and CaRROT-CDM, with the latter being the focus here.  CaRROT-CDM takes mapping information from the CaRROT-Mapper and source data as input. It produces OMOP CDM format data as output. The tool was designed to run in Data Partners’ compute environments, reducing the governance burden for transforming data to the common standard. Sensitive, identifiable data are never seen by the development team.  Conclusions and Current Work  The CaRROT-CDM tool is in use at Data Partner sites and has transformed over 20 COVID-19 and Pain data sets, so far, which are available for aggregated query via the HDR UK innovation gateway. Current work is focussed on re-engineering and testing the software for scaling to population-level health data.

CaRROT-CDM:An Open-Source Tool for Transforming Data for Federated Discovery in Health Research

Health Data are collected or repurposed for research in many organisations across the UK. These data are held in many formats and at many scales. Such data can contain information on biometric measurements, medical conditions, medical procedures, demographics, and prescribed medications with several coding systems in use. For GDPR compliance, data are stored securely and de-identified prior to use in research making sharing and standardisation more difficult. The Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) program’s Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) provides standard data objects and coding for health data.   CaRROT-CDM  Open-Source tools were developed to define mappings and transform data from numerous disparate organisations (the Data Partners) to the OMOP standard to allow federated data queries via the Health Data Research UK (HDR-UK) gateway. These tools are CaRROT-Mapper and CaRROT-CDM, with the latter being the focus here.  CaRROT-CDM takes mapping information from the CaRROT-Mapper and source data as input. It produces OMOP CDM format data as output. The tool was designed to run in Data Partners’ compute environments, reducing the governance burden for transforming data to the common standard. Sensitive, identifiable data are never seen by the development team.  Conclusions and Current Work  The CaRROT-CDM tool is in use at Data Partner sites and has transformed over 20 COVID-19 and Pain data sets, so far, which are available for aggregated query via the HDR UK innovation gateway. Current work is focussed on re-engineering and testing the software for scaling to population-level health data.

How are declarations of interest working?:A cross-sectional study in declarations of interest in healthcare practice in Scotland and England in 2020/2021

MM is funded by the Chief Scientist Office Scotland, RBH and RMcD had summer medical studentships from the University of St Andrews.Objective To understand arrangements for healthcare organisations’ declarations of staff interest in Scotland and England in the context of current recommendations. Design Cross-sectional study of a random selection of National Health Service (NHS) hospital registers of interest by two independent observers in England, all NHS Boards in Scotland and a random selection of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in England. Setting NHS Trusts in England (NHSE), NHS Boards in Scotland, CCGs in England, and private healthcare organisations. Participants Registers of declarations of interest published in a random sample of 67 of 217 NHS Trusts, a random sample of 15 CCGs of in England, registers held by all 14 NHS Scotland Boards and a purposeful selection of private hospitals/clinics in the UK. Main outcome measures Adherence to NHSE guidelines on declarations of interests, and comparison in Scotland. Results 76% of registers published by Trusts did not routinely include all declaration of interest categories recommended by NHS England. In NHS Scotland only 14% of Boards published staff registers of interest. Of these employee registers (most obtained under Freedom of Information), 27% contained substantial retractions. In England, 96% of CCGs published a Gifts and Hospitality register, with 67% of CCG staff declaration templates and 53% of governor registers containing full standard NHS England declaration categories. Single organisations often held multiple registers lacking enough information to interpret them. Only 35% of NHS Trust registers were organised to enable searching. None of the private sector organisations studied published a comparable declarations of interest register. Conclusion Despite efforts, the current system of declarations frequently lacks ability to meaningfully obtain complete healthcare professionals’ declaration of interests.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe