What are Canadian Labor Laws as They Relate to Leave Administration, Specifically Military, Disability, FMLA, Vacation and Bereavement?

Question: What are Canadian labor laws as they relate to leave administration, specifically military, disability, FMLA, vacation and bereavement? How do these laws in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec differ from U.S. laws

Older women and craft: extending educational horizons in considering wellbeing

While the social work literature is broader and more holistic than many disciplines, we undoubtedly still limit the knowledge we draw upon in ways that stifle our creativity in conceptualising and attempting to facilitate wellbeing, which flows on to limit our teaching. In particular, the significance to wellbeing of place and social space, the value of informal networks to generate support and opportunities for reciprocity, and the inherent therapeutic value of creative activity appears to be neglected. In this paper we draw upon a small Australian research study around older women and craftmaking to explore how learning from diverse disciplines, such as critical gerontology and textile making, can illuminate our understanding of wellbeing. We relate this discussion to examining notions of ageing that go beyond a focus on illness and deterioration, to enhance positive and diverse concepts of health in the context of everyday life. We then discuss the implications for social work education, with particular emphasis on ageing, and argue that by engaging with a diverse range of disciplines, we are able to think about, teach and advocate for wellbeing in more expansive and useful ways.<br /

Craft groups: sites of friendship, empowerment, belonging and learning for older women

This article reports on a qualitative research project conducted in Victoria,&nbsp;Australia, with nine older women. The purpose of the research was to explore the&nbsp;women&rsquo;s experience of involvement in craft groups, and specifically, the impact of&nbsp;this involvement on their sense of well-being. Traditionally the health of older people&nbsp;has been examined in relation to medical markers of physical well-being, and often, decline.&nbsp;We were interested to widen this perspective to understand the impact of social&nbsp;connection, belonging and ongoing learning and development on the ageing experience.While the focus of the groups was on domestic craftwork, the process of coming together&nbsp;as a collective appeared to have significant bearing on the holistic health of the women&nbsp;involved. Consistent with feminist groupwork literature, the findings indicated that&nbsp;the women we interviewed experienced the group setting as affirming and generative&nbsp;in a number of ways. These include providing an avenue for mutual aid, addressing&nbsp;isolation, affirming individual and collective strength and wisdom, while acquiring new&nbsp;skills, and normalising concerns regarding health and family

Airline Brands on Twitter: Discovering What Consumers Value to Create a Stronger Social CRM Strategy

Abstract Title: Airline Brands on Twitter: Discovering What Consumers Value to Create a Stronger Social CRM Strategy Date of the Seminar: June 2nd, 2015 Course: BUSN39. Degree project in global marketing Authors: Jane Macfarlane-Grieve Emily Widen Advisors: Christian Koch, PhD Keywords: Social Customer Relationship Management, Communication, Twitter, Airline, Customer Satisfaction Thesis purpose: The objective of this research paper is to gain a clear understanding of consumer attitudes and expectations whilst engaging in conversation with airline brands on the social media platform Twitter. This paper seeks to understand what manner of interactions consumers find valuable, and if there is a method of ensuring a satisfying response from the airline. This will examine how airline brands can strengthen social CRM strategies on a theoretical level to offer consumers what they most value. Furthermore, this paper will identify and create a model in which to use to utilize for future interactions with consumers on Twitter in the airline industry. This thesis will address the specific question; how can airline brands satisfy consumer expectations with their social CRM strategy to best interact with consumers on Twitter? Additionally, the sub-question will be addressed; can traditional communication and customer satisfaction theories enhance airline brands social CRM strategies? Methodology: In order to explore these questions in depth; first a comprehensive literature review of all relevant theories was completed. Next, a netnography study of 600 Twitter conversations were collected and coded in an attempt to gain insight and understanding of what consumers want and need from airlines on Twitter. This code was developed based on the data. Also, a self-completion web survey was used as a way to speak directly with consumers about airlines and Twitter. Theoretical perspective: This paper examines the theories of; communication, customer satisfaction, empowered consumer, social CRM, as social media theories. Empirical data: This mixed method study combines a netnography study of 600 Twitter conversations with a supplemental consumer self-completion web survey. Conclusion: The most notable theoretical findings are that present social customer relationship management theories do not fully encompass the ever-changing and culturally significant social media platforms. Customer satisfaction theories and communication theories were considered as subset elements of customer relationship management theory, and while these could align with a basic understanding of the principles of CRM social media, they could not fully grasp unique culture of Twitter and the significance of the empowered consumer. Elements such as the reduced character count on Twitter and the expectations of immediate response need to be adapted to a more specific theory, which better understands this vast communication platform. We propose that while this theory begins to emerge, brands can utilize standard theories on communication and customer satisfaction to create a comprehensive social CRM strategy to build relationships with the empowered consumer. Knowing consumer expectations, and what the consumer values, will lead to a successful implementation of these concepts in social CRM. Additionally, many practical consumer wants and needs were discovered and a model was created. This model is to be used as a guideline for airline brand managers in order to best interact with consumers via Twitter

Attention-based Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural ODE for Traffic Prediction

Traffic forecasting is an important issue in intelligent traffic systems (ITS). Graph neural networks (GNNs) are effective deep learning models to capture the complex spatio-temporal dependency of traffic data, achieving ideal prediction performance. In this paper, we propose attention-based graph neural ODE (ASTGODE) that explicitly learns the dynamics of the traffic system, which makes the prediction of our machine learning model more explainable. Our model aggregates traffic patterns of different periods and has satisfactory performance on two real-world traffic data sets. The results show that our model achieves the highest accuracy of the root mean square error metric among all the existing GNN models in our experiments

A data-centric weak supervised learning for highway traffic incident detection

Using the data from loop detector sensors for near-real-time detection of traffic incidents in highways is crucial to averting major traffic congestion. While recent supervised machine learning methods offer solutions to incident detection by leveraging human-labeled incident data, the false alarm rate is often too high to be used in practice. Specifically, the inconsistency in the human labeling of the incidents significantly affects the performance of supervised learning models. To that end, we focus on a data-centric approach to improve the accuracy and reduce the false alarm rate of traffic incident detection on highways. We develop a weak supervised learning workflow to generate high-quality training labels for the incident data without the ground truth labels, and we use those generated labels in the supervised learning setup for final detection. This approach comprises three stages. First, we introduce a data preprocessing and curation pipeline that processes traffic sensor data to generate high-quality training data through leveraging labeling functions, which can be domain knowledge-related or simple heuristic rules. Second, we evaluate the training data generated by weak supervision using three supervised learning models -- random forest, k-nearest neighbors, and a support vector machine ensemble -- and long short-term memory classifiers. The results show that the accuracy of all of the models improves significantly after using the training data generated by weak supervision. Third, we develop an online real-time incident detection approach that leverages the model ensemble and the uncertainty quantification while detecting incidents. Overall, we show that our proposed weak supervised learning workflow achieves a high incident detection rate (0.90) and low false alarm rate (0.08)

Privity and exceptions to privity in Scots Private Law: a new taxonomy

The doctrine of privity of contract broadly provides that a contract should neither benefit nor burden parties external to the contract. This thesis can be divided into two parts: the first on privity itself, and the second on its exceptions. The first part contains a historical analysis of the development of privity, leading to the provision of a definition of privity in modern Scots law. It also examines whether privity is compatible with the leading theories of Scots contract law (will theory, promissory theory, and assumption theory) and considers the relationship between privity and third party rights. The interaction between privity and delict has proved controversial in various situations involving third-party loss. Accordingly, this part analyses the intersection between privity and delictual liability. The first part also identifies and assesses the policy considerations that have justified statutory exceptions to privity. It concludes with discussion on whether privity does and should continue to exist in Scots law. The second part provides a taxonomy of concepts which operate where: 1. There is an extra-contractual party 2. Which has suffered loss caused by non-performance or defective performance of a contract 3. And it lacks a contractual right to recover its losses 4. And the concept provides a means of recovery for the extra-contractual party, and/ or a means by which the contracting party which did not cause the loss can recover on behalf of the extra-contractual party. The four relevant concepts are: contracts for the benefit of another; transferred loss; ad hoc agency; and undisclosed agency. The thesis analyses each concept in turn, examining its relationship with privity, contract theory, and delictual liability. Policy considerations supporting each exception are identified and assessed. The conclusions of the thesis address whether these concepts can be recognised as justifiable exceptions to privity. The question of whether external network liability should be recognised as a new exception to privity is also considered. Whilst the thesis focuses on Scots law, comparative reference is made throughout to English law. This is because the development of contracts for the benefit of another, transferred loss, and undisclosed agency is closely intertwined in the two jurisdictions