“We wanted our children should have it better”: Jewish Medical Students at the University of Toronto, 1910-51

This article traces the development of a large contingent of Jewish students among those enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto from 1910 to mid-century. During most of this period, unlike many other North American universities, Toronto imposed no quotas on Jewish entrants, nor any systematic barriers to their academic progress. Many of them found the university's medical school an educational niche, and a relatively rare opportunity to acquire the means to make a respectable professional living. The students' socio-economic backgrounds and academic careers before and during medical school help to illuminate that experience. By examining the peculiar intersection of university policies and the political culture of the province, the article also seeks to explain why, over most of the period, the University of Toronto maintained the principles of accessibility and opportunity for all, despite the prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes in the larger Canadian society.L'auteur suit ici la carrière d'un grand nombre d'étudiants juifs inscrits à la Faculté de médecine de l'université de Toronto entre 1910 et les années 1950. Pendant cette période, contrairement à ce qui se passait dans de multiples autres universités nord-américaines, celle de Toronto ne contingenta pas l'inscription d'étudiants juifs et ne posa pas systématiquement d'obstacles à l’avancement de leurs études. Pour nombre de juifs, l'école de médecine constituait un créneau d'étude qui leur procurait la possibilité par ailleurs plutôt mince d'acquérir les moyens de mener une vie professionnelle respectable. C'est l'observation qu'on peut faire lorsqu'on examine l'origine socio-économique des étudiants et leur cheminement universitaire avant et pendant leur passage à l'école de médecine. En analysant les liens particuliers rapprochant les politiques de l'université avec la culture politique de la province, l'auteur explique également pourquoi, durant presque toute la période étudiée, l'université de Toronto a maintenu les principes d'universalité en matière d'accessibilité aux études et de possibilité d'avancement, et ce, malgré l'antisémitisme dont la société canadienne était alors imprégnée

The Salaries of Teachers in English Canada, 1900-1940: A Reappraisal

Any student of Canadian education during the first half of the twentieth century has encountered the belief, common among those engaged in the educational enterprise and sometimes shared by others, that teachers were badly paid for their work. Though not a universal assessment, a similar view has also dominated the historiography. This interpretation, we think, is overdue for revision. In this article we address two central questions. One focuses more narrowly on teachers' salaries per se: how much, on average, did teachers earn, and how did this change over time? The other asks, just how good or bad were their salaries compared to those of other people in the Canadian workforce? We tackle these questions on a Canada-wide basis, excluding only the province of Quebec, and over an extended period, covering the first four decades of the century. -- Parmi les chercheurs et les étudiants intéressés par l’histoire de l’éducation canadienne pour la première moitié du vingtième siècle, un lieu commun persiste, à savoir, que les enseignants étaient très mal payés pour leur travail. Bien que cette assertion ne soit pas partagée par tous, ce point de vue domine dans l’historiographie de cette période. Nous croyons qu’il est temps de repenser cette interprétation. Dans cet article, nous nous intéressons à deux questions fondamentales. La première porte spécifiquement sur la rémunération des enseignants: combien gagnaient-ils en moyenne et comment leurs salaires ont-ils évolué dans le temps? La deuxième compare les salaires des enseignants à ceux versés aux autres travailleurs canadiens: étaient-ils pires ou meilleurs? Notre étude s’intéresse aux enseignants canadiens, à l’exception de ceux du Québec, et couvre les quatre premières décennies du vingtième siècle.Parmi les chercheurs et les étudiants intéressés par l’histoire de l’éducation canadienne pour la première moitié du vingtième siècle, un lieu commun persiste, à savoir, que les enseignants étaient très mal payés pour leur travail. Bien que cette assertion ne soit pas partagée par tous, ce point de vue domine dans l’historiographie de cette période. Nous croyons qu’il est temps de repenser cette interprétation. Dans cet article, nous nous intéressons à deux questions fondamentales. La première porte spécifiquement sur la rémunération des enseignants: combien gagnaient-ils en moyenne et comment leurs salaires ont-ils évolué dans le temps? La deuxième compare les salaires des enseignants à ceux versés aux autres travailleurs canadiens: étaient-ils pires ou meilleurs? Notre étude s’intéresse aux enseignants canadiens, à l’exception de ceux du Québec, et couvre les quatre premières décennies du vingtième siècle

Can The Carbon and Nitrogen Isotope Values of Offspring be Used as a Proxy for Their Mother\u27s Diet? Using Foetal Physiology to Interpret Bulk Tissue and Amino Acid \u3ci\u3eδ\u3c/i\u3e\u3csup\u3e15\u3c/sup\u3eN Values

The measurement of bulk tissue nitrogen (δ15N) and carbon isotope values (δ13C) chronologically along biologically inert tissues sampled from offspring can provide a longitudinal record of their mothers\u27 foraging habits. This study tested the important assumption that mother-offspring stable isotope values are positively and linearly correlated. In addition, any change in the mother-offspring bulk tissues and individual amino acids that occurred during gestation was investigated. Whiskers sampled from southern elephant seal pups (Mirounga leonina) and temporally overlapping whiskers from their mothers were analyzed. This included n = 1895 chronologically subsampled whisker segments for bulk tissue δ15N and δ13C in total and n = 20 whisker segments for amino acid δ15N values, sampled from recently weaned pups (n = 17), juvenile southern elephant seals (SES) \u3c 2 years old (n = 23) and adult female SES (n = 17), which included nine mother-offspring pairs. In contrast to previous studies, the mother-offspring pairs were not in isotopic equilibrium or linearly correlated during gestation: the Δ15N and Δ13C mother-offspring offsets increased by 0.8 and 1.2‰, respectively, during gestation. The foetal bulk δ15N values were 1.7 ± 0.5‰ (0.9-2.7‰) higher than mothers\u27 δ15N values before birth, while the foetal δ13C increased by ~1.7‰ during gestation and were 1.0 ± 0.5‰ (0.0-1.9‰) higher than their mothers\u27 δ13C at the end of pregnancy. The mother-offspring serine and glycine Δ15N differed by ~4.3‰, while the foetal alanine δ15N values were 1.4‰ lower than that of their mothers during the third trimester of pregnancy. The observed mother-offspring δ15N differences are likely explained by shuttling of glutamate-glutamine and glycine-serine amongst skeletal muscle, liver, placenta and foetal tissue. Foetal development relies primarily on remobilized endogenous maternal proteinaceous sources. Researchers should consider foetal physiology when using offspring bulk tissue isotope values as biomarkers for the mother\u27s isotopic composition as part of monitoring programmes

Can the carbon and nitrogen isotope values of offspring be used as a proxy for their mother’s diet? Using foetal physiology to interpret bulk tissue and amino acid δ15N values

Please read abstract in the article.Data will be made available on the Dryad Digital Repository.The Society for Marine Mammalogy (SMM) Small Grant in Aid of Research, the National Research Foundation (NRF), with the logistic support of the Department of Environmental Affairs under the South African National Antarctic Program (SANAP).https://academic.oup.com/conphyshj2020ImmunologyMammal Research InstituteZoology and Entomolog

Fasting affects amino acid nitrogen isotope values: a new tool for identifying nitrogen balance of free-ranging mammals

Changes in the nutritional status of free-ranging animals have a strong influence on individual fitness, yet it remains challenging to monitor longitudinally. Nitrogen (δ15N) and carbon (δ13C) isotope values measured chronologically along the length of metabolically inert keratinous tissues can be used as a nutritional biomarker to retrospectively reconstruct the foraging ecology and eco-physiology of consumers. We quantitatively describe the physiological effects of fasting on amino acid metabolism using sequentially measured bulk tissue and amino acid δ15N values along the length of whiskers sampled from free-ranging juvenile, subadults, adult female, and male southern elephant seals (SES; Mirounga leonina) on Marion Island in the Southern Ocean. For both juveniles and adult females, whisker segments representing fasting had significantly higher bulk tissue δ15N values of 0.6 ± 0.5‰ and 1.3–1.8‰, respectively, in comparison to segments unaffected by fasting. We also found a large increase (2–6‰) in δ15N values for most glucogenic amino acids and a simultaneous depletion (2–3‰) of alanine in segments reflecting fasting, which enabled us to accurately predict (74%) the nutritional status of our model species. We hypothesize that the glucose-alanine cycle is the mechanism driving the observed depletion of alanine δ15N values during fasting. We demonstrated that keratinaceous tissues can be used as a longitudinal nutritional biomarker to detect changes in the nitrogen balance of an individual. Moreover, it is evident that physiological factors have an important influence on tissue δ15N values and can lead to erroneous bulk tissue or amino acid isotope-based reconstructions of foraging habits.The National Research Foundation (NRF) and the ‘Society for Marine Mammalogy (SMM) Small Grant in Aid of Research’.http://link.springer.com/journal/4422021-04-16hj2020ImmunologyMammal Research InstituteZoology and Entomolog

The roles of the formal and informal sectors in the provision of effective science education

For many years, formal school science education has been criticised by students, teachers, parents and employers throughout the world. This article presents an argument that a greater collaboration between the formal and the informal sector could address some of these criticisms. The causes for concern about formal science education are summarised and the major approaches being taken to address them are outlined. The contributions that the informal sector currently makes to science education are identified. It is suggested that the provision of an effective science education entails an enhanced complementarity between the two sectors. Finally, there is a brief discussion of the collaboration and communication still needed if this is to be effective

Patterns in random walks and Brownian motion

We ask if it is possible to find some particular continuous paths of unit length in linear Brownian motion. Beginning with a discrete version of the problem, we derive the asymptotics of the expected waiting time for several interesting patterns. These suggest corresponding results on the existence/non-existence of continuous paths embedded in Brownian motion. With further effort we are able to prove some of these existence and non-existence results by various stochastic analysis arguments. A list of open problems is presented.Comment: 31 pages, 4 figures. This paper is published at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-18585-9_

Radiative cooling of carbon cluster anions C2n+1− (n = 3–5)

Radiative cooling of carbon cluster anions C2n+1− (n = 3–5) is investigated using the cryogenic electrostatic ion storage ring DESIREE. Two different strategies are applied to infer infrared emission on slow (milliseconds to seconds) and ultraslow (seconds to minutes) timescales. Initial cooling of the ions over the millisecond timescale is probed indirectly by monitoring the decay in the yield of spontaneous neutralization by thermionic emission. The observed cooling rates are consistent with a statistical model of thermionic electron emission in competition with infrared photon emission due to vibrational de-excitation. Slower cooling over the seconds to minutes timescale associated with infrared emission from low-frequency vibrational modes is probed using time-dependent action spectroscopy. For C9− and C11−, cooling is evidenced by the time-evolution of the yield of photo-induced neutralization following resonant excitation of electronic transitions near the detachment threshold. The cross-section for resonant photo-excitation is at least two orders of magnitude greater than for direct photodetachment. In contrast, C7− lacks electronic transitions near the detachment threshold

Reliability, Validity, and Responsiveness of InFLUenza Patient-Reported Outcome (FLU-PRO©) Scores in Influenza-Positive Patients

Objectives: To assess the reliability, validity, and responsiveness of InFLUenza Patient-Reported Outcome (FLU-PRO©) scores for quantifying the presence and severity of influenza symptoms. Methods: An observational prospective cohort study of adults (≥18 years) with influenza-like illness in the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and South America was conducted. Participants completed the 37-item draft FLU-PRO daily for up to 14 days. Item-level and factor analyses were used to remove items and determine factor structure. Reliability of the final tool was estimated using Cronbach α and intraclass correlation coefficients (2-day reliability). Convergent and known-groups validity and responsiveness were assessed using global assessments of influenza severity and return to usual health. Results: Of the 536 patients enrolled, 221 influenza-positive subjects comprised the analytical sample. The mean age of the patients was 40.7 years, 60.2% were women, and 59.7% were white. The final 32-item measure has six factors/domains (nose, throat, eyes, chest/respiratory, gastrointestinal, and body/systemic), with a higher order factor representing symptom severity overall (comparative fit index = 0.92; root mean square error of approximation = 0.06). Cronbach α was high (total = 0.92; domain range = 0.71–0.87); test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient, day 1–day 2) was 0.83 for total scores and 0.57 to 0.79 for domains. Day 1 FLU-PRO domain and total scores were moderately to highly correlated (≥0.30) with Patient Global Rating of Flu Severity (except nose and throat). Consistent with known-groups validity, scores differentiated severity groups on the basis of global rating (total: F = 57.2, P < 0.001; domains: F = 8.9–67.5, P < 0.001). Subjects reporting return to usual health showed significantly greater (P < 0.05) FLU-PRO score improvement by day 7 than did those who did not, suggesting score responsiveness. Conclusions: Results suggest that FLU-PRO scores are reliable, valid, and responsive to change in influenza-positive adults