Toronto’s Reponse to the Outbreak of War, 1939

Canadian historians have paid little attention to the transition from peace to war in late August and early September 1939. Jonathan Vance’s award-winning Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (1997) does a marvelous job of surveying attitudes towards war in the wake of the Great War, but it does not expand into the start of the Second. C.P. Stacey’s official history, Six Years of War, devotes only minimal space to exploring the transition, focusing instead on the activities of Canadian servicemen and women. The dozens of militia histories written by the units after the war dwell on the fighting, not the training. After telling of the story of Toronto’s experience of the first months of the Second World War, it is possible to reflect on why events unfolded as they did. Community reaction to the transformation of Toronto’s militia force into Canadian Active Service Force (CASF) units provides a window into the world of late August and early September 1939. Through what process did this body of militia men transform themselves into the backbone of First Canadian Army? How many of them volunteered to serve the Empire in the second continental European war in a generation? How did Toronto’s citizens respond to the need to equip another generation of its sons with the tools of war

Knot cobordisms, bridge index, and torsion in Floer homology

Given a connected cobordism between two knots in the 3-sphere, our main result is an inequality involving torsion orders of the knot Floer homology of the knots, and the number of local maxima and the genus of the cobordism. This has several topological applications: The torsion order gives lower bounds on the bridge index and the band-unlinking number of a knot, the fusion number of a ribbon knot, and the number of minima appearing in a slice disk of a knot. It also gives a lower bound on the number of bands appearing in a ribbon concordance between two knots. Our bounds on the bridge index and fusion number are sharp for $T_{p,q}$ and $T_{p,q}\# \overline{T}_{p,q}$, respectively. We also show that the bridge index of $T_{p,q}$ is minimal within its concordance class. The torsion order bounds a refinement of the cobordism distance on knots, which is a metric. As a special case, we can bound the number of band moves required to get from one knot to the other. We show knot Floer homology also gives a lower bound on Sarkar's ribbon distance, and exhibit examples of ribbon knots with arbitrarily large ribbon distance from the unknot.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, to appear in the Journal of Topolog

Development of Resting Cell Assay Protocol to Characterize Sulfolane Degrading Bacteria

Sulfolane is a chemical contaminant present in hundreds of commercial and residential drinking wells in the North Pole area. Due to the possible health impacts of consumption, degradation/removal of the sulfolane from contaminated wells is necessary. Microbial isolates taken from sulfolane contaminated sites have shown the potential to degrade sulfolane. It is the purpose of my research to design a protocol by which sulfolane tolerant bacteria could be screened or their potential to utilize sulfolane as a sole carbon source (SOCS), and characterize them as sulfolane degraders

Dental workforce 2012

Summary: Access to reliable, comprehensive, timely and nationally consistent trend data is required to understand the current health workforce and for its future planning. There is particular interest in changes to the size and composition of the various health professions, and the potential impacts of these changes on health-care delivery. This report provides data on the Australian dental practitioner workforce in 2012. Size of the dental workforce In 2012, there were 19,462 dental practitioners registered in Australia. Three-quarters of these practitioners (14,687) were dentists. The number of employed dentists increased by 5.3%, from 12,599 in 2011 to 13,266 in 2012. There were 1,330 dentists working as specialists. Orthodontics was the most common specialty (518 dentists). In 2012, there were also 1,425 dental hygienists, 1,117 dental therapists, 1,100 dental prosthetists and 675 oral health therapists employed in their fields. Sex and age of the dental workforce Sex Dentistry is a male dominated profession; however, the proportion of female dentists increased to 36.5% in 2012 from 35.2% in 2011. Employed dental therapists, dental hygienists and oral health therapists, were predominantly women (96.9, 94.6% and 84.7%, respectively). Dental prosthetists were much more likely to be men. Women made up 14.7% of this workforce, an increase from 13.9% in 2011. Age The average age of dentists employed in 2012 was 43.4 (the same as in 2011) and 23.4% were aged 55 and over. Employed dental prosthetists, dental therapists, dental hygienists and oral health therapists were aged 49.1, 46.4, 37.4 and 31.0, on average, respectively. Working arrangements Dentists worked, on average, 37.0 hours per week in 2012, a slight decrease from 2011 (37.3 hours per week). In 2012, 31.7% dentists worked part time (less than 35 hours per week). The majority of employed dentists were working in private practice (79.7% of clinicians and 77.3% of all dentists). Most specialists worked in private practice (75.0%) and in Major cities (89.1%). Major cities had more dentists per capita than other areas in 2012 at 64.3 full-time equivalent (FTE) dentists per 100,000 population, and more than the Australian rate of 56.9 FTE dentists