Chronic Rigidity: The East's Labour Market Problem and How to Fix It

Canada’s generally good labour market performance over the past several years, exemplified in a 33-year, record-low unemployment rate, masks strikingly large regional disparities. In September 2007, the national unemployment rate was 6 percent, but it ranged from 2.8 percent in central Alberta to 17.8 percent in southern Newfoundland and Labrador. Such wide variances are also present within single provinces, from 5.4 percent to 12 percent in New Brunswick, for example, in that same month. These statistics suggest rigidity in Canada’s labour market. The economy creates jobs at a rapid pace, but people do not readily move to where the jobs are, leaving large pockets of unemployment. And hence our economy as a whole does not achieve its full economic potential.social policy, labour market performance, unemployment rates

Breaking Down Monopolies: Expanding Choice and Competition in Education

Economic theory and international experience show that greater school choice can be a winning educational strategy, and can be implemented in a way that preserves social equity and equality of opportunity.social policy, education

SMAGEXP: a galaxy tool suite for transcriptomics data meta-analysis

Bakground: With the proliferation of available microarray and high throughput sequencing experiments in the public domain, the use of meta-analysis methods increases. In these experiments, where the sample size is often limited, meta-analysis offers the possibility to considerably enhance the statistical power and give more accurate results. For those purposes, it combines either effect sizes or results of single studies in a appropriate manner. R packages metaMA and metaRNASeq perform meta-analysis on microarray and NGS data, respectively. They are not interchangeable as they rely on statistical modeling specific to each technology. Results: SMAGEXP (Statistical Meta-Analysis for Gene EXPression) integrates metaMA and metaRNAseq packages into Galaxy. We aim to propose a unified way to carry out meta-analysis of gene expression data, while taking care of their specificities. We have developed this tool suite to analyse microarray data from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database or custom data from affymetrix microarrays. These data are then combined to carry out meta-analysis using metaMA package. SMAGEXP also offers to combine raw read counts from Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) experiments using DESeq2 and metaRNASeq package. In both cases, key values, independent from the technology type, are reported to judge the quality of the meta-analysis. These tools are available on the Galaxy main tool shed. Source code, help and installation instructions are available on github. Conclusion: The use of Galaxy offers an easy-to-use gene expression meta-analysis tool suite based on the metaMA and metaRNASeq packages

Illinois Youth - Ready for Life? Illinois Youth Share their Perspective on Challenges and Opportunities as They Make the Transition from Childhood to Adulthood

Today's youth are tomorrow's leaders and decision makers. They are the future teachers, business owners, parents, and community members of our state. As youth make the important and often difficult transition from childhood to adulthood, families, communities, and the state provide critical opportunities and supports. Investments made in youth today through programs, services, and other opportunities are a wise contribution to Illinois' collective future. In order to ensure that all young people in Illinois are ready for life, Illinois policymakers, parents, and other adult leaders must work intentionally and collaboratively to devise a comprehensive youth development strategy

Asymptotic profiles for a travelling front solution of a biological equation

We are interested in the existence of depolarization waves in the human brain. These waves propagate in the grey matter and are absorbed in the white matter. We consider a two-dimensional model u_t=\Delta u + f(u) \1_{|y|\leq R} - \alpha u \1_{|y|>R}, with $f$ a bistable nonlinearity taking effect only on the domain \Rm\times [-R,R], which represents the grey matter layer. We study the existence, the stability and the energy of non-trivial asymptotic profiles of possible travelling fronts. For this purpose, we present dynamical systems technics and graphic criteria based on Sturm-Liouville theory and apply them to the above equation. This yields three different behaviours of the solution $u$ after stimulation, depending of the thickness $R$ of the grey matter. This may partly explain the difficulties to observe depolarization waves in the human brain and the failure of several therapeutic trials

Front blocking and propagation in cylinders with varying cross section

In this paper we consider a bistable reaction-diffusion equation in unbounded domains and we investigate the existence of propagation phenomena, possibly partial, in some direction or, on the contrary, of blocking phenomena. We start by proving the well-posedness of the problem. Then we prove that when the domain has a decreasing cross section with respect to the direction of propagation there is complete propagation. Further, we prove that the wave can be blocked as it comes to an abrupt geometry change. Finally we discuss various general geometrical properties that ensure either partial or complete invasion by 1. In particular, we show that in a domain that is "star-shaped" with respect to an axis, there is complete invasion by 1

Differential meta-analysis of RNA-seq data from multiple studies

High-throughput sequencing is now regularly used for studies of the transcriptome (RNA-seq), particularly for comparisons among experimental conditions. For the time being, a limited number of biological replicates are typically considered in such experiments, leading to low detection power for differential expression. As their cost continues to decrease, it is likely that additional follow-up studies will be conducted to re-address the same biological question. We demonstrate how p-value combination techniques previously used for microarray meta-analyses can be used for the differential analysis of RNA-seq data from multiple related studies. These techniques are compared to a negative binomial generalized linear model (GLM) including a fixed study effect on simulated data and real data on human melanoma cell lines. The GLM with fixed study effect performed well for low inter-study variation and small numbers of studies, but was outperformed by the meta-analysis methods for moderate to large inter-study variability and larger numbers of studies. To conclude, the p-value combination techniques illustrated here are a valuable tool to perform differential meta-analyses of RNA-seq data by appropriately accounting for biological and technical variability within studies as well as additional study-specific effects. An R package metaRNASeq is available on the R Forge

Realistic Expectations: Demographics and the Pursuit of Prosperity in Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan's current economic good times belie serious demographic challenges that threaten the province's ability to improve its citizens living standards in the years ahead, or provide robust social programs.growth, innovation, demographics, Saskatchewan

The effect of forcing on the spatial structure and spectra of chaotically advected passive scalars

The stationary distribution of passive tracers chaotically advected by a two-dimensional large-scale flow is investigated. The tracer field is force by resetting the value of the tracer in certain localised regions. This problem is mathematically equivalent to advection in open flows and results in a fractal tracer structure. The spectral exponent of the tracer field is different from that for a passive tracer with the usual additive forcing (the so called Batchelor spectrum) and is related to the fractal dimension of the set of points that have never visited the forcing regions. We illustrate this behaviour by considering a time-periodic flow whose effect is equivalent to a simple two-dimensional area-preserving map. We also show that similar structure in the tracer field is found when the flow is aperiodic in time.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figure