The Corixidae (Hemiptera-Heteroptera) of British Columbia

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Work and Industrial Relations : Towards a New Agenda

The relevance and continuing existence of industrial relations, as a field of academic study, is facing a number of challenges, particularly in English-speaking countries, as union membership declines, collective bargaining coverage shrinks and the number of strikes wanes each year. Yet issues of employment and workplace relations remain significant to economic prosperity and social harmony, particularly with the changing nature of work and of employment contracts. Furthermore, there are a number of other means by which employee voice is heard, through the agency of non-government organizations, community groups and various consultative bodies. In order to reinforce its relevance, industrial relations needs to include new actors, cover a wider range of issues and adopt a multi-level approach which incorporates both local and global dimensions

A Hard X-ray View of the Distant Active Galactic Nucleus Population with NuSTAR

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs), the sites of mass accretion onto supermassive black holes, have been hosted by most galaxies at some point in their lifetime. X-rays are a direct and efficient means of identifying AGNs and measuring their intrinsic properties reliably. A recent breakthrough in this regard is the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), the first space satellite observatory with the ability to focus high-energy (i.e., ``hard''; >10 keV) X-ray photons. In this thesis I use NuSTAR to study the distant hard X-ray emitting AGN population, with a view to improving the cosmic census of AGNs as well as understanding their demography and evolution. In addition to these broad goals, a more specific focus is to identify elusive Compton-thick (CT) AGNs, which may represent an important phase of hidden black hole growth. Two overall approaches are taken: (1) optically selected Type 2 quasars suspected to be CT (i.e., candidate CTQSO2s) are deliberately targetted with NuSTAR; and (2) a large and unbiased serendipitous survey of ~500 X-ray sources is performed using almost all of the science data taken with the NuSTAR observatory over a 40-month period. For both of these complementary samples, the broad-band X-ray and multiwavelength properties are studied. For the candidate CTQSO2s, the addition of >10 keV NuSTAR data provides an improvement compared to constraints with Chandra and XMM alone (i.e., with the most sensitive observatories at =0.56) and a hard X-ray luminosity range of log(L_10-40keV [erg/s]) ~ 39 to 46. Singling out the most extreme likely-CT sources in the serendipitous survey gives an insight into the prevalence of such extreme systems within the general AGN population

Changing Employment Relations and Governance in the International Auto Industry

In recent years, considerable debate has surrounded the issue of whether a fundamental transformation of employment relations is underway in both the industrialised and industrialising countries. Comparative studies at the national or macro-level of employment relations have been conducted within both an OECD group of countries (see Locke et al 1995) and newly industrialising economies (see Verma et al 1995). To these have been added complementary studies at the industry-level: in steel, telecommunications, banking and automobile manufacturing. These studies have adopted a broader similar analytical framework that focus on five sets of employment practices or issues, as follows: (1) the way work is organised (2) the process of skills acquisition and development (3) the structures and processes of pay and compensation (4) staffing and employment security arrangements (5) enterprise governance and labour-management relations issues. The analytical framework adopted for these studies argues that employment practices are shaped by features of the external environment and the choices of firms, unions and governments, as well as by the broader institutional context at the industry and firm levels. The issue of enterprise governance occupies an ambiguous position in that it may be viewed both as a feature of the external environment (especially where governments have legislated for certain arrangements) as well as an element in employment relations practice

A computer program for the estimation of protein and nucleic acid sequence diversity in random point mutagenesis libraries

A computer program for the generation and analysis of in silico random point mutagenesis libraries is described. The program operates by mutagenizing an input nucleic acid sequence according to mutation parameters specified by the user for each sequence position and type of point mutation. The program can mimic almost any type of random mutagenesis library, including those produced via error-prone PCR (ep-PCR), mutator Escherichia coli strains, chemical mutagenesis, and doped or random oligonucleotide synthesis. The program analyzes the generated nucleic acid sequences and/or the associated protein library to produce several estimates of library diversity (number of unique sequences, point mutations, and single point mutants) and the rate of saturation of these diversities during experimental screening or selection of clones. This information allows one to select the optimal screen size for a given mutagenesis library, necessary to efficiently obtain a certain coverage of the sequence-space. The program also reports the abundance of each specific protein mutation at each sequence position, which is useful as a measure of the level and type of mutation bias in the library. Alternatively, one can use the program to evaluate the relative merits of preexisting libraries, or to examine various hypothetical mutation schemes to determine the optimal method for creating a library that serves the screen/selection of interest. Simulated libraries of at least 109 sequences are accessible by the numerical algorithm with currently available personal computers; an analytical algorithm is also available which can rapidly calculate a subset of the numerical statistics in libraries of arbitrarily large size. A multi-type double-strand stochastic model of ep-PCR is developed in an appendix to demonstrate the applicability of the algorithm to amplifying mutagenesis procedures. Estimators of DNA polymerase mutation-type-specific error rates are derived using the model. Analyses of an alpha-synuclein ep-PCR library and NNS synthetic oligonucleotide libraries are given as examples

Neurodegeneration: new clues on inclusions

AbstractThe rare neurological disorders frontotemporal dementia and British dementia have been linked to two mutant genes whose products constitute the fibrils that define the two disease pathologies. Two recent studies add to the mounting circumstantial case that protein fibrillization, inside (neurofibrillary tangles) or outside (amyloid plaques) of the neuron, may be pathogenic and suggest that either or both of these mechanisms could initiate Alzheimer’s disease

How do STEM students use digital and non-digital learning resources?

We create online/digital resources in various formats for our students, and expect them to be digital natives who can use them effectively, but what evidence do we have that this is the case? This session reports on research carried out looking at how students actually study. Students on 3 STEM second year modules which have study materials supplied in different formats (from entirely online to mostly book based) were surveyed, and in-depth interviews carried out