3,737 research outputs found
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 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
after stimulation, depending of the thickness 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
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
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
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