Mending Canada's Employment Insurance Quilt: The Case for Restoring Equity

Under the current Employment Insurance (EI) system, long-lasting EI benefits are more easily accessed in regions with high unemployment rates than in regions with low unemployment rates where workers face tighter restrictions to access short-lived benefits. This complicated screening procedure, intended to better support the various circumstances facing unemployed workers across the country, creates a number of undesirable consequences: the most glaring being pockets of high, chronic unemployment. The goals and intentions of the EI regime should be simplified to better address the needs of Canada’s unemployed workers.Social Policy, Canada, employment insurance (EI), EI reforms

Back to Basics: Restoring Equity and Efficiency in the EI Program - EI Reform Part II

Regionally based entry requirements and benefit durations prolong the persistence of unemployment and reduce economic incentives to adjust to labour-market conditions. Reforms aimed at equity are overdue. Regionally based criteria should be replaced by uniform, countrywide, employment insurance entrance requirements and benefit durations.employment insurance reform

Construction subcontracts: for what we are about to receive

This paper is from a study on specialist and trade contracting in the construction industry. The research was commissioned by CIRIA and undertaken by the University of Reading in conjunction with Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners Ltd. The purpose of the work was to provide guidance for effective and equitable practice in the management of projects where much of the work is executed, and possibly designed, by specialist and trade contractors (STCs). As part of this study, a preliminary investigation into the nature and origins of specialist contracting was undertaken, in conjunction with a survey of the problems confronting STCs. This paper presents that phase of the project

Promoting Inquiry in Science Classrooms in European Schools : a Handbook for Tutors

In Scotland, PISCES stands for Promoting Inquiry Skills for a Curriculum for Excellence in Science. It is a CPD module for teachers of science, which has been developed in Scotland with the support of the S-TEAM project. However, this Handbook uses our international acronym in which PISCES stands for Promoting Inquiry in Science Classrooms in European Schools . It is, we believe, potentially equally as successful across Europe as it was designed around the idea of empowering teachers to think for themselves how to make their practice more-inquiry based, wherever they are. It is recognised that some school, social, policy and cultural environments may be more supportive of the idea of ‘more inquiry-based practice’ than others. PISCES empowers teachers to make small or large changes to their practice, according to those sorts of contextual factors, their own aims and how they perceive the needs of their pupils. You will note that we have been careful to use the word ‘more’ in ‘more inquiry-based.’ As befits the idea of empowerment to adapt to one’s own context, there is no single model of inquiry being ‘pushed’ here. Indeed, we count it as a measure of success of PISCES that the teachers who have participated did very different things in making their practice more inquiry-based. Strathclyde University is a leading partner in S-TEAM. Members of Strathclyde University, along with the Development Officer for Curriculum for Excellence for East Lothian, successfully developed and delivered a pilot version of PISCES as a module to a group of East Lothian teachers, in 2010/11. The module resulted in successful ‘experiments in practice’ and increased awareness of the benefits of inquiry-based teaching and learning. The same group of teachers have also taken part in a follow-up course (ARIES: Advanced Resources for Inquiry and Evaluation in Science). PISCES is a high quality CPD programme, valued by teachers and supportive of their professional self-development. It can be applied to both primary and secondary teaching, in all science subjects. Pupils benefit from learning experiences, which develop scientific inquiry skills. Feedback from participating teachers has been consistently positive

Promoting inquiry skills in Curriculum for Excellence in Science: conceptualising inquiry to improve practice

This paper describes a Scottish initiative (arising out of a EU funded development project) involving university researchers, a local authority curriculum development officer and a group of teachers interested in developing more inquiry based approaches in science education. The project is not one in which the researchers bring prescriptions from research. Rather, it is seen as a joint effort aimed at solving practitioners' conceptual and practice issues. The overall question for the teachers was, How do I (we) make our practice more inquiry based? The question for the researchers was, How do we help you (the interested science teachers) to make your practice more inquiry based? This has two sub-questions: How do we help you to conceptualise the issues? How do we help you to solve the practice problems? As it turned out, the particular group of teachers we worked with did not ask for help with practice issues, so we have not made much progress in answering the second question. Therefore, this paper will focus on the first. We seem to have been successful in helping the teachers to acquire some useful conceptual tools for thinking about and changing their practice in ways that they valued for themselves. Perhaps the answer to the second question is that researchers can help teachers to solve their practice problems by helping them to conceptualise the issues

Coherent Population Trapping of Electron Spins in a Semiconductor

In high-purity n-type GaAs under strong magnetic field, we are able to isolate a lambda system composed of two Zeeman states of neutral-donor bound electrons and the lowest Zeeman state of bound excitons. When the two-photon detuning of this system is zero, we observe a pronounced dip in the excited-state photoluminescence indicating the creation of the coherent population-trapped state. Our data are consistent with a steady-state three-level density-matrix model. The observation of coherent population trapping in GaAs indicates that this and similar semiconductor systems could be used for various EIT-type experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures replaced 6/25/2007 with PRL versio

Working Together to Build Cooperative Food Systems

The combined challenges of food insecurity, agriculture-related environmental decline, corporate concentration, and the decline of community resilience are being met by growing societal interest in developing more just and sustainable food systems. A recent emphasis on cooperation and innovative forms of collective action within the food movement invokes a community-centered approach to food provisioning where collective problem-solving and democracy take center place in the development agenda (Ikerd, 2012). Cooperative alternative food networks are becoming powerful tools for community development and important vehicles for cultivating democratically controlled food systems at multiple scales. The papers in this special issue provide an important contribution to our understanding of the function, the challenges, and the potential of collective action in enabling more just and resilient food systems. Cooperative alternative food networks represent a break from the competitive productivism of the dominant food economy and create new relational spaces that hold promise for overcoming the pragmatic and political limits of some of the more individualistic approaches in the local/ sustainable food movement. These include cooperative forms of: food hubs, local food networks, farmers' markets, CSAs, box schemes, buying clubs, and value chains, along with a range of agriculture and food cooperatives owned by farmers, consumers, workers, and in emerging multistakeholder cooperative structures. With a renewed emphasis on civic governance, the resulting food-provisioning systems are based on principles of participatory democracy, solidarity, and reciprocity (Renting, Schermer, & Rossi, 2012) and provide spaces to nurture collective subjectivities required for transformative food practice and politics (Levkoe, 2011)

Self-repair ability of evolved self-assembling systems in cellular automata

Self-repairing systems are those that are able to reconfigure themselves following disruptions to bring them back into a defined normal state. In this paper we explore the self-repair ability of some cellular automata-like systems, which differ from classical cellular automata by the introduction of a local diffusion process inspired by chemical signalling processes in biological development. The update rules in these systems are evolved using genetic programming to self-assemble towards a target pattern. In particular, we demonstrate that once the update rules have been evolved for self-assembly, many of those update rules also provide a self-repair ability without any additional evolutionary process aimed specifically at self-repair