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It is time for layoffs – know your rights


by gio

Although according to some financial analysts Canada seems to be set for a speedier recovery from the current global economic turmoil, job market figures across Canada, and more particularly in BC, are far from encouraging. The most recent issue of Business in Vancouver reports that unemployment is hitting double digits in some part of BC – such as the Okanagan and the Cariboo. In April, job openings “grew in tandem with the size of the labour force”, keeping the unemployment rate at 7.4% for the whole of British Columbia. And the number of service sector jobs remained pretty much unchanged.

What could this mean? If we make the safe assumption that most job losses in the Cariboo and Okanagan were due to the resource sector, we can still somewhat guess that layoffs and hirings in the service sector (concentrated in the Lower Mainland) are still going on at the same rate. Which means that the time of the layoffs is far from gone.
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Previously


Social aggregators (know who your daddy is)

There have been plenty of tech articles warning us of the dangers of posting information about us online – especially when it comes to naughty pictures and compromising comments. However, not many people know that there are special search engines out there whose aim is to scavenge all the information you have disseminated on the web, and put it together in one single place – for the pleasure of HR recruiters everywhere.


Beat a substance dependence with another one

I was going through my usual morning news reading, and then something in the European news section of the BBC really tickled my interest: it is the story of a once successful French cardiologist who beat his alcohol dependence prescribing himself a muscle relaxant drug.


A roundup on the credit crunch

I refuse to use the word “recession”, as I am in Canada at the moment! However, as one of the major importers (if not the major) of Canadian products and services is the USA – therefore, their recession is starting to affect the Canadian economy, even though Canadian banks fared pretty well during the hot times of the financial meltdown. While working on another post and doing my usual news reading, I encountered some interesting news, and takes, about the current global crisis.


It’s raining cats

This is how I felt today while waiting for the bus in Vancouver…


Statins might benefit healthy people

Or at least, this is what a study funded by AstraZeneca suggests. The study has been recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine — you can download a free pdf copy of it here (watch out, it opens in a new window).

Or at least, this is what a study funded by AstraZeneca suggests. The study has been recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine — you can download a free pdf copy of it here (watch out, it opens in a new window). In this blog post, I am going to examine and summarize the paper, and trying to draw some conclusions from it. Are the results reliable? Was the follow-up long enough, and their study sample of appropriate size? Find out just below the fold.


Why did Obama win?

I usually do not mention politics on this blog, but today I am due for an exception. Yesterday night, Barack Obama became the 44th President-elect of the United States of America.
I am not going to discuss this because the States are such an influential player in world politics, so influential that their decisions often have a decisive impact for most other countries involved in alliances, wars, or treaties with them. I am going to discuss it because, although it now seems inevitable that Obama should win this election, it was in fact not so.