Canadian public service employee satisfaction and its main drivers

Using the results of the 2005 Public Service Employee Survey (PSES), this paper identifies which factors have the greatest effect on employee satisfaction in the Canadian public service. Several hypotheses are tested against the backdrop of existing literature. In general, public servant satisfaction is affected by belief in opportunities for promotion, fair classification, adherence to client service standards, life balance, recognition by immediate supervisors, team relationships with colleagues, how well information is shared and, finally, belief in the abilities of senior management. Some interesting elaborations of these basic findings emerge when other variables are controlled. The discussion considers how the public service can be seen as a more desirable career choice.     

The “Indo-Pacific”—New Regional Formulations and New Maritime Frameworks for US-India Strategic Convergence

This article argues three things. First, it argues that at the conceptual level there has been a strategic rediscovery of a maritime regional framework, the Indo-Pacific. Second, it argues that at the policy level there is a significant regional security convergence, a degree of strategic balancing, between India and the United States in this Indo-Pacific. Third, it argues that at the causal level there is a common maritime challenge from China faced by India in the Indian Ocean and by the United States in the Pacific Ocean, a common Indo-Pacific strategic challenge which is generating this significant US-India naval convergence. In order to deal with such matters, the article looks at the strategic discourse employed around the concept of the Indo-Pacific, and the related maritime assets deployed in the Indo-Pacific by the United States and India.     

‘Fat cat’ lawyers and ‘illegal’ migrants: the impact of intersecting hostilities and toxic narratives on access to justice

ABSTRACT

This article examines how three spheres of hostility intersect to prevent effective access to justice for those living with insecure immigration status. The neoliberal governance model, the barren justice landscape and the hostile environment are supported by the cynical construction of the ‘fat cat’ lawyer and the toxic ‘folk devil’ narrative of the ‘bogus’ asylum seeker. To the extent that the judiciary have frustrated the more obvious, ideologically driven, attempts to restrict access to justice for migrants, the austerity predicated measures pursuant to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) have completely altered the legal landscape. The analysis is informed by the findings of the ‘Legal advice and support for persons with insecure status’ project (hereafter LAPIS) in Nottingham which explores the challenges faced by service providers and the lived experiences of those with insecurity of status. It is clear that access to justice is a passport to the realisation of other rights, yet participants struggled to access a remedy because legal advice is too often out of reach.     

Estimating Individual Contributions to Complex DNA SNP Mixtures.,

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) of large panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides an alternative or complimentary approach to short tandem repeats (STRs) panels for the analysis of complex DNA mixture forensic samples. For STRs, methods to estimate individual contribution concentrations compare capillary electrophoresis peak heights, peak areas, or HTS allele read counts within a mixture. This article introduces three approaches (mean, median, and slope methods) for estimating individual DNA contributions to forensic mixtures for HTS/massively parallel sequencing (MPS) SNP panels. For SNPs, the major:minor allele ratios or counts, unique to each contributor, were compared to estimate contributor proportion within the mixture using the mean, median, and slope intercept for these alleles. The estimates for these three methods were typically within 5% of planned experimental contributions for defined mixtures.