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.

Most workers are not going to be prepared for a layoff. Companies are quick at laying off, and hardly ever warn their workforce to avoid losing productivity and deter costly personal revenges (which often result in loss of confidential data). That means that a layoff will most probably come quickly, and you need to know your rights when it does.

In this post, I am going to pick a few typical layoff examples, and explain how the BC Employment Standards Act applies to them. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer, so if you are already in a “sticky” situation, make sure to consult a professional about your specific case.

Let’s start with this example. A company hires a fresh graduate to work for them, knowing full well that this person has just obtained a bachelor’s degree in the previous summer. After some pushing and pulling, this graduate finally manages to obtain a job contract. The contract states that the probation period for the job is 6 months in length from the start of employment. In the meantime, more and more layoffs are seen in BC, and the company’s boss decides to call in the graduate for a meeting. He tells the graduate that he is not satisfied with the quality of the work he has seen, and that he is looking for someone with better qualifications to take over the  job. He then decides to fire the fresh graduate – a few days after the end of the probation period.

Is the graduate entitled to severance pay? Is the boss’ motivation for firing considered “just cause”? If you are the graduate in question, what are your rights?

First of all, we need to consider that, ultimately, this employee was fired. It does not matter whether the actual words (”You’re fired!”) were pronounced, as the Act recognizes a variety of actions on the part of the employer as firings.

Was this termination motivated by a “just cause”? To some of you, it might look like this might be true in this case – “the employee could not perform his/her duties, and was rightly fired”. However, the legal definition of “just cause” is quite stringent. In fact, you can consider yourself fired because of a “just cause” if:

• use drugs or alcohol that interfere with your job performance
• ignore a strict rule of “no alcohol during work hours”
• intentionally disobey your boss
• consistently refuse to follow a clearly defined chain of authority in a tightly-knit business
• are disloyal to your employer or put yourself in a conflict of interest; for example, you set up a business to compete directly with your employer
• ignore a clear workplace policy, procedure, or rule
• are dishonest about something important

The fact that the employer – who, remember, is the one who chose to hire this person in the first place! – thinks an employee is not performing well enough is not considered “just cause”. If someone is let go without a “just cause”, then this person is entitled to notice and pay. In fact, the Employment Standards Act says that

• If employment is terminated
  18 (1) An employer must pay all wages owing to an employee within 48 hours after the employer terminates the employment.
  (2) An employer must pay all wages owing to an employee within 6 days after the employee terminates the employment.
• Banking of overtime wages
  42 (5) On termination of employment or on receiving the employee’s written request to close the time bank, the employer must pay the employee any amount credited to the time bank.
• Vacation pay
  58 (3) Any vacation pay an employee is entitled to when the employment terminates must be paid to the employee at the time set by section 18 for paying wages.

Got it? This employee is entitled to vacation pay, wages owing and vacation pay. But is the employee also entitled to severance pay? This depends on whether appropriate notice was given, and the length of employment. In this case, it is ambiguous whether sufficient notice was given – the employee was made free to go pretty much right away. That might mean that the employee is entitled to severance pay according to section 63 (1).

Liability resulting from length of service
63 (1) After 3 consecutive months of employment, the employer becomes liable to pay an employee an amount equal to one week’s wages as compensation for length of service.
(2) The employer’s liability for compensation for length of service increases as follows:
(a) after 12 consecutive months of employment, to an amount equal to 2 weeks’ wages;
(b) after 3 consecutive years of employment, to an amount equal to 3 weeks’ wages plus one additional week’s wages for each additional year of employment, to a maximum of 8 weeks’ wages.
(3) The liability is deemed to be discharged if the employee
(a) is given written notice of termination as follows:
(i) one week’s notice after 3 consecutive months of employment;
(ii) 2 weeks’ notice after 12 consecutive months of employment;
(iii) 3 weeks’ notice after 3 consecutive years of employment, plus one additional week for each additional year of employment, to a maximum of 8 weeks’ notice;
(b) is given a combination of written notice under subsection (3) (a) and money equivalent to the amount the employer is liable to pay, or
(c) terminates the employment, retires from employment, or is dismissed for just cause.

In case the employer refuses to pay back the employee’s unpaid wages, vacation pay, overtime banked hours, and the due severance pay (this last only in case proper notice was not provided), he or she will be in contravention of the Employment Standards Act.

If you think you were victim of an employment standards violation, read up some relevant sections in the Act itself (Part 10 — Complaints, Investigations and Determinations and Part 11 — Enforcement), contact the closest office of the Employment Standards Branch, and/or consult a lawyer.

**Any reference to actual events is purely a coincidence. This article contains no names, and the cases here are just examples. Last but not least, I am not a lawyer – make sure to consult a professional about your specific case… and if you are a victim of an employment standards violation, fight back for your sake and ours. You should also consult the Employment Standards Branch in your area for guidance and reliable information.**

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There are other tools available for nosy ex-boy/girlfriends and HR recruitment professionals out there. Some of these look to me almost malevolent: Spokeo decidedly targets HR recruitment firms and professionals, offering to go “a step beyond”, and automate “candidate researches across 41 social networks“. Other tools are targeting anyone who would like to feel more in control of their online identity, and therefore see all the information about them in one single place – Profilactic is among them. I do not know how much such a tool would really protect you, regardless of what the name might be implying…

On the other hand, as a reaction to the new generation of social aggregators, other tools are being created to allow you to basically censor anything potentially embarassing or even dangerous that has been posted about you online. The one most easy to find at this point is ReputationDefender. But if you wish that some government records or published materials were removed from the net, you are out of luck.

What does this mean for the average internet user? That you really need to be careful about anything you post on the web – anywhere. You need to be particularly careful about privacy settings in any sites that offer you the opportunity to show public profiles – and, if there is information that would like others rather not know about you, then refrain from posting that altogether. Also, be responsive and fast if someone asks you to remove from the net information you have posted about them. Last but not least, it might help to have a personal website, where people can look for up-to-date information about you, ad where you can effectively manage your online identity (or persona, for that matter).

Further reading: 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles on Mashable.com

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What really attracted my attention about this article is not the story in itself, but how this is a variant of an ethical dilemma that seems to be becoming more and more frequent: is it ethical to prescribe an untested drug, or a drug tested for other purposes, to people who seem to be in dire need of it? Depending on how we define “dire need”, we could be looking at different populations: workers trying to stay awake at night, terminal cancer patients, or people affected by all the consequence of substance dependence – and possibly, other groups I cannot think of right now. There are two more examples that I can make about the other two groups, and they are both relatively recent: the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs in healthy people, and the use of DCA, a drug not tested as an oncological treatment, in terminal cancer patients.

The main issue here is whether there is any real advantage from taking these drugs. In some cases, one could make a “harm reduction” argument, but I feel that in most cases one cannot. For instance, is the muscle relaxant really solving the issues underlying alcoholism? No, but it could be used in the context of a harm reduction strategy, where people are allowed to get off their dependence on alcohol thanks to pharmacological treatment first, but are also being provided with assistance to overcome the root causes of their dependence – which should eventually allow them to avoid taking the drug altogether. This argument could also be made for drug users being provided with drugs and/or a safe place where to inject – think of the recent Swiss heroin prescription initiative, or Vancouver’s Insite.

However, can we make the argument that it is moral to provide an untested cancer treatment to severely ill patients, or that it is moral for healthy people to use cognitive enhancement drugs currently prescribed to people suffering of cognitive difficulties such as ADHD, Parkinson’s and other disorders? I seriously doubt it: in these cases, not only there is no harm reduction, but people are being exposed to potential damage at best, and being set up for future dependence and obligation to assume pharmaceuticals at worst. It is not hard to imagine a day when, if cognitive enhancer uses went mainstream, one could be obliged by a potential employer to consume certain drugs to enhance their ability to concentrate or work longer hours.

Other readings

• Read more on the discussion about the use of cognitive enhancers
• Read more about the story behind DCA, and the way it has been marketed to desperate cancer patients
• For more science blogging, and possibly the best selection of science blogging of the year, head over to this list of posts compiled by Bora at A Blog Around The Clock.

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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. In the last month, more than 70,000 jobs were lost in Canada, though Ontario had the lion share of job losses, and economists are suggesting that an economic stimulus package is urgently needed – something that, as the current unrest in the Canadian Parliament suggests, is unlikely to come any time soon. I think “unrest” really is the only word that can describe what happened recently in Canadian politics – and its possibly heavy consequences.

Anyway, while working on another post and doing my usual news reading, I encountered more interesting news, and takes, about the current global crisis.

For instance, I found out that the most recent data suggest that almost 600,000 jobs were lost in the month of November in the United States. At the same time, many prospective retirees find themselves stranded and having to look for work in a suddenly flooded labour market.

On the other hand, some countries with stricter banking regulations are faring quite well in the midst of the financial crisis – and some of these are places you would not expect to make a profit at times of general turmoil.

Also, this might be a time for small businesses and non-profits to look into spending their money in a smarter way – protecting the human resources they run on, and saving on other costs that can be completely avoided: one way of doing this would be to convert to using open source software, while retaining or recruiting a workforce able to work with, and adapt to, a variety of software platforms.

[If you cannot see the video, please click here.]

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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.

More than 17,000 patients of both sexes were randomly assigned to a group being treated with a daily dose of rosuvastatin, or placebo. The study found that, compared to the placebo group, patients being treated with the statin showed reduced cholesterol levels and C-reactive protein levels by a significant margin (50% and 37% respectively). These patients also showed reduced incidence of cardiovascular disease over a 2-year follow-up period. While rates of cancer and other causes of death were not affected, the study noticed an increase in “physician-reported diabetes”, which the results were unable to explain.

There are two main issues with this paper. The first is the strong involvement of the main authors with the funding agent — in this case a pharmaceutical company which is involved in the production and sale of the drug in question, rosuvastatin. The second one is the relatively short follow-up time: although all subjects were in age groups prone to cardiovascular disease — 60-year-old or more for men, 50-year-old or more for women — the study does not shed any light on possible long-term side-effects of statin use in healthy people. The increased diabetes reports might have turned into a substantial figure if a long-term study were conducted, but we are not going to know that until an independently funded study will try to shed light on this. Also, levels of C-reactive protein are not, at leats until now, widely recognized as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

Going back to the issue of the strong involvement of AstraZeneca in this study, the first thing I noticed about this paper, apart from the results of course, was the disclosure statement. Authors of academic and medical papers are required to disclose their affiliation with the funding agencies, as well as any personal benefit they might get from the results. This study was done for the JUPITER study group (Justification for the Use of Statins in Prevention: an Intervention Trial Evaluating Rosuvastatin); the head of the steering committee for the group, who is also the principal investigator, has tight professional relations with AstraZeneca. Moreover, he is

a coinventor on patents held by Brigham and Women’s Hospital that relate to the use of inflammatory bio-markers in cardiovascular disease, including the use of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein in the evaluation of patients’ risk of cardiovascular disease

C-reactive protein was used in this study as a possible indicator of risk of cardiovascular disease: in fact, the study concentrated on subjects that, by normal standards (LDL levels <130 mg/dL), are completely healthy, but who have more elevated levels of C-reactive protein, which has been showed to indicate a state of inflammation.

On the positive side, the study was conducted over a wide sample, representative of both genders and major racial groups. People with conditions that could make them prone to cardiovascular disease were excluded from the study, and so were those who were affected by diseases caused by, or resulting in, widespread inflammation. This was important, as the main hypothesis behind the study was that general inflammation levels, indicated by the abundance of C-reactive protein, could be a prognostic factor for the future occurrence of cardiovascular disease in otherwise completely healthy people. The paper is therefore also suggesting that levels of C-reactive proteins might be indicative of a susceptibility to cardiovascular disease in people with normal cholesterol levels.

In conclusion, although the results outlined in this paper will need further scrutiny, if confirmed, then they strongly suggest that healthy people could greatly benefit from a daily dose of rosuvastatin, in case it is shown that the statin is not directly responsible for an increase in diabetes cases in the test cohort.

Post Scriptum: Thank you to Alex Palazzo for including this post in the latest edition of the Molecular & Cell Biology Carnival.

P. M Ridker, E. Danielson, F. A.H. Fonseca, J. Genest, A. M. Gotto, J. J.P. Kastelein, W. Koenig, P. Libby, A. J. Lorenzatti, J. G. MacFadyen, B. G. Nordestgaard, J. Shepherd, J. T. Willerson, R. J. Glynn (2008). Rosuvastatin to Prevent Vascular Events in Men and Women with Elevated C-Reactive Protein New England Journal of Medicine DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa0807646

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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. The extraordinary part of yesterday night was that Obama, after unexpectedly clinching the Democratic nomination, went on to win the post of US President — by a landslide. And although we got used to hearing his name and seeing his face repeatedly in the last two years, the unlikelihood of this event is something that should be sealed in our memory — and understood.

Obama likes to say that this is proof that America really is what she says she is, that it is a “country of unyielding hope”, and that this hope can make the most unlikely dreams come true. It maybe hasn’t sunk in, in the minds of many, that Obama shares his middle name with millions of Muslim people around the Earth, that he is the son of globalization and that, while he says that “this couldn’t have happened in any other country on earth”, we in fact know that many like him exist, all over the world — living in inter-racial families, building their lives in more than one country, and carrying a true melting pot around in their gene pool. But this is maybe not the most important thing in the campaign.

What is, in my opinion, the most stunning thing, is that we had a chance to observe, for two years, how a civil servant not widely known to the public, and with an unlikely personal story for a politician (even for a place like America), managed to get the most difficult and powerful job on earth. How did he do it? Why did he win?

The most likely reasons, which surely played a big part, I think only deserve bullet points in this post, because they have been extensively discussed elsewhere:

• the economic crisis – the ruling party during an economic crisis usually does not get re-elected right away
• the war in Iraq – it has been dragging on for 7 years now, and people’s support for the war has been steadily decreasing over the years
• people are bored and want “change” – after eight years of the Republican Party occupying the White House, you could imagine this would be the time when people finally got tired of it
• people are now paying more attention to social and economic, rather than moral issues – which favours the Democratic Party
• race? maybe yes, maybe no, but I think everyone would agree that this is a step towards creating “A More Perfect Union“, and start washing away, in practical terms, the sin of slavery.

Ultimately, though, I think there are two main factors: the circumstances (all of the above), and this man’s ability to orchestrate the most successful marketing campaign of all times — well, maybe after Jesus, Mohamed and Buddha.

What is marketing? Is it selling a product? Is it making money? Is it lying, and tricking people, and making them think they will be happier after they get something rather than now? Maybe a mediocre marketer could believe that – someone who just wants to sell you stuff, whatever the “stuff” is. And it is true – people are receptive to certain design and communication “tricks”. But does this make them stupid?

In our world, information is not only sent in by the traditional media – a new form of communication is rising, and although traditional media still has a great role in generating it, it now goes in two directions, and tons of the discussion is now generated by what used to be the traditional audience. This also means that, although this audience are still susceptible to the old “tricks” (they are human after all), it also means that they are becoming more skilled at recognizing insincerity, but also the very instruments of marketing.

At this point in time, the great marketer is not selling you anything. He or she embodies an idea, and the marketer challenges you to take it on yourself. Things are just a vehicle for that idea, nothing more than something on the side – something that surely generates income, but is never the main focus.

Barack Obama’s campaign is the greatest marketing campaign since the time of the prophets because he challenged everybody to take on what he believes in, to look at his personal story and say, “I am not that different, I am starting from zero just like he did, so I can do it too”. At which point, although the entire campaign was magistrally directed by him, his chief campaign manager and his chief strategist, much of it took a life of its own, with or without the campaign’s approval or endorsement. Some examples? The funny Obama Girl videos, the songs, the graphic designers and artists working around the clock to support him, the American volunteers, and those around the world who called in — cold-called American people, asking them to join in, to do what they are not allowed to do not because they do not want to pick up the challenge, but because, alas, they are not American citizens.

Is Obama’s election evidence that his campaign was great? Yes. But at the same time, we will only know how great it was if people will finally pick up the challenge “be their brother’s keeper, be their sister’s keeper”, and start paying attention, in their daily life, to the common good and not only to their personal business. If Obama the marketer is the real deal, he will never give up — this is his life, this is his mission, this is his story, and will work relentlessly, during his whole life, to make this idea spread like a plague, like a virus, until the world turns old  and not one of us will be left without knowing his name, and having taken up that challenge. If he ends up raising almost $700 mil and selling some cups and shirts in the meantime, instead of dying on a cross or ransacking some caravans, well, that’s just part of getting there and getting it done in the 21st century.

Credits: the poster was designed by Shepard Fairey, and the composite image is from Neu Black.

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I have only recently been back to broadband land, and I am thinking of some topics for the upcoming articles. No worries, the blog will be up and running again very soon…but I will probably have a stricter schedule, and will write only twice a week.

If you have any suggestions about things you’d like me to discuss on the blog, just leave a comment on this post: would you like to see a podcast? Are there any specific topics that you’d like to see covered more (or less)? Do you have an idea for a post? Let me know, I am all ears!

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We all know the stories of mystics living in poverty, and still living a fulfilling life: but how many of us would seriously consider such a life choice? Living in poverty, owning nothing, and with no kind of security, there is no way we could really be happy. Good for them, we think. But if only we could win a jackpot, land that job, marry that person…then, we really would be happy. The fact is, the people who landed the job, got the cheque, and married the hotshot are not necessarily happier than you already are.

Now you must be annoyed. You thought this was a serious blog, talking about science, technology, skepticism and the like – but here you are, reading platitudes. But what if, for a moment, I could convince you to be skeptical of your own skepticism about the sources of happiness in your life? Just lend me, and Dr. Dan Gilbert, about half an hour. I promise you’ll laugh.

[If you cannot see the movie, you can watch it here.]

Post Scriptum: One of my posts has been picked by Tangled Bank. You can read the post here, and find more good science blogging visiting the Bank’s latest edition.

Image credits: sxc.hu, and other copyright holders

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