The Retirement Plans and Expectations of Non-retired Canadians Aged 45 to 59
This study examines retirement issues for older working Canadians: income, pension coverage, home ownership status, immigration status, marital status and self-assessed health. It uses data from the 2002 General Social Survey.
Original Article: Women's “Choices” and Canadian Water Research and Policy: A Study of Professionals' Careers, Mentorship, and Experiential Knowledge
This article is an investigation of the different factors that potentially influence the career choices of Canadian female professionals working in water research and policy (WRP). This community was broadly defined as any Canadian engineers, technicians, biologists, planners, economists, scholars conducting physical and social research, public servants (e.g., national, provincial, municipal), and civil society activists who were self-identified as working on water-related issues. Participants' essay responses were assessed by using an integrated comparative framework—drawing insights from economics, social network theory, environmental psychology, innovation, knowledge management, and pro-environmental behavior. Focus was placed on participants' responses about what motivated their careers, how this motivation sustained their professional participation over time, and whether different experiences with people and/or nature influenced their contributions to Canadian WRP. The data analysis indicated that female professionals draw on their relationships and experiential knowledge to make career decisions, sustain their career progression, and direct their career contributions. The analysis suggested that both recruitment and retention within the water community could be improved by providing recognition of alternative knowledge opportunities, including opportunities to develop skill mastery over existing or new skills, and experiential knowledge in nature for children, and by facilitating mentorship relationships and social networks. By doing so, these interventions would help sustain the availability of diverse knowledge resources held by female professionals within Canadian WRP.
Imaging the Internal Structure of an Alpine Glacier via L-Band Airborne SAR Tomography
In this paper, we report results from the analysis of 3-D L-band airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) acquisitions acquired in March 2014 over the Mittelbergferner glacier, Austrian Alps, during the European Space Agency (ESA) campaign AlpTomoSAR. The campaign included coincident in situ measurements of snow and ice properties and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data acquired at 600 and 200 MHz over a total length of 18 km. Radar data were acquired by repeatedly flying an L-band SAR along an oval racetrack at an altitude of about 1300 m over the glacier, such that two data stacks from opposite views are obtained. Data from all passes were coherently combined to achieve 3-D resolution capabilities, resulting in the generation of 3-D tomographic SAR (TomoSAR) cubes, where each voxel represents L-band radar reflectivity from a particular location in the 3-D space at a spatial resolution on the order of meters. TomoSAR cubes were finally corrected to account for wave propagation velocity into the ice, which was a necessary step to associate the observed features with their geometrical location, hence enabling a direct comparison to GPR data. The TomoSAR cubes show the complexity of the glacier subsurface scattering. Most areas are characterized by surface scattering in proximity of the ice surface, plus a complex pattern of in-depth volumetric scattering beneath and scattering at the ice/bedrock interface. Various subsurface features observed in GPR transects at 200 MHz clearly showed up in TomoSAR sections as well, particularly firn bodies, crevasses, layer transitions, and bedrock reflection down to 50 m below the ice surface.