Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals' political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. A facial recognition algorithm was applied to ...naturalistic images of 1,085,795 individuals to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberal and conservative others. Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal-conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and the UK), environments (Facebook and dating websites), and when comparing faces across samples. Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.
Since the 2010s, all levels of governments in Canada have gradually initiated social procurement as a policy tool to further their social values and political agendas. Social enterprises of various ...shapes and sizes across the country have served as partners in the execution of those agendas. Selling Social examines the experiences of these enterprises in social procurement and social purchasing. Selling Social presents the findings of a three-year Canadian research project detailing experiences of work integration social enterprises (WISEs) selling their goods and services to organizational purchasers, including governments, businesses, and non-profit organizations. Drawing on survey findings and interviews, the book explores a diverse group of social enterprises from across Canada, showcasing their successes and their challenges based on real-life examples to aid social enterprises that are considering this path. The book emphasizes the importance of including social and environmental considerations in procurement and purchasing decisions, particularly at larger scales and through public policy. In doing so, Selling Social extends the understanding of social enterprises beyond their social and economic outcomes and into the broader movement towards responsible procurement and purchasing.
•We model world fossil fuel production by country including unconventional sources.•Four countries, China, USA, Canada and Australia modelled by state/province level.•Three ultimately recouverable ...resources applied, that range from 48.4 to 121.5 ZJ.•Scenarios suggest coal production peaks before 2025 due to China.•Results suggest lack of fossil fuels to deliver high IPCC scenarios: A1Fl, RCP8.5.
Detailed projections of world fossil fuel production including unconventional sources were created by country and fuel type to estimate possible future fossil fuel production. Four critical countries (China, USA, Canada and Australia) were examined in detail with projections made on the state/province level. Ultimately Recoverable Resources (URR) for fossil fuels were estimated for three scenarios: Low=48.4 ZJ, Best Guess (BG)=75.7 ZJ, High=121.5 ZJ. The scenarios were developed using Geologic Resources Supply-Demand Model (GeRS-DeMo). The Low and Best Guess (BG) scenarios suggest that world fossil fuel production may peak before 2025 and decline rapidly thereafter. The High scenario indicates that fossil fuels may have a strong growth till 2025 followed by a plateau lasting approximately 50years before declining. All three scenarios suggest that world coal production may peak before 2025 due to peaking Chinese production and that only natural gas could have strong growth in the future. In addition, by converting the fossil fuel projections to greenhouse gas emissions, the projections were compared to IPCC scenarios which indicated that based on current estimates of URR there are insufficient fossil fuels to deliver the higher emission IPCC scenarios A1Fl and RCP8.5.
Gendering the nation Armatage, Kay
Gendering the nation,
c1999, 19990610, 1999, 2000, 1999-01-01
eBook
The definitive collection of essays, both original and previously published, that address the impact and influence of a century of women's film making in Canada.
Climate change and global warming as the main human societies’ threats are fundamentally associated with energy consumption and GHG emissions. The residential sector, representing 27% and 17% of ...global energy consumption and CO2 emissions, respectively, has a considerable role to mitigate global climate change. Ten countries, including China, the US, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Canada, Iran, and the UK, account for two-thirds of global CO2 emissions. Thus, these countries’ residential energy consumption and GHG emissions have direct, significant effects on the world environment. The aim of this paper is to review the status and current trends of energy consumption, CO2 emissions and energy policies in the residential sector, both globally and in those ten countries. It was found that global residential energy consumption grew by 14% from 2000 to 2011. Most of this increase has occurred in developing countries, where population, urbanization and economic growth have been the main driving factors. Among the ten studied countries, all of the developed ones have shown a promising trend of reduction in CO2 emissions, apart from the US and Japan, which showed a 4% rise. Globally, the residential energy market is dominated by traditional biomass (40% of the total) followed by electricity (21%) and natural gas (20%), but the total proportion of fossil fuels has decreased over the past decade. Energy policy plays a significant role in controlling energy consumption. Different energy policies, such as building energy codes, incentives, energy labels have been employed by countries. Those policies can be successful if they are enhanced by making them mandatory, targeting net-zero energy building, and increasing public awareness about new technologies. However, developing countries, such as China, India and Iran, still encounter with considerable growth in GHG emissions and energy consumption, which are mostly related to the absence of strong, efficient policy.
•The impact of oil price uncertainty on economic growth in OECD countries is studied.•Taking a historic perspective, the sample covers a 144-year period starting in 1870.•The negative impact of ...uncertainty is more severe for oil producing countries.•A smaller impact is recorded in the post-World War II subsample period.•Reasons for declining impact of oil price uncertainty are proposed.
This paper uses a number of different panel data estimators, including fixed effects, bias-corrected least squares dummy variables (LSDVC), generalised methods of moments (GMM), feasible generalised least squares (FGLS), and random coefficients (RC) to analyse the impact of real oil price volatility on the growth in real GDP for 17 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), over a 144-year time period from 1870 to 2013. The main finding of the study is that oil price volatility has a negative and statistically significant impact on economic growth of the OECD countries in the sample. In addition, when allowing for slope heterogeneity, oil-producing countries are significantly negatively impacted by oil price uncertainty, most notably Norway and Canada.
In recent years, the world witnessed many devastating wildfires that resulted in destructive human and environmental impacts across the globe. Emergency response and rapid response for mitigation ...calls for effective approaches for near real-time wildfire monitoring. Capable of penetrating clouds and smoke, and imaging day and night, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can play a critical role in wildfire monitoring. In this communication, we investigated and demonstrated the potential of Sentinel-1 SAR time series with a deep learning framework for near real-time wildfire progression monitoring. The deep learning framework, based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), is developed to detect burnt areas automatically using every new SAR image acquired during the wildfires and by exploiting all available pre-fire SAR time series to characterize the temporal backscatter variations. The results show that Sentinel-1 SAR backscatter can detect wildfires and capture their temporal progression as demonstrated for three large and impactful wildfires: the 2017 Elephant Hill Fire in British Columbia, Canada, the 2018 Camp Fire in California, USA, and the 2019 Chuckegg Creek Fire in northern Alberta, Canada. Compared to the traditional log-ratio operator, CNN-based deep learning framework can better distinguish burnt areas with higher accuracy. These findings demonstrate that spaceborne SAR time series with deep learning can play a significant role for near real-time wildfire monitoring when the data becomes available at daily and hourly intervals with the launches of RADARSAT Constellation Missions in 2019, and SAR CubeSat constellations.
Torrefaction is a mild pyrolysis, which has been explored for the pretreatment of biomass to increase the heating value and hydrophobicity. Due to its potential applications for making torrefied ...pellets, which can be used as a high quality feedstock in gasification for high quality syngas production and as a substitute for coal in thermal power plants and metallurgical processes, torrefaction and densification have attracted great interest in recent years from both academia and bioenergy industry. This paper provides a comprehensive review of research progresses in this area, drawing on major contributions from two major research groups of the authors on torrefaction and densification at Canada and Taiwan as well as literatures. It is revealed that torrefaction of various biomass species and their major components, lignin, cellulose and hemicelluloses have been extensively studied in thermogravimetric apparatus (TGA) under both inert (N2) and oxidative (O2, H2O) environments to elucidate the weight loss as a function of temperature, particle size and time. It was found that the higher heating value and saturated water uptake of torrefied biomass were a strong function of weight loss, which represents the degree of torrefaction. When torrefied sawdust is compressed into torrefied pellets, more mechanical energy is consumed and higher die temperature is required to make torrefied pellets of similar density and hardness as regular pellets. Simple economics analyses based on laboratory scale experimental data showed that because of the potential savings from pellets transport, handling and storage logistics, the overall cost for torrefied pellets can be lower than regular pellets in European market for both European and Canadian pellets. The gasification could be improved in terms of both energy efficiency and syngas quality because of the removal of oxygenated volatile compounds from torrefied biomass.
Intergenerational income mobility is lower in the United States than in Canada but varies significantly within each country. Our subnational analysis finds that the national border only partially ...distinguishes the approximately 1,000 regions we analyze within these countries. The Canada-US border divides central and eastern Canada from the US Great Lakes and northeastern regions. Simultaneously, some Canadian regions have more in common with the low-mobility southern parts of the United States than with the rest of Canada; that these areas represent a much larger fraction of the US population also explains why mobility is lower in the United States.
To investigate the nexus among clean energy consumption, economic growth and CO2 emissions, a newly developed bootstrap ARDL bounds test with structural breaks is employed to survey the cointegration ...and causality for G7 countries. We find no cointegration among real GDP per capita, clean energy consumption and CO2 emissions in Canada, France, Italy, the US and the UK. However, cointegration exists in Germany when real GDP per capita and CO2 emissions serve as dependent variables and in Japan when CO2 emissions is the dependent variable. Regarding the results of causality test that we find clean energy consumption causes real GDP per capita for Canada, Germany and the US and CO2 emissions causes clean energy consumption for Germany. Besides, we find feedbacks between clean energy consumption and CO2 emissions for Germany, and unidirectional causality running from clean energy consumption to CO2 emissions for the US. Our study has important policy implications for G7 countries conducting efficient energy-use strategy to reduce CO2 emissions.
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