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This study evaluates the outlook of government expenditure through public and private financing for the green economic revitalization after COVID-19 in Canada. The various econometric estimations are used to measure the impact of government expenditure on green economic recovery. The implementation of public investment is explicitly associated with private funding. The results suggest that the government policy incentives and non-government financing influence fossil fuel energy sources proportions on non-government investment, which is additional than the feed-in tariffs. According to fixed effects results, the distribution of fossil fuel energy sources is an essential obstacle in solar energy investment. In contrast, the presence of varied types of renewable energy encourages non-government climate investment. Throughout the study period after the breakout of the pandemic phase, neither fossil fuel energy sources nor economic policy is marginally efficient. The different macroeconomic programs in green economic recovery might be ideal for attaining the needed impact. The critical policy conclusion of the results of this research is that an influential role of the public and private investment may be part of an optimal firm innovation plan for green economic recovery in the post-COVID-19 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty-one nonvitamin, nonmineral dietary supplements commonly consumed by women in Canada were analyzed for isoflavones (formononetin, daidzein, genistein, glycitein), lignans (pinoresinol, lariciresinol, secoisolariciresinol, matairesinol), and coumestrol to complement our previously published food phytoestrogen database. Supplements containing soy or red clover had the highest concentrations of total isoflavones (728.2–35,417.0 ug/g) and total phytoestrogens (1030.1–35,517.7 ug/g) followed by licorice and licorice-containing supplements (41.3–363.3 ug/g isoflavones; 56.5–370.0 ug/g total phytoestrogens). Other supplements had considerably less isoflavones (≤ 19.0 ug/g) and total phytoestrogens (≤ 44.2 ug/g). Lignans were present in all (≤ 298.9 ug/g), whereas coumestrol was either not present or present in only small amounts (≤ 3.0 ug/g). Supplements differed in phytoestrogen profiles. The daily intake of isoflavones and lignans from some supplements may greatly exceed those from several servings of soy or vegetables. Hence, the intake of supplements should be taken into consideration in clinical or epidemiological studies for more accurate estimation of phytoestrogen intakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiagent cooperation is one of the most attractive research fields in multiagent systems. There are many attempts made by researchers in this field to promote cooperation behavior. However, several issues still exist, such as complex interactions among different groups of agents, redundant communication contents of irrelevant agents, which prevents the learning and convergence of agent cooperation behaviors. To address the limitations above, a novel method called multiagent hierarchical cognition difference policy (MA-HCDP) is proposed in this paper. It includes a hierarchical group network (HGN), a cognition difference network (CDN), and a soft communication network (SCN). HGN is designed to distinguish different underlying information of diverse groups' observations (including friendly group, enemy group, and object group) and extract different high-dimensional state representations of different groups. CDN is designed based on a variational auto-encoder to allow each agent to choose its neighbors (communication targets) adaptively with its environment cognition difference. SCN is designed to handle the complex interactions among the agents with a soft attention mechanism. The results of simulations demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our method compared with existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biological ion exchange (BIEX) has proved to remove natural organic matter (NOM) better than biological activated carbon (BAC). This raises the question if BIEX can be integrated into a full-scale drinking water treatment plant to remove NOM and ammonia. In this study, a pilot plant consisting of one BIEX filter, three GAC filters and one BAC filter was set up as second-stage filtration at the Sainte-Rose drinking water treatment plant (Laval, Canada). The pilot plant was operated for a period of nine months without regeneration of the ion exchange resins. The influent water showed low DOC (2.5 mg/L) and high sulfate concentrations (28.2 mg/L). Except of a short peak of DOC released at about 1 000 BV, the BIEX filter achieved a nearly constant removal of 29-36% over the whole study period. The DOC removals of GAC were similar to BIEX at < 8000 BV but then stabilized at 13-24% after 8 000 BV. Most DOC removal in the BIEX filter was achieved at the top 30 cm layer (81%) compared to 62-66% removal in the GAC/BAC filters in the same layer. After the rapid exhaustion of the primary ion exchange capacity (<1 000 BV), sulfate displaced the fraction of NOM with lower affinity than sulfate, corresponding to the initial DOC release in the BIEX filter. The fraction of NOM with higher affinity than sulfate can still replace sulfate, which explains the good long-term performance of the BIEX filter. BIEX released ammonia with an average of 15% in warm water condition, probably related to the small diameter of the column which limited backwash effectiveness., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)