Déclarer l’état d’urgence pendant une crise sanitaire : les critères légaux sont-ils suffisants pour éviter une dérive politique ?

Dans la foulée de la crise sanitaire causée par la pandémie de COVID-19, cet essai s’attarde aux balises légales permettant de limiter les déclarations d’état d’urgence malintentionnées, associées à des dérives politiques. Trois régimes d’exception qui ont ou auraient pu trouver application pendant cette crise sont examinés à ce titre, soit l’état d’urgence déclaré pour cause de sinistre en vertu de la Loi sur les mesures d’urgence fédérale, l’état d’urgence sanitaire sous la Loi sur la santé publique du Québec et l’état d’urgence national prévu à la Loi sur la sécurité civile du Québec. Une comparaison des critères légaux encadrant le processus de déclaration de ces trois régimes permet de cerner certaines de leurs faiblesses ou, en revanche, certaines balises qui pourraient potentiellement inspirer les autres régimes. Cet exercice comparatif s’opère à l’aune de trois prémisses, soit que pour être à l’épreuve des dérives politiques, les déclarations d’urgence doivent s’appuyer sur la science, être prises dans le respect de la démocratie et les circonstances donnant lieu à une telle déclaration doivent être précises. Il ressort de cette étude que la loi fédérale semble empêcher mieux les dérives politiques lors d’une déclaration d’état d’urgence lors d’une crise sanitaire en raison des exigences qu’elle pose.Abstract : In the wake of the health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this essay focuses on legal safeguards to limit ill-intentioned declarations of states of emergency associated with political abuses. Three exceptional regimes that were or could have been applied during this crisis are examined in this regard: the state of emergency declared for a public welfare emergency under the federal Emergencies Act, the public health emergency under the Quebec Public Health Act and the national state of emergency under the Quebec Civil Protection Act. A comparison of the legal criteria governing the declaration process for these three regimes highlights some of their weaknesses or, on the other hand, some of the specific safeguards that could potentially inspire the other regimes. This comparative exercise is based on three premises: that an emergency declaration must be based on science, it must be made in respect of democracy, and it must be specific about the circumstances allowing for such a declaration. This study suggests that the federal law appears to be better able to prevent political abuses during a declaration of a state of emergency in the context of a health crisis because of the requirements that it sets

Super-transient scaling in time-delay autonomous Boolean network motifs

Autonomous Boolean networks are commonly used to model the dynamics of gene regulatory networks and allow for the prediction of stable dynamical attractors. However, most models do not account for time delays along the network links and noise, which are crucial features of real biological systems. Concentrating on two paradigmatic motifs, the toggle switch and the repressilator, we develop an experimental testbed that explicitly includes both inter-node time delays and noise using digital logic elements on field-programmable gate arrays. We observe transients that last millions to billions of characteristic time scales and scale exponentially with the amount of time delays between nodes, a phenomenon known as super-transient scaling. We develop a hybrid model that includes time delays along network links and allows for stochastic variation in the delays. Using this model, we explain the observed super-transient scaling of both motifs and recreate the experi- mentally measured transient distributions

Transient scaling and resurgence of chimera states in networks of Boolean phase oscillators

We study networks of non-locally coupled electronic oscillators that can be described approximately by a Kuramoto-like model. The experimental networks show long complex transients from random initial conditions on the route to network synchronization. The transients display complex behaviors, including resurgence of chimera states, which are network dynamics where order and disorder coexists. The spatial domain of the chimera state moves around the network and alternates with desynchronized dynamics. The fast timescale of our oscillators (on the order of $100\;\mathrm{ns}$) allows us to study the scaling of the transient time of large networks of more than a hundred nodes, which has not yet been confirmed previously in an experiment and could potentially be important in many natural networks. We find that the average transient time increases exponentially with the network size and can be modeled as a Poisson process in experiment and simulation. This exponential scaling is a result of a synchronization rate that follows a power law of the phase-space volume.Comment: http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.90.03090

Reservoir computing with a single time-delay autonomous Boolean node

We demonstrate reservoir computing with a physical system using a single autonomous Boolean logic element with time-delay feedback. The system generates a chaotic transient with a window of consistency lasting between 30 and 300 ns, which we show is sufficient for reservoir computing. We then characterize the dependence of computational performance on system parameters to find the best operating point of the reservoir. When the best parameters are chosen, the reservoir is able to classify short input patterns with performance that decreases over time. In particular, we show that four distinct input patterns can be classified for 70 ns, even though the inputs are only provided to the reservoir for 7.5 ns.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure