Elevated corticosterone in feathers correlates with corticosterone-induced decreased feather quality: A validation study

The newly described technique of extracting corticosterone (CORT) from bird feathers may serve as a less invasive, more integrated measure of a bird\u27s stress response. Previous work indicated that elevated plasma CORT resulted in poorer quality feathers during molt. We tested the hypothesis that a direct link exists between plasma and feather CORT concentrations. We experimentally increased plasma CORT concentrations using implants and found that the corresponding rise in CORT could be detected in feathers grown during implantation. Furthermore, CORT levels in two feathers grown at the same time from the same bird were very consistent. These results provide evidence that elevated CORT is a causative factor in decreasing feather quality during molt. However, there remain technical details that suggest caution when interpreting data from CORT extracted from feathers. Different portions of a growing feather did not necessarily reflect changes in plasma CORT at the time different parts of the feather were forming, a standard pool of homogenized feathers indicated that sample mass affects measured feather CORT concentration, and different antibodies produced different measured CORT concentrations, leaving in doubt the exact steroid being assayed. © 2011 The Authors

Canadian federal public administration and the COVID-19 crisis: lessons to be learned for the upcoming digital transformation

As it is the case with all public administrations, the Canadian Federal Public Administration swiftly mobilized to provide assistance to the Government of Canada amidst the COVID-19 crisis that has been shaking the entire world for the past few weeks (Fillion, 2020; The Canadian Press, 2020). Beyond daily decisions made by the Executive since the beginning of the crisis and which will continue to be made in the future whether or not there is a pandemic, two distinct elements have caught our attention from the administrative perspective of governance and information management: namely connectivity and computability. These fundamental factors, which will be analyzed more extensively throughout the various post-mortem assessments, are certainly less pressing and less apparent in the current context given the emergency to take actions. Nevertheless, they remain paramount to the capacity of our public administrations to meet citizens’ expectations nowadays and in the future

Contributorship and division of labor in knowledge production

Scientific authorship has been increasingly complemented with contributorship statements. While such statements are said to ensure more equitable credit and responsibility attribution, they also provide an opportunity to examine the roles and functions that authors play in the construction of knowledge and the relationship between these roles and authorship order. Drawing on a comprehensive and multidisciplinary dataset of 87,002 documents in which contributorship statements are found, this article examines the forms that division of labor takes across disciplines, the relationships between various types of contributions, as well as the relationships between the contribution types and various indicators of authors’ seniority. It shows that scientific work is more highly divided in medical disciplines than in mathematics, physics, and disciplines of the social sciences, and that, with the exception of medicine, the writing of the paper is the task most often associated with authorship. The results suggest a clear distinction between contributions that could be labeled as ‘technical’ and those that could be considered ‘conceptual’: While conceptual tasks are typically associated with authors with higher seniority, technical tasks are more often performed by younger scholars. Finally, results provide evidence of a U-shaped relationship between extent of contribution and author order: In all disciplines, first and last authors typically contribute to more tasks than middle authors. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for the reward system of science

L’administration publique fédérale et la crise du COVID-19 : leçons à tirer pour la transformation numérique à venir

Comme toutes les administrations publiques, l’administration publique fédérale s’est vite mobilisée pour appuyer le gouvernement dans la crise qui secoue le monde entier depuis quelques semaines (Fillion, 2020; La Presse canadienne, 2020). Au-delà des décisions de l’exécutif qui ont été prises chaque jour depuis le début de la crise et continueront de l’être dans l’avenir qu’il y ait ou non pandémie, deux éléments ont retenu notre attention du point de vue de la gouvernance et de la gestion de l’information soit la connectivité et la calculabilité. Ces éléments qu’on analysera plus en détail dans les divers post-mortem sont certes moins pressants et moins apparents dans le contexte actuel vu l’urgence d’agir. Ils demeurent toutefois centraux à la capacité de nos administrations publiques de répondre aux attentes citoyennes aujourd’hui et dans l’avenir

Quelques défis sur l’usage de l’intelligence artificielle dans les organisations publiques : l’exemple du 3-1-1

Le présent article est basé sur deux publications qui ont chacune analysé un aspect de l’usage de l’intelli-gence artificielle dans le fonctionnement des organisations publiques. La première étude s’est penchée sur l’utilisation de l’intelligence artificielle pour harnacher les données recueillies à travers le 3-1-1 dans une municipalité québécoise. La seconde s’est interrogée sur l’importance et la forme que pourrait prendre la réglementation visant à assurer une gouvernance algorithmique appropriée autour des usages de l’intelli-gence artificielle. L’objectif poursuivi ici est de mettre en commun ces deux réflexions pour faire ressortir quelques pistes de solution aux défis que peut poser l’usage de l’intelligence artificielle dans une organisation

Infants’ intentionally communicative vocalisations elicit responses from caregivers and are the best predictors of the transition to language: a longitudinal investigation of infants’ vocalisations, gestures, and word production

What aspects of infants’ prelinguistic communication are most valuable for learning to speak, and why? We test whether early vocalisations and gestures drive the transition to word use because, in addition to indicating motoric readiness, they 1) are early instances of intentional communication and 2) elicit verbal responses from caregivers. In study 1, 11-month-olds (N = 134) were observed to coordinate vocalisations and gestures with gaze to their caregiver’s face at above chance rates, indicating that they are plausibly intentionally communicative. Study 2 tested whether those infant communicative acts that were gaze-coordinated best predicted later expressive vocabulary. We report a novel procedure for predicting vocabulary via multi-model inference over a comprehensive set of infant behaviours produced at 11- and 12-months (n = 58). This makes it possible to establish the relative predictive value of different behaviours that are hierarchically organised by level of granularity. Gaze-coordinated vocalisations were the most valuable predictors of expressive vocabulary size up to 24 months. Study 3 established that caregivers were more likely to respond to gaze-coordinated behaviours. Moreover, the dyadic combination of infant gaze-coordinated vocalisation and caregiver response was by far the best predictor of later vocabulary size. We conclude that practice with prelinguistic intentional communication facilitates the leap to symbol use. Learning is optimised when caregivers respond to intentional vocalisations with appropriate language