Methodological considerations for measuring glucocorticoid metabolites in feathers

Methodological considerations for measuring glucocorticoid metabolites in feathers

In recent years, researchers have begun to use corticosteroid metabolites in feathers (fCORT) as a metric of stress physiology in birds. However, there remain substantial questions about how to measure fCORT most accurately. Notably, small samples contain artificially high amounts of fCORT per millimetre of feather (the small sample artefact). Furthermore, it appears that fCORT is correlated wi...

Methodological considerations for measuring spontaneous physical activity in rodents.

When exploring biological determinants of spontaneous physical activity (SPA), it is critical to consider whether methodological factors differentially affect rodents and the measured SPA. We determined whether acclimation time, sensory stimulation, vendor, or chamber size affected measures in rodents with varying propensity for SPA. We used principal component analysis to determine which SPA c...

Measuring Individual Differences in Decision Biases: Methodological Considerations

Individual differences in people's susceptibility to heuristics and biases (HB) are often measured by multiple-bias questionnaires consisting of one or a few items for each bias. This research approach relies on the assumptions that (1) different versions of a decision bias task measure are interchangeable as they measure the same cognitive failure; and (2) that some combination of these tasks ...

Measuring coral calcification under ocean acidification: methodological considerations

Applying FEATHERS for Travel Demand Analysis: Model Considerations

Activity-based models of travel demand have received considerable attention in transportation planning and forecasting over the last few decades. FEATHERS (The Forecasting Evolutionary Activity-Travel of Households and their Environmental Repercussions), developed by the Transportation Research Institute of Hasselt University, Belgium, is a micro-simulation framework developed to facilitate the...