Dances with disciplines? Practice and performance in multidisciplinary electronic patient record (EPR) research

Rather like archetypal stories (such as ‘Dances with Wolves’ or ‘Avatar’) that feature individuals who embark on adventures and are changed by their exposure to natives, social scientists and others have to negotiate new ways of working within the multidisciplinary team. Multidisciplinary research is valued for drawing on multiple knowledge bases to redefine problems and processes and to reach new understandings and solutions. Designing a project so that the practice and performance of various disciplines are truly interactive and interdependent rather than just parallel work-packages should offer maximum benefit but can be challenging to plan and implement successfully. A new research team brings a new set of challenges, potential barriers and facilitating factors to the table, all operating within a technologically dense environment (TDE). In this presentation, we will describe our Patient Record Enhancement Project (PREP) - the overall aim of which is to develop strategies for making available, for research and audit purposes, medical information that is ‘concealed’ in the free text parts of the primary care EPR. The research involves field work studying the creation and use of the primary care EPR to better understand the contexts within which coded data and free text forms are used. We work within a highly multidisciplinary team including social scientists, epidemiologists, doctors, statisticians, computer scientists and human-computer interaction analysts who all work on various aspects of the research in different ways. Drawing on our experiences during analysis of a particular data set- on ovarian cancer- and on insights from the field studies, we will reflect on how team practice and performance is mutually shaped and influenced. We will illustrate some of the slips and some of the successes that have emerged as we strive to function efficiently as a truly interdisciplinary team that crosses traditional boundaries of practice and performance

On Chern-Simons theory with an inhomogeneous gauge group and BF theory knot invariants

We study the Chern-Simons topological quantum field theory with an inhomogeneous gauge group, a non-semi-simple group obtained from a semi-simple one by taking its semi-direct product with its Lie algebra. We find that the standard knot observables (i.e. traces of holonomies along knots) essentially vanish, but yet, the non-semi-simplicity of our gauge group allows us to consider a class of un-orthodox observables which breaks gauge invariance at one point and which lead to a non-trivial theory on long knots in $\mathbb{R}^3$. We have two main morals : 1. In the non-semi-simple case, there is more to observe in Chern-Simons theory! There might be other interesting non semi-simple gauge groups to study in this context beyond our example. 2. In our case of an inhomogeneous gauge group, we find that Chern-Simons theory with the un-orthodox observable is actually the same as 3D BF theory with the Cattaneo-Cotta-Ramusino-Martellini knot observable. This leads to a simplification of their results and enables us to generalize and solve a problem they posed regarding the relation between BF theory and the Alexander-Conway polynomial. Our result is that the most general knot invariant coming from pure BF topological quantum field theory is in the algebra generated by the coefficients of the Alexander-Conway polynomial.Comment: To appear in Journal of Mathematical Physics vol.46 issue 12. Available on http://link.aip.org/link/jmapaq/v46/i1

On the Minority Game : Analytical and Numerical Studies

We investigate further several properties of the minority game we have recently introduced. We explain the origin of the phase transition and give an analytical expression of $\sigma^2/N$ in the $N\ll2^M$ region. The ability of the players to learn a given payoff is also analyzed, and we show that the Darwinian evolution process tends to a self-organized state, in particular, the life-time distribution is a power-law with exponent -2. Furthermore, we study the influence of identical players on their gain and on the system's performance. Finally, we show that large brains always take advantage of small brains.Comment: 9 pages, 19 figures, accepted for publication in Physica A. Latex compilation on VMS systems should now wor

The chromatographic identification of some biologically important phosphate esters

the objective of the present work was to provide a means for separating and indentifying phosphate esters involved in glycolysis in higher plants. Paper chromatography of phosphate esters has been employed by several workers, most notably Benson et al. (1) and Hanes and Isherwood (2). Benson's procedures were not primarily designed for identification of phosphate esters and gave low Rr values for the phosphate compounds of particular interest to us. The unidimensional methods of Hanes and Isherwood do not result in adequate resolution of the complex mixtures such as are obtained from our plant materials. The present procedure is based on two-dimensional chromatography with successive development in an acid and in a basic solvent. The solvents finally selected gave the best over-all resolution of the intermediates involved in plant glycolysis. Undoubtedly the resolution of certain pairs of compounds may be improved by suitable modifications. We have in addition made certain improvements in the procedure for locating the chromatographed materials