The Norwegian eHealth Platform: Development Through Cultivation Strategies and Incremental Changes

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Perfect variations in Romance

The morpho-syntactic configuration auxiliary (have or be) + past participle known as the have-perfect functions as a tense-aspect category in many Western European languages. Synchronic variation within Romance nicely illustrates the developmental pattern described as the aoristic drift, whereby the perfect develops over time into a perfective past with full-fledged past meanings. A parallel corpus study of L’Étranger by Albert Camus (1942) and its translations using the Translation Mining methodology provides empirical data supporting the view that modern French, Romanian and Italian make a more liberal use of the perfect, whereas the perfect distribution in Spanish is closer to (but not identical to) English. Catalan occupies an intermediate position and Portuguese has the most restricted perfect among the Romance languages. We argue that this variation is best captured by a perfect scale, without a clear cut-off point between perfect and perfective past meaning. The meaning ingredients that govern the distribution of the have-perfect across Romance languages emerge from the parallel corpus. They include lexical, compositional and discourse semantics, and range from sensitivity to aspectual class, pluractionality, hodiernal and pre-hodiernal past time reference to narration.

The challenges of implementing packaged hospital electronic prescribing and medicine administration systems in UK hospitals: premature purchase of immature solutions?

The UK National Health Service is making major efforts to implement Hospital Electronic Prescribing and Medicine Administration (HEPMA) to improve patient safety and quality of care. Substantial public investments have attracted a wide range of UK and overseas suppliers offering Commercial-Off –The-Shelf (COTS) solutions. A lack of (UK) implementation experience and weak supplier-user relationships are reflected in systems with limited configurability, poorly matched to the needs and practices of English hospitals. This situation echoes the history of comparable corporate information infrastructures - Enterprise Resource Planning systems - in the 1980s/1990s. UK government intervention prompted a similar swarming of immature, often unfinished, products into the market. This resulted, in both cases, in protracted and difficult implementation processes as vendors and adopters struggled to get the systems to work and match the circumstances of the adopting organisations. An analysis of the influence of the Installed Base on Information Infrastructures should explore how the evolution of COTS solutions is conditioned by the structure of adopter and vendor ‘communities’

Infrastructuring internet of things for public governance

Abstract Networks of smart devices referred to as Internet of Things (IoT) have valuable applications across policy areas in the public sector. However, we lack knowledge on how IoT actually takes part in pro- cesses of societal decision making and its social implications. In this paper, we report from research in progress on IoT and big data in the public sector. Empirically, we study three cases of utilization of IoT in three domains where sensors and wireless infrastructures are put in place. Specifically, the case studies are in the contexts of city management (smart city), healthcare and environmental moni- toring. Theoretically we make use of the concept of infrastructuring to go beyond the focus on IoT in- frastructures as networks of technical objects, and rather foreground IoT as political, value-laden and performative configurations. We focus on algorithmic phenomena to examine the processes by which algorithms shape reality. Our preliminary findings show that this is a promising direction for re- search. This study will contribute to improve the understanding of how IoT arrangements transform processes of governance in the public sector