Materiality, health informatics and the limits of knowledge production

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014 Contemporary societies increasingly rely on complex and sophisticated information systems for a wide variety of tasks and, ultimately, knowledge about the world in which we live. Those systems are central to the kinds of problems our systems and sub-systems face such as health and medical diagnosis, treatment and care. While health information systems represent a continuously expanding field of knowledge production, we suggest that they carry forward significant limitations, particularly in their claims to represent human beings as living creatures and in their capacity to critically reflect on the social, cultural and political origins of many forms of data ‘representation’. In this paper we take these ideas and explore them in relation to the way we see healthcare information systems currently functioning. We offer some examples from our own experience in healthcare settings to illustrate how unexamined ideas about individuals, groups and social categories of people continue to influence health information systems and practices as well as their resulting knowledge production. We suggest some ideas for better understanding how and why this still happens and look to a future where the reflexivity of healthcare administration, the healthcare professions and the information sciences might better engage with these issues. There is no denying the role of health informatics in contemporary healthcare systems but their capacity to represent people in those datascapes has a long way to go if the categories they use to describe and analyse human beings are to produce meaningful knowledge about the social world and not simply to replicate past ideologies of those same categories

Observation of hard scattering in photoproduction events with a large rapidity gap at HERA

Events with a large rapidity gap and total transverse energy greater than 5 GeV have been observed in quasi-real photoproduction at HERA with the ZEUS detector. The distribution of these events as a function of the $\gamma p$ centre of mass energy is consistent with diffractive scattering. For total transverse energies above 12 GeV, the hadronic final states show predominantly a two-jet structure with each jet having a transverse energy greater than 4 GeV. For the two-jet events, little energy flow is found outside the jets. This observation is consistent with the hard scattering of a quasi-real photon with a colourless object in the proton.Comment: 19 pages, latex, 4 figures appended as uuencoded fil

Modelling length-at-age variability under irreversible growth

In this paper, we describe a discrete-time formalism for describing the dynamics of the size-at-age distribution of a cohort of individuals exhibiting irreversible von Bertalanffy growth in a statistically uniform random environment. This formalism yields a highly efficient numerical implementation, which is particularly suited to automatic optimization. In the special case where mortality is sufficiently size-independent not to vary substantially across the bulk of the size distribution at any given age, we can further increase this efficiency by deriving compact update rules for the mean and coefficient of variation of size-at-age. In this case, we also demonstrate that the depensatory effect of random growth variability and the compensatory effect of deterministic von Bertalanffy growth balance to yield an attracting (initial condition independent) trajectory of mean length and length coefficient of variation against age. We demonstrate the applicability and extensibility of this formalism by two exemplary applications - juvenile salmonids and demersal cod