Constant Connectivity Practices: Enduring Interruptions or Attending to Urgency

This research focuses on work practices and aims to explore how connectivity is appropriated within practices

A Synthetic Representation of Inter-Organizational Multi-Actor Collaborative Structures: A Pragmatic Look at U.S. E-Prescribing

A synthetic representation of the collaborative structure in U.S. e-prescribing offers explanations for unintended enactments (e.g., surrogate prescribers) of this healthcare information technology. The generation and transmission of a prescription requires collaboration between at least a prescriber, pharmacy, and patient. The interactions of these actors are modeled through one or more pairs of synthetic representations built using various theoretical lenses such as language-action models. The pluralist pragmatic basis for building a synthetic representation is interpretive synthesis used widely in healthcare. The paper describes how 240+ academic articles in various fields of healthcare are used to synthesize a model of existing (manual prescribing) and intended (e-prescribing) practices. Comparison of these two synthetic models identifies differences such as change in roles or new relationships. These differences can then be interpreted through a theoretical framework which ultimately leads to research propositions, informing design or future policy

Catalyst: Piloting Capabilities for more Transparent Text Analytics

The surge and value of unstructured text is attracting substantial research and industry attention. Subsequently we are witnessing novel techniques and algorithms that are performing increasingly sophisticated text mining tasks. However the majority of such techniques are opaque, making it hard to trace the provenance of the analytical task on hand. We propose Catalyst, a framework to automatically transform, enrich and expose text into a linked graph-based layer to enable more transparent processing and access to the text elements. In brief, Catalyst extracts text dependencies, performs sentiment analysis, detects semantic relatedness, and links the text elements into a semantic triple-store that enables an easy access to the text entities through direct query functionalities. We plan to evaluate the performance of Catalyst by processing a dataset of user reviews around the dimensions of an evaluation model deployed in the context of e-government services

Affordances and Information Systems Research: Taking Stock and Moving Forward

The term affordance appears with increasing frequency in the Information Systems (IS) literature. Nevertheless, those who study information technologies/information systems (IT/IS) via the affordance lens often have different views about its origin, meaning, and appropriate application in IS research. In turn, not spelling out the related assumptions and boundaries inherent in these diverse views may have hindered a wider and more cumulative adoption of the affordance lens in IS research. This paper offers a potential solution by (1) synthesizing the ecological psychology literature to suggest five key modules of the affordance concept relevant to IS research and (2) taking stock of IS research that has employed the affordance concept and classifying it according to its focus on three key affordance elements: IT artifact, user, and context. Finally, this paper presents a set of challenges, opportunities, and recommendations regarding how IS researchers can advance affordance-based research in the field

The Structural and practical Investigation of the Rothamsted Model in Assessing the Effect of Climate Change on Soil Carbon Sources

Many studies have projected increasing the temperature with decreasing precipitation for future decades in different regions of Iran. But, few studies have evaluated the effect of climate change on the dynamics of soil organic carbon (SOC) sources. One of the obstacles is the lack of recognition of carbon models and the lack of sufficient information on the required data and how to supply the data. The purpose of present study was to investigate the structural and practical application of the RothC model as the most widely used model worldwide for assessing the effects of climate change on soil carbon sources. In this study, the model’s function for calculating SOC and the factors affecting SOC decomposition, including temperature correction coefficient, moisture correction coefficient, and vegetation correction coefficient were completely investigated. Then, in the application section of the model, the required data and how to provide them in the conditions of Iran, and finally validation and implementation of the model for future climate conditions were discussed. Results showed that the RothC model is now the best carbon model for Iran conditions due to the simplicity and availability of the required data to its implementation. Generally, the present study provides useful information needed in implementation and validating the RothC model to simulate and predict the effects of climate change on the dynamics of soil carbon sources

Role of Innovation Incubators and Accelerators in Alleviating the Refugee Crisis

A number of shy yet innovative ventures were identified in refugee camps in Lebanon to bring in education, health or work to refugees. Many social enterprises are active in the Mena region and Lebanon attempting to address a protracted refugee crisis. In the context of limited research on social enterprise in the MENA region in general and on incubators and accelerators we aim to explore their capacity to develop these ventures and increase social inclusion and development, and help resolve the refugee crisis. Our exploratory research contributes to the ICT in social development literature. First, we point out how refugee-oriented startups need to be specifically targeted as a locus of support activity much like other “markets” in order for this ecosystem to grow and develop. Second, the form of this support may have to include specialized incubators, accelerators and other capacity building initiatives for the ecosystem to thrive