The discursive structure of the social-technical divide: the example of information systems development1

The social and technical are commonly defined in opposition to each other. Yet technology practitioners are often quite comfortable with the idea that the technical is constitutively social. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a computerised information systems development project, this paper examines various usages of notions of ‘technical’. Attempts to situate the study at the ‘technical core’ of the project were met with a series of rebuffs. ‘Technical’ talk is to be understood as a categorising device which does boundary work. Technical talk invokes and performs a disjunction between networks of social relationships and stipulates a moral order with associated norms for acceptance and transition. The difficulty of penetrating the intelligibility of technical talk is understandable as a struggle in familiarising oneself with the routine social actions of a separate community. In addition, the private sphere of the technical is often distanced in time. The costs involved in journeying into the future are analogous to those of penetrating alien cultures. Ideas of progress and advance are often associated with the invocation of ‘the technical’. These connote a notion of timing which reinforces the distance and difference of—and hence depicts the costs involved in penetrating—removed sets of social relationships.     

The relationship between Type A Behaviour Pattern (TABP) and in-basket performance: recognition as moderator

The relationship between Type A Behaviour Pattern (TABP) and performance on an in-basket task was examined. Some of the subjects (n=40) were told that they would be recognized for superior performance, while others (n=22) were not given this information. Results indicated no relationship between a global TABP measure and all the measures of in-basket performance. Achievement Strivings (AS), a component of TABP, was positively related to overall effort, overall quality of performance, and interpersonal sensitivity. None of these relations was moderated by recognition. However, it was found that the relation between AS and use of delegation was moderated by recognition. AS was strongly and negatively related to delegation only among those who were told they would be recognized for superior performance. Impatience-Irritability (I-I), another component of TABP, was unrelated to measures of in-basket performance, although the relation between I-I and interpersonal sensitivity was moderated by recognition. I-I was strongly and negatively related to interpersonal sensitivity only among those not told that they would be recognized for superior performance. Implications of these findings are discussed and future research on TABP is suggested.     

Delivery, Management and Access Model for E_prints and Open Access Journals

A study conducted for the (United Kingdom) Joint Information Systems Committee reviewed possible models for implementing Open Access to research reports in institutional archives and Open Access journals. The conclusion was that a “harvesting model,” in which full texts reside on the original servers but metadata are harvested, held, and enhanced by a central service, was preferable to either a centralized national service or a completely decentralized service for the UK. The study included issues of populating institutional archives (IAs) and some form of mandatory archiving for publicly funded research results to obtain a critical mass of Open Access material in such a system.     

BUILDING ON PRETREATMENT CHANGE TO CONSTRUCT THE THERAPEUTIC SOLUTION: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

This paper reports the authors' "accidental" discovery that change in the problem situation frequently occurs prior to the first session, and that clients can often recall and describe such changes, if prompted. The authors describe one technique for eliciting reports of pretreatment change from clients, and discuss the results of an informal survey of 30 families who responded to this intervention. Rather than discounting pretreatment change as a "flight into health," it can be framed in Batesonian terms as a "difference that makes a difference."     

Open Source Software

Abstract

This article provides a brief introduction to the open source software (OSS) movement in libraries from a serialist's perspective. After defining what the open source software movement is about, the article highlights three examples of OSS applications in libraries: jake (Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment); Koha and OpenBiblio, two open source library systems; and MyLibrary@NCState.It concludes by suggesting some sources for further research and study and encourages serialists to get involved in this worthwhile movement. Serials Review 2003; 29:36–39.     

Resolving a Multi-Million Dollar Contract Dispute With a Latin Square

The City of New York negotiated a dispute over the performance of new garbage trucks purchased from a vehicle manufacturer. The dispute concerned the fulfillment of a specification in the purchase contract that the trucks load a minimum full-load of 12.5 tons of household refuse. On behalf of the City, but in cooperation with the manufacturer, the City's Department of Sanitation and consulting statisticians tested fulfillment of the contract specification, employing a Latin Square design for routing trucks. We present the classical analysis using a linear model and analysis of variance. We also show how fixed, mixed, and random effect models are useful in analyzing the results of the test. Finally, we take a Bayesian perspective to demonstrate how the information from the data overcomes the difference between the prior densities of the city and the manufacturer for the load capacities of the trucks to result in much closer posterior densities. This procedure might prove useful in similar negotiations. Supplementary material including the data and R code for computations in the article are available online.     

How a Catastrophe Found the Past Hurricane Floyd and the Rise of Historical Consciousness in Princeville,North Carolina

History has no voice. It requires those who care enough about the past to put it into words. But to narrate the past, we must be conscious of it. This paper is an inquiry into how a small town in North Carolina found its unique history in the wake of a catastrophic hurricane. In 1885, Princeville, North Carolina became the oldest town in America charted by free Blacks. In spite of its historical significance, over time the town's storied past was silenced. By the latter half of the 20th century, the unique place of Princeville in African-American history, indeed in United States history, was known to only a few elderly people; and they did not talk about it. The reasons a muted past begins to matter are themselves rooted in history. In 1999 Princeville was flooded by the deluge that was Hurricane Floyd. In the midst of mayhem this wordless past found a voice. In this paper we explore how a massive storm created space for the emergence of an historical consciousness among the town's residents. We also look at how the people of Princeville are leveraging their new found past to secure a safer, more predictable future.     

Randomized Online Scheduling with Delivery Times

We study one of the most basic online scheduling models, online one machine scheduling with delivery times where jobs arrive over time. We provide the first randomized algorithm for this model, show that it is 1.55370-competitive and show that this analysis is tight. The best possible deterministic algorithm is 1.61803-competitive. Our algorithm is a distribution between two deterministic algorithms. We show that any such algorithm is no better than 1.5-competitive. To our knowledge, this is the first lower bound proof for a distribution between two deterministic algorithms.