Large-scale complex IT systems

Society depends on complex IT systems created by integrating and orchestrating independently managed systems. The incredible increase in scale and complexity in them over the past decade means new software-engineering techniques are needed to help us cope with their inherent complexity. The key characteristic of these systems is that they are assembled from other systems that are independently controlled and managed. While there is increasing awareness in the software engineering community of related issues, the most relevant background work comes from systems engineering. The interacting algos that led to the Flash Crash represent an example of a coalition of systems, serving the purposes of their owners and cooperating only because they have to. The owners of the individual systems were competing finance companies that were often mutually hostile. Each system jealously guarded its own information and could change without consulting any other system.

Self-organization in social tagging systems

Individuals often imitate each other to fall into the typical group, leading to a self-organized state of typical behaviors in a community. In this paper, we model self-organization in social tagging systems and illustrate the underlying interaction and dynamics. Specifically, we introduce a model in which individuals adjust their own tagging tendency to imitate the average tagging tendency. We found that when users are of low confidence, they tend to imitate others and lead to a self-organized state with active tagging. On the other hand, when users are of high confidence and are stubborn to change, tagging becomes inactive. We observe a phase transition at a critical level of user confidence when the system changes from one regime to the other. The distributions of post length obtained from the model are compared to real data, which show good agreement. © 2011 American Physical Society.

Does the subject content of the pharmacy degree course influence the community pharmacist’s views on competencies for practice?

Do community pharmacists coming from different educational backgrounds rank the importance of competences for practice differently-or is the way in which they see their profession more influenced by practice than university education? A survey was carried out on 68 competences for pharmacy practice in seven countries with different pharmacy education systems in terms of the relative importance of the subject areas chemical and medicinal sciences. Community pharmacists were asked to rank the competences in terms of relative importance for practice; competences were divided into personal and patient-care competences. The ranking was very similar in the seven countries suggesting that evaluation of competences for practice is based more on professional experience than on prior university education. There were some differences for instance in research-related competences and these may be influenced, by education.