Evidence-based practice comprises four fundamental steps: the formulation of clear clinical questions from a patient’s perspective; searching the literature; critically appraising the evidence and incorporating into practice. The Network for Evidence-Based Practice in Northern and Yorkshire (NEBPINY) seeks to establish a multi-disciplinary network of primary healthcare practitioners committed to evidence-based practice. Four interventions have been offered as part of an implementation programme: critical appraisal skills teaching; evidence-based guidelines; support for clinical audit and in-practice facilitation. Currently, three main issues are emerging from the nursing perspective: access to the evidence; knowledge of and confidence in applying critical appraisal skills, and the importance of teamwork. In-practice facilitation has encouraged meetings, for the common purpose of exploring the evidence-based guidelines and their potential impact upon practice. For some it has also been an opportunity to: discuss their own individual management of care with colleagues; to increase their awareness of the different roles played by each member and to exchange information and ideas.

In this paper, I examine the role of human and digital actants in various material and spatial configurations during the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) e-assessment events. It reports on an investigation into how data are produced and subsequently fed into statistical models that in turn produce analyses of skills in ‘centres of calculation’. These data are then used to produce reports, scientific papers, marketing documents and visualizations that profoundly affect how we understand concepts such as literacy or skill. Drawing upon the theoretical resources of Actor Network Theory, this investigation employs a new and innovative methodology, trace ethnography, to follow the distributed agency of hypermobile digital actants. I examine the detail of e-assessment events and interactions between coded technologies and people and how these are translated into statements about what it means to be literate. This, in turn, highlights the role of non-governmental organizations in influencing educational and economic policy-making through the intensification of data production.

This paper examines the investment value of financial analysts' advice (earnings forecasts and stock recommendations) to shareholders around two recent bubble periods in the United Kingdom: the dot‐com bubble period and the credit bubble period. We find that analysts' advice is valuable at the firm level, as reflected in their recommendations for high‐tech stocks before and after the dot‐com bubble burst. However, at the aggregate level, in neither bubble period do we uncover a stable relation between average stock returns and analysts' advice. The key to the lack of predictive power of analysts' advice does not seem to be their predictable nature, as the responsiveness of returns to such news, predicted or not, varies widely around the bubble periods studied.

International Large Scale Assessments have been producing data about educational attainment for over 60 years. More recently however, these assessments as tests have become digitally and computationally complex and increasingly rely on the calculative work performed by algorithms. In this article I first consider the coordination of relations between the human and non-human agents that perform the day-to-day tasks of data production used in economic and educational policymaking and practice. I examine the calculative agencies of an assemblage of algorithms encoded in the testing software for the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. These algorithms perform the sampling, sorting, scoring, and result prediction of test takers and items during digital assessment events. Second, I examine the role of psychometric practices and educational testing theories, and in particular, Item Response Theory, in the work of sorting and detaching situated practices into equivalence spaces that they can be manipulated and transformed by into calculable entities. Combined with digital assessment technologies, the probabilistic statistical techniques used by Item Response Theory are able to produce digital data such as test scores capable of transforming situated literacy practices into psychological constructs that can then be classified and rendered calculable. This reinforces the calculative agency of tests as well as a consensus about the legitimacy and necessity of the testing technologies as the dominant way to produce educational data.

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