Common linguistic habits render information as an attribute of messages or data, or as the purpose of human communication – as if information were an objective entity that could be carried from one place to another, purchased, or owned. This conception is seriously misleading. Gregory Bateson (1972, 381) defined information as “any difference which makes
Information science (IS) is a multidisciplinary field concerned with “facilitating the effective communication of desired information between human generator and human user” (Belkin 1978, 58). IS became established as an academic discipline with the creation of the American Society for Information Science in 1937 (now abbreviated ASIS&T) and the UK Institute of Information Scientists in
Information scanning concerns information acquisition from routine patterns of exposure to mediated and interpersonal sources. The essential idea is that even when individuals are not actively seeking information on a specific topic, routine use of media and interactions with other people yield exposures to information that affect knowledge, beliefs, and behavior. For many issues and
During the latter half of the twentieth century, the world’s established democratic nations – along with those nations seeking to adopt democratic principles – experienced a sea change in governance with the rise of transparency, the idea that the workings of government should be visible. This global movement is grounded in the accountability principle of
Value of Information (VOI) is an outgrowth of advances in Bayesian decision theory and welfare economics that seeks to quantify prospectively the benefits and costs of research and development (R&D) activities under uncertainty. VOI allows for the identification of sources of treatment uncertainty and provides a method to calculate the incremental value of pursuing research
Policy Relevance The general issue of balancing the value of evidence about the performance of a technology and the value of providing patients with access to a technology can be seen as central to a number of policy questions in many different types of healthcare systems (HCS). For example, decisions about approval or reimbursement of
Information processing is an approach to the study of behavior which seeks to explain what people think, say, and do by describing the mental systems that give rise to those phenomena. At the heart of the information-processing perspective is the conception of the mind as a representational system. That is, the mind is viewed as
There is an adage, “Give people a fish and they eat for a day, but teach them to fish and they eat for a lifetime.” This wise maxim succinctly captures the ultimate aim of the cognitive information processing (CIP) approach to career counseling—that is, enabling individuals to become skillful career problem solvers and decision makers.
During the early part of the 20th century, psychology was dominated by the school of thought known as behaviorism, which emphasized that psychological processes could only be examined at the level of observable behaviors. This approach assumed that all behaviors could be understood in terms of simple stimulus–response (S–R) relationships and that references to mental
The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) refers to the database of worker and occupational attributes that succeeds the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) as the primary source of information for occupations in the U.S. economy. Although the DOT had held this title for many years, numerous events— including the explosion of