Showing papers on "Principle of least effort published in 2006"

Iranian engineers' information needs and seeking habits: an agro-industry company experience

Abstract: Introduction. This descriptive research attempted to investigate the information seeking behaviour of engineers at Khuzestan Sugar-Cane and By-Product Company in Iran. Method. To collect the data, a questionnaire was distributed using Likert-type questions with six points ranging from 'never use' to 'very useful'. Of the 250 questionnaires distributed, 158 (63.2%) were used in the data analyses. The reliability coefficient was measured by the Cronbach Alpha which was 0.81 Analysis. Analysis of variance and the Tukey test were used to test the sole hypothesis of the research and to see if engineers who worked in various sites were different in their information-seeking behaviour. To answer the research questions, descriptive statistics were employed. Results. The results showed that the engineers in different work areas were significantly different in terms of information-seeking behaviour. The most important motivations for seeking information were: to develop their knowledge and expertise; to be able to use new job-related technologies and to be up-to-date in their specialty. Conclusions. Distance appears to have impact on information use and information-seeking behaviour of engineers. Thus, librarians must consider the Zipf's 'principle of least effort' in serving their clients.

Technology and the Gene for Minimizing Effort

Abstract: There is something so natural, so obvious, that it's invisible. That something is our knee-jerk association of value with technology's promise of ease, speed, convenience, and power. Google the keywords "Made Easy" and you get more than 70 million hits. Substitute "Fast" and over 1.6 billion sites check-in. This paper questions the automatic tie-in of goodness with human effort removal. It launches on the late Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf's Principle of Least Effort as it bears on the evolution, marketing, use, and abuse of technology. In a world not designed for our convenience, it made perfect sense to preserve what was once precious - food energy. Since effort burns energy, there was survival value in discovering and incorporating technology that was effort efficient. Today, in a developed world transformed to the tune of us, a world where acquiring food is as hard as letting your GPS talk you to the nearest McDrive-Up window, the instinct is fast getting us into accelerating trouble. Making life a little easier thanks to a specific product, service, or technique, is not the problem. It's the sheer sum total. With so many things capitalizing on this ship-out-of-water instinct to minimize effort, individually and collectively, physically and mentally, we're losing it because we're not using it. Soaring obesity, a kind of inner global warming, in America especially, is one hard to dismiss signature of the loss. Unfortunately, there's more. Looking at the knee that jerked to the hammer of ease is a first step en route to putting order back into the technology with humans system where it belongs (in us).

Alphabets and the Principle of Least Effort

Abstract: Alphabet systems have made the recording of information an efficient matter. As a consequence, they have made it possible for human civilizations to progress quickly and expansively. Alphabet characters are derivatives of pictographs, allowing for a more condensed means of recording and transmitting knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to argue that alphabets came about, in fact, to do just this - namely, to make knowledge representation efficient. One of the first to study the "efficient" nature of letters empirically was the Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who demonstrated that there is universally a correlation between the length of a specific word (in number of letters) and its rank order in a language. This paper will look at Zipf's work and assess its importance to semiotic theory, especially as it relates to the nature of signs and how they express meaning.