Showing papers on "Principle of least effort published in 2015"

Everyday life information seeking behaviour in relation to the environment: Disposable information?

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe one of the preliminary results from interviews conducted as part of a PhD study into examining the role of peer and family influences on information-seeking behaviour. Design/methodology/approach – The principal method of data collection was 38 semi-structured critical incident interviews, based on an interview guide and a short questionnaire to collect factual data. Some social network analysis of interviewees’ information sources is considered. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis were used to code the interview transcripts. A naturalistic approach to everyday information seeking is taken. Findings – One of the preliminary findings of this research is that the notion of a new type of information has emerged – disposable information. A new type of information-seeking behaviour is also suggested here for disposable information – disposable information seeking. Disposable information is task specific and likely to only be required by an in...

Zipf’s Law: Balancing Signal Usage Cost and Communication Efficiency

Abstract: We propose a model that explains the reliable emergence of power laws (e.g., Zipf’s law) during the development of different human languages. The model incorporates the principle of least effort in communications, minimizing a combination of the information-theoretic communication inefficiency and direct signal cost. We prove a general relationship, for all optimal languages, between the signal cost distribution and the resulting distribution of signals. Zipf’s law then emerges for logarithmic signal cost distributions, which is the cost distribution expected for words constructed from letters or phonemes.

Towards Creating an Ontology of Social Media Texts

Abstract: Texts live around us just as we live around them. At any instant, there are texts that people write, share, use to get informed, etc. (starting with an advertisement heard on the radio every morning and finishing with the contract of sale signed before a notary). Combining this with the concept of economy in language (or the principle of least effort) – a tendency shared by all humans – consisting in minimizing the amount of effort necessary to achieve the maximum result, it is no wonder why the social media, with its short, informal and context dependent texts, achieved such a high popularity.

Influence of Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort on Library and Information Science Research.

Abstract: Zipf's 1949 book focusing on principle of least effort is not cited in LIS articles until 1958.Zipf's 1949 book has a growing influence on LIS research.Zipf's concept of "Zipf's law" has had the largest influence."Principle of least effort" is the second most cited concept.Information behavior researchers focus on concepts relating to principle of least effort. This study identified the influence of the main concepts contained in Zipf's classic 1949 book entitled Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (HBPLE) on library and information science (LIS) research. The study analyzed LIS articles published between 1949 and 2013 that cited HBPLE. The results showed that HBPLE has a growing influence on LIS research. Of the 17 cited concepts that were identified, the concept of "Zipf's law" was cited most (64.8%), followed by "the principle of least effort" (24.5%). Although the concept of "the principle of least effort," the focus of HBPLE, was not most frequently observed, an increasing trend was evident regarding the influence of this concept. The concept of "the principle of least effort" has been cited mainly by researchers of information behavior and served to support the citing authors' claims. By contrast, the concept of "Zipf's law" received the most attention from bibliometrics research and was used mainly for comparisons with other informetrics laws or research results.

An Implementation and Evaluation of the Least-effort Approach of Crowd Simulation

Abstract: Crowd simulation serves as an important tool in architecture, where efficiency and safety could be improved with the knowledge of how large groups of people behave, and computer graphics as well as entertainment industry, where demands of animating large amounts of avatars exist. This project has implemented and evaluated an approach of crowd simulation based on the Principle of Least Effort, a fundamental rule of human behavior. The approach is capable of simulating thousands of agent in real time, and can be parallelized naturally to utilize the power of multiprocessor.The approach has been implemented using C++ and OpenMP. Results show that the approach generates smooth, collision-free, and visually plausible agent trajectories. To evaluate the approach in a quantitative manner, a set of metrics have been defined, and a set of test cases have been selected. By comparing the approach with RVO, a similar approach that does not consider the Principle of Least Effort, the evaluation shows that optimization based on the principle leads to agent trajectories that cost less effort and time. In further case studies, the approach has been proved to be able to generate a number of emergent phenomena verified in real crowd.