“Think like a librarian,” Milo used to urge us, which might sound less impressive than “Think like a philosopher,” “Think like a psychologist,” or even “Think like a lawyer,” but it did make the point that information wasn’t given, that it had to be actively sought. Once, a student called asking for book titles that might help her with her assigned topic on the pros and cons of marriage. The Library of Congress subject heading “marriage” was too broad to be of much use, and the subheadings in various library catalogs weren’t much better. But remembering James Thurber and E.B. White’s Is Sex Necessary?, I reasoned that there might well be a book on the pros and cons of marriage with an analogous title. Sure enough, Is Marriage Necessary? did turn up as a title in our catalog, and I was able to start the student on her way to a bibliography—nothing special, but our work was full of wonderful, nothing-special moments. Far more impressive was the ingenuity of a colleague who supplied a patron with the names of Korean massage parlors in the Gramercy Park area (yes, someone asked) by combing the Manhattan white pages for names (Oriental Health Spa, Rising Sun Health Club) of likely establishments on and around East Twenty-Third Street. Ours was not to reason why.

In the apprenticeship each of us endured under Milo’s exhausting tutelage before getting anywhere near a telephone, we learned not merely how to find information but how to think about finding information. Don’t take anything for granted; don’t trust your memory; look for the context; put two and three and four sources together, if necessary.

All research… All significant research is, in some respects, bottom-up. There is no alternative. And so, the only research that you can do top-down entirely is research for which you already have the solution.

The paradox of information systems[edit] Drummond suggests in her paper in 2008 that computer-based information systems can undermine or even destroy the organisation that they were meant to support, and it is precisely what makes them useful that makes them destructive – a phenomenon encapsulated by the Icarus Paradox.[9] For examples, a defence communication system is designed to improve efficiency by eliminating the need for meetings between military commanders who can now simply use the system to brief one another or answer to a higher authority. However, this new system becomes destructive precisely because the commanders no longer need to meet face-to-face, which consequently weakened mutual trust, thus undermining the organisation.[10] Ultimately, computer-based systems are reliable and efficient only to a point. For more complex tasks, it is recommended for organisations to focus on developing their workforce. A reason for the paradox is that rationality assumes that more is better, but intensification may be counter-productive.[11]

going back to find something they found before

Data shall be normalized between the organization and its customers and within the organization itself Data shall be easy to transfer and be reusable within the organization and within the partner network Wherever possible data entry shall be avoided and be replaced by data lookup, selection and confirmation utilities instead

Information flow is key to delivering high quality services; if people don’t know what they’re supposed to and when they’re supposed to know it – service suffers.

At the same time, we need to ensure that no information about other unsafe usernames or passwords leaks in the process, and that brute force guessing is not an option. Password Checkup addresses all of these requirements by using multiple rounds of hashing, k-anonymity, and private set intersection with blinding.

Science sorely needs best practices in visual communication as well as in information design, a mature field with quantitative methods.

For example, an individual who believes that knowledge in a certain domain consists of a set of discrete, relatively static facts will likely achieve a sense of certainty on a research question much more quickly than someone who views knowledge as provisional, relative, and evolving.

additional motivation for test subjects to process information accurately made the impact of early preferences less prominent, though the influence did not disappear entirely

Zack [42] distinguished these four termsaccording to two dimensions: the nature of what is being processed and the consti-tution of the processing problem.The nature of what is being processed is either information or frames of ref-erence. With information, we mean “observations that have been cognitively pro-cessed and punctuated into coherent messages” [42]. Frames of reference [4, p.108], on the other hand, are the interpretative frames which provide the context forcreating and understanding information. There can be situations in which there is alack of information or a frame of reference, or too much information or too manyframes of reference to process.

Sensemaking is about contextual rationality, built out of vaguequestions, muddy answers, and negotiated agreements that attempt to reduce ambi-guity and equivocality. The genesis of Sensemaking is a lack of fit between whatwe expect and what we encounter [40]. With Sensemaking, one does not look at thequestion of “which course of action should we choose?”, but instead at an earlierpoint in time where users are unsure whether there is even a decision to be made,with questions such as “what is going on here, and should I even be asking this ques-tion just now?” [40]. This shows that Sensemaking is used to overcome situationsof ambiguity. When there are too many interpretations of an event, people engagein Sensemaking too, to reduce equivocality.

Decision making is traditionally viewed as a sequential process of problem classifi-cation and definition, alternative generation, alternative evaluation, and selection ofthe best course of action [26]. This process is about strategic rationality, aimed atreducing uncertainty [6, 36]. Uncertainty can be reduced through objective analysisbecause it consists of clear questions for which answers exist [5, 40]. Complex-ity can also be reduced by objective analysis, as it requires restricting or reducingfactual information and associated linkages [42]

Crisis environments are characterized by various types of information problemsthat complicate the response, such as inaccurate, late, superficial, irrelevant, unreli-able, and conflicting information [30, 32]. This poses difficulties for actors to makesense of what is going on and to take appropriate action. Such issues of informationprocessing are a major challenge for the field of crisis management, both concep-tually and empirically [19].