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CONSUMABLES : We want information;
we need knowledge
By Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat
Gazette, January 7, 2003
"By the early 1990s, Peter
Pirolli and Stuart Card of Xerox's Palo Alto Research
Center, operating on the assumption that the human
quest for information was analogous to foraging
for food, began to apply what they called" foraging
theory" to information hunting and gathering.
"In 1995, they presented
their results in a paper at the 1995 Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Pirolli and
Card suggested that -- like food foragers -- info-seekers
employed a mostly unconscious cost-benefit analysis.
In this process, we weigh the benefit of the information
we seek against the cost of acquiring it, which,
in the computer era, is usually the time it takes
to find that information.
"When the costs of mining
a particular source -- say, an old-fashioned library
card catalog, for instance -- begin to outweigh the
residual benefits, we tend to switch to a new "information
patch," say an Internet Web site, data- base or
search engine.
"The
more likely we feel a certain source is to provide
us with the information we seek, the stronger the
'information scent.' "
PARC is currently seeking consulting
firms or web analysis companies interested in leveraging
our InfoScent Analyzer and Simulator within their
own businesses.
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