The purpose of this investigation is to define the architecture of computer informing systems. The methodology is based on an interdisciplinary, big-picture view of the cognition units which provide the foundation for informing systems. Among the findings are the following: informing systems should be designed for rigor and relevance with respect to the cognitive units (information), integrating its purpose and goal to achieve its expected utility; informing systems should also be designed for reasoning richness, informing modes, informing quality, and predicting informing biases and filters. Practical implications: A well-designed informing system should provide as an output a message and resonant change by reflecting information that triggers the client’s behavior. Social implication: The quest for the development of informing systems is not supported by Academia in practice; it is only supported by a close circle of early leaders of such systemic applications who sought to enhance the existing information systems which very often process data but do not inform as they should. Originality: This investigation, by providing an interdisciplinary and graphic modeling of informing channels and systems, indicates the vitality of these systems and their potential to create better decision-making in order to solve problems and sustain organizations and civilization.

Tensions are a ubiquitous feature of social life and are manifested in a number of particular forms: contradictory logics, competing demands, clashes of ideas, contradictions, dialectics, irony, paradoxes, and/or dilemmas. This essay aims to explore in detail tensions surrounding seven common findings of the information seeking literature relating to: interpersonal communication, accessibility, level of skill, individual preferences, psychological limits, inertia, and costs. Our incomplete understanding of these tensions can lead us to suggest resolutions that do not recognize their underlying dualities. Human information behavior stands at the intersection of many important theoretical and policy issues (e.g., personalized medicine). Policy makers need to be more attuned to these basic tensions of information seeking recognizing the real human limits they represent to informing the public. So, even if you build a great information system, people will not necessarily use it because of the force of these underlying tensions. While rationality rules systems, irrationality rules people. The proliferation of navigator roles over the last several years is actually a hopeful sign: recognition that people need a human interface to inform them about our ever more complex health care systems.

The purpose of this investigation is to define the central contents and issues of the impact of informing systems on the rise and development of Virtual Civilization. The methodology is based on an interdisciplinary big-picture view of the Virtual Civilization’s elements of development and their interdependency. Among the findings are: Virtual Civilization has infrastructural characteristics, a world-wide unlimited, socially constructed work and leisure space in cyberspace, and it can last centuries/millennia - as long as informing systems are operational. Practical implications: The mission of Virtual Civilization is to control the public policy of real civilizations in order to secure the common good in real societies. Social implication: The quest for the common good by virtual society may limit or even replace representative democracy by direct democracy which, while positively solving some problems, may eventually trigger permanent political chaos in real civilizations. Originality: This investigation, by providing an interdisciplinary and civilizational approach at the big-picture level defined the ethics question of the role of informing systems in the development of Virtual Civilization.

The paper introduces a novel Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) concept and prototype system. The system’s objective is to aid life-long-learning, resourcefulness, creativity, and teamwork of individuals throughout their academic and professional life and as contributors and beneficiaries of organizational and societal performance. Such a scope offers appealing and viable opportunities for stakeholders in the educational, professional, and developmental context. To further validate the underlying PKM application design, the systems thinking techniques of the transdiscipline of Informing Science (IS) are employed. By applying Cohen’s IS-Framework, Leavitt’s Diamond Model, the IS-Meta Approach, and Gill’s and Murphy’s Three Dimensions of Design Task Complexity, the more specific KM models and methodologies central to the PKMS concept are aligned, introduced, and visualized. The extent of this introduction offers an essential overview, which can be deepened and broadened by using the cited URL and DOI links pointing to the available resources of the author’s prior publications. The paper emphasizes the differences of the proposed meme-based PKM System compared to its traditional organizational document-centric counterparts as well as its inherent complementing synergies. As a result, it shows how the system is closing in on Vannevar Bush’s still unfulfilled vison of the ‘Memex’, an as-close-as-it-gets imaginary ancestor celebrating its 70th anniversary as an inspiring idea never realized. It also addresses the scenario recently put forward by Levy which foresees a decentralizing revolution of knowledge management that gives more power and autonomy to individuals and self-organized groups. Accordingly, it also touches on the PKM potential in terms of Kuhn’s Scientific Revolutions and Disruptive Innovations.

Technology has transformed education, perhaps most evidently in course delivery options. However, compelling questions remain about how technology impacts learning. Adaptive learning tools are technology-based artifacts that interact with learners and vary presentation based upon that interaction. This paper compares adaptive learning with a conventional teaching approach implemented in a digital literacy course. Current research explores the hypothesis that adapting instruction to an individual’s learning style results in better learning outcomes. Computer technology has long been seen as an answer to the scalability and cost of individualized instruction. Adaptive learning is touted as a potential game-changer in higher education, a panacea with which institutions may solve the riddle of the iron triangle: quality, cost and access. Though the research is scant, this study and a few others like it indicate that today’s adaptive learning systems have negligible impact on learning outcomes, one aspect of quality. Clearly, more research like this study, some of it from the perspective of adaptive learning systems as informing systems, is needed before the far-reaching promise of advanced learning systems can be realized.

This paper discusses applications of the measures of the risk of misinforming and the role of the warranty of misinforming in the context of the informing component of Customer Related Management (CRM) issues. This study consists of two parts. Firstly, we propose an approach for customers’ grouping based on their attitude toward assessing product's properties and their expertise on the terminology/domain of the seller’s message describing the product. Also we discuss what the most appropriate personal/group warranty is for each of these group/clusters. 

The impact that Facebook and Twitter usage has on the creation and maintenance of university student’s cognitive social capital was investigated on students in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Facebook and Twitter were selected as part of the research context because both are popular online social network systems (SNSs), and few studies were found that investigated the impact that both Facebook and Twitter have on the cognitive social capital of South African university students. Data was collected from a survey questionnaire, which was successfully completed by over 100 students from all 5 universities within the Western Cape. The questionnaire was obtained from a previous study, allowing comparisons to be made. Analysis of the results however, did not show a strong relationship between the intensity of Facebook and Twitter usage, and the various forms of social capital. Facebook usage was found to correlate with student’s satisfaction with university life; which suggests that increasing the intensity of Facebook usage for students experiencing low satisfaction with university life might be beneficial.

The article presents Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) as an overdue individualized as well as a collaborative approach for knowledge workers. Designing a PKM-supporting system, however, resembles a so-called “wicked” problem (ill-defined; incomplete, contradictory, changing requirements, complex interdependencies) where the information needed to understand the challenges depends on upon one’s idea for solving them. Accordingly, three main areas are attended to. Firstly, in dealing with a range of growing complexities, the notion of Popper’s Worlds is applied as three distinct spheres of reality and further expanded into six digital ecosystems (technologies, extelligence, society, knowledge worker, institutions, and ideosphere) that not only form the basis for the PKM System Concept named ‘Knowcations’ but also form a closely related Personal Knowledge Management for Development (PKM4D) framework detailed in a separate dedicated paper. Reflecting back on a United Nations scenario of knowledge mass production (KMP) over time, the complexities closely related to the digital ecosystems and the inherent risks of today’s accelerating attention-consuming over-abundance of redundant information are scrutinized, concluding in a chain of meta-arguments favoring the idea of the PKM concept and system put forward. Secondly, in light of the digital ecosystems and complexities introduced, the findings of a prior article are further refined in order to assess the PKM concept and system as a potential General-Purpose-Technology. Thirdly, the development process and resulting prototype are verified against accepted general design science research (DSR) guidelines. DSR aims at creating innovative IT artifacts (that extend human and social capabilities and meet desired outcomes) and at validating design processes (as evidence of their relevance, utility, rigor, resonance, and publishability). Together with the incorporated references to around thirty prior publications covering technical and methodological details, a kind of ‘Long Discussion Case’ emerges aiming to potentially assist IT researchers and entrepreneurs engaged in similar projects.

Certain trends in scientific research have important relevance to bioethics theory and practice. A growing stream of literature relates to increasing transparency and inclusivity of populations (stakeholders) in scientific research, from high volume data collection, synthesis, and analysis to verification and ethical scrutiny. The emergence of this stream of literature has implications for bioethics theory and practice. This paper seeks to make explicit these streams of literature and to relate these to bioethical issues, through consideration of certain extreme examples of scientific research where bioethical engagement is vital. Implications for theory and practice are derived, offering useful insights derived from multidisciplinary theory. Arguably, rapidly developing fields of citizen science such as informing science and others seeking to maximise stakeholder involvement in both research and bioethical engagement have emerged as a response to these types of issues; radically enhanced stakeholder engagement in science may herald a new maximally inclusive and transparent paradigm in bioethics based on lessons gained from exposure to increasingly uncertain ethical contexts of biomedical research.

The privacy of personal information is an important area of focus in today’s electronic world, where information can so easily be captured, stored, and shared. In recent years it has regularly featured as a topic in news media and has become the target of legislation around the world. Multidisciplinary privacy research has been conducted for decades, yet privacy remains a complex subject that still provides fertile ground for further investigation. This article provides a narrative overview of the nature of information privacy, describing the complexities and challenges that consumers and organizations face when making decisions about it, in order to demonstrate its importance to both groups. Based on this work, we present a transdisciplinary view of information privacy research linking the consumer and organization. It illustrates areas of concern for consumers and organizations together with the factors that influence the decisions they make about information privacy. By providing such a view we hope to encourage further cross-disciplinary research into this highly pertinent area.

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Walter Benjamin suggests that all cultural treasures “owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”. The most obvious and prominent examples of cultural treasures in Benjamin’s discourses can be found in monumental architectural works, and history has shown that rulers have really been interested in such splendor stone statements. Benjamin’s discourse challenges a dominant idea that seeks to give an ambitious image of these architectural works with the purpose of confirming and endorsing a splendid cultural past so that it can give shape to an integrated and arbitrary cultural geography. This theoretical study, which has been conducted using library resources, employing the discourse and method of “cinematic thinking”, attempts to review the role of these monumental architectural works in estab-lishing and shaping national cultural geography. This process is an effort to open boundaries of theorization in area of art and architecture, with the help of ideas that moving cinematic images leave in place.

Based on the diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory (Rogers, 2003), the uses and gratifications (U&G) theory, and trust theory, this study investigated the factors that influence the use of Twitter among the Kuwaiti community. The study surveyed Twitter users in Kuwait. A structured online questionnaire was used to collect data, and 463 respondents who provided complete answers participated. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the effect of three theoretical perspectives on Twitter usage. The result of the analysis showed that Twitter usage is better explained by DOI constructs than by U&G constructs. The findings indicated that the perceived relative advantage from DOI, and the need for information, need to pass time, and need for interpersonal utility from the U&G approach, have a direct positive significant effect on the use of Twitter. None of the trust theory constructs was found to be significant in predicting the general use of Twitter. The study results help Twitter providers and users in individual or organizational contexts to understand what factors generally affect the usage of the Twitter service.

The all-pervasive Internet has created serious problems, such as Internet overuse, which has triggered considerable debate over its relationship with addiction. To further explore its genetic susceptibilities and alternative explanations for Internet overuse, we proposed and evaluated four hypotheses, each based on existing knowledge of the biological bases of addiction, inattention, novelty-seeking, and harm-avoidance. Four genetic loci including DRD4 VNTR, DRD2 Taq1A, COMT Val158Met and 5-HTTLPR length polymorphisms were screened from seventy-three individuals. Our results showed that the DRD4 4R/4R individuals scored significantly higher than the 2R or 7R carriers in Internet Addiction Test (IAT). The 5-HTTLPR short/short males scored significantly higher in IAT than the long variant carriers. Bayesian analysis showed the most compatible hypothesis with the observed genetic results was based on attention (69.8%), whereas hypotheses based harm-avoidance (21.6%), novelty-seeking (7.8%) and addiction (0.9%) received little support. Our study suggests that carriers of alleles (DRD4 2R and 7R, 5-HTTLPR long) associated with inattentiveness are more likely to experience disrupted patterns and reduced durations of Internet use, protecting them from Internet overuse. Furthermore, our study suggests that Internet overuse should be categorized differently from addiction due to the lack of shared genetic contributions.

The global Business Intelligence (BI) market grew by 10% in 2013 according to the Gartner Report. Today organizations require better use of data and analytics to support their business decisions. Internet power and business trend changes have provided a broad term for data analytics – Big Data. To be able to handle it and leverage a value of having access to Big Data, organizations have no other choice than to get proper systems implemented and working. However traditional methods are not efficient for changing business needs. The long time between project start and go-live causes a gap between initial solution blueprint and actual user requirements in the end of the project. This article presents the latest market trends in BI systems implementation by comparing Agile with traditional methods. It presents a case study provided in a large telecommunications company (20K employees) and the results of a pilot research provided in the three large companies: telecommunications, digital, and insurance. Both studies prove that Agile methods might be more effective in BI projects from an end-user perspective and give first results and added value in a much shorter time compared to a traditional approach.

This study investigates the skill sets necessary for entry level systems analysts. Towards this end, the study combines two sources of data, namely, a content analysis of 200 systems analysts’ online job advertisements and a survey of 20 senior Information Systems (IS) professionals. Based on Chi-square tests, the results reveal that most employers prefer entry level systems analysts with an undergraduate Computer Science degree. Furthermore, most of the employers prefer entry level systems analysts to have some years of experience as well as industry certifications. The results also reveal that there is a higher preference for entry level systems analysts who have non-technical and people skills (e.g., problem solving and oral communication). The empirical results from this study will inform IS educators as they develop future systems analysts. Additionally, the results will be useful to the aspiring systems analysts who need to make sure that they have the necessary job skills before graduating and entering the labor market.

The main aim of this paper is to provide a theoretically and empirically grounded discussion on IT-based organizational creativity support. This study attempts to answer the following questions: (1) what is the issue of organizational creativity and its IT-based support, (2) what is the demand for IT –based organizational creativity support; (3) what are the main determinants and barriers to IT-based organizational creativity support; and (4) what success factors are crucial for IT-based organizational creativity support. This paper presents the analysis results of a survey conducted in 25 selected organizations. The paper provides valuable information on the possibilities of IT applications in organizational creativity support as well as the associated success factors. It makes useful contribution to our better understanding of IT-based organizational creativity support issues.