British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke's three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited. They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future.
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Bruce Schneier is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer. Schneier is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society as of November, 2013. He is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and The Tor Project; and an advisory board member of Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and cryptography and is a squid enthusiast.
The Dilbert principle is a satirical concept of management developed by Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, which states that companies tend to promote incompetent employees to management to minimize their ability to harm productivity. The Dilbert principle is inspired by the Peter principle, which is that employees are promoted based on success until they attain their "level of incompetence" and are no longer successful. By the Dilbert principle, employees who were never competent are promoted to management to limit the damage they can do. Adams first explained the principle in a 1995 Wall Street Journal article, and elaborated upon it in his humorous 1996 book The Dilbert Principle.
Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists, tend to share certain working assumptions such as the competence–performance distinction and the notion that some domain-specific aspects of grammar are partly innate in humans. These assumptions are rejected in non-generative approaches such as usage-based models of language. Generative linguistics includes work in core areas such as syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition, with additional extensions to topics including biolinguistics and music cognition.
Task analysis is a fundamental tool of human factors engineering. It entails analyzing how a task is accomplished, including a detailed description of both manual and mental activities, task and element durations, task frequency, task allocation, task complexity, environmental conditions, necessary clothing and equipment, and any other unique factors involved in or required for one or more people to perform a given task.
Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. Technocracy follows largely in the tradition of other meritocracy theories and assumes full state control over political and economic issues.
Adrian Bejan is a Romanian-American professor who has made contributions to modern thermodynamics and developed his constructal law. He is J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University and author of the books Design in Nature, The Physics of Life, Freedom and Evolution and Time And Beauty. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal.
In the field of human factors and ergonomics, human reliability is the probability that a human performs a task to a sufficient standard. Reliability of humans can be affected by many factors such as age, physical health, mental state, attitude, emotions, personal propensity for certain mistakes, and cognitive biases.
The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
Digital literacy is an individual's ability to find, evaluate, and communicate information using typing or digital media platforms. It is a combination of both technical and cognitive abilities in using information and communication technologies to create, evaluate, and share information.
Cem Kaner is a professor of software engineering at Florida Institute of Technology, and the Director of Florida Tech's Center for Software Testing Education & Research (CSTER) since 2004. He is perhaps best known outside academia as an advocate of software usability and software testing.
A design rationale is an explicit documentation of the reasons behind decisions made when designing a system or artifact. As initially developed by W.R. Kunz and Horst Rittel, design rationale seeks to provide argumentation-based structure to the political, collaborative process of addressing wicked problems.
Service-oriented modeling is the discipline of modeling business and software systems, for the purpose of designing and specifying service-oriented business systems within a variety of architectural styles and paradigms, such as application architecture, service-oriented architecture, microservices, and cloud computing.
Edholm's law, proposed by and named after Phil Edholm, refers to the observation that the three categories of telecommunication, namely wireless (mobile), nomadic and wired networks (fixed), are in lockstep and gradually converging. Edholm's law also holds that data rates for these telecommunications categories increase on similar exponential curves, with the slower rates trailing the faster ones by a predictable time lag. Edholm's law predicts that the bandwidth and data rates double every 18 months, which has proven to be true since the 1970s. The trend is evident in the cases of Internet, cellular (mobile), wireless LAN and wireless personal area networks.
Geography is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but also how they have changed and come to be. While geography is specific to Earth, many concepts can be applied more broadly to other celestial bodies in the field of planetary science. Geography has been called "a bridge between natural science and social science disciplines."
Richard W. Ziolkowski is an American electrical engineer and academician, who was the president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (2005), and a former vice president of this same society (2004). In 2006, he became an OSA Fellow. He is also an IEEE Fellow. He was born on November 22, 1952, in Warsaw, New York.
Parkinson's law can refer to either of two observations, published in 1955 by the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson as an essay in The Economist:
