1.
Knowledge management
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Knowledge management is the process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to an approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge. An established discipline since 1991, KM includes courses taught in the fields of administration, information systems, management, library. Other fields may contribute to KM research, including information and media, computer science, public health, several universities offer dedicated masters degrees in knowledge management. Several consulting companies provide advice regarding KM to these organizations, KM is an enabler of organisational learning. Knowledge management efforts have a history, including on-the-job discussions, formal apprenticeship, discussion forums, corporate libraries, professional training. In 1999, the personal knowledge management was introduced, it refers to the management of knowledge at the individual level. In the enterprise, early collections of case studies recognized the importance of knowledge management dimensions of strategy, process, in short, knowledge management programs can yield impressive benefits to individuals and organizations if they are purposeful, concrete and action-orientated. KM emerged as a discipline in the early 1990s. It was initially supported by individual practitioners, when Skandia hired Leif Edvinsson of Sweden as the worlds first Chief Knowledge Officer, hubert Saint-Onge, started investigating KM long before that. The objective of CKOs is to manage and maximize the intangible assets of their organisations, gradually, CKOs became interested in practical and theoretical aspects of KM, and the new research field was formed. The KM idea has taken up by academics, such as Ikujiro Nonaka, Hirotaka Takeuchi, Thomas H. Davenport. The KM discipline has been moving towards academic maturity. First, is a trend toward higher cooperation among academics, single-author publications are less common, second, the role of practitioners has changed. Their contribution to academic research declined from 30% of overall contributions up to 2002, multiple KM disciplines exist, approaches vary by author and school. As the discipline matured, academic debates increased regarding theory and practice, including, Techno-centric with a focus on technology, ideally those that enhance knowledge sharing, organisational with a focus on how an organisation can be designed to facilitate knowledge processes best. Ecological with a focus on the interaction of people, identity, knowledge, regardless of the school of thought, core components of KM roughly include people/culture, processes/structure and technology. The details depend on the perspective, different frameworks for distinguishing between different types of knowledge exist
2.
Communication
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Communication is the act of conveying intended meanings from one entity or group to another through the use of mutually understood signs and semiotic rules. The main steps inherent to all communication are, The forming of communicative motivation or reason, transmission of the encoded message as a sequence of signals using a specific channel or medium. Noise sources such as forces and in some cases human activity begin influencing the quality of signals propagating from the sender to one or more receivers. Reception of signals and reassemblying of the message from a sequence of received signals. Decoding of the encoded message. Interpretation and making sense of the original message. The channel of communication can be visual, auditory, tactile and haptic, olfactory, electromagnetic, human communication is unique for its extensive use of abstract language. Development of civilization has been linked with progress in telecommunication. Nonverbal communication describes the process of conveying information in the form of non-linguistic representations, examples of nonverbal communication include haptic communication, chronemic communication, gestures, body language, facial expressions, eye contact, and how one dresses. Nonverbal communication also relates to intent of a message, examples of intent are voluntary, intentional movements like shaking a hand or winking, as well as involuntary, such as sweating. Speech also contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, e. g. rhythm, intonation, tempo and it affects communication most at the subconscious level and establishes trust. Likewise, written texts include nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, Nonverbal communication demonstrates one of Wazlawicks laws, you cannot not communicate. Once proximity has formed awareness, living creatures begin interpreting any signals received, Nonverbal cues are heavily relied on to express communication and to interpret others’ communication and can replace or substitute verbal messages. There are several reasons as to why non-verbal communication plays a role in communication. Written communication can also have non-verbal attributes, e-mails and web chats allow individual’s the option to change text font colours, stationary, emoticons, and capitalization in order to capture non-verbal cues into a verbal medium. Many different non-verbal channels are engaged at the time in communication acts. “Non-verbal behaviours may form a language system. ”Smiling, crying, pointing, caressing. Such non-verbal signals allow the most basic form of communication when verbal communication is not effective due to language barriers, Verbal communication is the spoken or written conveyance of a message
3.
Email
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Electronic mail, or email, is a method of exchanging digital messages between people using digital devices such as computers and mobile phones. Email first entered use in the 1960s and by the mid-1970s had taken the form now recognized as email. Email operates across computer networks, which today is primarily the Internet, some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Todays email systems are based on a store-and-forward model, Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions to carry text in character sets. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, has been standardized, the history of modern Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET, with standards for encoding email messages published as early as 1973. An email message sent in the early 1970s looks very similar to an email sent today. Email played an important part in creating the Internet, and the conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services, historically, the term electronic mail was used generically for any electronic document transmission. For example, several writers in the early 1970s used the term to describe fax document transmission, as a result, it is difficult to find the first citation for the use of the term with the more specific meaning it has today. This spelling also appears in most dictionaries, Mail was the form used in the original protocol standard, RFC524. The service is referred to as mail, and a piece of electronic mail is called a message. EMail is a form that has been used in RFCs for the Authors Address and is expressly required for historical reasons. E-mail is sometimes used, capitalizing the initial E as in similar abbreviations like E-piano, E-guitar, A-bomb, by 1968, AUTODIN linked more than 300 sites in several countries. With the introduction of MITs Compatible Time-Sharing System in 1961, multiple users could log in to a system from remote dial-up terminals. Informal methods of using this to pass messages were developed and expanded,1965 – MITs CTSS MAIL and it used the Unix mail client to send messages between system users. The concept was extended to communicate remotely over the Berkeley Network,1979 – EMAIL, an application written by Shiva Ayyadurai for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. 1979 – MH Message Handling System developed at RAND provided several tools for managing electronic mail on Unix, most of them only allowed communication between users logged into the same host or mainframe, although there might be hundreds or thousands of users within an organization. In the early 1980s, networked personal computers on LANs became increasingly important, server-based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems were developed
4.
Entropy
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In statistical thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the number of microscopic configurations Ω that a thermodynamic system can have when in a state as specified by some macroscopic variables. Formally, S = k B ln Ω, for example, gas in a container with known volume, pressure, and temperature could have an enormous number of possible configurations of the collection of individual gas molecules. Each instantaneous configuration of the gas may be regarded as random, Entropy may be understood as a measure of disorder within a macroscopic system. The second law of thermodynamics states that an isolated systems entropy never decreases, such systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy. Non-isolated systems may lose entropy, provided their environments entropy increases by at least that amount, since entropy is a function of the state of the system, a change in entropy of a system is determined by its initial and final states. This applies whether the process is reversible or irreversible, however, irreversible processes increase the combined entropy of the system and its environment. The above definition is called the macroscopic definition of entropy because it can be used without regard to any microscopic description of the contents of a system. The concept of entropy has found to be generally useful and has several other formulations. Entropy was discovered when it was noticed to be a quantity that behaves as a function of state and it has the dimension of energy divided by temperature, which has a unit of joules per kelvin in the International System of Units. But the entropy of a substance is usually given as an intensive property—either entropy per unit mass or entropy per unit amount of substance. In statistical mechanics this reflects that the state of a system is generally non-degenerate. Understanding the role of entropy in various processes requires an understanding of how. It is often said that entropy is an expression of the disorder, or randomness of a system, the second law is now often seen as an expression of the fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics through the modern definition of entropy. In other words, in any natural process there exists an inherent tendency towards the dissipation of useful energy and he made the analogy with that of how water falls in a water wheel. This was an insight into the second law of thermodynamics. g. Clausius described entropy as the transformation-content, i. e. dissipative energy use and this was in contrast to earlier views, based on the theories of Isaac Newton, that heat was an indestructible particle that had mass. Later, scientists such as Ludwig Boltzmann, Josiah Willard Gibbs, henceforth, the essential problem in statistical thermodynamics, i. e. according to Erwin Schrödinger, has been to determine the distribution of a given amount of energy E over N identical systems. Carathéodory linked entropy with a definition of irreversibility, in terms of trajectories
5.
Knowledge
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Knowledge can refer to a theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. It can be implicit or explicit, it can be more or less formal or systematic, however, several definitions of knowledge and theories to explain it exist. Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes, perception, communication, and reasoning, the eventual demarcation of philosophy from science was made possible by the notion that philosophys core was theory of knowledge, a theory distinct from the sciences because it was their foundation. Without this idea of a theory of knowledge, it is hard to imagine what philosophy could have been in the age of modern science, the definition of knowledge is a matter of ongoing debate among philosophers in the field of epistemology. Some claim that conditions are not sufficient, as Gettier case examples allegedly demonstrate. Richard Kirkham suggests that our definition of knowledge requires that the evidence for the belief necessitates its truth. In contrast to this approach, Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, following Moores paradox, that one can say He believes it, but it isnt so, but not He knows it, but it isnt so. He goes on to argue that these do not correspond to distinct mental states, what is different here is not the mental state of the speaker, but the activity in which they are engaged. For example, on account, to know that the kettle is boiling is not to be in a particular state of mind. Wittgenstein sought to bypass the difficulty of definition by looking to the way knowledge is used in natural languages and he saw knowledge as a case of a family resemblance. Following this idea, knowledge has been reconstructed as a concept that points out relevant features. Symbolic representations can be used to indicate meaning and can be thought of as a dynamic process, hence the transfer of the symbolic representation can be viewed as one ascription process whereby knowledge can be transferred. Other forms of communication include observation and imitation, verbal exchange, philosophers of language and semioticians construct and analyze theories of knowledge transfer or communication. In his collection of essays Technopoly, Neil Postman demonstrates the argument against the use of writing through an excerpt from Platos work Phaedrus, in this excerpt, the scholar Socrates recounts the story of Thamus, the Egyptian king and Theuth the inventor of the written word. In this story, Theuth presents his new invention writing to King Thamus, King Thamus is skeptical of this new invention and rejects it as a tool of recollection rather than retained knowledge. Media theorists like Andrew Robinson emphasise that the depiction of knowledge in the modern world was often seen as being truer than oral knowledge. It is harder to preserve records of what was said or who originally said it – usually neither the nor the content can be verified. Gossip and rumors are examples prevalent in both media, major libraries today can have millions of books of knowledge
6.
Innovation
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Innovation can be defined simply as a new idea, device or method. However, innovation is also viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs. This is accomplished through more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, or business models that are available to markets, governments. The term innovation can be defined as something original and more effective and, as a consequence, new and it is related to, but not the same as, invention. Innovation is often manifested via the engineering process, the opposite of innovation is exnovation. In industrial economics, innovations are created and found empirically from services to meet the consumer demand. A2013 survey of literature on innovation found over 40 definitions and it is both a process and an outcome. In business and economics, innovation can be a catalyst to growth and he famously asserted that creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. One prime example was the boom of Silicon Valley startups out of the Stanford Industrial Park. In 1957, dissatisfied employees of Shockley Semiconductor, the company of Nobel laureate and co-inventor of the transistor William Shockley, left to form an independent firm, after several years, Fairchild developed into a formidable presence in the sector. Eventually, these founders left to start their own based on their own, unique, latest ideas. Over the next 20 years, this snowball process launched the momentous startup company explosion of technology firms. Essentially, Silicon Valley began as 65 new enterprises born out of Shockley’s eight former employees, since then, hubs of innovation have sprung up globally with similar metonyms, including Silicon Alley encompassing New York City. In the organizational context, innovation may be linked to changes in efficiency, productivity, quality, competitiveness. However, recent research findings highlight the role of organizational culture in enabling organizations to translate innovative activity into tangible performance improvements. Organizations can also improve profits and performance by providing work groups opportunities and resources to innovate and it is the means by which the entrepreneur either creates new wealth-producing resources or endows existing resources with enhanced potential for creating wealth. –Drucker According to Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation is the key to success in business. The organisation requires a structure in order to retain competitive advantage
7.
Economic growth
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Economic growth is the increase in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time. It is conventionally measured as the percent rate of increase in gross domestic product, or real GDP. Growth is usually calculated in real terms – i. e. inflation-adjusted terms – to eliminate the effect of inflation on the price of goods produced. Measurement of economic growth uses national income accounting, since economic growth is measured as the annual percent change of gross domestic product, it has all the advantages and drawbacks of that measure. The rate of economic growth refers to the annual rate of growth in GDP between the first and the last year over a period of time. Implicitly, this rate is the trend in the average level of GDP over the period. An increase in economic growth caused by efficient use of inputs is referred to as intensive growth. GDP growth caused only by increases in the amount of available for use is called extensive growth. The economic growth rate is calculated from data on GDP estimated by countries´statistical agencies, the rate of growth of GDP/capita is calculated from data on GDP and people for the initial and final periods included in the analysis. The rate of change of GDP/population is the sum of the rates of change of four variables plus their cross products. Increases in labor productivity have historically been the most important source of real per capita economic growth, increases in productivity lower the real cost of goods. Over the 20th century the price of many goods fell by over 90%. Economic growth has traditionally been attributed to the accumulation of human and physical capital, the rapid economic growth that occurred during the Industrial Revolution was remarkable because it was in excess of population growth, providing an escape from the Malthusian trap. Countries that industrialized eventually saw their population growth slow down, a known as the demographic transition. Increases in productivity are the factor responsible for per capita economic growth – this has been especially evident since the mid-19th century. Most of the growth in the 20th century was due to increased output per unit of labor, materials, energy. The balance of the growth in output has come from using more inputs, both of these changes increase output. The increased output included more of the goods produced previously and new goods
8.
Social change
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Social change refers to an alteration in the social order of a society. Social change may include changes in nature, social institutions, social behaviours, Social change may refer to the notion of social progress or sociocultural evolution, the philosophical idea that society moves forward by dialectical or evolutionary means. It may refer to a change in the socio-economic structure, for instance a shift away from feudalism. Accordingly, it may refer to social revolution, such as the Socialist revolution presented in Marxism, or to other social movements. Social change may be driven by cultural, religious, economic, scientific or technological forces, Developmental psychology can play a role in social change. Social change comes about with tangible/intangible resource inputs as social investment. One source is random or unique factors such as climate, weather, for example, successful development has the same general requirements, such as a stable and flexible government, enough free and available resources, and a diverse social organization of society. On the whole, social change is usually a combination of systematic factors along with some random or unique factors, there are many theories of social change. Generally, a theory of change should include elements such as aspects of change, processes and mechanisms of social change. Hegelian, The classic Hegelian dialectic model of change is based on the interaction of opposing forces, starting from a point of momentary stasis, Thesis countered by Antithesis first yields conflict, then it subsequently results in a new Synthesis. Marxist, Marxism presents a dialectical and materialist concept of history, Heraclitan, The Greek philosopher Heraclitus used the metaphor of a river to speak of change thus, On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow. What Heraclitus seems to be suggesting here, later interpretations notwithstanding, is that, in order for the river to remain the river, change must constantly be taking place. Thus one may think of the Heraclitan model as parallel to that of a living organism, a contemporary application of this approach is shown in the social change theory SEED-SCALE which builds off of the complexity theory subfield of Emergence. Daoist, The Chinese philosophical work Dao De Jing, I.8, water, although soft and yielding, will eventually wear away stone. Change in this model is to be natural, harmonious and steady, one of the most obvious changes currently occurring is the change in the relative global population distribution between countries. China and India continue to be the largest countries, followed by the US as a distant third, however, population growth throughout the world is slowing. Population growth among developed countries has been slowing since the 1950s, population growth among the less developed countries excluding the least developed has also been slowing, since 1960, and is now at 1. 3% annual growth. Population growth among the least developed countries has slowed relatively little, in much of the developed world, changes from distinct mens and womens work to more gender equal patterns have been economically important since the mid 20th century. Both men and women are to be considered to be contributors to social change world wide
9.
Unemployment
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During periods of recession, an economy usually experiences a relatively high unemployment rate. According to International Labour Organization report, more than 200 million people globally or 6% of the workforce were without a job in 2012. There remains considerable debate regarding the causes, consequences and solutions for unemployment. Classical economics, new classical economics, and the Austrian School of economics argue that market mechanisms are reliable means of resolving unemployment, Keynesian economics emphasizes the cyclical nature of unemployment and recommends government interventions in the economy that it claims will reduce unemployment during recessions. This theory focuses on recurrent shocks that suddenly reduce aggregate demand for goods and services, Keynesian models recommend government interventions designed to increase demand for workers, these can include financial stimuli, publicly funded job creation, and expansionist monetary policies. Structural arguments emphasize causes and solutions related to disruptive technologies and globalization, Causes and solutions for frictional unemployment often address job entry threshold and wage rates. Behavioral economists highlight individual biases in decision making, and often involve problems and solutions concerning sticky wages, for centuries, experts have predicted that machines would make workers obsolete and increase unemployment. The state of being without any work both for an educated & uneducated person, for earning ones livelihood is meant by unemployment, some additional types of unemployment that are occasionally mentioned are seasonal unemployment, hardcore unemployment, and hidden unemployment. Though there have been several definitions of voluntary and involuntary unemployment in the economics literature, voluntary unemployment is attributed to the individuals decisions, whereas involuntary unemployment exists because of the socio-economic environment in which individuals operate. In these terms, much or most of frictional unemployment is voluntary, on the other hand, cyclical unemployment, structural unemployment, and classical unemployment are largely involuntary in nature. So, in practice, the distinction between voluntary and involuntary unemployment is hard to draw and this happens with cyclical unemployment, as macroeconomic forces cause microeconomic unemployment which can boomerang back and exacerbate these macroeconomic forces. Classical, or real-wage unemployment, occurs when real wages for a job are set above the market-clearing level causing the number of job-seekers to exceed the number of vacancies. On the other hand, some argue that as wages fall below a livable wage many choose to drop out of the labor market. This is especially true in countries where low-income families are supported through public welfare systems, in such cases, wages would have to be high enough to motivate people to choose employment over what they receive through public welfare. Wages below a livable wage are likely to result in lower labor market participation in above stated scenario, in addition it must be noted that consumption of goods and services is the primary driver of increased need for labor. Higher wages leads to workers having more available to consume goods. Therefore, higher wages increase general consumption and as a result need for labor increases, many economists have argued that unemployment increases with increased governmental regulation. For example, minimum wage laws raise the cost of some low-skill laborers above market equilibrium, laws restricting layoffs may make businesses less likely to hire in the first place, as hiring becomes more risky
10.
Economic policy
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Economic policy refers to the actions that governments take in the economic field. Such policies are often influenced by international institutions like the International Monetary Fund or World Bank as well as political beliefs, almost every aspect of government has an important economic component. Trade policy, which refers to tariffs, trade agreements and the institutions that govern them. Fiscal policy, often tied to Keynesian economics, uses government spending, fiscal stance, The size of the deficit or surplus Tax policy, The taxes used to collect government income. It is concerned with the amount of money in circulation and, consequently, interest rates, sometimes other objectives, like military spending or nationalization are important. These are referred to as the goals, the outcomes which the economic policy aims to achieve. To achieve these goals, governments use policy tools which are under the control of the government and these generally include the interest rate and money supply, tax and government spending, tariffs, exchange rates, labor market regulations, and many other aspects of government. Government and central banks are limited in the number of goals they can achieve in the short term, for instance, there may be pressure on the government to reduce inflation, reduce unemployment, and reduce interest rates while maintaining currency stability. This dilemma can in part be resolved by using microeconomics, supply-side policy to help adjust markets, for instance, unemployment could potentially be reduced by altering laws relating to trade unions or unemployment insurance, as well as by macroeconomic factors like interest rates. For much of the 20th century, governments adopted discretionary policies like demand management designed to correct the business cycle and these typically used fiscal and monetary policy to adjust inflation, output and unemployment. However, following the stagflation of the 1970s, policymakers began to be attracted to policy rules, a discretionary policy is supported because it allows policymakers to respond quickly to events. This makes policy non-credible and ultimately ineffective, a rule-based policy can be more credible, because it is more transparent and easier to anticipate. Examples of rule-based policies are fixed exchange rates, interest rate rules, the stability and growth pact, some policy rules can be imposed by external bodies, for instance the Exchange Rate Mechanism for currency. A compromise between strict discretionary and strict rule-based policy is to grant discretionary power to an independent body. For instance, the Federal Reserve Bank, European Central Bank, Bank of England and Reserve Bank of Australia all set interest rates without government interference, another type of non-discretionary policy is a set of policies which are imposed by an international body. This can occur as a result of intervention by the International Monetary Fund, the first economic problem was how to gain the resources it needed to be able to perform the functions of an early government, the military, roads and other projects like building the Pyramids. Early governments generally relied on tax in kind and forced labor for their economic resources, however, with the development of money came the first policy choice. A government could raise money through taxing its citizens, however, it could now also debase the coinage and so increase the money supply
11.
Skills
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A skill is the ability to carry out a task with pre-determined results often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into general and domain-specific skills. Skill usually requires certain environmental stimuli and situations to assess the level of skill being shown, people need a broad range of skills in order to contribute to a modern economy. A joint ASTD and U. S. Department of Labor study showed that through technology, the workplace is changing, and identified 16 basic skills that employees must have to be able to change with it. Skilled workers have long had historical import as electricians, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers, brewers, coopers, printers, skilled workers were often politically active through their craft guilds. Life skills are problem-solving behaviors that are used appropriately and responsibly in the management of personal affairs and they are a set of human skills, acquired via learning or direct experience, that are used to handle problems and questions commonly encountered in daily human life. The subject varies depending on societal norms and community expectations. A British definition is “the ability to communicate effectively with people in a friendly way, the term people skills is used to include both psychological skills and social skills, but is less inclusive than life skills. Social skill is any skill facilitating interaction and communication with others, social rules and relations are created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways. The process of learning such skills is called socialization, soft skills are a combination of interpersonal people skills, social skills, communication skills, character traits, attitudes, career attributes and emotional intelligence quotient among others. Hard skills are any skills relating to a task or situation. These skills are easily quantifiable unlike soft skills which are related to ones personality
12.
Technology
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Technology is the collection of techniques, skills, methods and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation. Technology can be the knowledge of techniques, processes, and the like, the human species use of technology began with the conversion of natural resources into simple tools. The steady progress of technology has brought weapons of ever-increasing destructive power. It has helped develop more advanced economies and has allowed the rise of a leisure class, many technological processes produce unwanted by-products known as pollution and deplete natural resources to the detriment of Earths environment. Various implementations of technology influence the values of a society and raise new questions of the ethics of technology, examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity, and the challenges of bioethics. Philosophical debates have arisen over the use of technology, with disagreements over whether technology improves the condition or worsens it. The use of the technology has changed significantly over the last 200 years. Before the 20th century, the term was uncommon in English, the term was often connected to technical education, as in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The term technology rose to prominence in the 20th century in connection with the Second Industrial Revolution, the terms meanings changed in the early 20th century when American social scientists, beginning with Thorstein Veblen, translated ideas from the German concept of Technik into technology. In German and other European languages, a distinction exists between technik and technologie that is absent in English, which translates both terms as technology. By the 1930s, technology referred not only to the study of the industrial arts, dictionaries and scholars have offered a variety of definitions. Ursula Franklin, in her 1989 Real World of Technology lecture, gave another definition of the concept, it is practice, the way we do things around here. The term is used to imply a specific field of technology, or to refer to high technology or just consumer electronics. Bernard Stiegler, in Technics and Time,1, defines technology in two ways, as the pursuit of life by other than life, and as organized inorganic matter. Technology can be most broadly defined as the entities, both material and immaterial, created by the application of mental and physical effort in order to some value. In this usage, technology refers to tools and machines that may be used to solve real-world problems and it is a far-reaching term that may include simple tools, such as a crowbar or wooden spoon, or more complex machines, such as a space station or particle accelerator. Tools and machines need not be material, virtual technology, such as software and business methods. W. Brian Arthur defines technology in a broad way as a means to fulfill a human purpose
13.
Management
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Management is the administration of an organization, whether it be a business, a not-for-profit organization, or government body. The term management may also refer to the people who manage an organization, management is also an academic discipline, a social science whose objective is to study social organization and organizational leadership. Individuals who aim at becoming management researchers or professors may complete the Doctor of Business Administration or the PhD in business administration or management, in larger organizations, there are generally three levels of managers, which are typically organized in a hierarchical, pyramid structure. Senior managers provide direction to the managers who report to them. Middle managers, examples of which would include branch managers, regional managers and section managers, middle managers communicate the strategic goals of senior management to the front-line managers. Lower managers, such as supervisors and front-line team leaders, oversee the work of regular employees, in smaller organizations, the roles of managers have much wider scopes. A manager can perform several roles or even all of the commonly observed in a large organization. There are many smaller organizations than larger ones. Views on the definition and scope of management include, According to Henri Fayol, to manage is to forecast and to plan, to organise, to command, to co-ordinate, fredmund Malik defines it as the transformation of resources into utility. Management included as one of the factors of production - along with machines, materials, peter Drucker saw the basic task of management as twofold, marketing and innovation. Nevertheless, innovation is also linked to marketing, peter Drucker identifies marketing as a key essence for business success, but management and marketing are generally understood as two different branches of business administration knowledge. Management involves identifying the mission, objective, procedures, rules and this implies effective communication, an enterprise environment implies human motivation and implies some sort of successful progress or system outcome. As such, management is not the manipulation of a mechanism, not the herding of animals, management does not need to be seen from enterprise point of view alone, because management is an essential function to improve ones life and relationships. Management is therefore everywhere and it has a range of application. Based on this, management must have humans, communication, plans, measurements, motivational psychological tools, goals, and economic measures may or may not be necessary components for there to be management. At first, one views management functionally, such as measuring quantity, adjusting plans and this applies even in situations where planning does not take place. Critics, however, find this definition useful but far too narrow, one habit of thought regards management as equivalent to business administration and thus excludes management in places outside commerce, as for example in charities and in the public sector. More broadly, every organization must manage its work, people, processes, technology, nonetheless, many people refer to university departments that teach management as business schools
14.
Landscape ecology
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Landscape ecology is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. This is done within a variety of scales, development spatial patterns. The most salient characteristics of landscape ecology are its emphasis on the relationship among pattern, process and scale and these necessitate the coupling between biophysical and socioeconomic sciences. The German term Landschaftsökologie–thus landscape ecology–was coined by German geographer Carl Troll in 1939, heterogeneity is the measure of how parts of a landscape differ from one another. Landscape ecology looks at how this spatial structure affects organism abundance at the level, as well as the behavior. This includes studying the influence of pattern, or the order of a landscape, on process. Landscape ecology also includes geomorphology as applied to the design and architecture of landscapes, geomorphology is the study of how geological formations are responsible for the structure of a landscape. One central landscape ecology theory originated from MacArthur & Wilsons The Theory of Island Biogeography and this work considered the biodiversity on islands as the result of competing forces of colonization from a mainland stock and stochastic extinction. The concepts of island biogeography were generalized from physical islands to abstract patches of habitat by Levins metapopulation model and this generalization spurred the growth of landscape ecology by providing conservation biologists a new tool to assess how habitat fragmentation affects population viability. Recent growth of landscape ecology owes much to the development of information systems. Landscape ecology developed in Europe from historical planning on human-dominated landscapes, concepts from general ecology theory were integrated in North America. It frequently included human-caused landscape changes in theory and application of concepts, by 1980, landscape ecology was a discrete, established discipline. It was marked by the organization of the International Association for Landscape Ecology in 1982, landmark book publications defined the scope and goals of the discipline, including Naveh and Lieberman and Forman and Godron. Today, theory and application of landscape ecology continues to develop through a need for applications in a changing landscape. Landscape ecology relies on advanced technologies such as sensing, GIS. There has been associated development of quantitative methods to examine the interactions of patterns. An example would be determining the amount of carbon present in the based on landform over a landscape, derived from GIS maps, vegetation types. Landscape ecology explores the natural potential in terms of functional utility for human societies
15.
Post-industrial society
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In sociology, the post-industrial society is the stage of societys development when the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy. They all can be used in economics or social science disciplines as a general theoretical backdrop in research design, as the term has been used, a few common themes, including the ones below have begun to emerge. The economy undergoes a transition from the production of goods to the provision of services, knowledge becomes a valued form of capital, see human capital. Producing ideas is the way to grow the economy. Behavioral and information sciences and technologies are developed and implemented, Daniel Bell popularized the term through his 1974 work The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Although some have credited Bell with coining the term, French sociologist Alain Touraine published in 1969 the first major work on the post-industrial society. The term was used extensively by social philosopher Ivan Illich in his 1973 paper Tools for Conviviality. The term has grown and changed as it became mainstream, the term is now used by admen such as Seth Godin, public policy PhDs such as Keith Boeckelman, and sociologists such as Neil Fligstein and Ofer Sharone. President Bill Clinton even used the term to describe Chinese growth in a discussion in Shanghai in 1998. The post-industrialized society is marked by an increased valuation of knowledge and this itself is unsurprising, having been foreshadowed in Daniel Bell’s presumption as to how economic employment patterns will evolve in such societies. He asserts employment will grow faster in the tertiary relative to employment in the primary and secondary sector. This will continue to occur such that the “impact of the expert” will expand, as tertiary and quaternary sector positions are essentially knowledge-oriented, this will result in a restructuring of education, at least in its nuances. The “new power… of the expert” consequently gives rise to the role of universities. Post-industrial societies themselves become oriented around these places of production and production of experts as their new foci. Consequently, the greatest beneficiaries in the society are young urban professionals. The increasing importance of knowledge in post-industrial societies results in an increase in expertise through the economy. In this manner, it eliminates what Alan Banks and Jim Foster identify as “undesirable work as well as the forms of poverty and inequality. ”This effect is supplemented by the aforementioned movement of power into the hands of young educated people concerned with social justice. Economists at Berkeley have studied the value of knowledge as a form of capital, adding value to material capital, similarly, post-industrial society has serviced the creative culture
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Knowledge worker
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Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include software engineers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, public accountants, lawyers, Knowledge work can be differentiated from other forms of work by its emphasis on non-routine problem solving that requires a combination of convergent, divergent, and creative thinking. But despite the amount of research and literature on knowledge work, mosco and McKercher outline various viewpoints on the matter. It should thus be acknowledged that the knowledge worker can be quite broad in its meaning. Knowledge workers spend 38% of their time searching for information and they are also often displaced from their bosses, working in various departments and time zones or from remote sites such as home offices and airport lounges. As businesses increase their dependence on technology, the number of fields in which knowledge workers must operate has expanded dramatically. Managing knowledge workers can be a difficult task, most knowledge workers prefer some level of autonomy, and do not like being overseen or managed. Those who manage knowledge workers are often knowledge workers themselves, or have been in the past, projects must be carefully considered before assigning to a knowledge worker, as their interest and goals will affect the quality of the completed project. Knowledge workers must be treated as individuals, the manner in which each of the creative applications is applied is dependent on the role of the creative workers. This type of work includes a combination of skill sets or ‘creative knowledge work capacities. Other sector-related creative applications include a connection in the advertising sector. Creative workers also require abilities and aptitudes, linking these abilities and capacities are collaborative ways of working, which the findings from this study have identified. The two modes of working ranged from individual to collaborative where a worker might be doing either or both depending on the specific activity, the abilities to traverse between these two work modes alongside the relevant creative application are part of the complexity of this style of working. Creative workers also require an understanding of forms of knowledge. These are related to such as those from the humanities. Creative knowledge workers also require technical-related knowledge such as mathematics and computer sciences, in the IT software sector, technical knowledge of software languages is especially significant for programmers as ascertained in the findings. The technical know-how for a creative director relates only to the understanding of the possibilities of technologies in order to capitalise on the technical wizardry, the technical specialists are then required to execute the creative directors vision. As ascertained in the findings, there was other non-disciplinary knowledge, interviewees mentioned tacit experiences from their past work and life experiences, which they used to draw upon in performing their creative knowledge work
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Visualization (graphics)
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Visualization or visualisation is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been a way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. Examples from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, Visualization today has ever-expanding applications in science, education, engineering, interactive multimedia, medicine, etc. Typical of an application is the field of computer graphics. The invention of computer graphics may be the most important development in visualization since the invention of perspective in the Renaissance period. The development of animation also helped advance visualization, the use of visualization to present information is not a new phenomenon. It has been used in maps, scientific drawings, and data plots for over a thousand years, examples from cartography include Ptolemys Geographia, a map of China, and Minards map of Napoleons invasion of Russia a century and a half ago. Most of the learned in devising these images carry over in a straightforward manner to computer visualization. Edward Tufte has written three critically acclaimed books that explain many of these principles, Computer graphics has from its beginning been used to study scientific problems. However, in its early days the lack of power often limited its usefulness. The recent emphasis on visualization started in 1987 with the publication of Visualization in Scientific Computing, TV also offers scientific visualizations when it shows computer drawn and animated reconstructions of road or airplane accidents. Some of the most popular examples of scientific visualizations are computer-generated images that show real spacecraft in action, out in the void far beyond Earth, dynamic forms of visualization, such as educational animation or timelines, have the potential to enhance learning about systems that change over time. Apart from the distinction between interactive visualizations and animation, the most useful categorization is probably between abstract and model-based scientific visualizations, the abstract visualizations show completely conceptual constructs in 2D or 3D. These generated shapes are completely arbitrary, the model-based visualizations either place overlays of data on real or digitally constructed images of reality or make a digital construction of a real object directly from the scientific data. Scientific visualization is usually done with specialized software, though there are a few exceptions, there are also many proprietary software packages of scientific visualization tools. Data visualization is a subcategory of visualization dealing with statistical graphics. Scientific visualization focuses and emphasizes the representation of order data using primarily graphics. It is an important part of visualization and maybe the first one, as the visualization of experiments
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Everett Rogers
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Everett M. Rogers was an eminent American communication theorist and sociologist, who originated the diffusion of innovations theory and introduced the term early adopter. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Rogers was born on his familys Pinehurst Farm in Carroll, Iowa, in 1931. During the Iowa drought of 1936, while the seed corn stood tall on the neighbor’s farm. Rogers had no plans to attend university until a school teacher drove him, Rogers decided to pursue a degree there. He received a B. S. in Agriculture in 1952 and he then served in the Korean War for two years. He returned to Iowa State University to earn a M. S. in 1955, Rogers held faculty positions at Ohio State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan. As Fulbright Lecturer, Rogers taught the National University of Colombia in Bogotá and he served as President of the International Communication Association and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. In 1993, Rogers moved to the University of New Mexico as Chair of the Department of Communication and he had become fond of Albuquerque while he was stationed at an airbase during the Korean War. He helped the UNM launch a program in communication with a special emphasis on cross-cultural and intercultural contexts. Rogers suffered from disease and retired from the UNM in the summer of 2004. He died a few later, survived by his wife, Dr. Corinne Shefner-Rogers. During his 47-year academic career, Rogers authored more than 30 books, when the first edition of Diffusion of Innovations was published in 1962, Rogers was an assistant professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University. He was only 31 years old but was becoming an academic figure. In the mid-2000s, The Diffusion of Innovations became the second most-cited book in the social sciences, the fifth edition addresses the spread of the Internet, and how it has transformed the way human beings communicate and adopt new ideas. Rogers proposes that adopters of any new innovation or idea can be categorized as innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards and these categories, based on standard deviations from the mean of the normal curve, provide a common language for innovation researchers. Each adopters willingness and ability to adopt an innovation depends on their awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, people can fall into different categories for different innovations—a farmer might be an early adopter of mechanical innovations, but a late majority adopter of biological innovations or VCRs. His research and work became accepted in communications and technology adoption studies. Rogers was also able to relate his communications research to health problems, including hygiene, family planning, cancer prevention
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Diffusion of innovations
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Diffusion of innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread. Everett Rogers, a professor of communication studies, popularized the theory in his book Diffusion of Innovations, the book was first published in 1962, Rogers argues that diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the participants in a social system. The origins of the diffusion of innovations theory are varied and span multiple disciplines, Rogers proposes that four main elements influence the spread of a new idea, the innovation itself, communication channels, time, and a social system. This process relies heavily on human capital, the innovation must be widely adopted in order to self-sustain. Within the rate of adoption, there is a point at which an innovation reaches critical mass, the categories of adopters are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Diffusion manifests itself in different ways and is subject to the type of adopters. The criterion for the categorization is innovativeness, defined as the degree to which an individual adopts a new idea. The study of diffusion of innovations took off in the subfield of sociology in the midwestern United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Agriculture technology was advancing rapidly, and researchers started to examine how independent farmers were adopting hybrid seeds, equipment, and techniques. A study of the adoption of hybrid corn seed in Iowa by Ryan, in 1962, Everett Rogers, a professor of rural sociology, published his seminal work, Diffusion of Innovations. Using his synthesis, Rogers produced a theory of the adoption of innovations among individuals, Diffusion of Innovations and Rogers later books are among the most often cited in diffusion research. The key elements in research are, Studies have explored many characteristics of innovations. Meta-reviews have identified several characteristics that are common among most studies and these are in line with the characteristics that Rogers initially cited in his reviews. These qualities interact and are judged as a whole, for example, an innovation might be extremely complex, reducing its likelihood to be adopted and diffused, but it might be very compatible with a large advantage relative to current tools. Even with this high learning curve, potential adopters might adopt the innovation anyway, Studies also identify other characteristics of innovations, but these are not as common as the ones that Rogers lists above. The fuzziness of the boundaries of the innovation can impact its adoption, specifically, innovations with a small core and large periphery are easier to adopt. Innovations that are less risky are easier to adopt as the loss from failed integration is lower. Innovations that are disruptive to routine tasks, even when they bring a relative advantage
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Trans-cultural diffusion
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It is distinct from the diffusion of innovations within a specific culture. Examples of diffusion include the spread of the war chariot and iron smelting in ancient times, and this can include hierarchical, stimulus, and contagious diffusion. Relocation diffusion, an idea or innovation that migrates into new areas, hierarchical diffusion, an idea or innovation that spreads by moving from larger to smaller places, often with little regard to the distance between places, and often influenced by social elites. Contagious diffusion, an idea or innovation that spreads based on contact within a given population. Stimulus diffusion, an idea or innovation that spreads based on its attachment to another concept, inter-cultural diffusion can happen in many ways. Migrating populations will carry their culture with them, ideas can be carried by trans-cultural visitors, such as merchants, explorers, soldiers, diplomats, slaves, and hired artisans. Technology diffusion has occurred by one society luring skilled scientists or workers by payments or other inducement. Trans-cultural marriages between two neighboring or interspersed cultures have also contributed, among literate societies, diffusion can occur through letters, books, and, in modern times, through electronic media. There are three categories of diffusion mechanisms, Direct diffusion occurs when two cultures are very close to other, resulting in intermarriage, trade, and even warfare. Forced diffusion occurs when one culture subjugates another culture and forces its own customs on the conquered people, indirect diffusion happens when traits are passed from one culture through a middleman to another culture, without the first and final cultures being in direct contact. An example could be the presence of Mexican food in Canada, Direct diffusion was common in ancient times, when small groups of humans lived in adjoining settlements. Indirect diffusion is common in todays world because of the mass media and this concept was invoked with regard to the independent development of calculus by Newton and Leibnitz, and the inventions of the airplane and of the electronic computer. Early theories of hyperdiffusionism can be traced to ideas about South America being the origin of mankind, the work of Grafton Elliot Smith fomented a revival of hyperdiffusionism in 1911, he asserted that copper–producing knowledge spread from Egypt to the rest of the world along with megalithic culture. Smith claimed that all major inventions had been made by the ancient Egyptians and were carried to the rest of the world by migrants and his views became known as Egyptocentric-Hyperdiffusionism. William James Perry elaborated on Smiths hypothesis by using ethnographic data, another hyperdiffusionist was Lord Raglan, in his book How Came Civilization he wrote that instead of Egypt all culture and civilization had come from Mesopotamia. Hyperdiffusionism after this did not entirely disappear, but it was abandoned by mainstream academia. Historians have questioned recently whether Europe really owes the development of such inventions as gunpowder, the compass, while the concept of diffusion is well accepted in general, conjectures about the existence or the extent of diffusion in some specific contexts have been hotly disputed. Heyerdahls theory of Polynesian origins has not gained acceptance among anthropologists, major contributors to inter-cultural diffusion research and theory include, Franz Boas Anne Walbank Buckland James Burnett, Lord Monboddo Leo Frobenius Cyrus H. Gordon Fritz Graebner A. C
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Mentorship
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Mentorship is a relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person. The mentor may be older or younger than the person being mentored and it is a learning and development partnership between someone with vast experience and someone who wants to learn. The person in receipt of mentorship may be referred to as a protégé, a protégée, an apprentice or, in the 2000s, the mentor may be referred to as a godfather/godmother or a rabbi. Mentoring is a process always involves communication and is relationship-based. Mentoring in Europe has existed since at least Ancient Greek times, the roots of the practice are lost in antiquity. The word itself was inspired by the character of Mentor in Homers Odyssey, though the actual Mentor in the story is a somewhat ineffective old man, the goddess Athena takes on his appearance in order to guide young Telemachus in his time of difficulty. Mainstream business literature subsequently adopted the terms and concepts, promoting them as pathways to success for all career climbers, in 1970 these terms were not in the general American vocabulary, by the mid-1990s they had become part of everyday speech. The focus of mentoring is to develop the person and so the techniques are broad. Sowing, mentors are often confronted with the difficulty of preparing the learner before he or she is ready to change. Sowing is necessary when you know that what you say may not be understood or even acceptable to learners at first, catalyzing, when change reaches a critical level of pressure, learning can escalate. Here the mentor chooses to plunge the learner right into change, provoking a different way of thinking, showing, this is making something understandable, or using your own example to demonstrate a skill or activity. You show what you are talking about, you show by your own behavior, harvesting, here the mentor focuses on picking the ripe fruit, it is usually used to create awareness of what was learned by experience and to draw conclusions. The key questions here are, What have you learned, leadership authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Z. Multiple mentors, A new and upcoming trend is having multiple mentors and this can be helpful because we can all learn from each other. Having more than one mentor will widen the knowledge of the person being mentored, there are different mentors who may have different strengths. Profession or trade mentor, This is someone who is currently in the trade/profession you are entering and they know the trends, important changes and new practices that you should know to stay at the top of your career. A mentor like this would be someone you can discuss ideas regarding the field, industry mentor, This is someone who doesnt just focus on the profession. This mentor will be able to give insight on the industry as a whole, whether it be research, development or key changes in the industry, you need to know
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Training
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Training is teaching, or developing in oneself or others, any skills and knowledge that relate to specific useful competencies. Training has specific goals of improving ones capability, capacity, productivity and it forms the core of apprenticeships and provides the backbone of content at institutes of technology. People within many professions and occupations may refer to this sort of training as professional development, Physical training concentrates on mechanistic goals, training-programs in this area develop specific skills or muscles, often with a view of peaking at a particular time. Some physical training programs focus on raising overall physical fitness, in military use, training means gaining the physical ability to perform and survive in combat, and learning the many skills needed in a time of war. These include how to use a variety of weapons, outdoor survival skills, while some studies have indicated relaxation training is useful for some medical conditions, autogenic training has limited results or has been the result of few studies. Some commentators use a term for workplace learning to improve performance, training. There are also additional services available online for those who wish to receive training above, some examples of these services include career counseling, skill assessment, and supportive services. One can generally categorize such training as on-the-job or off-the-job, the on-the-job training method takes place in a normal working situation, using the actual tools, equipment, documents or materials that trainees will use when fully trained. On-the-job training has a reputation as most effective for vocational work. It involves employee training at the place of work while he or she is doing the actual job. Usually a professional trainer serves as the course instructor using hands-on training often supported by formal classroom training, sometimes training can occur by using web based technology or video conferencing tools. Simulation based training is another method which uses technology to assist in trainee development and this is particularly common in the training of skills requiring a very high degree of practice, and in those which include a significant responsibility for life and property. An advantage is that simulation training allows the trainer to find, study, off-the-job training method takes place away from normal work situations — implying that the employee does not count as a directly productive worker while such training takes place. Off-the-job training method also involves employee training at an away from the actual work environment. It often utilizes lectures, case studies, role playing and simulation, having the advantage of allowing people to get away from work and this type of training has proven more effective in inculcating concepts and ideas. Many personnel selection companies offer a service which would help to improve employee competences, the internal personnel training topics can vary from effective problem solving skills to leadership training. A more recent development in job training is the On the Job Training Plan, note for example the institutionalised spiritual training of Threefold Training in Buddhism, Meditation in Hinduism or discipleship in Christianity. These aspects of training can be short term or last a lifetime, depending on the context of the training, instructor Guide, is an important document available to an instructor. Specifically, it is used within a Lesson Plan, as the blueprint that ensures instruction is presented in proper sequence, objectives of a lesson plan, To ensure that instructors have considered all factors necessary to conduct a safe and effective lesson
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Information
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In other words, it is the answer to a question of some kind. It is thus related to data and knowledge, as data represents values attributed to parameters, as it regards data, the informations existence is not necessarily coupled to an observer, while in the case of knowledge, the information requires a cognitive observer. At its most fundamental, information is any propagation of cause, Information can be encoded into various forms for transmission and interpretation. It can also be encrypted for safe storage and communication, the uncertainty of an event is measured by its probability of occurrence and is inversely proportional to that. The more uncertain an event, the information is required to resolve uncertainty of that event. The bit is a unit of information, but other units such as the nat may be used. Example, information in one fair coin flip, log2 =1 bit, the concept that information is the message has different meanings in different contexts. The English word was derived from the Latin stem of the nominative. Inform itself comes from the Latin verb informare, which means to give form, eidos can also be associated with thought, proposition, or even concept. The ancient Greek word for information is πληροφορία, which transliterates from πλήρης fully and it literally means fully bears or conveys fully. In modern Greek language the word Πληροφορία is still in use and has the same meaning as the word information in English. In addition to its meaning, the word Πληροφορία as a symbol has deep roots in Aristotles semiotic triangle. In this regard it can be interpreted to communicate information to the one decoding that specific type of sign, from the stance of information theory, information is taken as an ordered sequence of symbols from an alphabet, say an input alphabet χ, and an output alphabet ϒ. Information processing consists of a function that maps any input sequence from χ into an output sequence from ϒ. The mapping may be probabilistic or deterministic and it may have memory or be memoryless. Often information can be viewed as a type of input to an organism or system, inputs are of two kinds, some inputs are important to the function of the organism or system by themselves. In his book Sensory Ecology Dusenbery called these causal inputs, other inputs are important only because they are associated with causal inputs and can be used to predict the occurrence of a causal input at a later time. Some information is important because of association with information but eventually there must be a connection to a causal input
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Fact
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A fact is something that has occurred or is correct. The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability—that is, standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement, the word fact derives from the Latin factum, and was first used in English with the same meaning, a thing done or performed, a meaning now obsolete. The common usage of something that has occurred or is the case dates from the middle of the sixteenth century. Fact is sometimes used synonymously with truth, as distinct from opinions, falsehoods and this use is found in such phrases as, It is a fact that the cup is blue or Matter of fact, and. Not history, nor fact, but imagination, filmmaker Werner Herzog distinguishes between the two, claiming that Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. Fact also indicates a matter under discussion deemed to be true or correct, alternatively, fact may also indicate an allegation or stipulation of something that may or may not be a true fact. This alternate usage, although contested by some, has a history in standard English. Fact may also indicate findings derived through a process of evaluation, including review of testimony, direct observation, or otherwise and this use is reflected in the terms fact-find and fact-finder. Facts may be checked by reason, experiment, personal experience, roger Bacon wrote If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics. In philosophy, the fact is considered in epistemology and ontology. Questions of objectivity and truth are closely associated with questions of fact, a fact can be defined as something that is the case—that is, a state of affairs. Facts may be understood as information that makes a sentence true. Facts may also be understood as things to which a true sentence refers. The statement Jupiter is the largest planet in the system is about the fact Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Engels version of the theory of truth explains that what makes a sentence true is that it corresponds to a fact. This theory presupposes the existence of an objective world, the Slingshot argument claims to show that all true statements stand for the same thing - the truth value true. If this argument holds, and facts are taken to be what true statements stand for, any non-trivial true statement about reality is necessarily an abstraction composed of a complex of objects and properties or relations
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Tag (metadata)
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In information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. Tagging was popularized by websites associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services and it is now also part of other database systems, desktop applications, and operating systems. People use tags to aid classification, mark ownership, note boundaries, Tags may take the form of words, images, or other identifying marks. An analogous example of tags in the world is museum object tagging. People were using textual keywords to classify information and objects long before computers, computer based search algorithms made the use of such keywords a rapid way of exploring records. Tagging gained popularity due to the growth of social bookmarking, image sharing and these sites allow users to create and manage labels that categorize content using simple keywords. Websites that include tags often display collections of tags as tag clouds, on websites that aggregate the tags of all users, an individual users tags can be useful both to them and to the larger community of the websites users. Tagging systems have sometimes been classified into two kinds, top-down and bottom-up, top-down taxonomies are created by an authorized group of designers, whereas bottom-up taxonomies are created by all users. Some researchers and applications have experimented with combining hierarchical and non-hierarchical tagging to aid in information retrieval, others are combining top-down and bottom-up tagging, including in some large library catalogs such as WorldCat. When tags or other taxonomies have further properties such as relationships and attributes, the use of keywords as part of an identification and classification system long predates computers. This use of the word tag did not refer to metadata tags, online databases and early websites deployed keyword tags as a way for publishers to help users find content. In The Equator the term Tag for user-input was described as a literal or keyword to aid the user. However, users defined singular Tags, and did not share Tags at that point, the success of Flickr and the influence of Delicious popularized the concept, and other social software websites—such as YouTube, Technorati, and Last. fm—also implemented tagging. In 2005, the Atom web syndication standard provided a category element for inserting subject categories into web feeds, many blog systems allow authors to add free-form tags to a post, along with placing the post into a predetermined category. For example, a post may display that it has been tagged with baseball, each of those tags is usually a web link leading to an index page listing all of the posts associated with that tag. The blog may have a listing all the tags in use on that blog
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