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Background. Until recently, information behaviour scholars have mainly focused on the workplace or educational settings, and defined information as either a tool for problem solving or a means to satisfy needs. This, however, only represents a partial picture of a larger horizon. In some arenas of life, such as serious leisure, people do not seek information to necessarily solve a problem or satisfy an urgent need. They look for information to enjoy a hobby or participate in an entirely voluntary activity. Objectives. The paper introduces transcendental information as a subjective and contextual concept to provide insights on lesser explored corners of the information behaviour scholarship. This concept is compared with existing theories and concepts in the information behaviour area. Method. This conceptual paper is based on a critical literature review of human information behaviour, and reflects on some key concepts in the field, including the nature of information, information needs, information seeking and sharing. The paper also provides a selective literature review of the serious leisure perspective to contextualise the analysis. Results. It is found that transcendental information usually has an aesthetic and intellectual essence. It may be expressed in various imaginative forms and can appear in different non-textual and embedded formats. Moreover, it can generate joyful and inspiring impacts. The paper refers to serious leisure as an exemplary setting to contextualise transcendental information within a relevant and well-established theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The present investigation compares the degree of self-citation of Iranian scholarly publications indexed in both Iranian Science Citation (ISC) and ISI’s Web of Science (WoS). The study covers the 2005-2009period. Subject distribution, extent of self-citations, mean differences in self-citation and nature of co-authorships and corporate affiliations were also studied. Methodology: Bibliometric method was deployed. The sample included 1089 articles indexed in ISC and 27729 articles indexed in WoS for 2005-2009 periods. Typical samples were taken using regular random sampling. Findings: Results indicated that WoS has the higher rate of co-authorships, citations, and self citations for Iranian articles indexed than ISC. No significance was observed in either databases regarding number of citations and number of authors. Examination of subject scope indicated that while Humanities and Social Sciences have the highest share in ISC, Basic Sciences are dominant in WoS.

Objective: This paper tries to analyse and visualize the co-authorship network of institutions in 1351 papers published in 7 knowledge and information science journals in Iran from 1387 through 1391.Methodology: In this paper, we use scientometric and social network analysis to study the collaboration network of institutions. Overall structure of the network was investigated using a few macro-level metrics like density, connectedness, clustering coefficient, components, mean distance and diameter. Additionally, centrality metrics include degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness sentrality, eigenvector, number of adjacent nodes as well as productivity measure were adopted to analyze the performance and status of institutions in the network. UCINET software was utilized for data analysis.Results: Findings of the study revealed that the majority of papers (68.8%) are multi-authored and publications by two authors are the most common type of co-authorship (45.22%). Based on the findings, 63.4% of publications in 7 journals were published through inter-institutional collaboration, which shows that Iranian KIS researchers tend to collaborate more with researchers from other institutions. The co-authorship network of institutions in Iranian KIS papers contains 218 vertices and 1002 cross-institutional collaboration links.

The evaluation of irrigation suitability plays a crucial role for the socio-economic development of the society, especially in the region of Sundarban. For sustainable agricultural practices, groundwater quality must be suitable for irrigation; otherwise, it can degrade soil and diminish crop yield. The entropy information theory, several irrigational indices, multivariate statistics, GIS, and geostatistics are used in this work to evaluate the geographical distribution and quality of groundwater in the Indian Sundarban region. In total, 33 groundwater samples were collected in 2018 (April and May), and they were evaluated for major cations, anions, as well as other parameters like electrical conductivity (EC), soluble sodium percentage (SSP), potential salinity (PS), total dissolved solids (TDS), Kelly ratio (KR), sodium absorption ratio (SAR), permeability index (PI), residual sodium carbonate (RSC), magnesium hazard (MH), and residual sodium bicarbonate (RSBC). The overall trend of the principal cations and anions is in the sequence of Na +  ≥ Mg 2+  ≥ Ca 2+  ≥ K 2+ and HCO 3 -  ≥ Cl -  ≥ NO 3 -  ≥ SO 4 2-  ≥ F - , respectively, whereas the spatial variation of %Na, SAR, RSBC, and MH demonstrate very poor irrigation water quality, and spatial variation of KR, RSC, SSP, PI, and PS signifies that the irrigation water quality is excellent to good. In order to identify the specific association and potential source of the dissolved chemical in the groundwater, statistical techniques like correlation and principal component analysis were also employed. The hydrochemical facies indicates that mixed type makes up the bulk (51.51%) of the water samples. Following the Wilcox plot, more than 75% of the water samples are good to doubtful; however, by the US salinity hazard map, roughly 60.60% of the samples had high salinity (C3-S1 zone). The EWQII reports that no samples fall into the very good (no restriction) category, whereas 30.30%, 30.30%, and 39.40% of the sample wells record good (low restriction), average (moderate restriction), and poor (severe restriction) irrigation water quality, respectively. Based on this study, the bulk of the groundwater samples taken from the study area are unsuitable for cultivation. The findings of this study will also help decision-makers develop adequate future plans for irrigation and groundwater resource management., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)

In the paper industry, numerous studies have explored means of optimizing order allocation and cutting trim loss. However, enterprises may not adopt the resulting solutions because some widths of the inventory exceed or are less than those required for acceptable scheduling. To ensure that the results better suit the actual requirements, we present a new decision model based on the adjustment of scheduling and limitation of inventory quantity to differentiate trim loss and inventory distribution data. Differential analysis is used to reduce data filtering and the information is valuable for decision making. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method. The results show that our proposed method outperforms the manual method regarding scheduling quantity and trim loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the use of theory in empirical papers presented at the ISIC: The Information Behavior Conference, from 1996 to 2020. The study examines the inclusion or lack of theory, the level of theory use, the specific theories used, and the disciplines from which these theories originated. The results indicate that most papers include theory, with many using theory substantially, but there is a significant decrease in theory use between the early and recent years of the conference.

During the last two decades, a systematic re-examination of the whole information science field has taken place around the FIS—Foundations of Information Science—initiative. With the occasion of its Fourth Conference in Beijing 2010, a group of selected contributors and leading practitioners of those fields have been invited to contribute to this Special Issue. What is the status of information science today? What is the relationship between information and the laws of nature? Is information merely “physical”? What is the difference between information and computation? Has the genomic revolution changed the contemporary views on information and life? And what about the nature of social information? Cogent answers to these questions and to quite many others are attempted in the contributions that follow.

Introduction: Rolf Landauer declared in 1991 that "information is physical". Since then, information has come to be seen by many physicists as a fundamental component of the physical world; indeed by some as the physical component. This idea is now gaining currency in popular science communication. However, it is often far from clear what exactly this statement means; exactly how is information physical? And why this should matter for information science? The purpose of this paper is to clarify just what is meant by the physical nature of information, and the significance of these considerations for our discipline. Methods: A selective literature review and conceptual analysis, based on literature from both physical science and information science. Results: The prospect of attempting to make links between objective and subjective conceptions of information has been strongly advocated by some authors and doubted by others. The physical nature of information can be understood from three main perspectives: the relation between information and physical entropy; the strongly informational nature of the quantum view of nature; and the possibility of recasting physical laws in informational terms. Conclusions: Based on this analysis, we muse on the relevance of such issues to information science, with particular reference to emergent properties of information. Apart from the added public awareness of the i-word in a very different context from the norm, it may that that there are general laws and principles, or at least useful metaphors and analogies, linking the concept of information in the physical, biological and social domains. [This paper was published as part of: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen, Denmark, 19-22 August, 2013.]

The papers range from the theoretical ones, the paper applying the models, to the papers providing software tools for causal inference. B Instrumental variable in causal inference. b Papers [[1], [3]] investigate models using instrumental variable in causal inference. The present Special Issue of Entropy, entitled "Causal Inference for Heterogeneous Data and Information Theory", covers various aspects of causal inference. In the first step, the treatment and outcome are modeled to incorporate the potential confounders, and in the second step, the predictions are inserted into the ATE estimators such as the Augmented Inverse Probability Weighting (AIPW) estimator, based on neural networks (NN). [Extracted from the article]

The primary objective of the research was to investigate the mailing practices and filing methods in a computer support or administrative environment involving the resulting abuse of paper. In applied research, an exploratory investigation focused on selected higher education institutions in Gauteng with a structured questionnaire as measuring instrument. In the analysis and interpretations of the findings, correlation and cross-tabulation on all sets of variables determined whether any meaningful associations could be found. The investigation indicated that the war against paper abuse is not over by any means. Perceptions regarding a paperless office and assumptions that technology could assist organisations to combat paper abuse were unfounded, mainly because of a lack of guidance, training interventions and control measures. Consequently, follow-up research is presently conducted whereby models will be designed and implemented concomitant with specified computer software features in order to counteract the abuse of paper and facilitate the effective use of information and communication technology interfaced work processes and procedures. This article focuses only on the electronic mail and filing components of the investigation.

Abstract: There are a number of issues which are involved with organizing a conference. Among these issues, assigning conference-papers to reviewers is one of the most difficult tasks. Assigning conference-papers to reviewers is automatically the most crucial part. In this paper, we address this issue of paper-to-reviewer assignment, and we propose a method to model the reviewers, based on the matching degree between the reviewers and the papers by combining a preference-based approach and a topic-based approach. We explain the assignment algorithm and show the evaluation results in comparison with the Hungarian algorithm. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recommendation algorithms have been researched extensively to help people deal with abundance of information. In recent years, the incorporation of multiple relevance criteria has attracted increased interest. Such multi-criteria recommendation approaches are researched as a paradigm for building intelligent systems that can be tailored to multiple interest indicators of end-users – such as combinations of implicit and explicit interest indicators in the form of ratings or ratings on multiple relevance dimensions. Nevertheless, evaluation of these recommendation techniques in the context of real-life applications still remains rather limited. Previous studies dealing with the evaluation of recommender systems have outlined that the performance of such algorithms is often dependent on the dataset – and indicate the importance of carrying out careful testing and parameterization. Especially when looking at large scale datasets, it becomes very difficult to deploy evaluation methods that may help in assessing the effect that different system components have to the overall design. In this paper, we study how layered evaluation can be applied for the case of a multi-criteria recommendation service that we plan to deploy for paper recommendation using the Mendeley dataset. The paper introduces layered evaluation and suggests two experiments that may help assess the components of the envisaged system separately. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we demonstrate how to identify whether different groups of students (classified by their major) provide different quantities of information in their student ratings of instruction (SROIs). As a corollary, we identified specific groups of students who provided a greater/lesser quantity of information in their responses. All calculations were undertaken using Microsoft Excel, and no prior statistical training was required to create or interpret our information measures. We used SROI data taken from a first-year logical reasoning course for health professions majors and found that the quantity of information provided by pharmacy and other health majors in their SROIs exceeded the quantity of information provided by nursing majors for every single SROI question. We also found that specific majors gave relatively greater quantities of information (relative to other majors) for specific types of SROI items.

The continuous expansion of the construction scale of smart city has reconstructed the urban information pattern. How to maintain the stability of information security while giving full play to the role of information sharing is a practical problem that must be solved for the sustainable development of smart city. Based on the information ecology theory, this paper construct the smart city information security risk evaluation system from six aspects. Then, zGT2FSs is established based on type-2 fuzzy set theory and IAA method, which fully considers the internal and external uncertainty of expert decision-making. According to the calculation results, the key influencing factors of information security risk of smart city are analyzed to provide suggestions and guidance for the formulation of information security control in the process of smart city construction in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Labeling information is a precarious and risky enterprise. Catalogers have the task of fitting unique concepts within established and rigid language frameworks while also minimizing personal bias. The way information literacy librarians interact with labeled information also influences how users interact with information. Labeling moves beyond the role of categorizing; it also contributes to meaning making and knowledge building. Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" serves as a philosophical footing to illustrate how the labeling of things, in this case information, shapes the way we give things meaning. Critical librarianship and philosophy of information theory add to the discussion by considering how personal perspective, power, and bias to manipulate the game of naming information that takes place in the information literacy classroom. This paper is an invitation for librarians to reflect upon the relationship between labeling and how all users of information engage with labels and subsequently create meaning and knowledge.

This paper analyzes the emergence of the paper as a kind of writing in the area of the Humanities that, in recent times, and with institutional support, has been imposed as the nearly unique and acceptable kind of academic discourse. The aim of this paper is, first, to study the main characteristics of this kind of writing, based on information in the manuals and instructions for paper writing and, secondly, to signal its implications for the intellectual work in general and for the work in Latin America in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been a lot of success in using the deterministic approach to provide approximate characterization of Gaussian network capacity. In this paper, we take a deterministic view and revisit the problem of wiretap channel with side information. A precise characterization of the secrecy capacity is obtained for a linear deterministic model, which naturally suggests a coding scheme which we show to achieve the secrecy capacity of the degraded Gaussian model (dubbed as “secret writing on dirty paper”) to within half a bit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines near-capacity dirty-paper code designs based on source-channel coding. We first point out that the performance loss in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in our code designs can be broken into the sum of the packing loss from channel coding and a modulo loss, which is a function of the granular loss from source coding and the target dirty-paper coding rate (or SNR). We then examine practical designs by combining trellis-coded quantization (TCQ) with both systematic and nonsystematic irregular repeat-accumulate (IRA) codes. Like previous approaches, we exploit the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart technique for capacity-approaching IRA code design; but unlike previous approaches, we emphasize the role of strong source coding to achieve as much granular gain as possible using TCQ. Instead of systematic doping, we employ two relatively shifted TCQ codebooks, where the shift is optimized (via tuning the EXIT charts) to facilitate the IRA code design. Our designs synergistically combine TCQ with IRA codes so that they work together as well as they do individually. By bringing together TCQ (the best quantizer from the source coding community) and EXIT chart-based IRA code designs (the best from the channel coding community), we are able to approach the theoretical limit of dirty-paper coding. For example, at 0.25 bit per symbol (b/s), our best code design (with 2048-state TCQ) performs only 0.630 dB away from the Shannon capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "writing on dirty paper"-channel model offers an information-theoretic framework for precoding techniques for canceling arbitrary interference known at the transmitter. It indicates that lossless precoding is theoretically possible at any signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and thus dirty-paper coding may serve as a basic building block in both single-user and multiuser communication systems. We design an end-to-end coding realization of a system materializing a significant portion of the promised gains. We employ multidimensional quantization based on trellis shaping at the transmitter. Coset decoding is implemented at the receiver using "virtual bits." Combined with iterative decoding of capacity-approaching codes we achieve an improvement of 2 dB over the best scalar quantization scheme. Code design is done using the EXIT chart technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a fundamental lemma called the Poisson matching lemma, and apply it to prove one-shot achievability results for various settings, namely channels with state information at the encoder, lossy source coding with side information at the decoder, joint source-channel coding, broadcast channels, distributed lossy source coding, multiple access channels and channel resolvability. Our one-shot bounds improve upon the best known one-shot bounds in most of the aforementioned settings (except multiple access channels and channel resolvability, where we recover bounds comparable to the best known bounds), with shorter proofs in some settings even when compared to the conventional asymptotic approach using typicality. The Poisson matching lemma replaces both the packing and covering lemmas, greatly simplifying the error analysis. This paper extends the work of Li and El Gamal on Poisson functional representation, which mainly considered variable-length source coding settings, whereas this paper studies fixed-length settings, and is not limited to source coding, showing that the Poisson functional representation is a viable alternative to typicality for most problems in network information theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Academic dishonesties, especially phenomena such as paper and/ or thesis and its related business, are increasing in Iran and now it is a challenge in higher education at the national level. Before any national policy making for controlling this phenomenon, determining different aspects of it can be helpful in further understanding and achieving a conceptual framework necessary for efficient and effective decisions. According to the importance of this subject, studying the related body of literature revealed that this phenomenon has not been paid from its main players i.e. writers and customers' points of view till now.Methodology: achieving a contextual and structural concept of this phenomenon, this research sought to study the experiences of these two main players with an inductive approach and a mix of ethnographic and grounded theory methods to find a pattern.Findings: Results showed that ghostwriting phenomena can be conceptualized using seven dimensions including the name of phenomenon, its scope, ghostwriters attributes, introducing channels, the economy of ghostwriting, attributes of ghostwriting customers, and attitudes toward ghostwriting. The results provide policymakers and researchers with the necessary understanding of ghostwriting phenomena.Originality: This research is the first qualitative study that seeks to conceptualize ghostwriting as one of academic misconduct.Keywords: academic dishonesty, paper, and thesis writing business, contextual study, ghostwriter, ghostwriting customer