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Softpanorama |
May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, an evil king,
was condemned to Hades to forever roll a big rock to the top of a mountain,
and then the rock always rolled back down again.
Similar version of Hell is suffered every day by people
managed by micromanagers and control freaks.
There are several typical cases of chronic overload:
Information overload/information fatigue syndrome: Symptoms include paralysis of analytical capacity, increased anxiety, greater self-doubt, and a tendency to blame others. When people are faced with more information than they can process, they become unable to make decisions or take action. There are several aspects of this problem.
One is information overload due to overwhelming complexity of the situation. Typical examples include network troubleshooting, complex programming and/or networking problem when complexity of the stuff is over human capacity to comprehend and people spend days trying to figure out what is wrong and why. Network administrators and security analysts know this type of situations pretty well.
The second situation is "junk" information overload when civilization produces more information than necessary for normal functioning, with most information of low quality. This is kind of new type of pollution, information smog.
What started out as a liberating stream during the Renaissance has turned into a deluge of chaos. In the USA, for example, there are ten thousand of newspapers and magazines. There are also more than 100,000 new book titles published every year (and it's probably more than a million world-wide) and just for the record, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail come into our mail boxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the instream of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.
The first type of overload is the worst as it is intrinsically connected with demoralization and burnout. Here the most helpful page is probably Softpanorama Humor Archive. Unique Collection of Open Source Related Humor. Humor is one of the most affecting methods of fighting stress and overload. It helps a person to remain positive in difficult situations more effectively that most drugs.
The last one is usually pretty benign. You just need to eradiate the view that 'Knowledge is Power' and start regularly throwing out Computer magazines that were never opened ;-). Email overload and its ultimate manifestation -- email spam -- can now be effectively controlled by technical means.
The second last aspect is work overload. Often it is typical for high-tech startups. "Technology has changed, but human nature hasn't. Whether it's the Gold Rush of 1849 or the Web Rush of l999, people are people. More often than not, they're miserable, nasty, selfish creatures, driven by vanity and greed, doing whatever they can to get ahead, even if it means stepping on the person next to them, crushing the weak, and destroying themselves in the process." Actually this is not true.
The IT industry is a unique environment; we are truly given a more choice as to where our priorities lie than in many other jobs. But there is no free lunch. You want a cool job? Don't expect to work for a huge company and get paid the big bucks. You want to make good money? Don't expect to be able to leave the office in the middle of the day just to sit in the park and drink coffee. You want to make great money? Don't expect to work 40 or even 50 hours a week...
Actually startups aren't about the paradise, nor are they viable for those who crave security. They are about risk, not just financial but also emotional and intellectual. Some think that the rewards for success are worth it, some not... It's true that some startups hire, than harass and inflict burnout on programmers and sys-admins. Life in the fast lane can be brutal - long hours, almost no employer-employee loyalty, greed and moral cowardice, back-stabbing, pressure, etc. If you don't want to do what your boss want, a startup can probably find immigrant that will do it for less money. That is the Silicon Valley Way (TM).
Many visitors to this page are probably system administrators. And it's sad to say but sysadmins are often the janitors of e-business. To clean up the messes from the ugly packages superfast growth and unrealistic schedules they often work long, late hours. It's a thankless job (although not the only one and not the most miserable one...) Anyway the reality is that sysadmins/programmers in startups and small companies that are struggling to survive. Sometimes are also put under substantial stress... I'm surprised most of them aren't more neurotic from sleep deprivation.
At the same time many sysadmins in established companies working with "Gold" coverage from Sun or HP can surf the WEB for 80% of the day... And if you can rarely showed up before 11 a.m., sometimes it is just a survival skill to stay past midnight once in a while... In large companies most sysadmin roles aren't always firefighting, and not so much stress, but they tends to wear on a capable person pretty quickly. Sometimes it is really look like cleaning. You clean it today, but in a month everything return to the same state. Sometimes it make sense to play an idiot in large company in best traditions of Peter Principle. Officially recognized low-performers often can spend 90% of their time addressing only 10% of problems that high-performer needs to address. The most valued employees in large companies are often on the verge of burn-out because they are too overloaded and have way too many pressures, conflicts and demands combined with too few rewards, acknowledgments and successes.
For IS top guns it might make sense to stop for a moment to dig infodirt and ask themselves a simple question "Does working with the fancy hardware and software (let's assume for a moment that Unix can be fancy first five years or so ;-) worth 60 hours a week or even 40 hours of cleaning infodirt?". Independent of your answer thinking about this may help to adjust your priorities :-).
Pseudo-Attention Deficit Disorder: Some programmers are perversely wired. It is not uncommon for them to be sitting in a meeting and using a hand-held device to exchange instant messages surreptitiously with someone in the same meeting. You have Pseudo-attention deficit disorder if:
- I find my mind wandering from tasks that are uninteresting or difficult
- I say things without thinking and later regret having said them.
- I make quick decisions without thinking enough about their possible bad results
- I have a quick temper, a short fuse
- I have trouble planning in what order to do a series of tasks or activities
- In group activities it is hard for me to wait my turn.
- I usually work on more than one project at a time, and fail to finish many of them.
Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov
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1/1/99 | Library Trends,
This project combines ideas from mythology, folklore, and library and information science in an effort to make sense of an aspect of modern culture that is frequently perceived as troublesome. Discussions of information overload, "data glut," or "information anxiety" are abundant in popular culture but do little to shed light on the origin of this problem. Library and information science work sidesteps the need to verify the existence of information overload, seeking instead to mitigate its effects. The discipline has produced a vast literature that addresses user perceptions, information needs, and information-seeking behavior. Information management, information retrieval, and attendant notions such as relevance have also received much attention. Within both popular culture and library and information science research, information overload is usually described or defined by means of anecdote or by associated symptoms.
However constituted, popular and scholarly attention confirms information overload as a recognized and resonant cultural concept that persists even without solid corroboration. Mythology and folkloristics are used here as analytic tools to suggest that information overload can be viewed as a myth of modern culture. Here myth does not mean something that is not true but an overarching prescriptive belief.
Motivation.
If you have arrived at this page, you may well be asking "why?". In fact, "Why does someone want to write about the disadvantages of hard work, when we are all told incessantly how beneficial it is?"
I conducted an experiment. I entered the terms
"hard work" disadvantagesinto http://www.google.com/ (try it for yourself) and found over 21,000 hits.I then rephrased my question and entered
"disadvantages of hard work"into Google and got precisely zero hits. No-one on the entire web, it would seem, has written this phrase. Why not? Clearly it is "culturally verboten".
I was motivated to ask this question of the search engine, as, after many years of teaching in the University sector, I have met a significant number of people who I consider have been significantly damaged as individuals by subscribing to the "hard work is necessary" hypothesis.
So let us put the record straight here, and spell out some of the advantages of working just sufficiently to satisfy the various criteria of emotional and spiritual need, the demands of the job, the necessity of keeping body supplied with food clothing and shelter, and the social requirements of interacting with others.
Case histories
Among the people I have observed who subscribe to the "hard work is good" hypothesis are several University academics whose ability to think clearly, and administer effectively, are adversely affected by their permanent state of tiredness. Often, these folk feel the need to intervene when it is inappropriate. People like this generally are unhappy with the status quo, and feel that any change or intervention is bound to be for the better.
Among the students I have met, there are significant numbers whose ability to learn and retain information, let alone process it effectively, have been compromised by years of being forced to acquire unnecessary skills and learn unnecessary facts; I maintain this has actually physically damaged their brains, and that an enlightened court of law would award them damages against their educational institutions. Often, this kind of mental overload seems to be a prerequisite for admission to the course being taken.
At Berkeley (Uni Calif) in the 1960s I noticed that the ability of overworked students to express themselves clearly in spoken English was severely impaired. This was confirmed in the early 1980s when a telephone conversation with a Physics grad student in a Californian University had to be abandoned as the person in question could not communicate fluently. It is also noticeable that overworked students cannot sequence or recall simple facts like names, addresses, and telephone numbers with accuracy. Neither can they spell accurately or proof read what they have written. They also try to "rote learn" ineffectually, as they cannot repeat accurately what they have just seen, read, or heard.
Among the medics I have met, there are a significant number, likewise, who "do what they do, regardless" - thus if you go to a physician you get dosed up with drugs; to a surgeon, you get cut open; in fact, each specialist tries to fit your ailment into his own field of competence. This activity is unrelated to the needs of the case.
Among the politicians I have known, the greatest damage to society is caused by those people who regard themselves as the greatest "movers and shakers". Moreover, there is a class of commentator that regards the activity of "moving and shaking" to be intrinsically beneficial, without regard to the end effects.
Choice in the marketplace
Much of the excessive pressure to work harder, to produce more for less, and to drive staff harder is justified by the mantra "choice for the consumer". It is a psychological observation that given excessive choice, the majority of people have extreme difficulty in exercising it and arriving at a rational purchasing decision. Supermarkets should note this. It is far easier to choose from a limited range of goods than from acres of produce spread out among miles of shelving.
The same observation applies to the motivation of students on modular degree courses. Excessive choice leads to a shallow educational experience. It is also somewhat demotivating for the student. I am often asked to delimit my course materials so that the student knows what is not to be covered in the exam tests.
Feedback regulation
There is a report at www.discover.com that the brain (specifically, the left pre-frontal cortex) undergoes structural changes on long exposure (many years) to stress such as overwork. This makes the brain's owner more disposed to see the negative side of events, rather than the positive. One can see a certain amount of self-regulation here, for positive disposition in a person predisposes him/her to work harder. We can also identify the scientific reasons for negative reactions to excessive perceived stress and the onset of depressive illness caused directly by being subjected to a heavy workload.
Optimum range of workload
It is apparent that most people have a range of demand that they can tolerate, or even feel comfortably happy with. Below the lower limit they feel discontented and underutilised, and above the upper limit they seek to shed work and may even become bad-tempered. An attribute of people who rise to high positions within their organisations is that they are very tolerant of a wide range of work demands; they find occupations for themselves if lightly loaded, and they are benign under pressure, even if it is unreasonable. For this reason, they are candidates for promotion.
Shared views
The tenor of this argument is shared by Prince Charles in a report in the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday 13th Sept 2005.
In todays world, mental overload is a fact of life. Fortunately, by applying some simple techniques from the computer world, you can avoid some of the costly consequences of a too full brain!
SIGNS OF AN OVERLOADA too-full computer can:
· give you error messages
· run slower
· take longer to process information
· crashA too-full brain can cause you to:
· make mistakes
· forget to do something
· let things slip through the cracks
· become sluggish
· loose creativity
· become unproductive
· procrastinate
· become indecisive
· get stressed out
· experience a total mental break down
Multi-tasking may be too much for the brain to handle Friday, March 09, 2007BY KATHERINE REYNOLDS LEWISNEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICEWe feel so efficient, listening to a teleconference while sorting e-mail and eating lunch at the same time. But experts warn that instead of completing three tasks in the space of one, we're really spending more time to achieve mediocre results.
"Research that's looked at multi-tasking shows that you can't do it well -- no one can," said Kristin Byron, assistant professor of management at Syracuse University. "You're fighting the way your brain works."
The brain acts on just one task at a time. What we perceive as simultaneous multi-tasking is really rapid switching back and forth to keep different tasks going -- even if one is as simple as deciding to lift the sandwich for another bite.
It's like the classic vaudeville act of spinning plates. Your brain can set a task in motion, then another, and then another, before returning to pick up the first task, explained David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
"If the demands of any given task aren't too taxing, you can get two, three, four plates going up, but at some point you're going to reach a threshold when they're going to crash."
You may avoid driving while talking on a cell phone because of the physical challenge of holding both phone and steering wheel. But Strayer's research shows hands-free cell phone use is just as dangerous while driving. The risk comes in toggling between the two mental demands.
Moreover, subjects in a recent study scored significantly lower on IQ tests they took while driving. "When your attention is taken away from a task, you are not going to perform it as smartly," Strayer said.
So does multi-tasking make us stupid?
It's not an outlandish conclusion. A 2005 study sponsored by Hewlett-Packard found the average worker lost 10 IQ points when interrupted by ringing telephones and incoming e-mails -- about equal to the cost of missing an entire night of sleep.
"Interruptions are time-consuming, and they are dangerous in the sense that they can lead to errors," said David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "You are trying to feed information through various kinds of processing channels in the brain which have limited capacity and are really only available for one thing at a time."
Whenever we drop one task to perform another, we face "resumption costs" -- the time and energy it takes to orient ourselves when we return to the original task. It's true that interweaving two lengthy tasks can take less total time than performing the tasks separately. But there's a price.
"A lot of tasks we have to do, there are little moments of gaps which you can steal for another task," said Hal Pashler, psychology professor at the University of California in San Diego. "The interesting hidden cost ... is that (we) may be strikingly unable to recollect what happened."
That's because the free moments in each task -- such as waiting for a partner to respond in a conversation -- appear to be used to store or consolidate memories. If we talk on the phone while checking e-mail, it's at the expense of downtime our brains need.
"The conversation plus the e-mail may take less of your life, but the cost is that tomorrow you may not know exactly what you said," Pashler said.
Thus, if you try to take in new material or facts while multi-tasking, you'll have a tougher time learning, said Russell A. Poldrack, psychology professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Does all this mean we should never check our Blackberries while waiting in line at the grocery store? Or even sip a cup of coffee while listening to a conference speaker? After all, multi-tasking is woven into the fabric of modern life. More than 85 percent of people multi-task, and 67 percent believe they do it well, according to a survey by Apex Performance, a Charlotte, N.C., training firm.
Fortunately, the experts give us some slack. "You can't say in every situation it would be better to always focus on one task," Poldrack said.
If you're a stock trader who has to respond quickly to a lot of information, it makes sense to monitor multiple televisions and computer screens at once, he said. It may not matter that the next day you're hazy about which news anchor said what.
Certain physical actions, like walking or eating, are so hard-wired that they don't tax our brains much. There's certainly no harm in combining simple, low-stakes tasks, like folding laundry and watching television. And if background music energizes you to finish your work, that may outweigh the cost of your mind shifting between listening and crafting a report, Poldrack said.
Similarly, talking to an adult passenger doesn't hurt your driving the way talking on a cell phone does, Strayer has found. That's because the person in your car is attuned to the driving environment, and will pause the conversation when a tricky maneuver approaches.
To the degree that tasks rely on similar processes, they are more likely to interfere with each other. For instance, talking on the phone and writing an e-mail is hard, because both involve language, Poldrack said.
The answer is to choose carefully when you take on more than one job at once. For high-priority or complex tasks, you might want to shut down your e-mail, turn off the phone and close your office door. Apex Performance founder Louis Czoka even recommends that clients shut their eyes to focus on a teleconference.
Just how bad have things gotten? That's the subject of Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek, a recent study from the Center for Work-Life Policy. The study found that 1.7 million people consider their jobs and their work hours extreme, thanks to globalization, BlackBerries, corporate expectations and their own Type A personalities.
... .... ....
What Hewlett and Buck Luce found in their survey was that workers were themselves to blame. Many of the people interviewed for the study say they love their jobs and are reluctant to lessen their work load. In Agoglia's case, working for the small business consulting group was exactly what she wished for. Now she only comes into the office on a need basis. "It offers an opportunity for someone like me who needs more breathing room," she says, "but it also fulfills my desire to be challenged in my job."That kind of fulfillment has its hazards. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed said their work pressures are self-inflicted but say it is taking a real toll on them individually. Nationally, 70 percent, and globally, 81 percent, say their jobs undermine their health in terms of exercise, diet and the impact of stress. Nationally, 46 percent, and globally, 59 percent, say it gets in the way of their relationships and nationally, 50 percent, say it affects their sex life.
Not surprisingly, men and women have a different take on the extreme nature of their jobs. In the global survey, 58 percent of men and 80 percent of women say they didn't want to work these hours for more than one more year. Says Buck Luce: "For women there's a flight risk. But men get burned out and are able to stick with it. There's a tremendous stigma for men who say, 'I can't do this.' That means there aren't going to be women at the top ranks of companies."
I wasn't surprised to read that 40% of Americans work 50 hours or more per week and rarely disconnect from their work, even on vacation. I hear about it all the time in my seminars where people feel like an 8 hour day is slacking off and working at night after the kids go to bed and in the morning before the office really opens is the only way they can stay on top of things.
Is it that people have too much to do or is it that they just don't have trusted systems (ala GTD) to feel like they can disconnect?
I've heard David Allen mention that we've always had too much to do. I don't think BlackBerry's necessarily create more work, it's just now people have higher expectations about how fast the work needs to get done.
Someone in one of my seminars recently told me she takes her laptop on vacation just to stay on top of her email (people actually hissed when she said this, perhaps from the fear that this will become expected.) The "vacation tax" of coming back to hundreds, if not thousands, of emails is just not worth it to her.
August 13, 2006 ( Los Angeles Times) It's vacation prime time. Millions of wage-earners are on the road, in the air or on the water in search of overdue recreation, relaxation and adventure. But for too many, it will be a futile quest, thanks to a big, fat killjoy stowed away on the trip: OCP, or obsessive-compulsive productivity, a frantic fixation to wring results from every minute of the day, even our play.
Americans have always had an insistent work ethic. But thanks to technology that allows us to get things done 24/7, growing job demands and the elevation of efficiency to an unofficial national religion, many vacationers simply can't turn off their productive machinery. Every minute of the day, even of play, must be productive.
It's a habit that's increasingly counterproductive, evident in soaring job-stress bills (a $300-billion-a-year tab for U.S. business, according to the American Institute of Stress, a nonprofit organization) and longer workweeks. Nearly 40% of Americans work more than 50 hours a week. The all-output, all-the-time mandate of OCP wires us to do holidays like jobs. We cram downtime with to-do lists and a performance-review mentality that dooms trips to disappointment because we couldn't see or do everything we wanted. The trip's experience is an afterthought in a crazed race to polish off sights to the finish line of the holiday.
But trying to make a vacation productive is like trying to get a cat to bark. It's the wrong animal for the outcome, because vacations aren't about output. Instead, they're about the realm of an increasingly rare species input that can't be measured by a performance yardstick. The most packed itinerary can't quantify play, fun, wonder, discovery, adventure. How do you tally the spray of an exploding waterfall? The pattern of ripples on a sand dune? How do you produce quiet?
The productivity of U.S. workers has doubled since 1969, according to Boston College economist Juliet Schor. But none of the dividends have come back in additional free time. The added time that greater productivity creates is simply fodder for more productivity increases and OCP jitters that we must get more done. How much production is enough?
Even on the job, too much time on task can lead to burnout, heart disease, carpal tunnel syndrome, mistakes, costly do-overs and rote performance. A study last year by the University of Massachusetts Medical School found that chronic 12-hour workdays increase your risk of illness or injury by 37%.
Work without time to think, analyze or recharge feeds knee-jerk performance and the hurry-worry of stress. Everything appears urgent when there isn't time to judge what is truly urgent and what isn't.
More than anybody else's, Americans' identity comes through labor. But the reflex to define self-worth by what we get done makes it hard to relax without a heap of guilt because there's always something next on the horizon to handle. Our focus on future results shrinks our experience of living and, ironically, the very thing we need for optimum performance input.
The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. asked managers where they got their best ideas. It wasn't at the office. Rather, inspiration came when people were at play on the golf course, running. Research on fatigue in the workplace since the 1920s shows that performance rises after a break in the action, whether a break of a few seconds or 15 minutes.
Studies have also found that job performance improves after a vacation. Income doubled at the H Group, an investment services company in Salem, Ore., after owner Ron Kelemen increased employee time off to 3 1/2 weeks. When Jancoa, a Cincinnati cleaning company, switched to a three-week vacation policy, worker productivity soared enough to cut overtime. Profits jumped 15%.
The true source of productivity isn't nonstop output. It's a refreshed and energized mind, something vacations specialize in.
But for that to happen, we must leave the OCP drill sergeant at home. Vacations require a different skill set leisure skills. Without them, we lapse into default mode produce, produce, produce. My retired father was stunned when he visited his former company and found a couple of his fellow retirees back at their desks. They didn't know what else to do.
As kids, we knew how to entertain ourselves. But many of us lost the knack when we learned that play for its own sake didn't produce rewards status, pats on the back, money, goodies. Once we're in OCP territory, we've forgotten how to do things simply because we enjoy doing them.
Researchers say we had it right as kids. "Quality of life does not depend on what others think of us or what we own," contends psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience." "The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves, and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience."
Famed for his studies on when people are at their happiest, Csikszentmihalyi adds that "when experience is intrinsically rewarding, life is justified in the present."
Things we do for our amusement are particularly good at improving that experience, delivering what's supposed to come out of all that production self-worth, a sense of competence and, best of all, life satisfaction. Upping levels of performance can't generate happiness, psychologists contend, because production is tied to external approval, which is gone by the next morning's to-do list. But research shows that the more active your leisure lifestyle is, the higher your life satisfaction. Leisure also increases initiative, confidence and a positive mood.
So, if you haven't taken your vacation yet, maybe it's time to dust off the leisure portfolio and resuscitate the childhood practice of play. The packing list should include participation, engagement, spontaneity, a nonjudgmental attitude, the ability to ferret out amusements, take detours, wander without aim, plunge into things you haven't done before, and get out of your head and into direct experience. Along the way you may discover something long forgotten. Recess rules.
Open directory: Reference Knowledge Management Information Overload
Information Overload Links -- links to several articles
Computer addicts tend to lose all sense of time when they are on-line. They are drawn so deeply into the world of bytes and bits that they do not notice entire days passing by. They forget to eat, sleep, go to school, and even care for their children. They shirk responsibilities, slack off at work, and miss appointments because they are unable to pull themselves away. The virtual world and the real world are competing for their attention, and the virtual world often wins.
The Anxiety Disorders Education Program is a national education campaign developed by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to increase awareness among the public and health care professionals that anxiety disorders are real medical illnesses that can be effectively diagnosed and treated. More than 19 million Americans suffer from anxiety disorders, which include panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias and generalized anxiety disorder. They suffer from symptoms that are chronic, unremitting and usually grow progressively worse if left untreated. Tormented by panic attacks, irrational thoughts and fears, compulsive behaviors or rituals, flashbacks, nightmares, or countless frightening physical symptoms, people with anxiety disorders are heavy utilizers of emergency rooms and other medical services. Their work, family and social lives are disrupted, and some even become housebound. Many of them have co-occuring disorders such as depression, alcohol or drug abuse, or other mental disorders. Because of widespread lack of understanding and the stigma associated with these disorders, many people with anxiety disorders are not diagnosed and are not receiving treatments that have been proven effective through research.
A reader from America , July 2, 1999
Excellent! A DYI approach to OCD and related disorders. A friend gave me this book and it is excellent. If you have OCD or even a related disorder it gives you a practical approach to learning to deal with and outsmart your disorder.
Take me, frinstance, while I do not have any checking compulsions, I have suffered from anxiety disorder and occasionally intrusive, disturbing thoughts for a number of years. (Other than that I am your regular guy, you wouldn't know I had a disorder if you saw me). This book gives you a 4-step method of "reframing" OCD in a way that makes it manageable. Ultimately, the authors say, by using their method you can "retrain your brain" and actually alter your brain chemistry in a positive direction and thus reduce the original symptoms to something liveable.
Buy it (or have a friend give it to you...) :-)
A reader from Santa Fe, NM , July 16, 1998
KIEV (Reuters) - A Ukraine businessman who bought a pager for each member of his staff as a New Year gift was so alarmed when all 50 of them went off at the same time that he drove his car into a lamp post, a newspaper said Thursday.
The unnamed businessman was returning from the pager shop when the accident happened, the Fakty daily reported. ''With no more than 100 meters to go to the office, the 50 pagers on the back seat suddenly burst out screeching. The businessman's fright was such that he simply let go of the steering wheel and the car ploughed into a lamp post.''
After he had assessed the damage to the car, the businessman turned his attention to the message on the 50 pagers. It read: ''Congratulations on a successful purchase!''
The tremendous growth in the price-performance of networking and storage has fueled the explosive growth of the web. The amount of information easily accessible from the desktop has dramatically increased by several orders of magnitude in the last few years, and shows no signs of abating. Users of the web are being confronted with the consequent information overload problem. It can be exceedingly difficult to locate resources that are both high-quality and relevant to their information needs. Traditional automated methods for locating information are easily overwhelmed by low-quality and unrelated content. Thus, the second generation of search engines will have to have effective methods for focusing on the most authoritative among these documents. The rich structure implicit in the hyperlinks among Web documents offers a simple, and effective, means to deal with many of these problems. The CLEVER search engine incorporates several algorithms that make use of hyperlink structure for discovering high-quality information on the Web.
Copyright © 1996-2007 by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov. www.softpanorama.org was created as a service to the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) in the author free time. Submit comments This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is placed under the copyright of the Open Content License(OPL). Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.
Standard disclaimer: The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the author present and former employers, SDNP or any other organization the author may be associated with. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose.
Last modified: February 28, 2008
