objective: over the last few decades, bangladesh has made significant progress towards achieving targets for the millennium development goals (mdgs) and women empowerment. this study is aimed at identifying the levels and patterns of women empowerment in relation to health seeking behavior in bangladesh. materials and methods: we conducted a cross-sectional study among 200 rural married women i...

The tendency to test outcomes that are predicted by our current theory (the confirmation bias) is one of the best-known biases of human decision making. We prove that the confirmation bias is an optimal strategy for testing hypotheses when those hypotheses are deterministic, each making a single prediction about the next event in a sequence. Our proof applies for two normative standards commonl...

purpose: scientific databases are the most important and useful sources where information is accessible via user interfaces. one of the approaches to eliminating the existing challenges in databases user interface is utilizing the sense-making theory (smt) approach. smt approach helps the users to understand problematic situations they have faced with and bridges the cognitive and information g...

Communication and coordination are considered essential components of successful collaborations, and provision of awareness is a highly valuable feature of a collaborative information seeking (CIS) system. In this article, we investigate how providing different kinds of awareness support affects people’s coordination behavior in a CIS task, as reflected by the communication that took place betw...

Since common ground is pivotal to collaboration, this paper proposes to define collaborative information seeking as the combined activity of information seeking and collaborative grounding. While information-seeking activities are necessary for collaborating actors to acquire new information, the activities involved in information seeking are often performed by varying subgroups of actors. Cons...

We investigated the differences in information seeking behaviours between low and high literacy users on an on-line social service system called the “Adviseguide” website. Ten volunteers participated in the study. Using the UK’s National Skills for Life Survey, five were classified as high literate; five as low literate. Participants had four information search tasks that vary in difficulty: ea...