American airlines flight 965 from Miami to Cali, Colombia, rammed a mountainside in December 1995, killing all 159 on board. The cause: a disconnect between information and context. Air traffic controllers in Cali radioed the plane to fly toward a nearby beacon named "Rozo." From a computerized list of beacons beginning with the letter R, the crew selected the first-by convention, the nearest. But in this case, unbeknownst to the crew, the list began with "Romeo," 100 miles to the left in Bogota. The autopilot followed the faulty directions, leading to what accident investigators call "controlled flight into terrain."

Humans only acquire data or "little-i information" and make it into useful understanding or "big-I Information" by assuming a context for it, and the results can be disastrous if they assume the wrong one, mathematician and math popularizer Keith Devlin warns in InfoSense. In the terms of the "situation theory" developed by Devlin and his colleagues at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information, the American Airlines crew sealed their doom by relating a piece of little-i information (the letter R) to a "constraint" or context (the convention of listing beacons from nearest to farthest) that was different from the constraints observed by the programmers of the flight mangement computer.