14.0502 amounts of information

From: by way of Willard McCarty (willard@lists.village.Virginia.EDU)
Date: 11/20/00

  • Next message: by way of Willard McCarty: "14.0503 is the switch on or off?"

                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 502.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
                  <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
    
       [1]   From:    Randall Pierce <rpierce@jsucc.jsu.edu>              (13)
             Subject: information
    
       [2]   From:    "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>              (36)
             Subject: Re: 14.0498 amounts of information
    
    
    --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 07:15:25 +0000
             From: Randall Pierce <rpierce@jsucc.jsu.edu>
             Subject: information
    
    While in graduate school I studied Interpersonal Classroom Interaction.
    It was a method to increase student participation in the learning
    process. Willard McCarty's comments are very apropos to this technique.
    Through gestures and pertinent questions, the teacher was to generate
    information exchange and development. This type of Socratic Method
    encouraged the student to take a fact and expand it into new areas of
    inquiry. This  could be quantified and measured with appropriate
    descriptive symbols. How would you determine how many information "bits"
    an exchange generated.?  Often the original concept was soon almost lost
    in "cognitive connections" to other fields. A datum in history might
    give rise to its political and sociological implications. Are these to
    counted as one "byte", or several?. I think this concept gives a
    different view of the quanification of units of information. Randall
    
    
    
    
    --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 07:16:15 +0000
             From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
             Subject: Re: 14.0498 amounts of information
    
    From: Osher Doctorow osher@ix.netcom.com, Wed. Nov. 15, 2000 7:17AM
    
    WM is correct in asking for clarification on information.  Knowledge as used
    in humanities and science has almost nothing to do with information/entropy
    as used in engineering and computers.  In fact, even information and entropy
    are so filled with questions that only a (humanist) philosopher could begin
    to examine their logical ontology.  It would probably require
    demystification of the whole field of information/entropy, which
    philosophers are generally afraid of and engineers generally protect as
    their private domain somewhat similarly to politicians in politics.   In
    logic-based probability (LBP), we study knowledge, or to include everything
    in the field we study knowledge-information-entropy (KIE).  An immediate
    question for philosopher/humanists is: what can be do about the
    contradictory/paradoxical behavior of engineering information near rare
    events?  You did not know about that?  Neither does most of the world.
    Engineers use logarithmic informtion and entropy, which blows up (because
    negatively infinite, in fact) near and at probability zero (very rare)
    events.    KIE resolves the problem in those regions by replacing
    logarithmic information by its reflection geometrically (technically about
    the main diagonal y = x), called exponential KIE or technically negative
    exponential KIE.  This KIE does not behave paradoxically at or near very
    rare, rare, or even probability zero events.  You don't need any more
    technical  information to start exploring KIE, but if you want it, look at
    abstracts of my 48 papers at http://www.logic.univie.ac.at, Institute for
    Logic of the University of Vienna (select ABSTRACTS, then select BY AUTHOR,
    then select my name), or read my recent paper just published in Quantum
    Gravity, Generalized Theory of Gravitation, and Superstring Theory-Based
    Unification, Eds. B. N. Kursunoglu, S. L. Mintz, and A. Perlmutter, Kluwer
    Academic/Plenum: New York 2000. By the way, latent variable theory in
    psychological/educational measurement/research and validity/reliability
    theory has some concepts similar to knowledge quantitatively.
    
    Osher Doctorow
    
    information
    
      >    [1]   From:    Randall Pierce <rpierce@jsucc.jsu.edu>               (7)
      >           >
      >    [2]   From:    Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>         (13)
      >          Subject: what's information?
      >
    



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