Re: [Fis] info meaning
Loet et al - I guess I am not convinced that information and entropy are connected. Entropy in physics has the dimension of energy divided by temperature. Shannon entropy has no physical dimension - it is missing the Boltzman constant. Therefore how can entropy and shannon entropy be compared yet alone connected? I am talking about information not entropy - an organized collection of organic chemicals must have more meaningful info than an unorganized collection of the same chemicals. On 11-Oct-07, at 5:34 PM, Loet Leydesdorff wrote: Loet - if your claim is true then how do you explain that a random soup of organic chemicals have more Shannon info than an equal number of organic chemicals organized as a living cell where knowledge of some chemicals automatically implies the presence of others and hence have less surprise than those of the soup of random organic chemicals? - Bob Dear Bob and colleagues, In the case of the random soup of organic chemicals, the maximum entropy of the systems is set by the number of chemicals involved (N). The maximum entropy is therefore log(N). (Because of the randomness of the soup , the Shannon entropy will not be much lower.) If a grouping variable with M categories is added the maximum entropy is log(N * M). Ceteris paribus, the redundancy in the system increases and the Shannon entropy can be expected to decrease. In class, I sometimes use the example of comparing Calcutta with New York in terms of sustainability. Both have a similar number of inhabitants, but the organization of New York is more complex to the extent that the value of the grouping variables (the systems of communication) becomes more important than the grouped variable (N). When M is extended to M+1, N possibilities are added. I hope that this is convincing or provoking your next reaction. Best wishes, Loet ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] info meaning
Bob, If the notions of Entropy and Shannon Information are alternative approaches to characterize the same phenomenon in Nature, then the ways they have been modeled would not necessarily reveal an underlying and fundamental commonality. I think that many of us suspect that this is the case and we are striving to understand and articulate (model) the fundamental commonality. We may be wrong, of course, but your argument doesn't dissuade me. In fact, I must admit sheepishly that I'm not sure how one would go about analyzing the relationship between these ideas in a way that could dissuade me. If such an analysis is not possible, then I suspect that the question of a fundamental commonality will have to die slowly as progress fails to occur. Regards, Guy on 10/12/07 12:01 PM, bob logan at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Loet et al - I guess I am not convinced that information and entropy are connected. Entropy in physics has the dimension of energy divided by temperature. Shannon entropy has no physical dimension - it is missing the Boltzman constant. Therefore how can entropy and shannon entropy be compared yet alone connected? I am talking about information not entropy - an organized collection of organic chemicals must have more meaningful info than an unorganized collection of the same chemicals. On 11-Oct-07, at 5:34 PM, Loet Leydesdorff wrote: Loet - if your claim is true then how do you explain that a random soup of organic chemicals have more Shannon info than an equal number of organic chemicals organized as a living cell where knowledge of some chemicals automatically implies the presence of others and hence have less surprise than those of the soup of random organic chemicals? - Bob Dear Bob and colleagues, In the case of the random soup of organic chemicals, the maximum entropy of the systems is set by the number of chemicals involved (N). The maximum entropy is therefore log(N). (Because of the randomness of the soup , the Shannon entropy will not be much lower.) If a grouping variable with M categories is added the maximum entropy is log(N * M). Ceteris paribus, the redundancy in the system increases and the Shannon entropy can be expected to decrease. In class, I sometimes use the example of comparing Calcutta with New York in terms of sustainability. Both have a similar number of inhabitants, but the organization of New York is more complex to the extent that the value of the grouping variables (the systems of communication) becomes more important than the grouped variable (N). When M is extended to M+1, N possibilities are added. I hope that this is convincing or provoking your next reaction. Best wishes, Loet ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] info meaning
At 09:01 PM 12/10/2007, bob logan wrote: Loet et al - I guess I am not convinced that information and entropy are connected. Entropy in physics has the dimension of energy divided by temperature. Shannon entropy has no physical dimension - it is missing the Boltzman constant. Therefore how can entropy and shannon entropy be compared yet alone connected? Bob, Temperature has the dimensions of energy per degree of freedom. Do the dimensional analysis, and you end up with a measure in degrees of freedom. This is a very reasonable dimensionality for information. I am talking about information not entropy - an organized collection of organic chemicals must have more meaningful info than an unorganized collection of the same chemicals. I am planning to make some general comments of meaning, but I am too busy right now. They will have to wait for later. There are some very tricky issues involved, but I will say right now that information is not meaningful, but has only a potential for meaning. All information must be interpreted to be meaningful, and the same information can have very different meanings depending on how it is interpreted. Information, on the other hand, has an objective measure independent of interpretation, and that depends on the measure of asymmetry within a system. See the recent book by my student Scott Muller for details, Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information, Springer 2007. http://www.amazon.ca/Asymmetry-Foundation-Information-Scott-Muller/dp/3540698833 This whole discussion on meaning needs far more precision and a lot of garbage collecting. Cheers, John -- Professor John Collier [EMAIL PROTECTED] Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 http://www.ukzn.ac.za/undphil/collier/index.html ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] info meaning
hi stan - I think we need to agree to disagree - for me final cause involves purpose or intention. A gas that expands into a larger volume has no intention or purpose and therefore one cannot talk about final cause because there is no agent - I did enjoy your argument but I just cannot buy it - Bob On 12-Oct-07, at 3:01 PM, bob logan wrote: Loet et al - I guess I am not convinced that information and entropy are connected. Entropy in physics has the dimension of energy divided by temperature. Shannon entropy has no physical dimension - it is missing the Boltzman constant. Therefore how can entropy and shannon entropy be compared yet alone connected? I am talking about information not entropy - an organized collection of organic chemicals must have more meaningful info than an unorganized collection of the same chemicals. On 11-Oct-07, at 5:34 PM, Loet Leydesdorff wrote: Loet - if your claim is true then how do you explain that a random soup of organic chemicals have more Shannon info than an equal number of organic chemicals organized as a living cell where knowledge of some chemicals automatically implies the presence of others and hence have less surprise than those of the soup of random organic chemicals? - Bob Dear Bob and colleagues, In the case of the random soup of organic chemicals, the maximum entropy of the systems is set by the number of chemicals involved (N). The maximum entropy is therefore log(N). (Because of the randomness of the soup , the Shannon entropy will not be much lower.) If a grouping variable with M categories is added the maximum entropy is log(N * M). Ceteris paribus, the redundancy in the system increases and the Shannon entropy can be expected to decrease. In class, I sometimes use the example of comparing Calcutta with New York in terms of sustainability. Both have a similar number of inhabitants, but the organization of New York is more complex to the extent that the value of the grouping variables (the systems of communication) becomes more important than the grouped variable (N). When M is extended to M+1, N possibilities are added. I hope that this is convincing or provoking your next reaction. Best wishes, Loet ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] Info, meaning narrative
Message forwarded from Beth Cardier. I understand It should have appeared a few days ago but for subscription difficulties. Her email is [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Ted +++ Dear FIS colleagues, My name is Beth Cardier, and I am currently researching narrative as information at Melbourne University. I haven't contributed to this list before but I have been watching it since I attended the FIS conference in Paris. In response to Ted's call for a hybrid space, I thought I'd share some of the ways that the ideas raised in this thread overlap with a few key concepts from the arts, as well as some of ways the logics differ. I also happen to know a lot about newspapers, which have recently entered the discussion. As a writer and media analyst, I don't deal with the conveyance of meaning numerically, but I suspect there could be a geometric way to understand narrative. For me, it seems that the first difference between an artistic and scientific notions of information is that artistic logic doesn't operate in terms of context and content n there is no container and object. Perhaps linguistic principles are responsible for the traditional idea of object and link, noun and verb. Instead, storytelling deals in situations, carrying an ontology in which participants are elements of context, because they compose the situation. I define a situation as you would expect, as a cluster of embodied spaces in the actual world. In a story, aspects of a situation are represented as images. Images are promiscuous in terms of what they can represent - not only tangible objects, but emotional sensations, philosophical positions, abstract impressions or metaphysical wonderings. They can be expressed via nouns or verbs, or both, or neither. They can also be expressed in the way the words are placed in relation to each other, or the frequency with which certain words occur. This is why linguistic descriptions of how words are related are not as important to me as understanding how images are related. My currency as a storyteller n the way I create meaning n lies in the association of images. I fit them together to create represented situations. Images are clustered into networks, like stones that join to form virtual pavements, interpermeated and overlapping. The situated nature of narrative information means that it is conditional, and no element is absolute in its identity. Indeed, the relativity of information is the subject of this FIS thread. But there is an additional quality to artistic information that you might find interesting. In narrative, when information is added incrementally, the identity of the entire system changes, and so isn't reducible to its parts. Let me give a crude example from Media Analysis, an activity that mines news reports for dominant narrative patterns. It should be noted that this example is noun-oriented for ease. When an analyst determines the public relations implications of a news story, one method is to look at the images present. For example, a news article that contains the words president, car accident and broken leg conveys one sort of story (1). An article containing the words president, car accident, broken leg, and woman passenger is a slightly different story (2). Watch how the story changes when the list of images becomes: president, car accident, broken leg, woman passenger, woman not president's wife, woman dead (3). Even though these reports share identical elements, they have three different meanings, and not only because the story is longer. For example, in each version, the role played by the image broken leg changes. In story 1, concern about the president's broken leg relates to the prestige and importance of the office he holds. In story 2, there are still suggestions of this concern, but the broken leg is also the reason we know about his trip with a female passenger (an analyst would recommend PR intervention). In story 3, the president is responsible for such a bad situation that the broken leg is almost a deserved punishment, the beginning of a much larger punishment to come (an analyst would recommend a lawyer). Of course there can be slightly different readings for these three stories, depending on the finer links between their images, although that sort of variation tends to be more common in fiction. There is actually not much variety in news reports, their recycled templates being part of what makes them fast to write and read. This begins to relate to Steven's and Christophe's observations about newspapers and interpretation. As you might guess, I see pattern as an agent in terms of information and meaning. In artistic terms, two patterns draw out each other's shared features simply by having similar structures. Perhaps this also speaks to Walter's thoughts about information transference. If I tell a story about a dying friend, and you have lost a friend in a similar way, the factors of your
