Intropy

Abstract & arbitrary symbolism, information and life

2012-02-07T23:54:00.001Z

Serendipity led me to: Information, Intelligence, and the Origins of Life by Randy Isaac. (Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, v63 n4 pp219-230) The paper tackles the theory (put forward by Intelligent Design proponents, especially William Dembski) that consideration of information leads to the need for a creator God. Isaac disagrees with that thesis. (And so do I, for the record!)

Isaac's paper very nicely summarises many key issues in the field, but for this post I want to pick up on one specific issue. He discusses the distinction between what he calls "physical symbolism" and "abstract symbolism". Abstract symbolism is what I've previously referred to as arbitrary symbolism (well, maybe, see below), and this binary distinction links to the distinction between environmental and semantic information (which I discussed here).

Here's some quotes from Isaac:

In physical symbolism, the symbol has a physical property which serves as the message. For example, a shiny, smooth metal surface can serve as a symbol of high reflectivity. Or a north pole of a magnet serves as a physical symbol of attraction to a south pole magnet. The meaning or significance of a physical symbol is derived from the physical properties of the symbol itself.

In abstract symbolism, the symbol has a meaning assigned to it which does not necessarily derive from its physical properties.

So far so good. He later says:

Abstract symbolism is a hallmark of intelligence. ... The ability to associate abstract symbolic significance with a distinguishable physical pattern is a key indicator of intelligence, though not the only factor. ... When abstract relationships are a necessary part of information systems, then an intelligent agent must be involved to generate or interpret or design that system.

So, where does that leave the peacock? Is the peacock's tail not an abstract (arbitrary) sign? Or is the peacock intelligent? Actually, when I wrote that about the peacock I was aware or a possible problem with my claim that "the sign is arbitrary since other birds manage with different signs meaning essentially the same thing": maybe the sign is not arbitrary to the peacock (or peahen). A peacock couldn't one day decide to woo a peahen with, say, a crest, instead of his tail. He wouldn't 'know' to do that and if he did the peahen wouldn't understand. Still, I think non-human animals can work with abstract symbols, but it needs teasing out a bit more carefully, and I'm still not sure whether that being the case means that animals display intelligence or that arbitrary signs don't need intelligence.

John Maynard Smith in his chapter (The Concept of Information in Biology, page 130) in Davies and Gregersen (Information and the Nature of Reality) says of the genetic code:

The correspondence between a particular triplet and the amino acid it codes for is arbitrary. Although decoding necessarily depends on chemistry, the decoding machinery (tRNAs, assignment enzymes) could be altered so as to alter the assignments. Indeed, mutations occur that are lethal because they alter the assignments. In this sense the code is symbolic.

This is the same sense of arbitrary that I was using about the peacock's tail. (I wonder, maybe there is a difference between Isaac's 'abstract' and Maynard Smith's 'arbitrary'?)

Something to flag for discussion another day. Maynard Smith argues that there is intention in the genetic code. I didn't understand that when I first read his chapter but I think I do now. (His ideas have been digested by my subconscious and were regurgitated when I was reading Isaac's paper!) But that is for a later post.

Luciano Floridi on "Enveloping the World"

2012-01-26T17:41:00.000Z

I'd thought of writing a blog post about this talk that I attended today, but my colleague Magnus Ramage has already written something in his 'Present on Earth' blog. This is handy, because I probably wouldn't have got around to writing anything (the 'posts' page of this blog contains 34 drafts that I started and never finished - many of them about talks I'd been to - "I ought to blog about that interesting talk").

So here's the start of Magnus's post:

Just back from a very interesting talk by Luciano Floridi, prof of the philosophy of information at the University of Hertfordshire. He was unable to come to our workshop The Difference That Makes a Difference 2011, but David Chapman and I have been reading his work quite a bit, so it was good to get to meet him. Luciano's title was "Enveloping the World: Understanding the Constraining Success of Smart Technologies", and he mostly talked about the interaction between technologies, especially those which might be seen as smart or even artificially intelligent, and their environment. He used the very helpful concept of enveloping from robotics, where a technology is situated within a constraining environment which has been tailored to make the robot work most efficiently; and he argued that the world as a whole has become tailored to enable us to interact smoothly with our supposedly smart technologies

Read it all

Information, Race, and Racism

2012-01-09T11:25:00.000Z

One of the many fascinating talks at "The Difference That Makes a Difference" (DTMD2011) last September, was by my OU colleague Mustafa Ali, entitled: "Race: The Difference That Makes A Difference". As with all the talks at DTMD2011, you can get the slides and hear a 'podcast' of the talk via the Programme and Proceedings page of the website. Mustafa looks at race from an information-theoretical perspective and information from a race-theoretical perspective. His work is ongoing, and we hope to have a paper in which he develops his ideas further in the planned Special Issue of TripleC Journal.

As usual, whereas Mustafa's work is well-grounded, rigorous academic research, here in this blog post I want to wave my hands around and argue that understanding information provides some new insights into understanding race and racism. (So don't be put off if you are unimpressed by my comments, please go instead to Mustafa's presentation!)

The key word is 'difference'. Information is the difference that makes a difference, and race is about defining differences. I find it helpful to hang the ideas on those trapeziums again. Underneath are people in all their miscellaneous colours, shapes and sizes, while out the top comes some way of categorising people. Maybe, for example, as 'black' or 'white'. But why? Why would the decoding the 'data' (people) give that particular 'information' (racial categorisations or by skin colour)?

An anecdote. Apparently (according to my mother - I've no memory of it) when was 5 or 6 years old, I came home from school one day and announced that I'd got a girlfriend. My mother quizzed me to try to identify her, and asked me whether she was black. I said no, but it turned out she was.

The point (and one that is often made about children) is that I hadn't yet learned to categorise people in that way - and therefore that the skin colour categorisation is not innate but is learned. The only reason it is a story worth relating is because of the baggage in the implications of defining someone as black. If the feature had been red hair, it would have been a reflection of my lack of observation and the incident would have been long forgotten, but because it was skin colour, and because I can now tell the story in a way that defines this girl 'as black' and readers will know what I mean, it becomes a story with a message.

Mustafa talks of race as a social construct, which is "genealogically-related to racism" (see his presentation). He says:

I think a really good case can be made that Race has a genealogical relationship to Racism, so it's not that race is some kind of neutral classification that just happens to have a historical development, but that it emerged in the context of a set of specific contingent social, political and economic circumstances

The way I'm describing it, it comes down to what determines the content of the trapezium. It's not that we can do without the trapezium. We can only deal with information[1], so we need to do the 'decoding' (the cognition, in the terminology of triple C[2]) - it is an example of a:

...binary opposition which we employ in our cultural practices help to generate order out of the dynamic complexity of experience

Chandler - see a previous post

I said it comes down to what determines the content of the trapezium, but maybe in this context more importantly it is a question of who determines the content. Who says 'this' is the information we get from the data - who has the power to construct the trapeziums that we all use? Perhaps we might talk in terms of the dominant or hegemonic trapeziums which have come about because of "a set of specific contingent social, political and economic circumstances".

To finish, I want to flag a couple of stories which seem relevant, but I don't have time to discuss:

Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black? A article from the BBC website, says:

"The fallacy, then, is simple. Just because some black people are good at something does not imply that black people in general will be good at it."

MP Diane Abbott tweeted: "White people love playing "divide and rule" we should not play their game".
BBC report of the story and Laurie Penny's commentary in the New Statesman.

------------------------------
Notes:

1 It's like I've been saying about maps. We can't deal with the territory, only with maps of the territory. Similarly we can't talk about people, only about information about people.

2 I'm coming to the conclusion that the suggestion I put forward in an earlier post that cognition = triangles whereas communication = trapeziums just won't do. I want to use the trapeziums for cognition too.

Environmental and Semantic Information: Natural and Non Natural Meaning

2011-12-19T12:15:00.002Z

Luciano Floridi, in his map of information (see, for example, "Information: A very short introduction" Oxford University Press 2010, or Semantic Conceptions of Information on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), has the primary distinction between Environmental and Semantic information.

Floridi's informational map, Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/

This is closely associated with Grice's distinction between Natural and Non Natural meaning (H. P. Grice, "Meaning" The Philosophical Review, 1957, Vol. 66(3), pp. 377-388 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2182440).

I talked about information being data plus meaning in a previous post, which is what Floridi refers to as "The General Definition of Information (GDI)", so we see that the two categories of information derive directly from the two categories of meaning.

Floridi points out that his concept of environmental information might not be 'natural'. Here's how he explains it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (op. cit.):

One of the most often cited examples of environmental information is the series of concentric rings visible in the wood of a cut tree trunk, which may be used to estimate its age. Yet “environmental” information does not need to be natural. Going back to our example, when you turned the ignition key, the red light of the low battery indicator flashed. This signal too can be interpreted as an instance of environmental information.

Environmental information is defined relative to an observer (an information agent), who is supposed to have no direct access to pure data in themselves. It requires two systems a and b to be coupled in such a way that a's being (of type, or in state) F is correlated to b being (of type, or in state) G, thus carrying for the observer the information that b is G [...]:

Environmental information:
Two systems a and b are coupled in such a way that a's being (of type, or in state) F is correlated to b being (of type, or in state) G, thus carrying for the information agent the information that b is G.

However, I don't think this in any significant way makes it different from Grice's 'natural meaning', or not in any way that matters for my concerns at the moment at least.

My interpretation is that semantic information/non-natural meaning requires intention, whereas environmental information/natural meaning 'just happens'.

Switching to the language of semiotics, a point about signs is that the signifier can be arbitrary. I'm wondering if there's a distinction between, say, natural signs and non-natural signs, where the signifier in a natural sign is necessary, but the signifier in a non-natural sign is arbitrary? We might interpret the rings visible in the wood of a cut tree as the signifier in a sign meaning the age of the tree (or maybe not, I'm not sure about that), but in that case the rings can't be said to be arbitrary: they are a necessary consequence of the way the tree grows. However the word 'tree' as the signifier for a tree is arbitrary, in the sense that we could equally say "arbre" or "der Baum" (http://translate.definitions.net/tree).

One thing I'm still not quite ready to concede, though, is that non-natural/semantic information/meaning/signs necessarily requires people.

Certainly I want to suggestion that animals can be responsible for semantic/non-natural signs. I want to say that when a peacock display's his tail this is a sign with meaning, that there is intention on the part of the peacock, and that the sign is arbitrary (since other birds manage with different signs meaning essentially the same thing).

Source http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peacock.jpg

I'm still trying to get to grips with what we mean by 'meaning', however, and I'm not sure saying there is a distinction between natural and non-natural meaning gets us any closer to what meaning is. I'm still ploughing my way through Ogden and Richards, 'The Meaning of Meaning' (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949) but can't say it has been especially enlightening so far, and has been made a little more difficult by their style and the casual 'of-their-time' racism in one the examples they use to illustrate their argument. Wittgenstein's perspective that I mentioned in the previous post sounds rather more promising so perhaps I need to track that down.

Triangles, trapeziums and three Cs. And a missing T.

2011-12-15T16:29:00.000Z

A few weeks back SIRG hosted a very interesting talk by Amanda Spink, Professor of Information Science at Loughborough University. When asked about a definition of information, she commented that for her and for the Information Science community, the definition of information wasn't really an issue (ie they aren't agonizing over it the way I am!), but, if pushed for a definition, it would be something like 'data that is meaningful for someone'.*

Compare some the definitions used by various authors in Ramage and Chapman:

Information is comprised of data in context (page 26, Bissell quoting Cordes)
INTELLIGENCE provided, a PERSON is informed by a SIGN about some THING in a certain CONTEXT (page 27, Bissell quoting Borgmann)
data plus meaning (interpretation) in a particular context at a particular time (page 72, Howell)

Triangles

Ignoring the reference to time in Howell's definition for the moment - I'll come back to that - I think we can encapsulate all these definitions in a semiotic triangle.

But what is 'data'? What is an 'interpreter? And what is 'meaning'?

With reference to the definitions of information above, the interpreter is the 'someone', 'person' or 'context'. Though several of the formulations above assume this to be human, my contention is that it need not be.

Likewise, my contention is that 'meaning' is not only something associated with people. At DTMD2011, Rainer Zimmermann proposed adopting "Wittgenstein's perspective that the meaning of a piece of information is to be found in the action this information provokes" (see Zimmermann's presentation on this page). I've not read Wittgenstein so I suppose that I could be doing damage to what he was talking about, but I'm using a definition of meaning that allows a mechanical response to data to constitute 'meaning'.

Data is a difference of some sort. So - maybe you spotted it coming - by equating 'provoking action' with 'making a difference' this conveniently aligns with Bateson's 'difference that makes a difference'.

Trapeziums

Rather than the triangle, though, I prefer to use a trapezium, drawing from conventions in the engineering of communication systems.

There are two reasons for preferring the trapezium. (Actually it could equally well be a rectangle. You see both used in engineering, but I favour the trapezium because it distinguished the top and bottom, and looks nicer.)

1) It emphasises that information is always about communication. (I mentioned this here. But see also below, comments on tripleC.)

So the trapezium that I've drawn above, which is a 'receiver', must always somewhere be matched with a transmitter that is the source of the meaning. Or rather, you should always think about what the source of the meaning is, which you may recall was very revealing when exploring school reports.

2) It makes it easier to concatenate them in layers - so that the meaning from one becomes the data for the layer above. 'data' and 'meaning' are not absolutes: meaning is only ever relative to data, mediated by the interpretation.

TripleC: cognition, communication and cooperation

Wolfgang Hofkirchner and co-workers have developed the concept of 'triple C': cognition, communication and cooperation. Hofkirchner presented an interpretation of information exploiting the triple C framework in his presentation at DTMD2011.

Maybe the triangle is for cognition, and the trapezium for communication. Then when we bring in the dimension of time, we allow for cooperation.

Information doesn't emerge from one-off events. Meaning only ever emerges from conversation. A single message can convey information, but only because there have been messages before. This is the beginning of cooperation.

So we need a diagramming convention that will display cooperation. I've no idea what that might be, at the moment, but it'd be really handy I can describe it by a word that begins with 'T' so we have 3Cs and 3Ts: cognition illustrated by a triangle; communication illustrated by a trapezium; and cooperation illustrated by a t...?

OK, so I know this doesn't all hold together, but this is a blog, not an academic paper, and it's work progress.

Any comments would be appreciated, though.

----------------

* I may not have got that exactly right. Since I was organising the talk I was distracted by the mechanics of the event, and not fully focussed on listening to what she said and not taking notes!

Where is the information?

2011-12-09T11:30:00.000Z

At Digital by Default last week one of the 'Masterclasses' that I attended was by epay, who provide electronic payment systems.

They were talking about stored-value cards, such might be used by schools for children to pay for their lunch, or store 'gift cards'. The way their system works (or the one they were talking about at the event) is that the credit on the card is stored on a central database, and, when the card is used for payment, the payment terminal communicates with the central database to check for available balance and deduct value as appropriate.

A couple of thoughts:

1) One of the virtues of the system - as presented by epay - is that it tracks use of the card. The central database 'knows' where and when the card is used. You wouldn't necessarily realise that, I'd not thought about it for store gift cards anyway. I'd thought of them as like cash, with the value 'on' the card, and therefore essentially untraceable. Of course a gift card can be passed between people (given as gift!) and you are not tracking who is using it, so it's not tracking you like a credit or debit card does, but even so it's not as anonymous as cash. Sometimes I like being anonymous (even though, pace Paul McMullan, I'm not a paedophile*)

2) But more relevant to the exploration of the nature of information, it draws attention to the problem of locating information. I thought the information was on the card, but it's not, it is on the database. But actually epay have more than one database. The main database is in Germany, then they have a mirror in the UK. So is the information on the German database or the one in the UK? And presumably they have a backup, so that if the database crashes it can be recovered.

There's nothing special about this, about stored value cards. Similar things can be said about, for example, the text I'm typing on my PC at the moment. Where is it? Is it on my computer, or on one of Google's computers somewhere? It's just that the stored-value card brought the question into sharp relief, because you might think the information is on the card (well I thought it was).

But even with cash when you start to think more carefully it's not so clear where the information is. Information is money but a five-pound note (or a pound coin) is only any use by virtue of its relationship to the monetary system in which is resides. This is reminder that information might have a body, but it doesn't reside in the body (think about Katherine Hales).

As an aside, not all card payment systems work in this way. Some use smart cards which store information on them. Apparently the Oyster cards used on the London underground are smart cards which keep track of the credit on the card. There is a central database, however, and the Oyster card terminals communicate with the central database which is updated overnight. (Thanks to one of the epay people at Digital by Default for explaining this. epay don't run the Oyster card system but he knew how it worked.)

--------------------

* Paul McMullan, former deputy features editor of the News of the World. Actually he was referring to privacy, but it's the same idea. McMullan's evidence to the Leveson inquiry (from the Guardian live blog, Tuesday 29 November 2011):

4.20pm: McMullan is asked to clarify whether he believes that no one should have privacy. He says "yes".

In 21 years of invading people's privacy I've never actually come across anyone who's been doing any good. Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in.

Privacy is evil; it brings out the worst qualities in people.

Privacy is for paedos; fundamentally nobody else needs it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2011/nov/29/leveson-inquiry-nick-davies-paul-mcmullan-live

Digital by default

2011-12-01T22:09:00.001Z

I was at Digital by Default today, and the first thing to say is how good it was. Well planned, good speakers, excellent venue (Barbican) and well run. I learned a lot from it.

But, let me try out a slightly tendentious interpretation of the day...

We should go Digital by Default because Digital is Utopia. Not only will the government save money (billions of pounds), but people are happier when they are online.

Today was about exploring how close we are to Utopia; to identify why we are not there already; and explore what we need to do to get there.

We are quite close. It varies by location and services. For example Tameside has 100% of school applications online.

We are not there yet because:
1) The services are not yet all available online, or are not yet good enough
2) Though most of the population are digitally-enabled (online via web or smart-phone), a minority are not. The minority (which also happens to include the most heavy users of government services) is made up of two categories:
- the unfortunates, prevented by lack of opportunity, by disability, or by ignorance
- refuseniks (Martha Lane Fox's term), who won't go on line because they are deviants (my interpretation!)

What to do to get there:
1) Put all services online (or, better, on mobile phones) and make them work better. We just need to try a bit harder to get it right.
2) For the unfortunates, we, the fortunate ones, should do all in our power to help them. We should, for example, give an hour to them get online. For the refuseniks, we need a 'carrot and stick' approach. We need to show them how wonderful it is to be online. (The example of the man who said he wasn't interested, he preferred going crown-green bowling. He was told he could watch all the crown green bowling online next year.) In the end, anyway, the alternatives will have to disappear because we won't make the savings if we leave them in place, so there'll be no choice. If you need government services it'll be digital or nothing.

As I said, slightly tendentious...

Seven people were nothing

2011-11-23T08:58:00.001Z

Further to my last post.

From John le Carré "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold". Liz is depressed by the poor attendance at the Party Meetings when she visits East Germany - they are no better then the Communist Party meetings she attended back in Bayswater, London.

At last, on the fourth day, the Thursday, came their own Branch Meeting. This was to be, for Liz at least, the most exhilarating experience of all; it would be an example of all that her own Branch in Bayswater could be one day. They had chosen a wonderful title for the evening's discussions - Coexistence after two wars - and they expected a record attendance. The whole ward had been circularised, they had taken care to see that there was no rival meeting in the neighbourhood that evening; it was not a late shopping day.
Seven people came.
Seven people and Liz and the Branch Secretary and the man from the District. Liz put a brave face on it but she was terribly upset. [...] It was like the meetings in Bayswater, it was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to Church - the same dutiful little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people. She always felt the same thing - it was awful, really, but she did - she wished no one would turn up, because that was absolute and it suggested persecution, humiliation - it was something you could react to.
But seven people were nothing: they were worse than nothing, because they were evidence of the inertia of the uncapturable mass. They broke your heart.

There would be a message, information, in no one turning up, but seven people is thermodynamic equilibrium.

Absence of information is the real nothing; not absence of stuff

2011-11-20T21:01:00.001Z

The current New Scientist is a Special Issue on 'Nothing'. They've got five articles linked to the theme:

From zero to hero. About the history of the mathematical symbol for '0', and the mathematical concept of zero.
Nothing in common. Building maths starting from the concept of the empty set
The hole story. How the concept of a 'hole' as a positively-charged particle rather than just the absence of an electron was crucial to the development of solid-state electronics
Out of the ether. Vacuum field - how quantum mechanics leads to the understanding that a vacuum is actually seething with particles emerging and disappearing
Putting the ideal to work. The discovery and value of Noble gases.

An interesting topic (though already pretty familiar to most readers of the New Scientist, I would have thought), but there's nothing there about information - they've missed the big story again!

It is the absence of information that is the real nothing, not the absence of stuff. It is similar to what I was saying about going faster than light. Stuff (matter/energy) only has any significance insofar as it carries information. A complete 'grey death' of the universe (thermodynamic equilibrium over the whole universe) would be a real nothing.

Like so much on this blog, I've got ideas about this, but other people have explored nothing and information much more rigorously.

Vlatko Vedral and Rainer Zimmermann talking about nothing.

At DTMD 2011, Vlatko Vedral introduced some of his ideas on how informational thinking provides insights into the fundamental question of how something comes from nothing. You can pick up his presentation from the DTMD 2011 proceedings page (or directly: Abstract Presentation Podcast). Vedral, though, was challenged by Rainer Zimmermann, one of the other delegates at the workshop, during the panel session after Vedral's presentation, and you can listen to that too: Panel Discussion (42 MByte mp3 file). Specifically, Zimmermann, says

I find the categories of nothingness and non-being mixed up...so the consequence is that your God metaphor and also your card game is not correct because it is not demonstrating what you would like to demonstrate. For instance saying that God himself would not know entails that you think of the assembly of knowledge for God, or substance, or whatever you would like to call it, in an anthropomorphic way, but it is obviously not logical at all. That is actually an idea going back to Spinoza in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, the card game is not telling anything about nothingness, because what you actually show is that if you discard the means of representation in favour of another means for instance by skipping the cards and doing that in an abstract way, for instance playing blind chess..., you are not actually doing anything ontological, all you do is switch the means of representation, so in fact there is not nothingness but it is quite a lot. Independent of the case nothingness in philosophical terms is not nothing, that is the point, it is actually the foundation of non-being. And non being is what is not but could be, it's a possibility. We had that already earlier in the keynote of Hofkirchner's field of possibilities and nothingness is the foundation of non-being. By coincidence on Friday afternoon I will give a talk on nothingness at the University of London...

(I've kept the reference to his University of London talk to point to the fact that he - Zimmermann - has been researching nothingness. I need to find out more!)

Talk of non-being, field of possibilities, what could be, puts me very much in mind of Rubem Alves writing in The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet of how the discovery of a dead body of man has all sorts of consequences precisely because he is dead - because he is not there (I referred to this in passing once before). However, I am aware I'm on shaky ground there, and I'm not sure Dr Zimmermann would approve!

The trouble with digital democracy

2011-11-16T12:20:00.001Z

This is nice:

24 hours in photos

This installation by Erik Kessels is on show as part of an exhibition at Foam in Amsterdam that looks at the future of photography. It features print-outs of all the images uploaded to Flickr in a 24-hour period...

Creative Review, 24 hours in photos

In the discussion we inevitably get the 'D' word

Perhaps sites such as Flickr, and the general ease of use provided by digital cameras, are instead encouraging us to think differently about photography, to see it as a truly democratic artform.

Whenever you see a claim that something is 'democratic', you need to ask two questions:

IS this (whatever is being discussed) democratic, or in what sense is it democratic?
If it is democratic, is it necessarily 'good'?

The point is, invariably the claim for democracy is taken as a claim to be 'good'. People are claiming something is democratic in order to show that it is good.

In many cases, the claim of democracy comes merely from something being made cheaper than before. So cheap flights from the likes of Easyjet and Ryanair have supposedly democratised air travel. Being cheap is frequently the main basis for claims of the democratising effects of new technology too, but it often goes along with ease of use and the ability to share something widely. This is the case with digital photography in the example above. Digital cameras are cheap (well, you can get digital cameras at low cost), they are easy to use, and by uploading your photos to a site such as flickr they can in principle be shared with millions of people right across the world. So, is this democratic? Or in what sense is it democratic? I don't know.

In a similar way, blogging is presented as democracy, giving anyone and everyone a platform previously reserved for the great and the good, or to journalists who had access to the media. Again, is this democratic? Or in what sense is it democratic? But maybe this is another strand of the information inflation story. Could there be such a thing as democracy-inflation? Can democracy be devalued?

And as to whether being democratic means being 'good', there's a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but apparently erroneously, that

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

Whoever said it, it is a useful reminder that we can't uncritically equate democracy with good.

Information in school reports: the layered communication model

2011-11-12T08:51:00.001Z

Further to my post last week, let's model the communication from teacher to parent, considering just a single subject for simplicity.

The teacher know lots about John, but inputs into the software just the name ("John", which is the address of the message), and the selection from one of fours levels, choosing in this case "m" (which is the message payload).

The software delivers a full report to the parents:

John has extended his knowledge of a variety of computer programs and he can log into the network without support. He has explored a variety of features included in software for composing music and is aware that questions can be turned into search criteria when using data handling programs. He has found information relating to his topic work from given websites on the worldwide web and explains patterns that govern a computer simulation

This is how I see the communication using the layered model and trapeziums to represent the coding and decoding (see my chapter in Ramage and Chapman or read the posts labelled trapezium in this blog).

The binary coding at the bottom isn't really relevant to this discussion (and could even introduce confusion between information bits and binary digits) but I think helps as a reminder of the way layers work. So the dashed lines show the virtual communication, and we can see the virtual communication of an m which is actually communicated by a binary representation. (Further confusion here because of course the Report King software will actually be working with binary representations and the m will presumably be ascii coded somewhere - but this isn't relevant to the model.)

The interesting bit, of course, is the layer above. The pretence is that the whole paragraph that the parent reads has been communicated virtually from the teacher. The reality is very different. The teacher - hopefully - does know lots about John and could communicate a full paragraph (and much more), but actually they have encoded their entire knowledge of John into the choice of 'm' (that John is an "average to more able achiever"). It was Report King that generated the paragraph.

A key point is the mismatch between the encoding and the decoding. The binary decoding just reverses the binary encoding, but the teacher encoding is different from the Report King decoding. Not entirely different of course, because the school teaches to the National Curriculum which the Report King uses the National Curriculum to do the decoding - that's why the Report King system works at all.

Apart from the message about information inflation, which is where this discussion started in last week's post, this model draws attention to the role of the encoding and decoding in communication. For example, decoding can never be perfect (even the binary decoding might get it wrong), and since they happen at different times and/or different places in some senses they are always completely independent? That's for further exploration at another time.

Differences are the things that get into the map

2011-11-11T22:00:00.001Z

Let us go back to the map and territory and ask: “what is it in the territory that gets into the map?” We know the territory does not get into the map. That is central point about which we here are all agreed. Now, if the territory were all uniform, nothing would get into the map except the boundaries, which are the points at which it ceases to be uniform against some larger matrix. What gets into the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or what-ever. Differences are the things that get into the map.

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an ecology of the mind, p320
http://www.seekeraftertruth.com/ebook-gregory-bateson-steps-to-an-ecology-of-mind-1972/

More musings on maps

2011-11-11T09:25:00.001Z

Further to yesterday's post:

Maps can be wrong

A street shown on the map might not exist, or might not go where it is shown to go. Or there might be a street that's not shown on the map

Or they might be misleading

[Added 29/11/11, suggestion by Chris Bissell] French IGN maps don't distinguish properly between very minor roads and tracks that cannot really be driven on.

Or they might impose decisions

Maps give names to locations, but who has the authority to decide where the area boundaries are? Sometimes there is a recognised authority - eg local government boundaries - but does everyone recognise the authority?

(A little anecdote on parish council maps. A few years ago I was a Parish Councillor on the Woolstone-cum-Willen Parish Council. We decided the ancient name of Woolstone-cum-Willen no longer fairly represented the modern parish in Milton Keynes, and renamed ourselves Campbell Park Parish Council. Unfortunately I read in the local newspaper yesterday that the Parish boundaries are being revised, and Campbell Park is being taken out of Campbell Park Parish Council and moved to Central Milton Keynes. They probably can't go back to Woolstone-cum-Willen because it seems likely that Willen will also be removed from their parish.)

So maps define the territory

Parish council boundaries might not count for much in defining territory but national boundaries can be much more influential (I've touched in this before).

Also, what the maps allow or don't allow determine what can exist. If there's no way of representing something on the map (if it is not defined in the map key), it doesn't exist in the universe of the map. But since we only know anything through the map, it doesn't exist at all until we find a map to put it on - extend an existing map by putting a new object on the map key, or draw up a new map.

So the compiler of the map is a powerful person

But the choice of which map to use also defines the territory

London is very different depending on whether you navigate with an A to Z, a map of the tube, or a bus map.

London underground

Central London bus map

Maps from the Transport for London website

Maps and information

2011-11-10T13:54:00.001Z

Maps

Start from the idea that 'the territory' is everything, reality, all that stuff out there (if there is anything).

A map is a representation of the territory. The map has a finite set of objects and relationships which can be manipulated. The map provides the language to tell a story, which is to say to understand something.

The territory is impossibly big: we cannot know anything except through maps. We cannot understand the territory, we can only understand maps of the territory.

We can improve maps - make the bigger scale, put more things in them - but eventually they cease to be any use. A 1:1 map's no good to anyone - if it were possible - it'd be just as incomprehensible as the territory

But no one map serves all purposes, so we have more than one map. We have different maps for different activities. That does not make one map right and another one wrong. They are all wrong, if by that we mean they are not the territory.

We take as a working assumption that there is a territory out there, but all we can do is observe whether our maps 'work' or not. If we make decisions based on the map and we get the results that the map predicts, then we reckon that the map is a good map of the territory. If it doesn't work, we reckon there's something wrong with the map.

When I travel to London I generally take both an A-Z street map and an topological map of the underground. If I travelled to parts of London that I don't know without a map I'd be completely lost.

Using the same map as someone else makes communication possible.

Information

So what's this got to do with information? Two things - and this starts to get self-referential.

Informational ideas provide a new map.

Maps are information. Maps exist in the universe of information.

A map built on informational ideas (including the idea that maps are information) is a useful new way of understanding the world.

Consciousness. Surely it IS the big question?

2011-11-08T11:40:00.001Z

Neuroscientist Colin Blakemore talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his life and work in ‘The Life Scientific’ on Radio 4 (Link to audio file.)

It focuses a lot on animal experimentation, but I was intrigued by Blakemore suggesting that consciousness may not be the biggest question.

(5:45 minutes in)

Al-Khalili: Would you agree that maybe the biggest question of all is what is consciousness? Is the brain just a complex computer in our heads, can you really say that… the most profound thoughts or feelings are down to biochemistry?

Blakemore: Mmm, err, well I mean consciousness looks likes, feels like, smells like, something really important and intriguing and interesting… feels as though it must be really important as a phenomenon. I would say we are not even sure of that. We don’t know what it is, we don’t know what it does, so we don’t know whether it is a hard problem or an easy problem really to solve, or even a relevant problem. Is it as important as knowing about what nerve cells are connected to what in the brain? Do we really need to know about consciousness in order to explain how brains work, that is a very hot issue. I think probably you are right consciousness is a big question but there isn’t a general agreement on that

Seems a bit evasive to me. Maybe it is not a problem neuroscience can address. Maybe even we don't need to know about consciousness in order to explain how brains work, but surely it is the Big Question (or part of it, anyway), as I suggested before.

Information inflation: school reports

2011-11-02T10:54:00.000Z

It is said there's more information around today than ever before. It is taken as a given fact, though people argue over whether it is a good thing or not (information riches or information glut?). But is it necessarily true?

A few years back, before the financial downturn, people in the UK would say ‘there’s more money around’ to account for the fact that people seemed to be consuming and acquiring goods more than ever before. You could have used the same expression: ‘there’s more money around’, about the Weimar Republic, in the 1920s & 30, but it would have meant something entirely different

Stamps from the Weimar Republic, showing inflation (from left to right: 1923, 1926 & 1928)

So, is the apparent increase in information real or hyperinflation?

With money you can make some meaningful comparisons - I was once told that the price of a Mars Bar is a good benchmark - but how can you do that for information?

I've been pondering this for a while (and had a paper on the topic rejected!). Here's some evidence for information inflation.

School reports, when I was a child, consisted of one or two hand-written sentences on each subject. The reports that my children have brought home are much more substantial: a printed booklet with paragraphs of, typically, between 50 and 200 words on each subject. At face value, I’m getting a lot more information about my children than my parents got about me.

School reports today are frequently put together with the aid of specialised software that reduces the workload on the teacher. An extreme example of this is The Report King that can be used in

England

. Using this software, all that a teacher needs to input is the name of the pupils and their grades for each subject, selected from a pre-defined set such as: h for higher achiever, m for average to more able achiever, l for average to less able achiever and sen for students with special educational needs. The software then writes the whole report, drawing on the statements contained in the National Curriculum for England. For example, entering m for ICT for one pupil (John), generated:

Entering the same grade for another pupil would generate a similar but different paragraph, because the software makes use of different wording and draws on different parts of the curriculum to ensure two different pupils don’t get the same report.

In terms of the Shannon model of communication, the message from the teacher is entirely specified by the name of the pupil and the grade. Since the grade was a selection of one from four, the information content (assuming each of the four grades was equally probable) about the pupil’s performance is 2 bits. That whole paragraph (73 words) is a symbol for the message m.

Comparing this to the hand-written sentence of times past, it is easy to see that a written sentence is likely to contain a lot more than two bits of information. Even the most harried teacher is likely to be selecting their sentence from a lot more than four possibilities. For really effective communication, though, the face-to-face meeting at the parents evening is still, as it always was, better than the report, whether hand-crafted or computer generated.

There’s an argument that there is more information in the computer-generated report, in this case information about the National Curriculum, but it’s not about John and it’s not from the teacher.

In conclusion, just as to say 'there's more money around' due to hyperinflation is a misuse of the word 'money', so too - maybe - to say there is more information around today is a misuse of the word information.

Presentations and audio files from DTMD 2011

2011-10-20T11:11:00.000+01:00

I should have said this before - they were ready a couple of weeks back - but there are now available pdf files and audio files ("podcasts") for each of the presentations at the Difference That Makes a Difference 2011. (On the Programme and Proceedings page)

If you open the presentation and the podcast at the same time, you can move through the slides while listening to the talk: a very effective substitute for a video of the presentation.

While editing the podcasts (mainly just cutting up the continuous audio recordings into individual files for each presentation, but also a minimal attempt to amplify quiet sections and remove extraneous sounds - you could spend weeks on that!) I was reminded how much there is in there and how much I would get out of going through them all again.

There's also the recordings of the panel sessions and the final synthesis session. The sound quality is variable for those - because the microphones were being handed around - but again there's lots in there worth another listen.

Photographs from the event are available via this page. I could do with more images or graphics in this blog, so here's one from the first presentation of the workshop, by Wolfgang Hofkirchner.

There's no information without communication...

2011-10-18T17:28:00.000+01:00

... and no communication without information?

Some - many - years back we were discussing suggestions for a new name for the department where I work at the OU. We discussed ICT: The Department of Information and Communication Technologies, and my colleague, Professor John Monk, commented that there was tautology in "information and communication" because Information and Communication are the same thing*.

Try to think of information without communication. It's like the tree falling in a forest that nobody hears. There may be information that's not communicated, but without it being communicated it may as well not exist. And unlike with the sound waves and the tree - the sound waves may leave some evidence that we can find later - there's no get-out with information. We only know about the information through communication, we can only know about information through communication. (The communication might, however, be through time rather than space - it can be memory.)

Similarly, what can be communicated if not information? Well actually, maybe there is answer to that, Perhaps, for example, emotion can be communicated. See John Monk's chapter in Ramage and Chapman, and the discussion of the different functions of signs: expressive (emotive); conative; phatic; meta-lingual; poetic. However, these only come through the interpretation of the signs, and to communicate the sign itself requires information?

In the trapezium model, it's information at the bottom and these other things out the top.

This seems to be taking me towards the fact that there are things other than information that can be communicated, so 'information and communication' is not quite a tautology, but for each you need the other.

Perhaps this intimate link between information and communication is one of the insights from Shannon.

-----------

* Warning! The details of this story may be wrong, my memory is not reliable. The key fact, though, is that the musing in this post were inspired by a comment of John's. If there is anything clever here it is probably due to John. If there isn't anything clever, it is probably because I misunderstood what John was saying.

Those neutrinos travelling faster than light

2011-09-26T22:52:00.001+01:00

Amplify’d from www.scientificamerican.com

An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics—that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 meters per second. [...]

The idea that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum is the cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics.
Read more at www.scientificamerican.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/ozVWVZ

This claim that 'nothing can travel faster than light' is sloppy, because you have to interpret what counts as a 'thing' in the word 'nothing'.

There's no problem at all with a phase velocity being faster than the speed of light. For example, an interference pattern can easily 'travel' faster than light, and the pattern might look like a 'thing'. Just think of two plane waves propagating at v and crossing at a shallow angle (say theta), then the intersection of the wavefronts 'travels' at a speed vp where vp = v/sin(theta/2). (I need for find an image of this). By making theta small vp can be as big as you like.

In a waveguide (such as an optical fibre) this is the phase velocity, but the more meaningful speed is the group velocity vg. The group velocity is the speed at which information can be transmitted, and is always less than v. In fact vg x vp = v^2.

My point is that the 'thing' that can't travel faster than light is information, which is the point I made before about the EPR paradox.

Of course all this probably irrelevant as far as the neutrino story is concerned. If particles are travelling faster than light and being detected, then presumably information could be transmitted using them. Still, it seemed like that at first sight with the EPR paradox yet when you analyse it carefully (which is way beyond my understanding but has been done by people who know) it turns out that you can't actually use it to send information faster than the speed of light.

My bet is that whatever the resolution of this latest neutrino story, it'll turn out that you can't send information faster than light.

Back again: DTMD 2011; and a bid to the Templeton Foundation

2011-09-26T14:41:00.000+01:00

The long silence on this blog was due largely to me being fully focused on two deadlines over the summer: for DTMD 2011; and for a grant application to The Templeton Foundation.

DTMD (The Difference that Makes a Difference) 2011 (7th - 9th September) was, from my perspective anyway, very successful. By which I mean we had an excellent range of speakers and some extremely valuable discussion. I certainly have learned a lot from it, and as I continue to think back over it I know I'll be learning lots more. For the moment, see www.dtmd2011.info, where you can can get a copy of the abstracts booklet, and shortly there will be copies of the slides of all the presentations and also the audio recordings. Hopefully there'll be more blog posts about it here in the future, but some of the delegates have already posted about it on their blogs, including:

Wolfgang Hofkirchner
José María Díaz Nafría on Bitrum Part 1 and Part 2
Robin Faichney
Peter Jones

Regarding the John Templeton Foundation bid, we'd had an online application (the first stage of the application process) accepted and were now invited to submit a full application for the 1st September deadline. The easiest way of explaining what we* are asking for is to quote the Executive Summary from the bid itself:

Interdisciplinary conversations on information: the new universal language

The development of information technologies has had a profound impact on modern society, and the language of information is increasingly used in a remarkably diverse range of disciplines. It has both practical and philosophical implications, with applications as wide as cosmology, quantum physics and theology, as well as the familiar territory of technology and library science. However it remains a difficult and contested concept. This project seeks:

to share insights to improve understanding about information in each field;

to contribute to the development of a unified theory of information;

to communicate widely the new ideas about information formulated within the project;

to foster an awareness of the importance of information both within a wide range of academic disciplines and among the educated general public

The project is a three year interdisciplinary conversation. There will be three annual themed workshops, one PhD studentship and the ongoing work of two investigators.

As part of each workshop, artists will be invited to propose works that would reflect, interpret and communicate some of the subjects explored by the other presenters at the workshop. At the end of the workshop one artist will be commissioned to create the work they proposed.

The project outputs will be three sets of workshop proceedings, three works of art, and a qualified PhD student and their dissertation. The applicants will also maintain a project website and a blog, and will aim to publish both academic and general interest outputs.

The outcome will be: a better understanding of information; greater awareness and more effective use of informational concepts in a wide variety of different disciplines; and a more cohesive interdisciplinary community exploring information as a way of making sense of the world.

* 'We' is firstly my colleague Magnus Ramage and me. All the activities that I've been doing on 'information' (including DTMD 2011 and the Templeton Foundation bid) have been in collaboration with Magnus. There are also lots of other people involved, however - collaboration is very important to our way of working.

Vlatko Vedral: What does it mean to call information the basis of reality?

2011-08-09T16:51:00.001+01:00

Vlatko Vedral, who is one the Keynote Speakers at next month's Difference that Makes a Difference, talks on "What does it mean to call information the basis of reality?"

A Conversation with Vlatko Vedral | Big Questions Online

Quantum Biology

2011-06-28T16:31:00.002+01:00

I like that "Biology has a knack for using what works".

Amplify’d from www.nature.com

On the face of it, quantum effects and living organisms seem to occupy utterly different realms. The former are usually observed only on the nanometre scale, surrounded by hard vacuum, ultra-low temperatures and a tightly controlled laboratory environment. The latter inhabit a macroscopic world that is warm, messy and anything but controlled. A quantum phenomenon such as 'coherence', in which the wave patterns of every part of a system stay in step, wouldn't last a microsecond in the tumultuous realm of the cell.

Or so everyone thought. But discoveries in recent years suggest that nature knows a few tricks that physicists don't: coherent quantum processes may well be ubiquitous in the natural world. Known or suspected examples range from the ability of birds to navigate using Earth's magnetic field to the inner workings of photosynthesis — the process by which plants and bacteria turn sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into organic matter, and arguably the most important biochemical reaction on Earth.

Biology has a knack for using what works, says Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. And if that means "quantum hanky-panky", he says, "then quantum hanky-panky it is".
Read more at www.nature.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/miiGGB

There's more information than matter in the world

2011-05-19T13:22:00.002+01:00

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..."

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

You might think that matter and information are incommensurate, and I think you might be right, but bear with me and perhaps you'll see what I mean.

These thoughts were prompted by reading 'The Library of Babel' in Jorge Luis Borges' "Labyrinths". Borges imagines a library consisting of every possible book of a certain size (letters per page, pages per book). Most of them are full of sets of nonsensical sequences of letters, but among them are also all possible meaningful books in every language that uses that script. (It is in the same vein as the 100 monkeys typing Shakespeare.) The script in the story has 22 letters (only one case), commas, full-stops and spaces, so there are 25 different characters to consider. (Obviously a much simplified script.)

The number of books of course is, I was going to say astronomical, but astronomical is way to small, if by that we mean of the order of, say, the number of atoms in the universe.

It may sound a bit daft, but I start out thinking about how close could I approach to generating a mini Library of Babel. That is I thought that I could write a programme to generate all strings of text of length n, so I wondered how long realistically could I make n.

For just one character, n=1, there are 25 books, for n=2, 25^2 = 625 and so on with the number of books being 25^n = 10^(1.398n) in general. I'd hoped I might be able to get to big enough n so as to generate word or two. I thought it would be nice to see some meaningful text emerge within the possibilities. Of course you will already seen this was a hopeless idea - just n = 4 requires more than 1/3 million books.

In the Library of Babel we are told:

"Each book contains 410 pages; each page, 40 lines; each line, about 80 black letters."

That makes n = 410 x 40 x 80 = 1,312,000.

Although I knew from the start that the Library of Babel was big, I don't think I'd quite thought through how big.

According to Wolfram Alpha, there are about 10^80 atoms in the known universe which requires n = 80/1.398 = 58. That is to say, if the book had only one page with one line of text, there'd be more books in the library than there are atoms in the universe.

Much of the universe is empty, of course, so now lets imagine that it was instead solid with matter. Again from Wolfram Alpha the diameter of the observable universe is 8.8 x 10^26 metres. An atom is about an angstrom in diameter so you could fit about (8.8 x 10^26/10^-10)^3 = 6.81 x 10^110 atoms in the universe. That would require about n = 111/1.398 = 80 - still only one line of text! Suddenly space doesn't sound quite so big...

I could go on, but you get the picture. 'All' I'm doing, of course, is pointing out how fast exponential growth is, but I also - and I know I need to be careful here - think it suggests something about the significance of information within the universe.

Knowing 'how much stuff (material)' we have, is much less significant than knowing how that stuff is arranged.

Detecting Schrödinger’s half-dead cat

2011-05-04T17:43:00.003+01:00

I'd thought it was theoretically impossible to do this, not just impractical.

Amplify’d from www.newscientist.com

IT MAY soon be possible to extract information from a quantum object - and even manipulate it - without simultaneously destroying its delicate quantum state. The result would be a boon for quantum computing, which requires control over such states. It would also defy a thought experiment dreamed up by physicist Erwin Schrödinger: in principle it is now possible to peek inside his box without endangering the life of the precarious pussycat inside.

In 2010, physicists put the largest system yet into a superposition: a 40-micrometre-long strip of piezoelectric material, which expands and contracts in response to voltage changes. They put it into a superposition of both minimal and more vigorous oscillation, but the method they used to observe the system caused it to lose this dual state.

Another team now proposes going a step further, putting a wire of about the same size in a superposition and offering a scheme to observe, and even manipulate it, without destroying the weird quantum state. Kurt Jacobs at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and his team describe their idea in a study to appear in Physical Review A.

The first step is to put the wire into a superposition in which vibrations simultaneously displace it by equal amounts in opposite directions, like a guitar string that gets plucked in two directions at once. Next, an electric charge can be added to the wire, creating an electromagnetic field that can be detected by a sensor (see diagram).

Even though the sensor cannot pinpoint the position of the charge - and therefore the wire - it can detect how far the charge is from a neutral, "unplucked" position. That reveals some information about the system - essentially providing a glimpse inside the box containing Schrödinger's cat. The key is that it avoids opening the box completely, which would destroy the superposition, says Jacobs: "I extract information, but in a way that I don't learn too much."

Carrying out this experiment is still a few years away
Read more at www.newscientist.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/lbLJ7i

BBC Radio 4/World Service, In Business on "For your information"

2011-05-04T14:12:00.001+01:00

Broadcast last week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010mv58 in the 'In Business' series, so is focussed on the role of information to business - information as a commodity; trading, marketing etc - but draws on Gleick for some broader insights.

Deloitte's consultant Robert Hillard: "The value of data drops by approximately half within the first 50 milliseconds of its generation"

Peter Moss of Thompson Reuters: ...the difference of a fraction of a millisecond... (with the use of computers in trading) ... "Using computers to extract meaning from text"

'Retargetting' - collecting data from the internet search records of people and using this for customised adverts. (Peter Day says: "Do you do any work on how annoying you are?")

Data/information: 'information is in the context of the business'.

Mark Little from Storyful Dublin based news organisation using social networks. Using people to 'liberate the wisdom that is in the data'.

Caroline Webb, co-author of "Recovering from information overload: Always-on, multitasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy."