Joe G
Posts: 12011
Joined: July 2007
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| Quote (OgreMkV @ Mar. 01 2013,13:50) | | Quote (Joe G @ Mar. 01 2013,13:15) | | Quote (OgreMkV @ Mar. 01 2013,13:12) | | Quote | The main concepts of information theory can be grasped by considering the most widespread means of human communication: language. Two important aspects of a concise language are as follows: First, the most common words (e.g., "a", "the", "I") should be shorter than less common words (e.g., "roundabout", "generation", "mediocre",) so that sentences will not be too long. Such a tradeoff in word length is analogous to data compression and is the essential aspect of source coding. Second, if part of a sentence is unheard or misheard due to noise — e.g., a passing car — the listener should still be able to glean the meaning of the underlying message. Such robustness is as essential for an electronic communication system as it is for a language; properly building such robustness into communications is done by channel coding. Source coding and channel coding are the fundamental concerns of information theory.
Note that these concerns have nothing to do with the importance of messages.
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Notice that last sentence?
Also note that it is specifically mentioned that 'meaning' is divorced from the actual information content. |
Kevin,
You still did NOT read what I orginally posted. So until you do then you cannot respond to it, let alone refute it.
The FACT remains that to the majority of people, the word "information" goes hand-in-hand with meaning. The entire world depends on it. |
In logic, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or most people believe it. In other words, the basic idea of the argument is: "If many believe so, it is so."
from your favorite source - Wikipedia
Many people believe Ronald Reagan was a great president, doesn't make it true (doesn't make it false either).
Many people believe "theory" means a guess about how or why something happened. Doesn't make that true either (especially when discussing science, which has a specific formal definition of 'theory').
No one cares what 'many people think', Joe. You're talking about a very specific claim and you are wrong.
Shannon information is ONLY concerned with the compression and transmission of information. That information could be a text speech, a video speech, a picture, or 10 gigabytes of random characters. As I quoted... the meaning is specifically not important to the information.
I don't know what's so hard about this (other than your massive ego thinking everything you say is correct no matter what).
It's the basic concept in information theory. In fact, Shannon pretty much started information theory. Did you know that the word 'meaning' was well understood before Shannon did his work? He could have called this 'meaning theory', but he didn't.
Whatever. |
Kevin,
Shut the fuck up. You still haven't read what I posted.
I KNOW what Shannon said. And I also know how the world runs- on information- meaningful and useful information.
When you "dial" 411 are you expecting a string of random numbers in response to your query? or are you expecting something meaningful?
When you were teaching (LoL!) was the information you gave your students just a mumble- jumble of characters or was it meaningful (at least to you)?
When you want to find information on the intertubes do you type in random characters or words that have meaning wrt what you are searching for?
When your boss asks you for information do you hand him/ her a page of random characters or do you hand in something meaningful and useful?
If policeman asked you for information regarding your whereabouts on a certain night, do you blurt out random letters or do you give him something meaningful?
Shannon knew it is impossible to quantify meaning. That is why he focused on quantifying it.
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"Facts are Stupid"- Timothy Horton aka Occam's Afterbirth
"Genetic mutations aren't mistakes"-ID and Timothy Horton
Whales do not have tails. Water turns to ice via a molecular code- Â Acartia bogart, TARD
YEC is more coherent than materialism and it's bastard child, evolutionism
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