BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

INFORMATION and INFORMATION CONTENT 1)5)

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D. Mac KAY states that a problem arises when information is confused with information content, i.e. "the confusion of a thing with a measure of a thing" (1969, p.56).

In his opinion:"Communication engineers have not developed a concept of information at all. They have developed a theory dealing explicitely with only one particular feature or aspect of messages "carrying" information – their unexpectedness or surprise value. Unexpectedness is a feature not only of messages but of other things, such as the states of a physical system. Physicists had already developed a quantitative method of measuring unexpectedness: by BOLTZMANN 's statistical concept of entropy. What SHANNON and others did was to adopt and extend this method to the measurement of the unexpectedness of messages.

"Their measure of unexpectedness, the average logarithm of the improbability of the message, -δp1 log p1, is not therefore information, but simply a particular measure of what they termed amount-of-information; (i.e.) the minuteness of the selection which the message makes from the set… of all possible messages".

"In this set, the different possible messages are pictured as occupying a space proportional to their relative probabilities, as that the least probable message occupies the smallest space and requires the most minute selective operation" (p.57).

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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