Relative Information


Book Description

For four decades, information theory has been viewed almost exclusively as a theory based upon the Shannon measure of uncertainty and information, usually referred to as Shannon entropy. Since the publication of Shannon's seminal paper in 1948, the theory has grown extremely rapidly and has been applied with varied success in almost all areas of human endeavor. At this time, the Shannon information theory is a well established and developed body of knowledge. Among its most significant recent contributions have been the use of the complementary principles of minimum and maximum entropy in dealing with a variety of fundamental systems problems such as predic tive systems modelling, pattern recognition, image reconstruction, and the like. Since its inception in 1948, the Shannon theory has been viewed as a restricted information theory. It has often been argued that the theory is capable of dealing only with syntactic aspects of information, but not with its semantic and pragmatic aspects. This restriction was considered a v~rtue by some experts and a vice by others. More recently, however, various arguments have been made that the theory can be appropriately modified to account for semantic aspects of in formation as well. Some of the most convincing arguments in this regard are in cluded in Fred Dretske's Know/edge & Flow of Information (The M.LT. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1981) and in this book by Guy lumarie.




Elements of Information Theory


Book Description

The latest edition of this classic is updated with new problem sets and material The Second Edition of this fundamental textbook maintains the book's tradition of clear, thought-provoking instruction. Readers are provided once again with an instructive mix of mathematics, physics, statistics, and information theory. All the essential topics in information theory are covered in detail, including entropy, data compression, channel capacity, rate distortion, network information theory, and hypothesis testing. The authors provide readers with a solid understanding of the underlying theory and applications. Problem sets and a telegraphic summary at the end of each chapter further assist readers. The historical notes that follow each chapter recap the main points. The Second Edition features: * Chapters reorganized to improve teaching * 200 new problems * New material on source coding, portfolio theory, and feedback capacity * Updated references Now current and enhanced, the Second Edition of Elements of Information Theory remains the ideal textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in electrical engineering, statistics, and telecommunications.




Modes of Perceiving and Processing Information


Book Description

First published in 1978. Since World War II the field of perception has developed in two major directions. The first evolved out of the traditional psychophysical approach and is manifest today in the new psychophysics. The second direction is in the increasing bond between the fields of perception and cognition. This volume grew out of the context of this second direction, a particular product of two workshops (held in the Spring of 1974 and 1975), organized by the Committee on Cognitive Research of the Social Science Research Council. The Committee on Cognition was organized in 1971 to encourage communication and interaction on specific problems in the area of cognition among the various social sciences.




Relative Intimacy


Book Description

Celebrated as new consumers and condemned for their growing delinquencies, teenage girls emerged as one of the most visible segments of American society during and after World War II. Contrary to the generally accepted view that teenagers grew more alienated from adults during this period, Rachel Devlin argues that postwar culture fostered a father-daughter relationship characterized by new forms of psychological intimacy and tinged with eroticism. According to Devlin, psychiatric professionals turned to the Oedipus complex during World War II to explain girls' delinquencies and antisocial acts. Fathers were encouraged to become actively involved in the clothing and makeup choices of their teenage daughters, thus domesticating and keeping under paternal authority their sexual maturation. In Broadway plays, girls' and women's magazines, and works of literature, fathers often appeared as governing figures in their daughters' sexual coming of age. It became the common sense of the era that adolescent girls were fundamentally motivated by their Oedipal needs, dependent upon paternal sexual approval, and interested in their fathers' romantic lives. As Devlin demonstrates, the pervasiveness of depictions of father-adolescent daughter eroticism on all levels of culture raises questions about the extent of girls' independence in modern American society and the character of fatherhood during America's fabled embrace of domesticity in the 1940s and 1950s.




Relative Values


Book Description

The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to offer a radical revisioning of kinship and kinship theory. Through a combination of vivid case studies and trenchant theoretical essays, the contributors—a group of internationally recognized scholars—examine both the history of kinship theory and its future, at once raising questions that have long occupied a central place within the discipline of anthropology and moving beyond them. Ideas about kinship are vital not only to understanding but also to forming many of the practices and innovations of contemporary society. How do the cultural logics of contemporary biopolitics, commodification, and globalization intersect with kinship practices and theories? In what ways do kinship analogies inform scientific and clinical practices; and what happens to kinship when it is created in such unfamiliar sites as biogenetic labs, new reproductive technology clinics, and the computers of artificial life scientists? How does kinship constitute—and get constituted by—the relations of power that draw lines of hierarchy and equality, exclusion and inclusion, ambivalence and violence? The contributors assess the implications for kinship of such phenomena as blood transfusions, adoption across national borders, genetic support groups, photography, and the new reproductive technologies while ranging from rural China to mid-century Africa to contemporary Norway and the United States. Addressing these and other timely issues, Relative Values injects new life into one of anthropology's most important disciplinary traditions. Posing these and other timely questions, Relative Values injects an important interdisciplinary curiosity into one of anthropology’s most important disciplinary traditions. Contributors. Mary Bouquet, Janet Carsten, Charis Thompson Cussins, Carol Delaney, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Sarah Franklin, Deborah Heath, Stefan Helmreich, Signe Howell, Jonathan Marks, Susan McKinnon, Michael G. Peletz, Rayna Rapp, Martine Segalen, Pauline Turner Strong, Melbourne Tapper, Karen-Sue Taussig, Kath Weston, Yunxiang Yan




Our World Is Relative


Book Description

A fun and engaging picture book from author Julia Sooy and illustrator Molly Walsh explaining Einstein's theory of relativity. Size, speed, weight, direction, distance We think of space and time as fixed and measurable. But these measurements—our experience of space and time—they are relative. Our world is relative. With simple, engaging text and vibrant art imbued with light and movement, Our World Is Relative offers a child's-eye view of time, space, and the vast role that relativity plays in comprehending our world. It's an introduction to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, perfect for any curious young scientist. Longlisted for the American Association for the Advancement of Science/ Subaru Children's Science Picture Book Award




Relative Optimization of Continuous-Time and Continuous-State Stochastic Systems


Book Description

This monograph applies the relative optimization approach to time nonhomogeneous continuous-time and continuous-state dynamic systems. The approach is intuitively clear and does not require deep knowledge of the mathematics of partial differential equations. The topics covered have the following distinguishing features: long-run average with no under-selectivity, non-smooth value functions with no viscosity solutions, diffusion processes with degenerate points, multi-class optimization with state classification, and optimization with no dynamic programming. The book begins with an introduction to relative optimization, including a comparison with the traditional approach of dynamic programming. The text then studies the Markov process, focusing on infinite-horizon optimization problems, and moves on to discuss optimal control of diffusion processes with semi-smooth value functions and degenerate points, and optimization of multi-dimensional diffusion processes. The book concludes with a brief overview of performance derivative-based optimization. Among the more important novel considerations presented are: the extension of the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman optimality condition from smooth to semi-smooth value functions by derivation of explicit optimality conditions at semi-smooth points and application of this result to degenerate and reflected processes; proof of semi-smoothness of the value function at degenerate points; attention to the under-selectivity issue for the long-run average and bias optimality; discussion of state classification for time nonhomogeneous continuous processes and multi-class optimization; and development of the multi-dimensional Tanaka formula for semi-smooth functions and application of this formula to stochastic control of multi-dimensional systems with degenerate points. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in the field of stochastic control and performance optimization alike.




Relative Clauses in Time and Space


Book Description

This book presents a comprehensive survey of historically attested relative clause constructions from a diachronic typological perspective. Systematic integration of historical data and a typological approach demonstrates how typology and historical linguistics can each benefit from attention to the other. The diachronic behaviour of relative clauses is mapped across a broad range of genetically and geographically diverse languages. Central to the discussion is the strength of evidence for what have previously been claimed to be ‘natural’ or even ‘universal’ pathways of change. While many features of relative clause constructions are found to be remarkably stable over long periods of time, it is shown that language contact seems to be the crucial factor that does trigger change when it occurs. These results point to the importance of incorporating the effects of language contact into models of language change rather than viewing contact situations as exceptional. The findings of this study have implications for the definition of relative clauses, their syntactic structures and the relationships between the different ‘subtypes’ of this construction, as well as offering new directions for the integration of typological and historical linguistic research.




Advances in Information Retrieval


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 33rd annual European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2011, held in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2010. The 45 revised full papers presented together with 24 poster papers, 17 short papers, and 6 tool demonstrations were carefully reviewed and selected from 223 full research paper submissions and 64 poster/demo submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on text categorization, recommender systems, Web IR, IR evaluation, IR for Social Networks, cross-language IR, IR theory, multimedia IR, IR applications, interactive IR, and question answering /NLP.







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