Special Issue "Information: Its Different Modes and Its Relation to Meaning"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Robert K. Logan
¹ Strategic Innovation Laboratory, Ontario College of Art and Design
² Prof. Emeritus in Physics, University of Toronto
³ Senior Fellow, Origins Institute, McMaster University
⁴ Senior Fellow, Institute of Biocomplexity, University of Calgary; Mailing address: Department of Physics, 60 St. George St., Toronto, ON M5S 1A7, Canada
Website: http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
E-Mail: logan@physics.utoronto.ca
Phone: +1 416 361 5928; Skype name: logan1939
Interests: information theory; media ecology; linguistics; emergence and complexity theory; systems biology; industrial design; knowledge management; computer applications in education; science education

Dear Colleagues,

The objective of the special issue entitled "Information: Its Different Modes and its Relation to Meaning" is to explore the nature of information in the wide variety of forms that it takes and answers the following questions:

What is information?

Does the nature of information change depending on the context in which it is employed? For example is the information stored in DNA or on a computer the same?

Is there a difference between symbolic information like that stored in a book or on a computer and DNA which is not symbolic of RNA but catalyzes its production?

What is the relationship of information to the medium in which it is stored or instantiated?

What is the relation of information to any of the following, i.e. to meaning, to data, to knowledge, to wisdom, to science, to physics, to chemistry, to biology, to medicine, to neurophysiology, to neural networks, to psychology, to psychiatry, to evolution, to mathematics, to philosophy, to technology, to computers, to engineering, to design, to economics, to complexity, to chaos, to emergence, to commerce, to business, to knowledge management, to culture, to history, to art, to music, to the sender, to the receiver, to the channel, to systems theory, to cybernetics, to ontology, to epistemology, to consciousness, and to x where x is some other topic of interest to you.

What role did the concept of or role of information play in the work of some scholar such as Shannon, Weaver, Kolmogorov, Chaitin, McLuhan, Innis, Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Freud, Jung, Kant, Descarte, Russell, Whitehead, Pierce, Bateson, Turing, Gödel, von Neumann or any other scholar of interest to you?

If you are interested in being part of this project please let me know as soon as possible for planning purposes. Email me at Bob Logan logan@physics.utoronto.ca. The deadline for a letter of intent will be February 3, 2012. The deadline for an abstract will be March 1 with a deadline of July 6, 2012 for the final article once the abstract has been accepted.

Prof. Dr. Robert K. Logan
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. For the first couple of issues the Article Processing Charge (APC) will be waived for well-prepared manuscripts. English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.

Robert K. Logan Review: What Is Information?: Why Is It Relativistic and What Is Its Relationship to Materiality, Meaning and Organization Information 2012, 3(1), 68-91; doi:10.3390/info3010068 Received: 15 January 2012 / Accepted: 2 February 2012 / Published: 14 February 2012 Show/Hide Abstract | Download PDF Full-text (155 KB) Abstract: We review the historic development of concept of information including the relationship of Shannon information and entropy and the criticism of Shannon information because of its lack of a connection to meaning. We review the work of Kauffman, Logan et al. that shows that Shannon information fails to describe biotic information. We introduce the notion of the relativity of information and show that the concept of information depends on the context of where and how it is being used. We examine the relationship of information to meaning and materiality within information theory, cybernetics and systems biology. We show there exists a link between information and organization in biotic systems and in the various aspects of human culture including language, technology, science, economics and governance.

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Gordana Dodig Crnkovic Article: Physical Computation as Dynamics of Form that Glues Everything Together Information 2012, 3(2), 204-218; doi:10.3390/info3020204 Received: 1 March 2012; in revised form: 14 April 2012 / Accepted: 18 April 2012 / Published: 26 April 2012 Show/Hide Abstract | Download PDF Full-text (284 KB) | View HTML Full-text | Download PMC-XML Full-text Abstract: The framework is proposed where matter can be seen as related to energy in a way structure relates to process and information relates to computation. In this scheme matter corresponds to a structure, which corresponds to information. Energy corresponds to the ability to carry out a process, which corresponds to computation. The relationship between each two complementary parts of each dichotomous pair (matter/energy, structure/process, information/computation) are analogous to the relationship between being and becoming, where being is the persistence of an existing structure while becoming is the emergence of a new structure through the process of interactions. This approach presents a unified view built on two fundamental ontological categories: Information and computation. Conceptualizing the physical world as an intricate tapestry of protoinformation networks evolving through processes of natural computation helps to make more coherent models of nature, connecting non-living and living worlds. It presents a suitable basis for incorporating current developments in understanding of biological/cognitive/social systems as generated by complexification of physicochemical processes through self-organization of molecules into dynamic adaptive complex systems by morphogenesis, adaptation and learning—all of which are understood as information processing.

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Type of Paper: Article
Title: On Modelling  Sources of  Evidence for  Relevance  Feedback in Information Retrieval
Authors: Emanuele Di Buccio and Massimo Melucci
Affiliation: University of Padua, Italy; E-Mails: melo@dei.unipd.it (M.M.); dibuccio@dei.unipd.it (E.D.B.)
Abstract:Information Retrieval (IR)  is the science that investigates the  design, implementation  and evaluation  of systems  which  aim at retrieving all and only  the documents containing information relevant to the user's  information need. In this paper,  we address the issues and  the use  of  feedback  methods for  IR.  User interactions  (e.g. relevance  assessments, user  behaviour)  are examples  of sources  of evidence  that can be  adopted by  the IR  systems for  predicting the documents  containing information relevant  to the  user's information needs  by the  way  of  relevance feedback.  However,  there are  many different sources of evidence that can be observed from the context in which  the   user  operates   when  searching  for   information.  The peculiarities  of  each source  of  evidence  make  a feedback  method inappropriate  for  other  sources  of  evidence and  call  a  uniform representation  that   enables  the  researchers   to  accurately  and effectively capture and leverage all these peculiarities as possible - a  weighting  function  that  effectively  scores  the  textual  terms processed by a  relevance feedback method might not  be effective when scoring  image features.  In this  paper,  we address  the problem  of uniformly and  formally modelling  different sources of  evidence that can  be used  for relevance  feedback. The  problem of  uniform source modelling is addressed by way of a mathematical formalism based on the abstract vector spaces. This  formalism allows us to design, implement and evaluate  a system that  leverages the evidence gathered  from the user interaction  with the IR system.  The objective is  to obtain and exploit a  usable representation  of the factors  of relevance  in the role  of subspaces  of a  single abstract  vector space  -  sources of evidence,  factors  of  relevance  and  relevance  assessments  become elements  of the  same vector  space.  The methodology  aims at  being general  and  not tailored  to  a  specific  source of  evidence.  The methodology defines  the set  of steps needed  for obtaining  a vector subspace-based  representation of the  information need  dimensions to further exploit this representation for relevance prediction purposes. Some experimental results will also be reported.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: The Relationship of Information Disclosure and Firms’ Decision-Makers
Authors: Erika Lopez-Quesada-Martin *; María-del-Mar Camacho-Miñano and María-Jesus Segovia-Vargas
Affiliation: Complutense University of Madrid, School of Business Administration, Madrid, Spain; E-Mail: erikalqm@ccee.ucm.es (E.L.Q.M.)
Abstract: The relativity of performance information disclosure may condition decisions of firms’ managers and their stakeholders, according to the agency theory. The aim of the research is to shed light about the preference for the financial performance statement presentation is associated to a more transparent presentation by managers and, consequently, associated to a higher level culture of Corporate Governance (CG). An artificial intelligence methodology is used in a sample of S&P 500 companies. The results show that the higher levels of CG culture and financial performance, the better firms’ decision-makers because managers disclosure financial performance in performance statements.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: The Role of Multimedia Content in Determining the Virality of Social Media Information
Authors: Leonardo Bruni, Paolo Giacomazzi and Chiara Francalanci
Affiliations: Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Via Ponzio, 34/5, 20133 Milano, Italy; E-Mail: francala@elet.polimi.it (C.F.)
Abstract: The paper provides empirical evidence supporting the assumption that content plays a critical role in determining the virality, i.e. the influence, of social media information. The analysis focuses on multimedia content on Twitter and explores the idea that links to multimedia information increase the virality of posts. In particular, we put forward the following three hypotheses: 1) posts with a link to multimedia content (photo or video) are more retweeted than posts without a link, 2) posts linking a photo are more retweeted than posts linking a video, and 3) posts linking a video raise more sentiment than posts linking a photo. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of roughly two million tweets posted in July 2011 including comments on Berlin, London, Madrid, and Milan relevant from a tourism perspective. Findings support our hypotheses and indicate that multimedia content plays an important role in determining not only the volumes of retweeting, but also the dynamics of the virality of posts measured as volumes of retweeting in a time unit.