Product Description: An illegal plague virus is let loose from a runaway tanker in Yellowstone National Park on a national holiday. The PetroDyne Corporation wants to prevent the story leaking and a homicidal psychopath is also on the loose.

When a tanker truck carrying a strain of hemorrhagic fever virus crashes into a creekbed on state park land, an army of government-approved assassins, bent on covering up the scandal, sets out to kill the people vacationing there. Reprint.

What distinguishes clever computers from stupid people (besides their components)? The author of Seeing and Knowing presents in his new book a beautifully and persuasively written interdisciplinary approach to traditional problems—a clearsighted interpretation of information theory. Psychologists, biologists, computer scientists, and those seeking a general unified picture of perceptual-cognitive activity will find this provocative reading. The problems Dretske addresses in Knowledge and the Flow of Information—What is knowledge? How are the sensory and cognitive processes related? What makes mental activities mental?—appeal to a wide audience. The conceptual tools used to deal with these questions (information, noise, analog versus digital coding, etc.) are designed to make contact with, and exploit the findings of, empirical work in the cognitive sciences. A concept of information is developed, one deriving from (but not identical with) the Shannon idea familiar to communication theorists, in terms of which the analyses of knowledge, perception, learning, and meaning are expressed. The book is materialistic in spirit—that is, spiritedly materialistic—devoted to the view that mental states and processes are merely special ways physical systems have of processing, coding, and using information. (view table of contents)

Book by West, Richard, Turner, Lynn H.

Product Description: This set of four volumes provides a range of essays both canonical in, and at the cutting edge of, communication theory. The essays included represent communication theory in a fashion cognizant with the breadth of communication – theories from humanities as well as from social sciences – that takes place in the universe...read more

Product Description: "Dynamics of Information Systems" presents state-of-the-art research explaining the importance of information in the evolution of a distributed or networked system. This book presents techniques for measuring the value or significance of information within the context of a system...read more

Product Description: The informational nature of biological organization, at levels from the genetic and epigenetic to the cognitive and linguistic.Information shapes biological organization in fundamental ways and at every organizational level. Because organisms use information―including DNA codes, gene expression, and chemical signaling―to construct, maintain, repair, and replicate themselves, it would seem only natural to use information-related ideas in our attempts to understand the general nature of living systems, the causality by which they operate, the difference between living and inanimate matter, and the emergence, in some biological species, of cognition, emotion, and language...read more

Product Description: In Decoding Reality, Vlatko Vedral offers a mind-stretching look at the deepest questions about the universe--where everything comes from, why things are as they are, what everything is. The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, he writes, but information--and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena...read more

Product Description: The book offers a new approach to information theory that is more general then the classical approach by Shannon. The classical definition of information is given for an alphabet of symbols or for a set of mutually exclusive propositions (a partition of the probability space Ω) with corresponding probabilities adding up to 1...read more

Although Erving Goffman never claimed to be a media or communication scholar, his work is definitely relevant to, and has already served as a substantial resource for, those who are. This is the first detailed presentation and analysis of his life and work intended specifically for a communication audience. While primarily an introduction to Goffman’s work, those already familiar with his ideas will also learn something new. In addition to summarizing Goffman’s major concepts and his influence on other scholars, the book includes an intellectual biography, explication of his methods, and an example of how to extend his ideas. Readers are invited to consider Goffman as a lens through which to view much of the pattern evident in the social world. Goffman’s work always appealed to the general public (several of his books became bestsellers), and so this book has implications for those who are interested in the role of media or communication in their own lives as well as those who study it professionally.

A classic source for exploring the connections between information theory and physics, this text is geared toward upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. The author, a giant of twentieth-century mathematics, applies the principles of information theory to a variety of issues, including Maxwell's demon, thermodynamics, and measurement problems.Author Leon Brillouin begins by defining and applying the term "information" and proceeds to explorations of the principles of coding, coding problems and solutions, the analysis of signals, a summary of thermodynamics, thermal agitation and Brownian motion, and thermal noise in an electric circuit. A discussion of the negentropy principle of information introduces Brillouin's renowned examination of Maxwell's demon. Concluding chapters explore the associations between information theory, the uncertainty principle, and physical limits of observation, in addition to problems related to computing, organizing information, and inevitable errors.

Product Description: The monograph applies sophisticated topological symmetry tools to biological applications of information theory, along with a Black Scholes model invocation of the Data Rate Theorem which links information and control theories. The focus is on statistical mechanics and other models that explore pathological phase transitions driven by changes in available rates of mitochondrial free energy in physiological functions, a cutting-edge topic in the study of chronic disease...read more

Product Description: Outstanding Academic Title, ChoiceCybernetics―the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans―originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society...read more