Information Theory Books - Page 3

Programming for Design: From Theory to Practice

Edith Cherry

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Editorial Review:

Quickly master architectural programming concepts, skills, and techniques

In the essential discipline of architectural programming, the ideas of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and history find their focus in the realities of site conditions, budgets, and functionality. Author Edith Cherry vividly demonstrates in this inspiring tutorial that the programming process not only helps architects avoid the endless design revisions occurring in most projects, but that it is also the key to designing for optimal form and function.

Programming for Design lets you rapidly acquire the knowledge and skills needed to successfully program a moderate-size space. Rather than simply describe basic principles and practices, this straightforward guide helps you master architectural programming by actually doing it.

Professor Cherry identifies the central issues involved and describes the skills needed to work with clients to identify problems to be solved by a design effort. Emphasizing designing for people, she offers proven strategies and techniques for goal setting, information gathering and analysis, concept development, program synthesis, and communicating with clients.

The book is also devoted to practical applications. The author walks you step-by-step through a project of your own choosing, providing numerous examples and four case studies within each step that vividly illustrate how to effectively gather, process, and communicate information.

Programming for Design features more than 200 supporting illustrations, diagrams, and sidebars appearing throughout the text, reproducing pithy sayings by such far-flung figures as Plato and Yogi Berra, Einstein and Lao Tzu, that help relate the programming process to other disciplines.

Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

Paul Dourish

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Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction"—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality—reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.

Error Control Coding (2nd Edition)

Shu Lin, Daniel J. Costello

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Foremost book in the field 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

I had the previous version of this book as my text at USC. This version is a huge improvement over the last one. This one covers all the new advances and adds emphasis on the use of coding to communications channels. A complaint I had of the last version was that it under-emphasized coding gains and Eb/N0 vs. BER performance figures. This book has overcome many of those difficulties. It is still a bit ponderous in places but then it is the only book that covers the material in this much detail, truly a Bible of the field. It is a great graduate level text and a must-have book for any comm engineer. Charan Langton complextoreal.com

Editorial Review:

A reorganized and comprehensive major revision of a classic book, this edition provides a bridge between introductory digital communications and more advanced treatment of information theory. Completely updated to cover the latest developments, it presents state-of-the-art error control techniques. Coverage of the fundamentals of coding and the applications of codes to the design of real error control systems. Contains the most recent developments of coded modulation, trellises for codes, soft-decision decoding algorithms, turbo coding for reliable data transmission and other areas. There are two new chapters on Reed-Solomon codes & concatenated coding schemes. Also contains hundreds of new and revised examples; and more than 200 illustrations of code structures, encoding and decoding circuits and error performance of many important codes and error control coding systems. Appropriate for those with minimum mathematical background as a comprehensive reference for coding theory.

A First Course in Information Theory (Information Technology: Transmission, Processing and Storage)

Raymond W. Yeung

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Incepted half a century ago, information theory is a classical yet modern field which is more vibrant than ever before. In particular, there have been a number of major research results on the foundation of the theory during the last ten years. These results enable information theory to be understood and explored in a way which has not been possible before, and they open new dimensions in the theory. In short, the depth of information theory is far beyond what we used to know.

This book is an integration of the most fundamental topics in information theory plus a few selected advanced topics. All concepts and technicalities are explained with clarity. Except for a few classical results, all the results included here are not found elsewhere in book form. These include the theory of I-Measure, Shannon-type and non-Shannon-type information inequalities, and network coding theory. Some important implications of information theory in probability theory and group theory are also explained in this book.

ITIP, the software package that comes with the book, is the only software package of its kind which can prove all Shannon-type information inequalities. It is an essential tool for all information theorists.

This book is suitable for use as a textbook, or as a reference book with any other textbook in a course on information theory. It is also an essential reference for researchers working in areas related to this subject matter.

Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society

James Boyle

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Who owns your genetic information? Might it be the doctors who, in the course of removing your spleen, decode a few cells and turn them into a patented product? In 1990 the Supreme Court of California said yes, marking another milestone on the information superhighway. This extraordinary case is one of the many that James Boyle takes up in Shamans, Software, and Spleens, a timely look at the infinitely tricky problems posed by the information society. Discussing topics ranging from blackmail and insider trading to artificial intelligence (with good-humored stops in microeconomics, intellectual property, and cultural studies along the way), Boyle has produced a work that can fairly be called the first social theory of the information age.

Now more than ever, information is power, and questions about who owns it, who controls it, and who gets to use it carry powerful implications. These are the questions Boyle explores in matters as diverse as autodialers and direct advertising, electronic bulletin boards and consumer databases, ethno-botany and indigenous pharmaceuticals, the right of publicity (why Johnny Carson owns the phrase "Here's Johnny!"), and the right to privacy (does J. D. Salinger "own" the letters he's sent?). Boyle finds that our ideas about intellectual property rights rest on the notion of the Romantic author--a notion that Boyle maintains is not only outmoded but actually counterproductive, restricting debate, slowing innovation, and widening the gap between rich and poor nations. What emerges from this lively discussion is a compelling argument for relaxing the initial protection of authors' works and expanding the concept of the fair use of information. For those with an interest in the legal, ethical, and economic ramifications of the dissemination of information--in short, for every member of the information society, willing or unwilling--this book makes a case that cannot be ignored.

Information Theory and Statistics (Dover Books on Mathematics)

Solomon Kullback

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the classic text on information theory 5 out of 5 stars.
32 of 32 people found this review helpful.

This is a very well written text by Kullback. Kullback is well known for the famous Kullback-Liebler information measure of distance between distribution functions. This was the first statistics text to cover statistical methods from the information theory viewpoint and now stands as a classic. For more recent developments see the text by Cover and Thomas. Rissanen also has an interesting book that shows how he used information theory ideas in model selection problems. Information theory goes back to Claude Shannon and others who worked on problems of encoding information for efficient transmission (particularly early telephone applications). This has been very important in electronic communications and is growing in use with modern satellite transmissions and the growing use of computer networks.

Editorial Review:

Highly useful text studies the logarithmic measures of information and their application to testing statistical hypotheses. Topics include introduction and definition of measures of information, their relationship to Fisher’s information measure and sufficiency, fundamental inequalities of information theory, much more. Numerous worked examples and problems. References. Glossary. Appendix. 1968 second, revised edition.

Feynman Lectures on Computation

Richard P. Feynman, Anthony Hey, Tony Hey, Robin W. Allen

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

I like this book 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Yes, I think you can teach the theory of computation from this book. And you can learn it from this book. Some of the material isn't all that recent, but much of it doesn't need to be.

35 years ago, if one were teaching a course on the theory of computation, I'd have recommended Minsky's book (it came out in 1967). That was a great text. Nowadays, there are numerous choices. But one could still use books that originally came out well before Feynman's notes, such as Lewis & Papadimitriou or Hopcroft, Motwani, and Ullman.

The question boils down to the quality of what is in the book, as well as what material it has that other books do not, and what material it is missing that most other texts have.

This book is quite readable and preserves much of Feynman's teaching style. So let's look at what it is missing. First, it doesn't talk much about real neurons. Of course, even Minsky doesn't dwell much on that, and other computation books avoid that topic too. But now, there's a more serious omission. Feynman spends something like two pages on grammars! If you were using Lewis and Papadimitriou (first edition) there would be a chapter of over 70 pages on context-free languages alone. As a teacher or a student, would you really want to miss all that?

No, as a student, you would have to read up on all that material elsewhere. And as a teacher, you would have to use another book or write your own notes. That material is too much a part of most required curricula.

But that doesn't take away from the value of the book when it comes to the rest of the material. And the final four chapters, which discuss coding and information theory, reversible computation and the thermodynamics of computing, quantum mechanical computers, and some physical aspects of computation, are all useful material that you often won't see in other computation texts.

As a student, I'd read the book. As a teacher, I'd recommend it to my students. But as either, I wouldn't expect to use it as the only textbook.

Editorial Review:

The famous physicist's timeless lectures on the promise and limitations of computers

When, in 1984-86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman, the course also featured, as occasional guest speakers, some of the most brilliant men in science at that time, including Marvin Minsky, Charles Bennett, and John Hopfield. Although the lectures are now thirteen years old, most of the material is timeless and presents a "Feynmanesque" overview of many standard and some not-so-standard topics in computer science such as reversible logic gates and quantum computers.

Model Based Inference in the Life Sciences: A Primer on Evidence

David R. Anderson

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The abstract concept of “information” can be quantified and this has led to many important advances in the analysis of data in the empirical sciences. This text focuses on a science philosophy based on “multiple working hypotheses” and statistical models to represent them. The fundamental science question relates to the empirical evidence for hypotheses in this set—a formal strength of evidence. Kullback-Leibler information is the information lost when a model is used to approximate full reality. Hirotugu Akaike found a link between K-L information (a cornerstone of information theory) and the maximized log-likelihood (a cornerstone of mathematical statistics). This combination has become the basis for a new paradigm in model based inference. The text advocates formal inference from all the hypotheses/models in the a priori set—multimodel inference.

This compelling approach allows a simple ranking of the science hypothesis and their models. Simple methods are introduced for computing the likelihood of model i, given the data; the probability of model i, given the data; and evidence ratios. These quantities represent a formal strength of evidence and are easy to compute and understand, given the estimated model parameters and associated quantities (e.g., residual sum of squares, maximized log-likelihood, and covariance matrices). Additional forms of multimodel inference include model averaging, unconditional variances, and ways to rank the relative importance of predictor variables.

This textbook is written for people new to the information-theoretic approaches to statistical inference, whether graduate students, post-docs, or professionals in various universities, agencies or institutes. Readers are expected to have a background in general statistical principles, regression analysis, and some exposure to likelihood methods. This is not an elementary text as it assumes reasonable competence in modeling and parameter estimation.

A Discipline of Programming (Prentice-Hall Series in Automatic Computation)

E. Dijkstra

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Author Edsger W. Dijkstra introduces A Discipline of Programming with the statement, "My original idea was to publish a number of beautiful algorithms in such a way that the reader could appreciate their beauty." In this classic work, Dijkstra achieves this goal and accomplishes a great deal more.

He begins by considering the questions, "What is an algorithm?" and "What are we doing when we program?" These questions lead him to an interesting digression on the semantics of programming languages, which, in turn, leads to essays on programming language constructs, scoping of variables, and array references. Dijkstra then delivers, as promised, a collection of beautiful algorithms.

These algorithms are far ranging, covering mathematical computations, various kinds of sorting problems, pattern matching, convex hulls, and more. Because this is an old book, the algorithms presented are sometimes no longer the best available. However, the value in reading A Discipline of Programming is to absorb and understand the way that Dijkstra thought about these problems, which, in some ways, is more valuable than a thousand algorithms.

Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications

Clay Spinuzzi

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How does a telecommunications company function when its right hand often doesn't know what its left hand is doing? How do rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary organizations hold together and perform their knowledge work? In this book, Clay Spinuzzi draws on two warring theories of work activity - activity theory and actor-network theory - to examine the networks of activity that make a telecommunications company work and thrive. In doing so, Spinuzzi calls a truce between the two theories, bringing them to the negotiating table to parley about work. Specifically, about net work: the coordinative work that connects, coordinates, and stabilizes polycontextual work activities. To develop this uneasy dialogue, Spinuzzi examines the texts, trades, and technologies at play at Telecorp, both historically and empirically. Drawing on both theories, Spinuzzi provides new insights into how net work actually works and how our theories and research methods can be extended to better understand it.