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 main 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 speed of retweeting. Full article

Practicing experiments on the origins of life within the framework of quantum mechanics comes to face a task of distinguishing the descriptive spaces of the object between a space of physical states and a space of probability distributions. One candidate for accommodating both the physical and the probabilistic description in a mutually tolerable manner is to apply first-second person descriptions to the space of physical states while letting the space of probability distributions addressable in third person descriptions be accessible via first-second person descriptions. The mediator or messenger for accommodating these two types of description is the process of probability flow equilibration. The relative state formulation of quantum mechanics opens a possibility for the likelihood that a simple atom such as a carbon atom may carry a message for holding the process of probability flow equilibration. An experimental example demonstrating a carbon atom serving as a messenger is found in the running of the citric acid cycle in the absence of biological enzymes. Full article

The paper considers the relation of Shannon-type information to those semantic and hermeneutic aspects of communication, which are often referred to as meaning. It builds on considerations of Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann and Robert K. Logan and relates them to an agent-based model that reproduces key aspects of the Talking Head experiment by Luc Steels. The resulting insights seem to give reason to regard information and meaning not as qualitatively different entities, but as interrelated forms of order that emerge in the interaction of autonomous (self-referentially closed) agents. Although on first sight, this way of putting information and meaning into a constructivist framework seems to open possibilities to conceive meaning in terms of Shannon-information, it also suggests a re-conceptualization of information in terms of what cybernetics calls Eigenform in order to do justice to its dynamic interrelation with meaning. Full article

D. Pollen and M. Trachtenberg proposed the holographic brain theory to help explain the existence of photographic memories in some people. They suggested that such individuals had more vivid memories because they somehow could access a very large region of their memory holograms. Hameroff suggested in his paper that cylindrical neuronal microtubule cavities, or centrioles, function as waveguides for the evanescent photons for quantum signal processing. The supposition is that microtubular structures of the brain function as a coherent fiber bundle set used to store holographic images, as would a fiber-optic holographic system. In this paper, the author proposes that superluminal photons propagating inside the microtubules via evanescent waves could provide the access needed to record or retrieve a quantum coherent entangled holographic memory. Full article

Virtual Globes reached the mass market in 2005. They created multi-million dollar businesses in a very short time by providing novel ways to explore data geographically. We use the term “Virtual Globes” as the common denominator for technologies offering capabilities to annotate, edit and publish geographic information to a world-wide audience and to visualize information provided by the public and private sectors, as well as by citizens who volunteer new data. Unfortunately, but not surprising for a new trend or paradigm, overlapping terms such as “Virtual Globes”, “Digital Earth”, “Geospatial Web”, “Geoportal” or software specific terms are used heterogeneously. We analyze the terminologies and trends in scientific publications and ask whether these developments serve science and society. While usage can be answered quantitatively, the authors reason from the literature studied that these developments serve to educate the masses and may help to democratize geographic information by extending the producer base. We believe that we can contribute to a better distinction between software centered terms and the generic concept as such. The power of the visual, coupled with the potential of spatial analysis and modeling for public and private purposes raises new issues of reliability, standards, privacy and best practice. This is increasingly addressed in scientific literature but the required body of knowledge is still in its infancy. Full article

People increasingly can and want to obtain and generate health information themselves. With the increasing do-it-yourself sentiment comes also the desire to be more involved in one’s health care decisions. Patient driven health-care and health research models are emerging; terms such as participatory medicine and quantified-self are visible increasingly. Given the health consumer’s desire to be more involved in health data generation and health care decision making processes the authors submit that it is important to be health policy literate, to understanding how health policies are developed, what themes are discussed among health policy researchers and policy makers, to understand how ones demands would be discussed within health policy discourses. The public increasingly obtains their knowledge through the internet by searching web browsers for keywords. Question is whether the “health consumer” to come has knowledge of key terms defining key health policy discourses which would enable them to perform targeted searches for health policy literature relevant to their situation. The authors found that key health policy terms are virtually absent from printed and online news media which begs the question how the “health consumer” might learn about key health policy terms needed for web based searches that would allow the “health consumer” to access health policy discourses relevant to them. Full article

I define information from a philosophical perspective as a category that indicates the presence of indirect existence, which is a self-display by material entities (with direct existence) of the status and trajectory of that existence. In this paper, based in part on articles published only in Chinese over the last 30 years, information is shown to include three basic forms: In-itself, for-itself and regenerated information, which is constituted by the first two. Information in these three basic forms establishes the essence of information which is further developed in a fourth form—social information. Information is further characterized by the qualities of its three different grades, corresponding to these forms: The quality of first-grade information demonstrates direct objective existence and indirect objective existence; the quality of second-grade information demonstrates multiple levels of direct objective and indirect objective existence; the quality of third-grade information is that of the subjective relationships in human understanding that are encoded as information. The grounding of information in the ontological structure of the world gives it a central role in the approach to knowledge, constituting a new and necessary critique of the classical separation of the academic disciplines and the bases of modern philosophy. Full article

Signals acquired by sensors in the real world are non-linear combinations, requiring non-linear mixture models to describe the resultant mixture spectra for the endmember’s (pure pixel’s) distribution. This communication discusses inferring class fraction through a novel hybrid mixture model (HMM). HMM is a three-step process, where the endmembers are first derived from the images themselves using the N-FINDR algorithm. These endmembers are used by the linear mixture model (LMM) in the second step that provides an abundance estimation in a linear fashion. Finally, the abundance values along with the training samples representing the actual ground proportions are fed into neural network based multi-layer perceptron (MLP) architecture as input to train the neurons. The neural output further refines the abundance estimates to account for the non-linear nature of the mixing classes of interest. HMM is first implemented and validated on simulated hyper spectral data of 200 bands and subsequently on real time MODIS data with a spatial resolution of 250 m. The results on computer simulated data show that the method gives acceptable results for unmixing pixels with an overall RMSE of 0.0089 ± 0.0022 with LMM and 0.0030 ± 0.0001 with the HMM when compared to actual class proportions. The unmixed MODIS images showed overall RMSE with HMM as 0.0191 ± 0.022 as compared to the LMM output considered alone that had an overall RMSE of 0.2005 ± 0.41, indicating that individual class abundances obtained from HMM are very close to the real observations. Full article

In the field of media ecology, defined as the study of media as environments, media and medium, and ecology and environment are key terms, while information, although commonly employed, is generally used without reference to a specific definition. This article examines the mostly implicit assumptions about and understandings of the term information in the context of the field of media ecology. Information can be seen as a synonym or subset of content or message, can be divided into different orders or levels of content/communication and relationship/medium, and on both levels is dependent on and altered by changes in technology, code, and form. Although sometimes discussed as if it were a substance, information is best understood as a function of communication, which in turn is a function of mediation. As a function of mediated communication, information is closely associated with news and control. Information is also considered the defining characteristic of our contemporary period, but is best understood as a product of electricity, electric technology, and the electronic media. As we have moved from orality to literacy to electricity, so too has the emphasis shifted from wisdom to knowledge to information. Despite popular celebration, this evolution is not an unmitigated good, and what is needed is a balanced media environment. Full article

In this first part of the paper, the category of meaning is traced starting from the origin of the Universe itself as well as its very grounding in pre-geometry (the second part deals with an appropriate bottom-up approach). In contrast to many former approaches in the theories of information and also in biosemiotics, we will show that the forms of meaning emerge simultaneously (alongside) with information and energy. Hence, information can be visualized as being always meaningful (in a sense to be explicated) rather than visualizing meaning as a later specification of information within social systems only. This perspective taken has two immediate consequences: (1) We follow the GDI as defined by Floridi, though we modify it somehow as to the aspect of truthfulness. (2) We can conceptually solve Capurro’s trilemma. Hence, what we actually do is to follow the strict (i.e., optimistic) line of UTI in the sense of Hofkirchner’s. While doing this, we treat energy and information as two different categorial aspects of one and the same underlying primordial structure. We thus demonstrate the presently developing convergence of physics, biology, and computer science (as well as the various theories of information) in some detail and draft out a line of argument eventually leading up to the further unification of UTI and biosemiotics. Full article

We are moving towards the information society, and we need to overcome the discouraging perspective, which is caused by the false belief that our thoughts (and thereby also our acting) represent a somehow externally existing world. Indeed, it is already a step forward to proclaim that there exists a somehow common world for all people. But if those internal forms of representation are primarily bound to the subject itself, then, consequently, anybody can argue for his or her view of the world as being the “right” one. Well, what is the exit strategy out of this dilemma? It is information; information as understood in its actual and potential dimension, in its identity of structure and meaning. Such an approach requires a deeper elaborated conceptual approach. The goal of this study is to show that such a concept is glued by the strong relationship between seemingly unrelated disciplines: physics, semantics (semiotics/cognition) and computer science, and even poetry. But the terminus of information is nowadays discussed and elaborated in all those disciplines. Hence, there is no shortcut, no way around. The aim of this study is not even to show that those strong relationships exist. We will see within the same horizon that, based on such a concept, new kinds of computing systems are becoming possible. Nowadays energy consumption is becoming a major issue regarding computing systems. We will work towards an approach, which enables new devices consuming a minimum amount of energy and maximizing the performance at the same time. And within the same horizon it becomes possible to release the saved energy towards a new ethical spirit—towards the information society. Full article

Interpretability and accuracy are two important features of fuzzy systems which are conflicting in their nature. One can be improved at the cost of the other and this situation is identified as “Interpretability-Accuracy Trade-Off”. To deal with this trade-off Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEA) are frequently applied in the design of fuzzy systems. Several novel MOEA have been proposed and invented for this purpose, more specifically, Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithms (NSGA-II), Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA2), Fuzzy Genetics-Based Machine Learning (FGBML), (2 + 2) Pareto Archived Evolutionary Strategy ((2 + 2) PAES), (2 + 2) Memetic- Pareto Archived Evolutionary Strategy ((2 + 2) M-PAES), etc. This paper introduces and reviews the approaches to the issue of developing fuzzy systems using Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization (EMO) algorithms considering ‘Interpretability-Accuracy Trade-off’ and mainly focusing on the work in the last decade. Different research issues and challenges are also discussed. Full article

This paper offers terms for talking about information and how it relates to both matter-energy and communication, by: (1) Identifying three different levels of signs: Index, based in contiguity, icon, based in similarity, and symbol, based in convention; (2) examining three kinds of coding: Analogic differences, which deal with positive quantities having contiguous and continuous values, and digital distinctions, which include “either/or functions”, discrete values, and capacities for negation, decontextualization, and abstract concept-transfer, and finally, iconic coding, which incorporates both analogic differences and digital distinctions; and (3) differentiating between “information theoretic” orientations (which deal with data, what is “given as meaningful” according to selections and combinations within “contexts of choice”) and “communication theoretic” ones (which deal with capta, what is “taken as meaningful” according to various “choices of context”). Finally, a brief envoi reflects on how information broadly construed relates to probability and entropy. Full article