Undervaluing Shannon

I've finally reached the point in Chandler where he mentions Shannon. I knew it was coming because I'd looked it up in the index, but I've been very strong-willed, and worked my way linearly¹ through the book², resisting the temptation to jump ahead.

Chandler makes very little of Shannon and passes on quite quickly. I think he's not giving due credit to the degree to which Shannon's ideas have fed into much else of what he has been discussing. Or more generally I think ideas from communication engineering have been used and developed in other fields. The idea of a 'code' in semiotics, did that not come from the codes of telecommunications?

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1 Doing things 'linearly' is almost a term of abuse these days. I'm always hopping around and being very non-linear, but I still think of that as getting distracted. The more linear I'm being, the more focussed I am.

2 'The book', actually I changed from the 1st edition to the 2nd edition somewhere around page 100!

Information Engineering, BCS/Turing lecture by Sir Michael Brady

I've just watched this on IET TV.

Information Engineering and its future Sir Michael Brady Presentation from BCS/IET Turing Lecture 2009 2009-01-28 12:00:00.0 IT Channel >> go to webcast>> recommend to friend

There's lots of fascinating ideas in there, but what initially caught my attention was the story of reading the stylus tablets from Vindolanda. More information in a paper by Melissa Terras (Interpreting the image: using advanced computational techniques to read the Vindolanda texts, ASLIB PROCEEDINGS v58 n1-2 pp102-117 2006):

This paper describes the developmental stages undertaken to construct a system that can read in images of an ancient document and produce plausible interpretations of the document, to aid the historians in the lengthy process of reading an ancient text. In carrying out the development, an explicit representation of how experts approach and reason about damaged and deteriorated texts was formulated, and a large corpus of letter forms and linguistic data were captured. Preliminary results from the resulting computer system are presented which demonstrate the usefulness of the technique, although more work is needed to develop this into a stand-alone computer system.

The multidisciplinary nature of the task stood out.

See also this on Michael Brady's Oxford website.