Some Background on Why People in the Empirical Sciences May Want to Better Understand the Information-theoretic Methods

Since the publication of the first edition of our book in late 1998, Ken Burnham and I have given a number of 1-, or 2-, or 4-day shortcoursesor workshops on the "InformationTheoretic" approaches to professional people with wide variety of science interests. Often, people are undecided as to whether they should take one of these shortcourses and how they might expect to benefit if they did. The purpose here is to introduce the subject in a nontechnical way. This is written to allow people to gain some level of understanding as to what these approaches do and why they might be generally useful. This document is short and very incomplete, but meant as a rough, general overview of the more technical material to be covered in the short course.