Short abstract In environmental ethics, the precautionary principle states that parties should refrain from actions in the face of scientific uncertainties about serious or irreversible harm to public health or the environment. A similar principle is lacking when judging effects of information technology. Such a principle would be helpful in guiding discussions, and that is why we try to develo...

The energies and wave functions of stationary many-body states are analyzed to look for the signatures of quantum chaos. Shell model calculations with the Wildenthal interaction are performed in the J − T scheme for 12 particles in the sd-shell. The local level statistics are in perfect agreement with the GOE predictions. The analysis of the amplitudes of the eigenvectors in the shell model bas...

A probabilistic approach for investigating the phenomena of dissonance and consonance in a simple auditory sensory model, composed by two sensory neurons and one interneuron, is presented. We calculated the interneuron’s firing statistics, that is the interspike interval statistics of the spike train at the output of the interneuron, for consonant and dissonant inputs in the presence of additio...

BACKGROUND Analysis of signals by means of symbolic methods consists in calculating a measure of signal complexity, for example informational entropy or Lempel-Ziv algorithmic complexity. For construction of these entropic measures one uses distributions of symbols representing the analyzed signal. RESULTS We introduce a new signal characteristic named sequential spectrum that is suitable for...

The abundance of simple but functional RNA sites in random-sequence pools is critical for understanding emergence of RNA functions in nature and in the laboratory today. The complexity of a site is typically measured in terms of information, i.e. the Shannon entropy of the positions in a multiple sequence alignment. However, this calculation can be incorrect by many orders of magnitude. Here we...

In this work, binary block-to-block distribution matching is considered. m independent and uniformly distributed bits are mapped to n output bits resembling a target product distribution. A rate R is called achieved by a sequence of encoder-decoder pairs, if for m,n → ∞, (1) m/n → R, (2) the informational divergence per bit of the output distribution and the target distribution goes to zero, an...

We investigate the classic "inverse problem" of extracting collision and scattering cross sections from measurements of electron swarm behavior. A Monte Carlo technique for simulating electron motion through a gas of isotropic scatterers is presented, providing a simplified version of Biagi's MAGBOLTZ algorithm. Using this Monte Carlo software, we examine the thermalization of electron swarms, ...

Atomic avoided crossings in strong magnetic and electric fields are usually identified by the energy level repulsion and by the sharp extremal value of the Shannon’s entropy of the two involved states. In this work the proposal of a new information-theoretic parameter, the continuous Fisher information, for the prediction and characterization of these nonlinear phenomena is done. For just aroun...

A new scenario for energy distribution, security and shareability is presented that assumes the availability of quantum information heat engines and a thermal bath. It is based on the convertibility between entropy and work in the presence of a thermal reservoir. Our approach to the informational content of physical systems that are distributed between users is complementary to the conventional...

New results are proved on the convergence of the Shannon lower bound to the rate distortion function as the distortion decreases to zero. The key convergence result is proved using a fundamental property of informational divergence. As a corollary, it is shown that the Shannon lower bound is asymptotically tight for norm-based distortions, when the source vector has a finite differential entrop...