Hi John,

Is Boulder still a mixture of super sporty shiny people blended with hippie nostalgia? :)

For the course, this essay I wrote back in 2000 could be of some use:
"Re-reading digitality through scientific discourses of cybernetics: Fantasies of disembodied users and embodied computers"
http://www.hum.utu.fi/oppiaineet/mediatutkimus/tutkimus/proceedings_pienennetty.pdf

Wendy's work is also insightful for seminars, maybe not introductory lecture series:
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/people/facultypage.php?id=10109

In lecture series as an introduction to critical HCI tend to use this book by Paul Dourish:
http://www.dourish.com/embodied/
(though some of the examples there are somewhat outdated, it works very well in teaching).

Kathy Hayles in my opinion is 70% brilliant, yet where she enters posthumanistic discourse there is also plenty to be critical about.
Same goes for Tiziana Terranova's work. Both are nevertheless good reads in seminar contexts.

cheers!

Tapio



On Aug 16, 2012, at 07:20 , John Hopkins <jhopkins@???> wrote:

> Hi August!
>
>> Basically, the layman definition of information tends to define it as
>> the communicable signal that rises above the noise (randomness) and
>> carries meaning.
>>
>> According to Shannon's narrow definition, information is a _measure_ of
>> entropy. In other words, information is not the signal in a noisy
>> channel, but a measure of the signal's content. It's a quantity not a
>> thing. The more information in a signal means more randomness (noise)
>> in a signal. A signal with lots of redundancy has little information.
>
> Ah, yeah, the entropy connection,
>
>> Shannon is also careful to unhinge "meaning" from his concept of
>> "information".
>>
>> It's more complicated, subtle, and interesting than what I describe
>> above, but that's the gist. Most of our communication technologies
>> depend on these ideas.
>>
>> The stuff on coding theorem and stochastic signals is what I find most
>> interesting. What makes a large part of his information theory work is
>> that most "human" signals (music, writing, etc.) are stochastic;
>> non-deterministic but statistically predictable.
>>
>> One interesting thing regarding stochastic signals is that you can
>> remove parts of them and still send enough communication for it to be
>> "understood". Eg: I cn wrt t y wtht vwls nd y shld b ble t ndrstnd
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