Week 9 : Confused Coffee Beans - Weaver

In its introductory notes on the “General Setting of the Analytical Communication Studies”, Warren Weaver eludes the mystery of communication through channels on a very distinctive mathematical method. We have to admit, the use of probability in the creation of information is quite strange but relevant in our modern world. With the new emerging technologies, our ways of communication have double, if not triple, and our vision of how communication works and can be adapted to this technological world must be define. Weaver’s idea of how entropy affects our information is very interesting. The fact that what we say and hear in the English language is 50% free choice and 50% structural to the specific language is oddly true. This principle can be compare to the concept of a computational machine, where half the language comes from the hardware and the other half from the software.

Another interesting point is how channels of communication are affected by the noise of the computational hardware. This refers to Shannon and his way of analyzing the data multiple times to reduce the amount of noise distributed.

Dana Ryashy, Sol Paul, Xavier Champoux, Rose-Marie Dion