Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the philosophical study of information. In this paper a two-part analysis of information gain—objective and subjective—in the context of doxastic change ...is presented and discussed. Objective information gain is analyzed in terms of doxastic movement towards true belief, while subjective information gain is analyzed as an agent's expectation value of her objective information gain for a given doxastic change. The resulting expression for subjective information gain turns out to be a familiar one with well-known formal properties: the Kullback–Leibler divergence. The two notions of information are discussed and the suggested measure of subjective information gain is then compared with the widely held view that information gain equals uncertainty reduction.
The last 20 years or so has seen an intense search carried out within Dempster—Shafer theory, with the aim of finding a generalization of the Shannon entropy for belief functions. In that time, there ...has also been much progress made in credal set theory—another generalization of the traditional Bayesian epistemic representation—albeit not in this particular area. In credal set theory, sets of probability functions are utilized to represent the epistemic state of rational agents instead of the single probability function of traditional Bayesian theory. The Shannon entropy has been shown to uniquely capture certain highly intuitive properties of uncertainty, and can thus be considered a measure of that quantity. This article presents two measures developed with the purpose of generalizing the Shannon entropy for (1) unordered convex credal sets and (2) possibly non-convex credal sets ordered by second order probability, thereby providing uncertainty measures for such epistemic representations. There is also a comparison with the results of the measure AU developed within Dempster—Shafer theory in a few instances where unordered convex credal set theory and Dempster—Shafer theory overlap.
Lone-wolf terrorism is a threat to the security of modern society, as was tragically shown in Norway on July 22, 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik carried out two terrorist attacks that resulted in a ...total of 77 deaths. Since lone wolves are acting on their own, information about them cannot be collected using traditional police methods such as infiltration or wiretapping. One way to attempt to discover them before it is too late is to search for various "weak signals" on the Internet, such as digital traces left in extremist web forums. With the right tools and techniques, such traces can be collected and analyzed. In this work, we focus on tools and techniques that can be used to detect weak signals in the form of linguistic markers for potential lone wolf terrorism.
The developments of the new European construction standard (Eurocodes) and the new European chemical legislation (REACH) have taken place in parallel, and they are now both in their final stages. ...Both consist in European harmonization of safety regulations that concern major industries. In this paper, we compare Eurocodes and REACH in terms of purpose, intended level of harmonization, the science-policy interface and controversies about the costs of the regulations. We have found that the science-policy interface of REACH is characterized by public controversy and by attempts to keep risk assessment and risk management apart while the science-policy interface of Eurocodes is characterized by trust in experts, limited public involvement and organizational confluence of risk assessment and risk management. Furthermore, the costs of REACH have been a major issue in discussions between the Commission and the chemical industry while, in contrast, the costs of Eurocodes have not even been calculated either by the Commission or by the construction industry. A major reason for this is that construction industry does not seem to regard possible cost increases due to Eurocodes as a threat to their business interests. Regulators seem to have treated the cost issue as a business interest, not as an aspect of the decision that they should be concerned with even in the absence of external pressure.
Uncertainty is, it seems, more or less constantly present in our lives. Even so, grasping the concept philosophically is far from trivial. In this doctoral thesis, uncertainty and its conceptual ...companion information are studied. Axiomatic analyses are provided and numerical measures suggested. In addition to these basic conceptual analyses, the widespread practice of so-called safety factor use in societal regulation is analyzed along with the interplay between science and policy in European regulation of chemicals and construction.
QC 20120202
