Re: [Fis] 2004 FIS session: concluding comments

From: <[email protected]>
Date: Mon 28 Jun 2004 - 18:24:48 CEST

Dear Stan et al.,

On Jun 26, 2004, at 2:32 PM, Stanley N. Salthe wrote:

> Pedro said:
>
>> Perhaps it is in this very context where we should consider the need
>> of
>> more fine-tuned conceptualizations on information /entropy. For
>> instance my
>> mild criticisms on Shannon's overextensions in last posting (Aleks was
>> right saving the cleanliness of his formalism assumptions) and
>> 'power law'
>> inspired approaches to entropy such as Tsallis. In network analysis,
>> something similar has already happened ---Barabasi and Albert,
>> working on
>> real-world networking. Scale-free nets' signatures can be found in
>> the market and companies distributions (Internet structure too), in
>> nervous systems, in protein networks... curiously, the very info
>> gateways I
>> was mentioning above (and the old fis theme of info 'model systems':
>> cells,
>> brains, companies). It is also curious that previous to Barabasi and
>> Albert
>> papers, research on networking was classically dominated by Paul
>> Erdos and
>> Alfred Reny's views on random networks (mandating a Poisson
>> distribution in
>> the links). The paper I mentioned last week by Dante Chiavo was
>> advancing
>> not so disparaging views (with his 'multiscale entropy').
> SS: Well, I have the sense that these scale-free, power law, 1/f
> distributions, since they seem to be found partout (in data from both
> material and immaterial realms) are not specfically informative of
> anything. Likely they are artefacts of analysis!

I heard John Doyle make an interesting argument about power laws at the
ICCS 2004 conference this summer. He argued that power law
distributions should be the ones called "normal" and that they are
actually the distributional pattern predicted by the Central Limit
Theorem, rather than the bell shaped curves we traditionally call
"normal." If he is correct (the argument sounds right to me), then
power laws are not merely artifacts of analytical methods. Instead,
they would be ubiquitously generated by nature.

Thoughts?

Guy Hoelzer

Department of Biology
University of Nevada Reno
Reno, NV 89557

Phone: 775-784-4860
Fax: 775-784-1302

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Received on Mon Jun 28 18:26:52 2004

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