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This study examines the script crisis that emerged in China during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the old ideology of state phonocentrism and the new wave of computer science demanded the abandoning of Chinese characters altogether. Under the project of establishing new human-machine interfaces, national debates over such technical issues as the statistical properties of Chinese according to Claude Shannon's information theory took place in various venues, challenging the conventional language ideologies. As linguists and engineers rallied to collaborate on the scriptal modernization project on the basis of the discursive space opened up by critiques of the 1977 Simplification Scheme, efforts to integrate Chinese script into computer data-storage formats ended up destabilizing the understanding of Chinese writing that conventionally takes "zi" as opposed to "ci" as its basic unit. The shifting foci of script reform discourses during the period demonstrate that the rise of information technology and resumed debates over script reform jointly instigated a retheorization of written Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supply chain practices in mature production are widely investigated but little is known about their roles in new product ramp-up. To address this gap, this study specifically investigates the impact of two just-in-time (JIT) supply chain practices (i.e. JIT delivery by suppliers and JIT link with customers) on new product cost and speed-to-market performance. Moreover, the moderating effects of information technology (IT) integration are examined according to organisational information processing theory. After regression analysis with a survey data of 193 firms, the study finds that JIT delivery by suppliers improves cost performance while JIT link with customers increases speed-to-market performance. Moreover, the positive performance effects of JIT delivery by suppliers on cost performance is enhanced by both internal and external IT integration while that of JIT link with customers on speed-to-market performance can only be enhanced by internal IT integration. The theoretical and managerial implications of this study are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compression is an essential technique used across diverse information systems, one in which supposedly redundant or superfluous information is minimized or eliminated in order to make the storage, transmission, or reception of other information more legible or efficient. Compression is involved in everything from computer data storage (encoding) and efficient computational processes (floating point arithmetic) to the formatting of media (telephony, radio, streaming) or the engineering and circulation of sound and image (dynamic compression of volume, jpeg resolution). Beyond any particular technical implementation, though, compression names the peculiar perceptual regime of late modernity—it is our percepteme, our episteme. As Galloway and LaRivière (2017) have noted—everything is compressed, from the logic of digital computers to our attention spans. Yet, if compression designates the essence of experience today, it is precisely in response to a complementary concept of noise. Noise is the lived affect of our material conditions which cannot be made significant to us: not only the literal acoustic noise of late modernity (the waste-product of technologies which hang over perceptual spaces like smog hangs over cities) but, perhaps more critically, compression emerges to cope with a new, properly "cognitive complexity" embodied in the unprecedented entanglement and mediation of social relations through the technical/computational unfolding of the value-form of capital. Such complexity—lying beyond the grasp of any human individual—is logistically offloaded onto the nootechnical externalizations associated with, for instance, AI algorithms. On the other hand, it is individuated in experience as noise. Because such noise is perceptually intractable, compression becomes the necessary shape of our aesthesis, one that rigorously flattens the available modalities of experience/value—yet giving birth to new forms of abstraction, perception, and thought. While several thinkers—notably, Jason LaRivière and Cécile Malaspina—have brilliantly elaborated each concept on its own, I argue that they can only be properly situated through each other. In order to do this, I combine computational and information theory, philosophy, media and cultural theory, as well as political economy with concrete domains where compression and noise articulate the phenomenological stakes for aesthetics today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative scheduling (CS) and related practices impact the performance of construction projects which can be measured by key performance indicators (KPIs). However, little is known about which of these practices are implemented and how their combined implementation might impact KPIs. The objectives of this research are to identify perceptions of CS practices that drive project performance, define CS practices used by industry that impact KPIs, and establish practices that are more commonly implemented and have a higher potential to positively impact KPIs. The research team conducted a nationwide survey in the United States and obtained 241 usable responses. Utilizing an information theory approach to measure the uncertainty of implementation and impact of each practice, the research built a set of Chow–Liu tree models to determine the most efficient sequence of actions to improve CS. Results indicate that meeting owners' expectation throughout the life-cycle of the project from design through construction and commissioning, using the schedule to support a strong project culture, and an effective communication plan were the top CS levers for overall KPI improvement. An innovative method was developed to help construction project managers discover the value of each CS practice, the relation between CS practices, and CS practices' influence to project KPIs so that managers can improve KPIs efficiently by prioritizing their CS practices according to their own project needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent theories developing broad notions of context and its effects on inference are becoming increasingly important in fields as diverse as cognitive psychology, information science and quantum information theory and computing. Here we introduce a novel and general approach to the characterisation of contextuality using the techniques of Chu spaces and Channel Theory viewed as general theories of information flow. This involves introducing three essential components into the formulism: events, conditions and measurement systems. Incorporating these factors in relationship to conditional probabilities leads to information flows both in the setting of Chu spaces and Channel Theory. The latter provides a representation of semantic content using local logics from which conditionals can be derived. We employ these features to construct cone-cocone diagrams, commutativity of which enforces inferential coherence. With these we build a scale-free architecture incorporating a Bayesian-like hierarchical structure, in which there is an interpretation of active inference and Markov blankets. We compare this architecture with other theories of contextuality which we briefly review. We also show that this development of ideas conveniently accommodates negative probabilities, leading to the notion of signed information flow, and address how quantum contextuality can be interpreted within this model. Finally, we relate contextuality to the Frame Problem, another way of characterising a fundamental limitation on the observational and inferential capabilities of finite agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent studies, much attention has been paid to the usefulness and importance of quantile functions as an alternative approach in statistical modeling, analysis of data and information theory. In the present paper, some new divergence measures based on quantile are proposed and then utilizing these divergence measures, some goodness of fit tests for Rayleigh distribution are constructed. Monte Carlo simulations are performed for various alternatives and sample sizes in order to compare the proposed tests with other goodness of fit tests for Rayleigh distribution in the literature. Simulation results show that in comparison with the existing tests, our proposed tests have good performances. Finally, illustrative examples for use of the proposed tests are presented and analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]