Causation and Information: Where Is Biological Meaning to Be Found?

Suicide: where can help be found?

The meaning of biological information

Biological information encoded in genomes is fundamentally different from and effectively orthogonal to Shannon entropy. The biologically relevant concept of information has to do with 'meaning', i.e. encoding various biological functions with various degree of evolutionary conservation. Apart from direct experimentation, the meaning, or biological information content, can be extracted and quan...

To Find or To be Found, That is the Question in Mobile Information Retrieval

Web search engines today require users to specify their interests using keywords. By and large, they are successful because the web is so large and so diversify that any reasonable keywords can return some useful documents, whether or not the most relevant or most complete results are returned is a different question. Information filtering aims at matching dynamic information sources against a ...

“ Top - down ” effects where none should be found :

120 words) A tidal wave of recent research purports to have discovered that higher-level states such as moods, action-capabilities, and categorical knowledge can literally and directly affect what we see. Are these truly effects on perception, or might some instead reflect influences on judgment, memory, or response bias? Here, we exploit an infamous art-historical reasoning error (the socalled...

Where is biological therapy going?

The substantial progress in our understanding of molecular and cellular biology has allowed us to design biological therapeutics ('biologicals') with defined targets and effector functions. These biologicals have greatly contributed to our current knowledge of pathogenetic mechanisms in autoimmune diseases. However, although some of the biologicals have been extremely successful in treating the...