The sources of information are. Sources of financing

All sources of scientific and technical information can be divided into two types: documentary and electronic. The main part of scientific information is presented in the form of documents that can be conditionally divided into primary and secondary, which are the result of information transformation based on the study of primary documents. The list of main sources of information is presented in fig. 3.1.

Rice. 3.1. Main sources of information

In turn, primary sources are divided into published and unpublished (Fig. 3.2).

Rice. 3.2. Classification of primary sources of information

Published sources of information

Book - a non-periodical publication in the form of several bound sheets of printed material, with a volume of more than 48 pages, as a rule, in a cover or binding, which has undergone editorial and publishing processing. Books are divided into several types:

Scientific, popular science and production and technical;

Textbooks and teaching aids;

Reference books and encyclopedias;

Normative Literature.

Brochure - a printed work, from 5 to 48 pages.

Periodical - printed works issued in separate, non-repeating issues under one title, which are regularly published at certain or indefinite intervals, with each issue having a serial number or date.

Magazine - a periodical published at least twice a year and no more than once a week, subordinated to the interests of a certain circle of readers, having a permanent title, the same design and annual continuous numbering.

The important role of the journal in scientific communications is as follows:

The journal simultaneously performs the functions of a current notification and a public archive, ensuring prompt delivery of information;

Is a means of approbation of results scientific research;

Fixes the priority of scientific and applied problems, creating conditions for the recognition of authors as scientists.

Journal publications account for approximately 70% of all scientific documents, and about 80% of specialists at various levels consider a scientific journal to be the main source of scientific and technical information.

Preprint - a reprint of the published article, which the publisher distributes through its correspondent network. The preprint publishes what, perhaps, could not be published in the journal and will never be published later, as well as material that is considered raw, controversial, untested, not requiring such peer review as a journal article.

Unpublished sources of information.

Thesis - a qualifying scientific work in a certain field of science, containing a set of scientific results and provisions put forward by the author for public defense and indicating the author's personal contribution to science and his qualities as a scientist. The thesis is based on completed and published scientific works, discoveries or inventions, technological processes introduced into production, etc.

Deposited Manuscripts - scientific papers submitted for storage to the depositary body, performed individually or in collaboration and intended for a limited circle of consumers. Information about deposited manuscripts is reflected in abstract journals and bibliographic indexes. Deposited manuscripts are equated to publications, and their authors retain the right to publish articles in scientific journals. The restrictions on the volume of deposited manuscripts are much less than for publications, which allows the author to more fully present the results of his work.

scientific report - a report of a scientific organization on the study, which is available to organizations and individuals, is stored in the VNTICentre fund.

Secondary sources serve as an intermediary between documents and recipients (readers, viewers, listeners) and are the result of analytical and synthetic processing of information (ASPI). Information publications , the purpose of which is to provide operational information about the publications themselves and about the most significant aspects of their content. Information publications, unlike conventional bibliographic publications, operate not only with information about printed works, but also with the ideas and facts contained in them. The issue of information publications is carried out by institutes, centers and services of scientific and technical information (NTI).

The bulk of the sources are divided into three types: bibliographic, abstract and review (Fig. 3.3).

Rice. 3.3. Classification structure of information publications

Summary - answers the question "What?" about the source of information.

annotation - answers the question "What?" and “About what?” about the source of information.

abstract - this is an abbreviated summary of the content of the primary document (or part of it) with the main factual information and conclusions. Abstracting implies an analysis of the literature on the problem, i.e. a systematic presentation of other people's thoughts with an indication of the source and, without fail, with one's own assessment of the stated.

Catalogs (file cabinets), indexes that can be compiled according to various criteria. Most often there are alphabetical, author's, subject, geographical, numbering, chronological, systematic catalogs (by branches of knowledge, regardless of who is the author), card indexes of personalities (about someone), address card indexes.

Bibliographic editions contain an ordered set of bibliographic descriptions that inform specialists about what has been published on the issue of interest to them. The bibliographic description has two functions here. On the one hand, it notifies about the appearance of a document (signal function), and on the other hand, it provides the necessary information to find it (address function). From bibliographic descriptions make up bibliographic indexes and bibliographic lists.

Bibliographic indexes are most often of a signal nature and consist of a list of bibliographic descriptions, often without annotations and abstracts. These publications reflect domestic and foreign literature with maximum completeness. They are distinguished by the speed of preparation and the relatively short time from the moment a publication is published to the moment it is reflected in the index.

The most significant bibliographic index is "Signal Information" (SI). The purpose of such a publication is to quickly inform specialists about new publications on world science and technology. It is these publications that are entrusted with the function of advancing the notification of readers about the newly published scientific and technical literature. The SI is predominantly systematic indexes issued in the form of bulletins, the subject matter of which covers almost all branches of world science and technology.

In connection with the development of scientific research and the need to analyze in detail the literature published in previous years, it is becoming increasingly important for researchers retrospective bibliography, the purpose of which is the preparation and dissemination of bibliographic information about printed works for any period of time in the past.

This bibliography is represented by a wide range of manuals. Among them are thematic indexes and reviews, in-book and article lists of references, catalogs of branch scientific and technical publishing houses, personal bibliography of outstanding natural scientists and engineers, bibliographic indexes on the history of natural science and technology.

Abstract editions contain publications of abstracts, including an abbreviated summary of the content of primary documents (or parts thereof) with basic factual information and conclusions. Abstract publications include abstract journals, abstract collections, express information, information leaflets.

Abstract journals in technical sciences publishes VINITI, which most fully reflects the entire world literature on natural science and technology, publishing abstracts, annotations and bibliographic descriptions compiled for articles, monographs, collections.

abstract collections are periodical, ongoing, or non-periodical publications that contain abstracts of unpublished documents. They are issued by the central branch institutes of scientific and technical information and feasibility studies. Such publications are usually narrowly thematic.

Express information (EI) - This is a periodical publication of a journal or sheet form, which contains extended abstracts of the most relevant published foreign materials and unpublished domestic documents that require prompt coverage. Abstracts contain all the basic data of primary sources, accompanied by figures and tables, as well as theoretical calculations, as a result of which there is no need to refer to the original.

Information leaflets - operational printed publications that contain abstracts reflecting information on advanced production experience or scientific and technological achievements.

To review publications include a review on a single issue, direction, and a collection of reviews. Reviews summarize the information contained in primary documents, being the highest level their analytical and synthetic processing. Such publications usually report on the state or development of some branch of science or practice, reflecting everything new that has been done in it for a certain time.

The purpose of the reviews is to ensure that scientific research and development is carried out at the modern level, to eliminate parallelism in the work of research organizations, to help make the right choice of direction and development methods in a particular area.

An applicant conducting a search for literary sources cannot ignore the publications of the book chamber, which issues bibliographic indexes; publications of the state library; the State Library of Foreign Literature, which publishes various bibliographic indexes and card indexes.

Along with information publications for information retrieval, one should use automated information retrieval systems, databases and data banks . Search data can be used directly, but most often they serve as a step (key) to the discovery of primary sources of information, which are scientific works (monographs, collections) and others necessary for scientific work editions.

| Information security network technology work

Lesson 38
Information security network technology work

Information systems security threats

There are four actions performed with information that may contain a threat: collection, modification, leakage and destruction. These actions are basic for further consideration.

Adhering to the accepted classification, we will divide all sources of threats into external and internal.

Sources of internal threats are:

employees of the organization;
Software;
Hardware.

Internal threats can manifest themselves in the following forms:

User errors and system administrators;
violation by employees of the company of established regulations for the collection, processing, transfer and destruction of information;
errors at work software;
failures and failures in the operation of computer equipment.

External sources of threats include:

Computer viruses and malware;
Organizations and individuals;
Natural disasters.

Forms of manifestation of external threats are:

Infection of computers with viruses or malware;
unauthorized access (UAS) to corporate information;
information monitoring by competing structures, intelligence and special services;
actions of state structures and services, accompanied by the collection, modification, withdrawal and destruction of information;
accidents, fires, man-made disasters.

All types of threats (forms of manifestation) listed by us can be divided into intentional and unintentional.

According to the ways of influencing information security objects, threats are subject to the following classification: informational, software, physical, radio-electronic and organizational and legal.

Information threats include:

Unauthorized access to information resources;
illegal copying of data in information systems;
theft of information from libraries, archives, banks and databases;
violation of information processing technology;
illegal collection and use of information;
use of information weapons.

Software threats include:

Use of errors and "holes" in the software;
computer viruses and malware;
installation of "mortgage" devices;

To physical threats relate:

Destruction or destruction of information processing and communication facilities;
theft of storage media;
theft of software or hardware keys and means of cryptographic data protection;
impact on staff;

Electronic threats include:

Implementation of electronic devices for intercepting information in technical facilities and premises;
interception, decryption, substitution and destruction of information in communication channels.

Organizational and legal threats include:

Procurement of imperfect or obsolete information technologies and means of informatization;
violation of legal requirements and delay in making the necessary legal and regulatory decisions in the information sphere.

Consider the model network security and the main types of attacks that can be carried out in this case. Then we will look at the main types of services and security mechanisms that prevent such attacks.

Network security model

Classification of network attacks

AT general case there is an information flow from the sender (file, user, computer) to the recipient (file, user, computer):

Rice. 1 Information flow

All attacks can be divided into two classes: passive and active .

Passive Attack

A passive attack is such an attack in which the adversary is unable to modify the transmitted messages and insert his messages into the information channel between the sender and the recipient. The purpose of a passive attack can only be listening to transmitted messages and traffic analysis.

Rice. 2 Passive Attack

Active attack

An active attack is such an attack in which the adversary has the ability to modify the transmitted messages and insert his own messages. There are the following types of active attacks:

1. Denial of Service - DoS attack (Denial of Service)

A denial of service disrupts the normal functioning of network services. An adversary can intercept all messages sent to a specific destination. Another example of such an attack is the creation of significant traffic, as a result of which the network service will not be able to process requests from legitimate clients. A classic example of such an attack in TCP/IP networks is a SYN attack, in which the attacker sends packets that initiate the establishment of a TCP connection, but does not send packets that complete the establishment of this connection. As a result, the server may run out of memory and the server may not be able to establish a connection with legitimate users.

Rice. 3 DoS attack

2. Data flow modification - "man in the middle" attack

Modifying a data stream means either changing the content of the message being forwarded or changing the order of the messages.

Rice. 4 Attack "man in the middle"

3. Creating a false flow (falsification)

Falsification (violation of authenticity) means an attempt by one subject to impersonate another.

Rice. 5 Creating a false stream

4. Reuse.

Reuse means passively capturing data and then sending it to gain unauthorized access - this is the so-called replay attack. In fact, replay attacks are one type of spoofing, but due to the fact that this is one of the most common attacks to gain unauthorized access, it is often considered a separate type of attack.

Rice. 6 Replay attack

The listed attacks can exist in any type of networks, not only in networks using TCP / IP protocols as a transport, and at any level of the OSI model. But in networks built on the basis of TCP / IP, attacks are most common, because, firstly, the Internet has become the most common network, and secondly, when developing TCP / IP protocols, security requirements were not taken into account in any way.

Security Services

The main security services are as follows:

Confidentiality - prevention of passive attacks on transmitted or stored data.

Authentication - confirmation that the information is obtained from a legitimate source, and the recipient is really who he claims to be.

In the case of a single message transmission, authentication must ensure that the intended recipient of the message is the intended one and that the message is from the claimed source. There are two aspects to a connection establishment.

First of all, when initializing a connection, the service must ensure that both parties are required.

Secondly, the service must ensure that the connection is not affected in such a way that a third party can masquerade as one of the legitimate parties after the connection is established.

Integrity - a service that guarantees that information has not changed during storage or transmission. Can be applied to a message flow, a single message, or individual fields in a message, as well as stored files and individual records files.

Impossibility of refusal - the impossibility, both for the recipient and the sender, to refuse the fact of the transfer. This way, when a message is sent, the recipient can verify that the legitimate sender did it. Similarly, when a message arrives, the sender can verify that it has been received by a legitimate recipient.

Access control - the ability to restrict and control access to systems and applications via communication lines.

Availability - the result of attacks may be the loss or decrease in the availability of a particular service. This service designed to minimize the possibility of DoS attacks.

Security mechanisms

We list the main security mechanisms:

Algorithms symmetric encryption - encryption algorithms in which the same key is used for encryption and decryption, or the decryption key can easily be obtained from the encryption key.

Algorithms asymmetric encryption - encryption algorithms in which two different keys, called public and private keys, are used for encryption and decryption, and knowing one of the keys, it is impossible to calculate the other.

Hash functions - functions, the input value of which is a message of arbitrary length, and the output value is a message of a fixed length. Hash functions have a number of properties that make it possible to determine, with a high degree of probability, a change in the input message.

Networking Model

The secure networking model in general view can be represented as follows:

Fig.7 Network security model

A message that is transmitted from one participant to another passes through various kinds of networks. In this case, we will assume that a logical information channel is being established from the sender to the recipient using various communication protocols (for example, TCP/IP).

Security features are necessary if you want to protect the transmitted information from an adversary that may pose a threat to confidentiality, authentication, integrity, and so on. All safety enhancement technologies have two components:

1. Relatively secure transmission of information. An example is encryption, where the message is modified in such a way that it becomes unreadable to an adversary, and possibly augmented with a code that is based on the content of the message and can be used to authenticate the sender and ensure the integrity of the message.
2. Some secret information shared by both participants and unknown to the adversary. An example is an encryption key.

In addition, in some cases, a third trusted party (TTP) is needed to ensure secure transmission. For example, a third party may be responsible for distributing secret information between two parties that would not be made available to an adversary. Alternatively, a third party may be used to resolve disputes between two parties regarding the authenticity of the message being transmitted.

From this general model, there are three main tasks that need to be solved when developing a specific security service:

1. Develop an encryption/decryption algorithm to perform secure information transfer. The algorithm should be such that the adversary could not decrypt the intercepted message without knowing the secret information.
2. Create secret information used by the encryption algorithm.
3. Develop a messaging protocol to distribute shared secret information in such a way that it does not become known to the enemy.

Information system security model

There are other security-related situations that do not fit the network security model described above. The general pattern of these situations can be illustrated as follows:

Rice. 8 Information system security model

This model illustrates the concept of information system security, which prevents unwanted access. A hacker who is trying to hack into systems accessible over the network may simply enjoy hacking, or may be trying to damage the information system and/or introduce something into it for his own purposes. For example, a hacker's goal might be to obtain credit card numbers stored on the system.

Another type of unwanted access is the placement of something on a computer system that affects application programs and software utilities such as editors, compilers, and the like. Thus, there are two types of attacks:

1. Access to information in order to obtain or modify data stored in the system.
2. Attacking services to prevent them from being used.

Viruses and worms are examples of such attacks. Such attacks can be carried out both using floppy disks and over the network.

Security services that prevent unwanted access can be divided into two categories:

1. The first category is defined in terms of the watchdog function. These mechanisms include login procedures based, for example, on the use of a password, which allows access to only authorized users. These mechanisms also include various firewalls that prevent attacks at various levels of the TCP / IP protocol stack, and, in particular, prevent the penetration of worms, viruses, and other similar attacks.
2. The second line of defense consists of various internal monitors that control access and analyze user activity.

One of the basic concepts in ensuring the security of an information system is the concept of authorization - the definition and granting of access rights to specific resources and/or objects.

The security of an information system should be based on the following basic principles:

1. Information system security should be consistent with the role and objectives of the organization in which this system installed.
2. Ensuring information security requires an integrated and holistic approach.
3. Information security should be an integral part of the management system in a given organization.
4. Information security must be economically justified.
5. Responsibilities for security should be clearly defined.
6. The security of the information system should be periodically reassessed.
7. Of great importance for ensuring the security of the information system are social factors, as well as administrative, organizational and physical security measures.

The concept of funding sources

Ensuring the development of the company includes the financing of various business operations. To do this, the firm can use the resources that were attracted from different sources. In economic practice, there are two main sources of funding:

1. Internal sources of financing;

2. External source of financing (borrowed and borrowed funds);

To detail the sources of funding, we propose to consider Figure 1.

Internal funding is the mobilization of own financial resources, which are formed in the course of the enterprise's activities. The main sources of internal financing are: net profit, depreciation, debts of creditors, various reserves and income from the sale of property.

External funding- is the use of funds for the activities of the enterprise, which are received from external counterparties. In turn, external financing is divided into borrowed and borrowed funds. The subjects of external financing can be: financial - credit organizations, state, legal and natural persons and others.

The figure below shows the systematization of the main sources of financing for the enterprise.

The main problem of Russian industrial enterprises is the depreciated state of fixed production assets. Funds are subject to both physical and moral obsolescence. In the case of renewal of fixed assets, one of the key stages is the choice of a source of financing. In economic practice, the following sources of financing are distinguished:

* Internal financing (net profit, sale of assets, depreciation);

* Raised funds (investments, sale of shares and securities);

* Borrowed funds (credit, leasing, promissory note);

* Mixed financing.

Domestic funding

Sources of financing is a complex economic category, because in the course of economic activity they are transformed into material, intellectual, technical, innovative and other types of resources. In terms of their attraction, they are divided into internal and external. In the context of the unstable economic situation, attracting external sources of financing is problematic, therefore, business entities are guided in their financial activities by attracting internal sources of financing.

The internal sources of financing of business entities include net profit; depreciation, provision for future expenses and payments.

Net profit is the property of the founders (participants). Its unused part is reflected in section I of the balance sheet liability "Retained earnings". In the future, it is directed to replenish its own current assets, the formation of long-term assets, as well as the formation of reserve capital, material incentives and social development.

Depreciation charges are accumulated during the operation of fixed assets. Depreciation calculations are usually used to purchase new or replace worn-out long-term assets, intangible assets, technical innovations and other qualitative and quantitative upgrades of the production capacities of enterprises. Similarly, depreciation can be used to repair damaged assets.

Ensuring future expenses and payments are created on the own initiative of the enterprise. The effect of financing through the provision of subsequent payments is manifested due to the existence of a time gap between the moment of their formation and use.

External funding

The basis of the functioning of the loan is the movement of value in the sphere of exchange, during which there is a gap in time between the movement of goods and its monetary equivalent. If the movement of commodity flows outstrips the movement of cash flows, then enterprises-consumers of goods, with the onset of payment for them, do not always have enough funds to pay for the purchased goods, as a result of which manufacturers experience a lack of funds, which can stop the production process. Therefore, they have a need for borrowed funds. Credit relations may also arise in connection with the peculiarities of production, untimely settlements and other circumstances.

Sources of capital borrowing by business entities are diverse. They can be attracted both on the credit and stock markets, from business entities, the state, as well as owners and employees of the enterprise.

According to the forms of lending, loans are commodity and cash. Commodity credit is a form of commercial credit in which the lender transfers the goods to the borrower under an agreement that provides for a promissory note at the time of the final settlement. The object of a monetary loan is funds in national or foreign currencies.

Loans are of the following types:

• financial (bank loans and loans from financial and credit organizations);
• commercial (as a rule, a short-term loan from one enterprise to another, which is provided in the form of a deferred payment for goods, robots, services).
• Leasing is a loan that is issued by fixed assets, and which is concluded by drawing up a leasing agreement.

Special sources of external financing include financing from the owners of the enterprise or the sale of a share in the company. Often such sources are referred to as an internal source of external financing. It includes additional contributions by participants of a share in the company, the sale of shares on the stock market, and others.

The owners of the enterprise can contribute additional financial resources through non-refundable investments, or through retained earnings. Such financing is a priority, since in this case the company is not a debtor for external counterparties.

The sale of company shares can be carried out in different forms. The company can also pay dividends in the form of shares.

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The resources of our planet are not unlimited. They are used by mankind as a material for creating social benefits and recreational activities. Sometimes they are thoughtlessly spent in large quantities, which leads to the depletion of reserves.

Non-renewable natural resources are especially affected. This problem covers most developed countries, so experts in this field have come up with many rational ways to solve the problem of exhaustion.

Resource classification

A simple classification will help us figure out what kind of resources to worry about in the first place. All the resources of the planet are divided into two large groups: exhaustible and inexhaustible.

1. Inexhaustible resources are, first of all, the water reserves of the planet. This group also includes cosmic rays, wind energy, air, and tidal energy.
2. Exhaustible resources are divided into two main subgroups: renewable and non-renewable resources.

Renewable resources

This group includes plants and animals, forests, some minerals and soil. A feature of such resources is the ability to self-renewal, which can last for a different period of time.

For example, animals and plants restore their population in a few years, while forests will take several hundred years, and the fertile layer of the earth - humus - will accumulate for a thousand years. By the way, due to such a long period of time, the soil is classified as a conditionally renewable resource.

While these sources of raw materials can be regenerated, they are sometimes strongly needed and then scarce. For example, if you cut down forests for a period that will be less than the time of their restoration, the arrays will gradually disappear. The same applies to animal and plant species listed in the Red Book.

Problems of rational use of soil

When you look at a map of the world, the land seems like an immense territory. However, only one third of her is capable of fertility. The rest is either mountain ranges, or swamps, or deserts, or even permafrost.

The soil is a conditionally renewable resource, so it is necessary to spend it on the agricultural sector, taking into account the rapid depletion of the fertile layer of the earth.

The situation is aggravated by such natural factors as soil erosion and drying up. In addition, the person himself negatively affects the process of humus restoration. Examples are the many successful attempts to improve swamp areas, where now the quality of the soil is significantly inferior to the necessary requirements.

There are other indirect anthropogenic factors. For example, excessive soil fertilization with chemicals, sewage pollution (and, accordingly, all dissolved substances entering the soil).

Agree, the picture is depressing. This means that it is worth more reverently treating the soil as a resource necessary for a person for the development of agriculture. Cultivation of vegetable crops is one of the main sources of food, which is an important factor in improving the situation with the deterioration of soil quality and the reduction of their territories.

Plants and animals

The biosphere is a source of a large amount of materials that go to the formation of social benefits. We are talking about flora and fauna.

A person uses these resources not only in the form of food, but also as sources for the production of tissue materials and medicines. Scientists also test their developments on animals or plants in the laboratory.

The anthropogenic factor influencing the formation of the biosphere is very large. This is felt by the disappearance of some species or an extremely small number of their representatives, by a change in the quality of biocenoses and, as a result, the formation of negative flora and fauna. Pollution of soils and water bodies is the reason for the disappearance of animals and plants important to humans.

The loss of one link in the food chain disrupts the entire chain. This is what is happening now in nature: animals leave their native territories in order to survive, and other species come in their place, which negatively affect the entire ecosystem.

Of course, animals and plants do not belong to the group non-renewable resources, and yet vigilant surveillance of changes in the biosphere is essential.

Non-renewable resources

Particular attention should be paid to this group of minerals, since these materials have found great application in modern industry.

Non-renewable resources include various metal ores, oil, natural gas, oil shale, peat, limestone, etc. All these are the precursors of building materials and fuel, without which a modern civilized person cannot do.

Exhaustible non-renewable resources require competent handling. The rate of extraction of minerals is incommensurable with the time of their formation, therefore, a gradual decrease in the corresponding sources is already being felt.

Inexhaustible resources

The problem of non-renewable resources is the potential exhaustibility of their sources, which cannot self-renew. Therefore, the amount of minerals consumed must be monitored so that the mines and mines are not depleted ahead of time.

Partially, this problem can be solved using potential energy sources. This includes air and wind energy, cosmic (solar) rays, and the heat of the Earth. Such resources are inexhaustible, since their consumption will not affect the environment in any way, and the sources themselves accumulate a large amount of energy.

The water reserves of the Earth also belong to this group of resources. Despite the apparent possibility of reducing the volume of water, its reserves are large enough to be enough for both energy production and use in production.

Water is a potential source of energy

The water resources of the Earth are used by man everywhere. From consumption in the food industry to cooling devices in factories and factories, most areas of human life depend on water.

Depending on how water is used by the population, consumers and users are distinguished.

1. Consumers are agriculture and utilities, industry (both food and technology). This group uses water as a resource that is consumed locally.
2. Users are fishermen, hydroelectric power plants, water transport. Here we are not talking about the depletion of water, because it is not consumed directly, but only helps to achieve the goals.

Of all the reserves, fresh water is only 2%. Therefore, the use of clean fresh water is also monitored, because the relative volume is catastrophically small. In some cases, the reserves of life-giving moisture can be compared to a non-renewable resource, and its shortage is especially felt in the developing countries of Africa.

Natural Resource Potential (NRP)

PRP is more of an economic concept that shows the ability of a resource source to provide a certain amount of material without harm to the environment and itself in particular.

The natural resource potential is relevant for solving environmental problems, since a certain territory is usually considered with its own sources of minerals, vegetation, animals, and water. In general, all listed types of renewable and non-renewable natural resources are accepted as components of the PDP.

The term "recreational potential" is also relevant in the context of environmental problems. RP is all the natural resources of a given territory, which, in theory, can be used to organize recreational activities. In parallel, topical socio-cultural, natural and economic problems are considered here.

Stocks of non-renewable resources

In theory, everyone imagines that someday the sources of minerals will be empty. At the same time, even experts cannot accurately calculate the available amount of non-renewable resources at the moment, since there are undiscovered points of metal ores and oil, and only an approximate amount of extracted materials is known in existing sources.

All reserves of the Earth are classified into undetected and identified. Each of these categories is divided into two more subgroups: reserves and other resources.

1. Reserves are those minerals that can be extracted with subsequent profit and use as sources of energy or necessary materials. These resources can be mined with modern technological devices.
2. Other resources represent either undiscovered or potential sources of minerals. Extraction from such sources may not be possible due to equipment deficiencies or high costs outweighing profits.

The problem of exhaustibility of renewable and non-renewable resources is indirectly solved general rule: if 80% of the reserve minerals have already been mined, the source is considered depleted. main reason- this is the financial disadvantage of the remaining 20% ​​of the materials.

Energy: pros and cons

What criteria are decisive when working with various sources resources?

• General stocks of materials.
• Clean useful output.
• Social and state security.
• Price.
• Potential impact on the environment.

The most developed at the moment are the following energy sources:

1. Oil. Relatively cheap source fuel around the world. Oil is easily transported through advanced pipe systems, and is also processed without problems in production. Can be used raw.

The main environmental problem of using oil is the large volumes of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, which is a source of the development of the greenhouse effect with related problems.

According to experts, the existing oil reserves can be developed in 40-80 years.

2. Coal. The most common type of minerals. It has a good yield of heat and energy, but it has a detrimental effect on the environment due to the side emission of CO 2 . Also, the extraction of coal itself affects the natural processes of the nearest biogeocenoses.

3. Gas. It is considered, along with coal, an inexpensive natural source of thermal energy. Unfortunately, the combustion of gas also generates the release of a large amount of CO 2 .

findings

The extraction of any kind of resource requires careful control over the process. The depletion of the most important sources of raw materials and energy is the path to world economic and political problems that will cause a deterioration in the life of the population of any country.

The use of non-renewable resources has a negative impact on the environment. This issue plays an important role, since climate change and problems in biocenoses can lead to global catastrophes.

Information is information about something.

The concept and types of information, transmission and processing, search and storage of information

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Information is, definition

Information is any information received and transmitted, stored by various sources. Information is the totality of information about the world around us, about all kinds of processes taking place in it, which can be perceived by living organisms, electronic machines and other information systems.

- This significant information about something, when the form of their presentation is also information, that is, it has a formatting function in accordance with its own nature.

Information is everything that can be supplemented by our knowledge and assumptions.

Information is information about something, regardless of the form of their presentation.

Information is the mental product of any psychophysical organism, produced by it when using some means, called the means of information.

Information is information perceived by a person and (or) special. devices as a reflection of the facts of the material or spiritual world in the process of communication.

Information is data organized in such a way that makes sense to the person dealing with it.

Information is the value a person puts into data based on the known conventions used to represent it.

Information is information, explanation, presentation.

Information is any data or information that anyone is interested in.

Information is information about objects and phenomena of the environment, their parameters, properties and state, which are perceived by information systems (living organisms, control machines, etc.) in the process of life and work.

The same information message (newspaper article, announcement, letter, telegram, reference, story, drawing, radio broadcast, etc.) may contain a different amount of information for different people - depending on their previous knowledge, on the level of understanding of this messages and interest in it.

In cases where they talk about automated work with information through any technical devices, they are not interested in the content of the message, but in how many characters this message contains.

In relation to computer data processing, information is understood as a certain sequence of symbolic designations (letters, numbers, encoded graphic images and sounds, etc.) that carry a semantic load and are presented in a form understandable to a computer. Everyone new character in such a sequence of characters increases the information volume of the message.

Currently, there is no single definition of information as a scientific term. From point of view various areas knowledge, this concept is described by its specific set of features. For example, the concept of "information" is basic in the course of computer science, and it is impossible to define it through other, more "simple" concepts (similarly, in geometry, for example, it is impossible to express the content basic concepts"point", "straight line", "plane" through simpler concepts).

The content of the basic, basic concepts in any science must be explained with examples or identified by comparing them with the content of other concepts. In the case of the concept of "information", the problem of its definition is even more complicated, since it is a general scientific concept. This concept is used in various sciences (informatics, cybernetics, biology, physics, etc.), while in each science the concept of "information" is associated with different systems of concepts.

The concept of information

In modern science, two types of information are considered:

Objective (primary) information is the property of material objects and phenomena (processes) to generate a variety of states, which through interactions (fundamental interactions) are transmitted to other objects and imprinted in their structure.

Subjective (semantic, semantic, secondary) information is the semantic content of objective information about the objects and processes of the material world, formed by the human mind with the help of semantic images (words, images and sensations) and fixed on some material carrier.

In the everyday sense, information is information about the surrounding world and the processes taking place in it, perceived by a person or a special device.

Currently, there is no single definition of information as a scientific term. From the point of view of various fields of knowledge, this concept is described by its specific set of features. According to the concept of K. Shannon, information is the removed uncertainty, i.e. information that should remove, to one degree or another, the uncertainty that the consumer has before they are received, expand his understanding of the object with useful information.

From Gregory Beton's point of view, the elementary unit of information is a "caring difference" or an effective difference for some larger perceiving system. Those differences that are not perceived, he calls "potential", and perceived - "active". "Information consists of indifferent differences" (c) "Any perception of information is necessarily an acquisition of information about a difference." From the point of view of computer science, information has a number of fundamental properties: novelty, relevance, reliability, objectivity, completeness, value, etc. The science of logic is primarily involved in the analysis of information. The word "information" comes from the Latin word informatio, which in translation means information, clarification, familiarization. The concept of information was considered by ancient philosophers.

Before the beginning industrial revolution, the definition of the essence of information remained the prerogative mainly of philosophers. Further, the science of cybernetics, which was new at that time, began to consider issues of information theory.

Sometimes, in order to comprehend the essence of a concept, it is useful to analyze the meaning of the word that denotes this concept. Clarifying the internal form of the word and studying the history of its use can shed unexpected light on its meaning, eclipsed by the usual "technological" use of this word and modern connotations.

The word information entered the Russian language in the Petrine era. For the first time it is recorded in the "Spiritual Regulations" of 1721 in the meaning of "representation, concept of something". (In European languages, it was fixed earlier - around the 14th century.)

Based on this etymology, information can be considered any significant change in form, or, in other words, any materially fixed traces formed by the interaction of objects or forces and amenable to understanding. Information is thus a converted form of energy. The carrier of information is a sign, and the way of its existence is interpretation: revealing the meaning of a sign or a sequence of signs.

The meaning can be an event reconstructed from the sign that caused its occurrence (in the case of "natural" and involuntary signs, such as traces, evidence, etc.), or a message (in the case of conventional signs characteristic of the sphere of language). It is the second kind of signs that makes up the body of human culture, which, according to one of the definitions, is "a set of non-hereditarily transmitted information."

Messages may contain information about facts or interpretation of facts (from Latin interpretatio, interpretation, translation).

A living being receives information through the senses, as well as through reflection or intuition. The exchange of information between subjects is communication or communication (from lat. communicatio, message, transmission, derived in turn from lat. communico, to make common, to inform, talk, connect).

From a practical point of view, information is always presented as a message. An informational message is associated with a message source, a message recipient, and a communication channel.

Returning to the Latin etymology of the word information, let's try to answer the question of what exactly the form is given here.

It is obvious that, firstly, some sense, which, being initially formless and unexpressed, exists only potentially and must be "built" in order to become perceived and transmitted.

Secondly, to the human mind, which is brought up to think structurally and clearly. Thirdly, a society that, precisely because its members share these meanings and share them, gains unity and functionality.

Information as an expressed reasonable meaning is knowledge that can be stored, transmitted and be the basis for the generation of other knowledge. Forms of knowledge conservation ( historical memory) are diverse: from myths, annals and pyramids to libraries, museums and computer databases.

Information - information about the world around us, about the processes taking place in it, which are perceived by living organisms, control machines and other information systems.

The word "information" is Latin. Behind long life its meaning has undergone evolution, sometimes expanding, sometimes narrowing its boundaries to the limit. At first, the word "information" meant: "representation", "concept", then - "information", "message transmission".

AT last years scientists decided that the usual (accepted by all) meaning of the word "information" is too elastic, vague, and gave it such a meaning: "a measure of certainty in a message."

Information theory was brought to life by the needs of practice. Its origin is associated with the work of Claude Shannon "Mathematical Theory of Communication", published in 1946. The foundations of information theory are based on the results obtained by many scientists. By the second half of the 20th century Earth buzzed with information being transmitted, running through telephone and telegraph cables and radio channels. Later, electronic computers appeared - information processors. And for that time, the main task of information theory was, first of all, to increase the efficiency of the functioning of communication systems. The difficulty in the design and operation of means, systems and communication channels is that it is not enough for the designer and engineer to solve the problem from physical and energy positions. From these points of view, the system can be the most perfect and economical. But it is also important when creating transmission systems to pay attention to how much information will pass through this transmission system. After all, information can be quantified, calculated. And they act in such calculations in the most usual way: they abstract from the meaning of the message, as they renounce concreteness in the arithmetic operations familiar to all of us (as from the addition of two apples and three apples they pass to the addition of numbers in general: 2 + 3).

The scientists said they "completely ignored human evaluation of information." To a sequence of 100 letters, for example, they assign a certain meaning to information, without regard to whether that information makes sense and whether, in turn, practical application makes sense. The quantitative approach is the most developed branch of information theory. According to this definition, a collection of 100 letters—a 100-letter phrase from a newspaper, Shakespeare's play, or Einstein's theorem—has exactly the same amount of information.

This quantification of information is highly useful and practical. It corresponds exactly to the task of the communications engineer, who must convey all the information contained in the submitted telegram, regardless of the value of this information for the addressee. The communication channel is soulless. One thing is important for the transmitting system: to transmit the required amount of information in a certain time. How to calculate the amount of information in a particular message?

The assessment of the amount of information is based on the laws of probability theory, more precisely, it is determined through the probabilities of events. This is understandable. The message has value, carries information only when we learn from it about the outcome of an event that has a random character, when it is to some extent unexpected. After all, the message about the already known does not contain any information. Those. if, for example, someone calls you on the phone and says: “It is light during the day and dark at night,” then such a message will surprise you only with the absurdity of the statement of the obvious and well-known, and not with the news that it contains. Another thing, for example, the result of the race at the races. Who will come first? The outcome here is difficult to predict. The more the event of interest to us has random outcomes, the more valuable the message about its result, the more information. An event message that has only two equally possible outcomes contains one piece of information called a bit. The choice of the unit of information is not accidental. It is associated with the most common binary way of encoding it during transmission and processing. Let us try, at least in the most simplified form, to imagine that general principle of the quantitative evaluation of information, which is the cornerstone of the entire theory of information.

We already know that the amount of information depends on the probabilities of certain outcomes of an event. If an event, as scientists say, has two equally likely outcomes, this means that the probability of each outcome is 1/2. This is the probability of getting heads or tails when tossing a coin. If an event has three equally likely outcomes, then the probability of each is 1/3. Note that the sum of the probabilities of all outcomes is always equal to one: after all, one of all possible outcomes will definitely come. An event, as you understand, can have unequal outcomes. So, in a football match between strong and weak teams, the probability of a strong team winning is high - for example, 4/5. The probability of a draw is much less, for example 3/20. The probability of defeat is very small.

It turns out that the amount of information is a measure of reducing the uncertainty of some situation. Different amounts of information are transmitted over communication channels, and the amount of information passing through the channel cannot be more than it. bandwidth. And it is determined by how much information passes here per unit of time. One of the characters in Jules Verne's novel The Mysterious Island, journalist Gideon Spillet, was telephoning a chapter from the Bible so that his competitors could not use the telephone. In this case, the channel was loaded completely, and the amount of information was equal to zero, because the subscriber received information known to him. This means that the channel was idle, passing a strictly defined number of pulses, without loading them with anything. Meanwhile, the more information each of a certain number of pulses carries, the more fully the channel bandwidth is used. Therefore, it is necessary to intelligently encode information, to find an economical, stingy language for transmitting messages.

The information is "sifted" in the most thorough way. In the telegraph, frequently occurring letters, combinations of letters, even whole phrases are depicted with a shorter set of zeros and ones, and those that are less common are shown with a longer one. In the case when the length of the code word is reduced for frequently occurring symbols and increased for rarely occurring ones, one speaks of efficient encoding of information. But in practice, it often happens that the code resulting from the most thorough “sifting”, a convenient and economical code, can distort the message due to interference, which, unfortunately, always happens in communication channels: sound distortion in the phone, atmospheric noise in radio, distortion or darkening of the image in television, transmission errors in the telegraph. These interferences, or, as they are called by experts, noise, fall on the information. And from this there are the most incredible and, of course, unpleasant surprises.

Therefore, to increase the reliability in the transmission and processing of information, it is necessary to introduce extra characters - a kind of protection against distortion. They - these extra characters - do not carry the actual content in the message, they are redundant. From the point of view of information theory, everything that makes a language colorful, flexible, rich in shades, multifaceted, multi-valued, is redundancy. How redundant from such positions is Tatyana's letter to Onegin! How much informational excesses are in it for a short and understandable message "I love you"! And how informationally accurate are the hand-drawn signs that are understandable to everyone who enters the subway today, where instead of words and phrases of announcements there are laconic symbolic signs indicating: “Entrance”, “Exit”.

In this regard, it is useful to recall an anecdote told at one time by the famous American scientist Benjamin Franklin about a hatter who invited his friends to discuss a sign project. It was supposed to draw a hat on the sign and write: “John Thompson, the hatter, makes and sells hats for cash” . One of the friends remarked that the words "for cash" are redundant - such a reminder would be offensive to the buyer. Another also found the word "sells" superfluous, since it goes without saying that a hatter sells hats, and does not give them away for free. The third thought that the words "hatter" and "makes hats" were an unnecessary tautology, and the last words were thrown out. The fourth suggested throwing out the word "hatter" - the painted hat clearly says who John Thompson is. Finally, the fifth assured that it was completely indifferent to the buyer whether the hatter was called John Thompson or otherwise, and suggested that this indication be dispensed with. Thus, in the end, there was nothing left on the sign but a hat. Of course, if people used only such codes, without redundancy in messages, then all "information forms" - books, reports, articles - would be extremely short. But they would lose in intelligibility and beauty.

Information can be divided into types according to different criteria: in truth: true and false;

according to the way of perception:

Visual - perceived by the organs of vision;

Auditory - perceived by the organs of hearing;

Tactile - perceived by tactile receptors;

Olfactory - perceived by olfactory receptors;

Taste - perceived by taste buds.

in the form of presentation:

Text - transmitted in the form of symbols intended to designate lexemes of the language;

Numerical - in the form of numbers and signs denoting mathematical operations;

Graphic - in the form of images, objects, graphs;

Sound - oral or in the form of a recording, the transmission of language lexemes by auditory means.

by appointment:

Mass - contains trivial information and operates with a set of concepts understandable to most of the society;

Special - contains a specific set of concepts, when used, information is transmitted that may not be clear to the bulk of society, but is necessary and understandable within a narrow social group where this information is used;

Secret - transmitted to a narrow circle of people and through closed (secure) channels;

Personal (private) - a set of information about a person that determines social status and types social interactions within the population.

by value:

Relevant - information is valuable at a given time;

Reliable - information received without distortion;

Understandable - information expressed in a language understandable to the person to whom it is intended;

Complete - information sufficient to make the right decision or understanding;

Useful - the usefulness of information is determined by the subject who received the information, depending on the volume of possibilities for its use.

The value of information in various fields of knowledge

In information theory, many systems, methods, approaches, ideas are being developed nowadays. However, scientists believe that new trends will be added to the modern trends in information theory, new ideas will appear. As proof of the correctness of their assumptions, they cite the “live”, developing nature of science, point out that information theory is surprisingly quickly and firmly introduced into the most diverse areas of human knowledge. Information theory has penetrated into physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, philosophy, linguistics, pedagogy, economics, logic, technical sciences, and aesthetics. According to the experts themselves, the doctrine of information, which arose due to the needs of the theory of communication and cybernetics, stepped over their limits. And now, perhaps, we have the right to talk about information as a scientific concept that puts into the hands of researchers a theoretical and informational method with which you can penetrate into many sciences about animate and inanimate nature, about society, which will allow not only to look at all problems from a new perspective. side, but also to see the unseen. That is why the term "information" has become widespread in our time, becoming part of such concepts as the information system, information culture, even information ethics.

Many scientific disciplines use information theory to emphasize a new direction in the old sciences. This is how, for example, information geography, information economics, information law. But the term "information" has become extremely important in connection with the development of the latest computer technology, the automation of mental work, the development of new means of communication and information processing, and especially with the emergence of computer science. One of the most important tasks of information theory is the study of the nature and properties of information, the creation of methods for its processing, in particular, the transformation of the most diverse modern information into computer programs with the help of which the automation of mental work takes place - a kind of strengthening of the intellect, and hence the development of the intellectual resources of society.

The word "information" comes from the Latin word informatio, which means information, clarification, familiarization. The concept of "information" is basic in the course of computer science, but it is impossible to define it through other, more "simple" concepts. The concept of "information" is used in various sciences, and in each science the concept of "information" is associated with different systems of concepts. Information in biology: Biology studies wildlife and the concept of "information" is associated with the appropriate behavior of living organisms. In living organisms, information is transmitted and stored using objects of various physical nature (DNA state), which are considered as signs of biological alphabets. Genetic information is inherited and stored in all cells of living organisms. Philosophical approach: Information is interaction, reflection, cognition. Cybernetic approach: Information is the characteristics of a control signal transmitted over a communication line.

The role of information in philosophy

The traditionalism of the subjective has always dominated in the early definitions of information as categories, concepts, properties of the material world. Information exists outside our consciousness, and can only be reflected in our perception as a result of interaction: reflection, reading, receiving in the form of a signal, stimulus. Information is not material, like all properties of matter. Information stands in the following order: matter, space, time, consistency, function, etc., which are the fundamental concepts of a formalized reflection of objective reality in its distribution and variability, diversity and manifestations. Information is a property of matter and reflects its properties (state or ability to interact) and quantity (measure) through interaction.

From a material point of view, information is the order of the objects of the material world. For example, the order of letters on a sheet of paper according to certain rules is written information. The order of multi-colored dots on a sheet of paper according to certain rules is graphic information. The order of musical notes is musical information. The order of genes in DNA is hereditary information. The bit order in a computer is computer information etc. etc. For the implementation of information exchange, the presence of necessary and sufficient conditions is required.

The necessary conditions:

The presence of at least two different objects of the material or non-material world;

The presence of objects in common property that allows you to identify objects as a carrier of information;

Objects have a specific property that allows them to distinguish objects from each other;

The presence of a space property that allows you to determine the order of objects. For example, the arrangement of written information on paper is a specific property of paper that allows letters to be arranged from left to right and from top to bottom.

There is only one sufficient condition: the presence of a subject capable of recognizing information. This is a person and human society, societies of animals, robots, etc. An informational message is constructed by selecting copies of objects from the basis and arranging these objects in space in a certain order. The length of the informational message is defined as the number of copies of the basis objects and is always expressed as an integer. It is necessary to distinguish between the length of an information message, which is always measured as an integer, and the amount of knowledge contained in an information message, which is measured in an unknown unit of measure. From a mathematical point of view, information is a sequence of integers that are written into a vector. The numbers are the number of the object in the information basis. The vector is called the information invariant, since it does not depend on the physical nature of the basis objects. One and the same informational message can be expressed in letters, words, sentences, files, pictures, notes, songs, video clips, any combination of all previously named.

The role of information in physics

Information is information about the surrounding world (object, process, phenomenon, event), which is the object of transformation (including storage, transmission, etc.) and is used to develop behavior, to make decisions, to manage or to learn.

The characteristics of information are as follows:

This is the most important resource of modern production: it reduces the need for land, labor, capital, reduces the consumption of raw materials and energy. So, for example, having the ability to archive your files (that is, having such information), you can not spend money on buying new floppy disks;

Information brings new productions to life. For example, the invention of the laser beam was the cause of the emergence and development of the production of laser (optical) disks;

Information is a commodity, and the seller of information does not lose it after the sale. So, if a student informs his friend about the schedule of classes during the semester, he will not lose this data for himself;

Information gives additional value to other resources, in particular, labor. Indeed, an employee higher education valued more than the average.

As follows from the definition, three concepts are always associated with information:

The source of information is that element of the surrounding world (object, process, phenomenon, event), information about which is the object of transformation. So, the source of information that the reader of this textbook is currently receiving is computer science as a sphere of human activity;

The consumer of information is that element of the surrounding world that uses information (for the development of behavior, for decision making, for management or for learning). The consumer of this information is the reader himself;

A signal is a material carrier that captures information for its transfer from a source to a consumer. In this case, the signal is electronic in nature. If the student takes this manual in the library, then the same information will be on paper. Being read and memorized by a student, the information will acquire another carrier - biological, when it is "recorded" in the student's memory.

The signal is the most important element in this circuit. The forms of its presentation, as well as the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the information contained in it, which are important for the consumer of information, are discussed later in this section of the textbook. The main characteristics of the computer as the main tool that maps the source of information into a signal (link 1 in the figure) and “bringing” the signal to the consumer of information (link 2 in the figure) are given in the Computer section. The structure of the procedures that implement links 1 and 2 and make up the information process is the subject of consideration in the part Information process.

The objects of the material world are in a state of continuous change, which is characterized by the exchange of energy of the object with the environment. A change in the state of one object always leads to a change in the state of some other object in the environment. This phenomenon, regardless of how, which particular states and which particular objects have changed, can be considered as a signal transmission from one object to another. Changing the state of an object when a signal is sent to it is called signal registration.

A signal or a sequence of signals form a message that can be perceived by the recipient in one form or another, as well as in one volume or another. Information in physics is a term that qualitatively generalizes the concepts of "signal" and "message". If signals and messages can be quantified, then we can say that signals and messages are units of measurement of the amount of information. Message (signal) different systems interpreted in its own way. For example, a long and two short beeps in sequence in Morse code terminology is the letter de (or D), in BIOS terminology from AWARD, a video card malfunction.

The role of information in mathematics

In mathematics, information theory (mathematical communication theory) is a section of applied mathematics that defines the concept of information, its properties, and establishes limiting relationships for data transmission systems. The main sections of information theory are source coding (compressive coding) and channel (noise-immune) coding. Mathematics is more than a scientific discipline. It creates a single language for all Science.

The subject of mathematics research is abstract objects: number, function, vector, set, and others. Moreover, most of them are introduced axiomatically (axiom), i.e. without any connection with other concepts and without any definition.

Information is not among the subjects of study of mathematics. However, the word "information" is used in mathematical terms - own information and mutual information, related to the abstract (mathematical) part of information theory. However, in mathematical theory, the concept of "information" is associated with exclusively abstract objects - random variables, while in modern information theory this concept is considered much more widely - as a property of material objects. The connection between these two identical terms is undeniable. It was the mathematical apparatus of random numbers that was used by the author of information theory Claude Shannon. He himself means by the term "information" something fundamental (irreducible). Shannon's theory intuitively assumes that information has content. Information reduces the overall uncertainty and information entropy. The amount of information available to measure. However, he warns researchers against the mechanical transfer of concepts from his theory to other areas of science.

"The search for ways to apply information theory in other fields of science is not reduced to a trivial transfer of terms from one field of science to another. This search is carried out in a long process of putting forward new hypotheses and their experimental verification." K. Shannon.

The role of information in cybernetics

The founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, spoke of information as follows:

Information is not matter or energy, information is information. "But the basic definition of information that he gave in several of his books is the following: information is a designation of content that we received from the outside world, in the process of adapting us and our feelings.

Information is the basic concept of cybernetics, just as economic information is the basic concept of economic cybernetics.

There are many definitions of this term, they are complex and contradictory. The reason, obviously, is that various sciences deal with cybernetics as a phenomenon, and cybernetics is only the youngest of them. I. is the subject of study of such sciences as the science of management, mathematical statistics, genetics, the theory of mass media I. (press, radio, television), computer science, which deals with the problems of scientific and technical I., etc. Finally, recently Philosophers show great interest in the problems of reflection: they tend to regard reflection as one of the basic universal properties of matter, associated with the concept of reflection. With all interpretations of the concept of I., it assumes the existence of two objects: the source of I. and the consumer (receiver) of I. The transfer of I. from one to another occurs with the help of signals that, generally speaking, may not have any physical connection with its meaning: this the relationship is determined by agreement. For example, a blow to the veche bell meant that it was necessary to gather in the square, but for those who did not know about this order, he did not inform any I.

In the situation with the vesper bell, the person involved in the agreement on the meaning of the signal knows that at the moment there can be two alternatives: the vespers will take place or not. Or, to put it in the language of I. theory, an indefinite event (veche) has two outcomes. The received signal leads to a decrease in uncertainty: the person now knows that the event (veche) has only one outcome - it will take place. However, if it was known in advance that the veche would take place at such and such an hour, the bell did not announce anything new. It follows from this that the less likely (i.e., more unexpected) the message, the more I. it contains, and vice versa, the more likely the outcome before the event, the less I. contains the signal. Approximately such reasoning led in the 40s. 20th century to the emergence of a statistical, or “classical”, theory of I., which defines the concept of I. through a measure of reducing the uncertainty of knowledge about the accomplishment of an event (such a measure was called entropy). N. Wiener, K. Shannon and Soviet scientists A. N. Kolmogorov, V. A. Kotelnikov and others stood at the origins of this science. ., storage capacity of I. devices, etc., which served as a powerful stimulus for the development of cybernetics as a science and electronic computing technology as a practical application of the achievements of cybernetics.

As for the definition of the value, usefulness of I. for the recipient, there is still a lot of unresolved, unclear. If we proceed from the needs of economic management and, consequently, economic cybernetics, then information can be defined as all the information, knowledge, messages that help solve a particular management problem (that is, reduce the uncertainty of its outcomes). Then some possibilities open up for evaluating I.: it is all the more useful, more valuable, the sooner or at a lower cost it leads to the solution of the problem. The concept of I. is close to the concept of data. However, there is a difference between them: data are signals from which I still need to be extracted. Data processing is the process of bringing them to a form suitable for this.

The process of their transfer from the source to the consumer and perception as I. can be considered as passing through three filters:

Physical, or statistical (a purely quantitative limitation on the bandwidth of the channel, regardless of the content of the data, that is, in terms of syntax);

Semantic (selection of those data that can be understood by the recipient, i.e., correspond to the thesaurus of his knowledge);

Pragmatic (selection among the understood information of those that are useful for solving a given problem).

This is well shown in the diagram taken from E. G. Yasin's book on economic information. Accordingly, three aspects of the study of I. problems are distinguished - syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic.

According to its content, I. is subdivided into socio-political, socio-economic (including economic I.), scientific and technical, etc. In general, there are many classifications of I., they are built on various grounds. As a rule, due to the proximity of concepts, data classifications are built in the same way. For example, I. is subdivided into static (constant) and dynamic (variable), and data at the same time - into constants and variables. Another division is primary, derivative, output I. (data are classified in the same way). The third division is I. managing and informing. The fourth is redundant, useful and false. Fifth - complete (continuous) and selective. This idea of ​​Wiener gives a direct indication of the objectivity of information, i.e. its existence in nature is independent of human consciousness (perception).

Modern cybernetics defines objective information as an objective property of material objects and phenomena to generate a variety of states that are transferred from one object (process) to another through fundamental interactions of matter and imprinted in its structure. The material system in cybernetics is considered as a set of objects that themselves can be located in different states, but the state of each of them is determined by the states of other objects in the system.

In nature, the set of system states is information, the states themselves are the primary code, or source code. Thus, each material system is a source of information. Cybernetics defines subjective (semantic) information as the meaning or content of a message.

The role of information in computer science

The subject of science is precisely the data: methods of their creation, storage, processing and transmission. Content (also: "filling" (in the context), "site content") - a term meaning all types of information (both textual and multimedia - images, audio, video) that make up the content (visualized, for the visitor, content) of the web -site. It is used to separate the concept of information that makes up the internal structure of the page / site (code), from that which will eventually be displayed on the screen.

The word "information" comes from the Latin word informatio, which means information, clarification, familiarization. The concept of "information" is basic in the course of computer science, but it is impossible to define it through other, more "simple" concepts.

The following approaches to the definition of information can be distinguished:

Traditional (ordinary) - used in computer science: Information is information, knowledge, messages about the state of affairs that a person perceives from the outside world with the help of the senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch).

Probabilistic - used in information theory: Information is information about objects and phenomena of the environment, their parameters, properties and state, which reduce the degree of uncertainty and incompleteness of knowledge about them.

Information is stored, transmitted and processed in symbolic (sign) form. The same information can be presented in different forms:

Signed writing, consisting of various signs, among which there is a symbolic one in the form of text, numbers, specials. characters; graphic; tabular, etc.;

The form of gestures or signals;

Oral verbal form (conversation).

The presentation of information is carried out with the help of languages, as sign systems, which are built on the basis of a certain alphabet and have rules for performing operations on signs. Language is a certain sign system for representing information. Exist:

Natural languages ​​are spoken languages ​​in spoken and written form. In some cases, spoken language can be replaced by the language of facial expressions and gestures, the language of special signs (for example, road signs);

Formal languages ​​are special languages ​​for various areas of human activity, which are characterized by a rigidly fixed alphabet, stricter rules of grammar and syntax. These are the language of music (notes), the language of mathematics (numbers, mathematical signs), number systems, programming languages, etc. At the heart of any language is the alphabet - a set of symbols / signs. The total number of symbols in an alphabet is called the cardinality of the alphabet.

Information carriers are a medium or a physical body for the transmission, storage and reproduction of information. (These are electrical, light, thermal, sound, radio signals, magnetic and laser discs, publications, photographs, etc.)

Information processes are processes associated with the receipt, storage, processing and transmission of information (i.e. actions performed with information). Those. These are processes during which the content of information or the form of its presentation changes.

To ensure the information process, a source of information, a communication channel and a consumer of information are needed. The source transmits (sends) information, and the receiver receives (perceives) it. The transmitted information is achieved from the source to the receiver using a signal (code). Changing the signal allows you to get information.

Being an object of transformation and use, information is characterized by the following properties:

Syntax is a property that determines how information is presented on a carrier (in a signal). So, this information is presented on electronic media using a specific font. Here you can also consider such information presentation parameters as the style and color of the font, its size, line spacing etc. The selection of the required parameters as syntactic properties is obviously determined by the proposed transformation method. For example, for a visually impaired person, the font size and color are essential. If you intend to enter this text into a computer through a scanner, the paper size is important;

Semantics is a property that defines the meaning of information as the correspondence of a signal to the real world. So, the semantics of the signal “computer science” is in the definition given earlier. Semantics can be thought of as some agreement, known to the consumer of information, about what each signal means (the so-called interpretation rule). For example, it is the semantics of signals that is studied by a novice motorist who studies the rules traffic, learning road signs (in this case, the signs themselves act as signals). The semantics of words (signals) is learned by a learner of any foreign language. We can say that the meaning of teaching computer science is to study the semantics of various signals - the essence of the key concepts of this discipline;

Pragmatics is a property that determines the impact of information on consumer behavior. So the pragmatics of the information received by the reader of this study guide is, at least, the successful passing of the computer science exam. I would like to believe that the pragmatics of this work will not be limited to this, and it will serve for further education and professional activity of the reader.

It should be noted that signals of different syntax can have the same semantics. For example, the signals "computer" and "computer" mean an electronic device for converting information. In this case, one usually speaks of signal synonymy. On the other hand, one signal (i.e., information with one syntactic property) can have different pragmatics for consumers and different semantics. Thus, a road sign known as a “brick” and having a well-defined semantics (“no entry”) means a ban on entry for a motorist, but it does not affect a pedestrian in any way. At the same time, the “key” signal can have different semantics: a treble clef, a spring clef, a key to open a lock, a key used in computer science to encode a signal in order to protect it from unauthorized access (in this case, the signal is called homonymy). There are signals - antonyms that have opposite semantics. For example, "cold" and "hot", "fast" and "slow", etc.

The subject of study of the science of informatics is precisely the data: the methods of their creation, storage, processing and transmission. And the information itself recorded in the data, its meaningful meaning is of interest to users of information systems who are specialists in various sciences and fields of activity: a physician is interested in medical information, a geologist is interested in geological information, an entrepreneur is interested in commercial information, etc. (including a computer scientist who is interested in information on working with data).

Semiotics - the science of information

Information cannot be imagined without its receipt, processing, transmission, etc., that is, outside the framework of information exchange. All acts of information exchange are carried out by means of symbols or signs, with the help of which one system influences another. Therefore, the main science that studies information is semiotics - the science of signs and sign systems in nature and society (the theory of signs). In each act of information exchange, one can find three of its "participants", three elements: a sign, an object that it designates, and a recipient (user) of the sign.

Depending on the relations between which elements are considered, semiotics is divided into three sections: syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. Syntactics studies signs and the relationships between them. At the same time, it abstracts from the content of the sign and from its practical significance for the recipient. Semantics studies the relationship between signs and the objects they designate, while abstracting from the recipient of signs and the value of the latter: for him. It is clear that the study of the patterns of semantic display of objects in signs is impossible without taking into account and using the general patterns of construction of any sign systems studied by syntactics. Pragmatics studies the relationship between signs and their users. Within the framework of pragmatics, all factors that distinguish one act of information exchange from another are studied, all issues practical results use of the information and its value to the recipient.

At the same time, many aspects of the relationship of signs between themselves and with the objects they designate are inevitably affected. Thus, the three sections of semiotics correspond to three levels of abstraction (distraction) from the characteristics of specific acts of information exchange. The study of information in all its diversity corresponds to pragmatic level. Distracting from the recipient of information, excluding him from consideration, we move on to studying it at the semantic level. With a distraction from the content of signs, the analysis of information is transferred to the level of syntactic. Such interpenetration of the main sections of semiotics, associated with different levels of abstraction, can be represented using the scheme "Three sections of semiotics and their relationship." Measurement of information is carried out respectively in three aspects: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. The need for such different dimension information, as will be shown below, is dictated by the practice of designing and organizing the work of information systems. Consider a typical production situation.

At the end of the shift, the site planner prepares data on the implementation of the production schedule. This data is sent to the information and computer center (ICC) of the enterprise, where it is processed, and in the form of reports on the state of production at this moment issued to leaders. Based on the data received, the shop manager decides to change the production plan for the next planning period or to take any other organizational measures. It is obvious that for the head of the shop, the amount of information that the summary contained depends on the magnitude of the economic impact received from its use in decision-making, on how useful the information was. For the site planner, the amount of information in the same message is determined by the accuracy of its correspondence to the actual state of affairs on the site and the degree of surprise of the reported facts. The more unexpected they are, the faster you need to report them to management, the more information in this message. For ITC employees, the number of characters, the length of the message carrying information will be of paramount importance, since it determines the loading time of computer equipment and communication channels. At the same time, neither the usefulness of information, nor the quantitative measure of the semantic value of information is practically of no interest to them.

Naturally, when organizing a production management system, building models for choosing a solution, we will use the usefulness of information as a measure of the information content of messages. When building an accounting and reporting system that provides management of data on the course of the production process, the novelty of the information received should be taken as a measure of the amount of information. The organization of procedures for the mechanical processing of information requires measuring the volume of messages in the form of the number of characters being processed. These three essentially different approaches to measuring information do not contradict or exclude each other. On the contrary, by measuring information on different scales, they allow a fuller and more comprehensive assessment of the information content of each message and more effectively organize the production management system. According to the apt expression of Prof. NOT. Kobrinsky, when it comes to the rational organization of information flows, the quantity, novelty, usefulness of information turn out to be as interconnected as the quantity, quality and cost of products in production.

Information in the material world

Information is one of general concepts associated with matter. Information exists in any material object in the form of a variety of its states and is transmitted from object to object in the process of their interaction. The existence of information as an objective property of matter logically follows from the well-known fundamental properties of matter - structure, continuous change (movement) and interaction of material objects.

The structure of matter is manifested as an internal dismemberment of integrity, a regular order of connection of elements in the composition of the whole. In other words, any material object, from the subatomic particle of the Meta Universe (Big Bang) as a whole, is a system of interconnected subsystems. As a result of continuous movement, understood in a broad sense as movement in space and development in time, material objects change their states. The state of objects also changes when interacting with other objects. The set of states of the material system and all its subsystems represents information about the system.

Strictly speaking, due to uncertainty, infinity, structural properties, the amount of objective information in any material object is infinite. This information is called complete. However, it is possible to single out structural levels with finite sets of states. Information that exists at a structural level with a finite number of states is called private. For private information, the meaning is the concept of the amount of information.

From the above representation, the choice of the unit of measure for the amount of information follows logically and simply. Imagine a system that can be in only two equally probable states. Let's assign code "1" to one of them, and "0" to the other. This is the minimum amount of information that the system can contain. It is the unit of measurement of information and is called a bit. There are other, more difficult to define, methods and units for measuring the amount of information.

Depending on the material form of the carrier, information can be of two main types - analog and discrete. Analog information changes in time continuously and takes values ​​from a continuum of values. Discrete information changes at some points in time and takes values ​​from a certain set of values. Any material object or process is the primary source of information. All its possible states constitute the code of the source of information. The instantaneous value of states is represented as a symbol ("letter") of this code. In order for information to be transmitted from one object to another as a receiver, it is necessary that there be some kind of intermediate material carrier that interacts with the source. Such carriers in nature, as a rule, are rapidly propagating processes of the wave structure - cosmic, gamma and x-ray radiation, electromagnetic and sound waves, potentials (and maybe not yet discovered waves) of the gravitational field. When interacting electromagnetic radiation with an object, as a result of absorption or reflection, its spectrum changes, i.e. the intensities of some wavelengths change. The harmonics of sound vibrations also change during interactions with objects. Information is also transmitted during mechanical interaction, however, mechanical interaction, as a rule, leads to big changes structures of objects (up to their destruction), and the information is greatly distorted. Distortion of information during its transmission is called misinformation.

The transfer of source information to a carrier structure is called encoding. In this case, the source code is converted into the carrier code. A carrier with a source code transferred to it in the form of a carrier code is called a signal. The signal receiver has its own set of possible states, which is called the receiver code. The signal, interacting with the receiving object, changes its states. The process of converting a signal code into a receiver code is called decoding. The transfer of information from a source to a receiver can be considered as an information interaction. Information interaction is fundamentally different from other interactions. With all other interactions of material objects, there is an exchange of matter and (or) energy. In this case, one of the objects loses matter or energy, while the other receives them. This property of interactions is called symmetry. During information interaction, the receiver receives information, and the source does not lose it. Information interaction is not symmetrical. Objective information itself is not material, it is a property of matter, such as structure, movement, and exists on material carriers in the form of its codes.

Information in wildlife

Wildlife is complex and varied. Sources and receivers of information in it are living organisms and their cells. The organism has a number of properties that distinguish it from inanimate material objects.

Main:

Continuous exchange of matter, energy and information with the environment;

Irritability, the body's ability to perceive and process information about changes in the environment and the internal environment of the body;

Excitability, the ability to respond to the action of stimuli;

Self-organization, manifested as changes in the body to adapt to conditions external environment.

The organism, considered as a system, has a hierarchical structure. This structure, relative to the organism itself, is subdivided into internal levels: molecular, cellular, the level of organs, and, finally, the organism itself. However, the organism also interacts with organismic living systems, the levels of which are the population, the ecosystem, and the whole Live nature as a whole (biosphere). Not only matter and energy flows, but also information flows between all these levels. Information interactions in living nature occur in the same way as in inanimate nature. At the same time, wildlife in the process of evolution has created a wide variety of sources, carriers and receivers of information.

The reaction to the influences of the external world is manifested in all organisms, since it is due to irritability. In higher organisms, adaptation to the external environment is in the nature of a complex activity that is effective only with sufficiently complete and timely information about environment. The receivers of information from the external environment are the sense organs, which include sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and the vestibular apparatus. In the internal structure of organisms, there are numerous internal receptors associated with the nervous system. The nervous system consists of neurons, the processes of which (axons and dendrites) are analogous to information transmission channels. The main organs that store and process information in vertebrates are the spinal cord and brain. In accordance with the characteristics of the sense organs, the information perceived by the body can be classified as visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory and tactile.

Getting on the retina of the human eye, the signal in a special way excites the cells that make it up. Nerve impulses of cells through axons are transmitted to the brain. The brain remembers this sensation in the form of a certain combination of states of its constituent neurons. (Continuation of the example - in the section "Information in human society"). Accumulating information, the brain creates a connected structure on its structure. information model the surrounding world. In wildlife for the organism - the receiver of information important characteristic is its availability. The amount of information that the human nervous system is able to submit to the brain when reading texts is approximately 1 bit per 1/16 of a second.

The study of organisms is hampered by their complexity. The abstraction of structure as a mathematical set, which is acceptable for inanimate objects, is hardly acceptable for a living organism, because in order to create a more or less adequate abstract model of an organism, it is necessary to take into account all the hierarchical levels of its structure. Therefore, it is difficult to introduce a measure of the amount of information. It is very difficult to determine the relationships between the components of the structure. If it is known which organ is the source of information, then what is the signal and what is the receiver?

Before the advent of computers, biology, dealing with the study of living organisms, used only qualitative, i.e. descriptive models. In a qualitative model, take into account information links between the components of the structure is almost impossible. Electronic computing technology has made it possible to apply new methods in biological research, in particular, the method of machine modeling, which involves a mathematical description of known phenomena and processes occurring in the body, adding hypotheses about some unknown processes to them, and calculating possible variants of the body's behavior. The resulting options are compared with the actual behavior of the organism, which allows you to determine the truth or falsity of the hypotheses put forward. Information interaction can also be taken into account in such models. Extremely complex are the information processes that ensure the existence of life itself. And although it is intuitively clear that this property is directly related to the formation, storage and transmission of complete information about the structure of the body, an abstract description of this phenomenon seemed impossible for some time. However, the information processes that ensure the existence of this property have been partly revealed through the deciphering of the genetic code and reading the genomes of various organisms.

Information in human society

The development of matter in the process of motion is directed towards the complication of the structure of material objects. One of the most complex structures is the human brain. So far, this is the only structure known to us that has the property that man himself calls consciousness. Speaking about information, we, as thinking beings, a priori mean that information, in addition to its presence in the form of signals we receive, also has some kind of meaning. Forming in his mind a model of the surrounding world as an interconnected set of models of its objects and processes, a person uses semantic concepts, not information. Meaning is the essence of any phenomenon that does not coincide with itself and connects it with a wider context of reality. The word itself directly indicates that the semantic content of information can be formed only by thinking receivers of information. In human society, it is not the information itself that acquires decisive importance, but its semantic content.

Example (continued). Having experienced such a sensation, a person assigns the concept “tomato” to the object, and the concept “red color” to its state. In addition, his consciousness fixes the connection: "tomato" - "red". This is the meaning of the received signal. (Example continued: later in this section). The ability of the brain to create semantic concepts and connections between them is the basis of consciousness. Consciousness can be viewed as a self-developing semantic model of the surrounding world. Meaning is not information. Information exists only on a physical medium. Human consciousness is considered intangible. Meaning exists in the human mind in the form of words, images and sensations. A person can pronounce words not only out loud, but also “to himself”. He can also create (or remember) images and sensations “to himself”. However, he can retrieve the information corresponding to this meaning by speaking or writing the words.

Example (continued). If the words "tomato" and "red color" are the meaning of concepts, then where is the information? Information is contained in the brain in the form of certain states of its neurons. It is also contained in the printed text consisting of these words, and when encoding letters with a three-digit binary code its number is 120 bits. If you say the words aloud, there will be much more information, but the meaning will remain the same. The largest number information carries a visual image. This is reflected even in folklore - "it is better to see once than to hear a hundred times." Information restored in this way is called semantic information, since it encodes the meaning of some primary information (semantics). Hearing (or seeing) a phrase spoken (or written) in a language that a person does not know, he receives information, but cannot determine its meaning. Therefore, in order to transmit the semantic content of information, some agreements are required between the source and the receiver about the semantic content of the signals, i.e. words. Such agreements can be reached through communication. Communication is one of the most important conditions for the existence of human society.

AT modern world information is one of the most important resources and, at the same time, one of the driving forces for the development of human society. Information processes occurring in the material world, wildlife and human society are studied (or at least taken into account) by all scientific disciplines from philosophy to marketing. The increasing complexity of the tasks of scientific research has led to the need to involve large teams of scientists of various specialties in their solution. Therefore, almost all the theories considered below are interdisciplinary. Historically, two complex branches of science - cybernetics and informatics - are directly involved in the study of information.

Modern cybernetics is a multi-disciplinary branch of science that studies super-complex systems, such as:

Human society (social cybernetics);

Economics (economic cybernetics);

Living organism (biological cybernetics);

The human brain and its function - consciousness ( artificial intelligence).

Informatics, which was formed as a science in the middle of the last century, separated from cybernetics and is engaged in research in the field of methods for obtaining, storing, transmitting and processing semantic information. Both of these industries use several underlying scientific theories. These include information theory, and its sections - coding theory, algorithm theory and automata theory. Studies of the semantic content of information are based on a complex of scientific theories under the general name of semiotics. Information theory is a complex, mainly mathematical theory, which includes a description and evaluation of methods for extracting, transmitting, storing and classifying information. Considers information carriers as elements of an abstract (mathematical) set, and interactions between carriers as a way of arranging elements in this set. This approach makes it possible to formally describe the information code, that is, to define an abstract code and explore it. mathematical methods. For these studies, he applies the methods of probability theory, mathematical statistics, linear algebra, game theory and other mathematical theories.

The foundations of this theory were laid by the American scientist E. Hartley in 1928, who determined the measure of the amount of information for some communication problems. Later, the theory was significantly developed by the American scientist C. Shannon, Russian scientists A.N. Kolmogorov, V.M. Glushkov and others. Modern information theory includes sections of coding theory, algorithm theory, digital automata theory (see below) and some others. There are also alternative information theories, for example, "Qualitative Information Theory", proposed by the Polish scientist M. Mazur. Any person is familiar with the concept of an algorithm, without even knowing it. Here is an example of an informal algorithm: “Cut the tomatoes into circles or slices. Put chopped onion in them, pour over with vegetable oil, then sprinkle with finely chopped capsicum, mix. Before use, sprinkle with salt, put in a salad bowl and garnish with parsley. (Tomato salad).

The first rules for solving arithmetic problems in the history of mankind were developed by one of the famous scientists of antiquity Al-Khwarizmi in the 9th century AD. In his honor, formalized rules for achieving a goal are called algorithms. The subject of the theory of algorithms is to find methods for constructing and evaluating effective (including universal) computational and control algorithms for information processing. To substantiate such methods, the theory of algorithms uses the mathematical apparatus of information theory. The modern scientific concept of algorithms as ways of processing information was introduced in the works of E. Post and A. Turing in the 20s of the twentieth century (Turing Machine). A great contribution to the development of the theory of algorithms was made by the Russian scientists A. Markov (Normal Markov Algorithm) and A. Kolmogorov. possible devices processing discrete information at discrete times.

The concept of an automaton originated in the theory of algorithms. If there are some universal algorithms for solving computational problems, then there must be devices (albeit abstract) for the implementation of such algorithms. Actually, the abstract Turing machine, considered in the theory of algorithms, is at the same time an informally defined automaton. The theoretical justification for the construction of such devices is the subject of automata theory. Automata theory uses the apparatus of mathematical theories - algebra, mathematical logic, combinatorial analysis, graph theory, probability theory, etc. Automata theory, together with the theory of algorithms, is the main theoretical basis for creating electronic computers and automated control systems. Semiotics is a complex of scientific theories that study the properties of sign systems. The most significant results have been achieved in the branch of semiotics - semantics. The subject of research in semantics is the semantic content of information.

A sign system is a system of concrete or abstract objects (signs, words), with each of which a certain value is associated in a certain way. In theory, it is proved that there can be two such comparisons. The first type of correspondence directly defines the material object that denotes this word and is called the denotation (or, in some works, the nominee). The second type of correspondence determines the meaning of the sign (word) and is called the concept. At the same time, such properties of comparisons as “meaning”, “truth”, “definability”, “following”, “interpretation”, etc. are studied. For research, the apparatus of mathematical logic and mathematical linguistics is used. F de Saussure in the 19th century, formulated and developed by C. Pierce (1839-1914), C. Morris (b. 1901), R. Carnap (1891-1970) and others. the meaning of a text in a natural language as a record in some formalized semantic (semantic) language. Semantic analysis is the basis for creating devices (programs) for machine translation from one natural language to another.

Information is stored by means of its transfer to some material carriers. Semantic information recorded on a material storage medium is called a document. Mankind has learned to store information for a very long time. In the most ancient forms of information storage, the arrangement of objects was used - shells and stones on the sand, knots on a rope. A significant development of these methods was writing - a graphic representation of symbols on stone, clay, papyrus, paper. Of great importance in the development of this direction was the invention of printing. Throughout its history, humanity has accumulated a huge amount of information in libraries, archives, periodicals and other written documents.

At present, the storage of information in the form of sequences of binary characters has gained particular importance. To implement these methods, various storage devices are used. They are the central link of information storage systems. In addition to them, such systems use information retrieval tools (search engine), help obtaining tools (information and reference systems) and information display tools (output device). Formed according to the purpose of information, such information systems form databases, data banks and a knowledge base.

The transfer of semantic information is the process of its spatial transfer from the source to the recipient (addressee). Man learned to transmit and receive information even earlier than to store it. Speech is a method of transmission that our distant ancestors used in direct contact (conversation) - we still use it now. To transmit information over long distances, it is necessary to use much more complex information processes. To implement such a process, information must be formalized (presented) in some way. Various methods are used to present information. sign systems- sets of predetermined semantic symbols: objects, pictures, written or printed words of natural language. The semantic information about some object, phenomenon or process presented with their help is called a message.

Obviously, in order to transmit a message over a distance, information must be transferred to some kind of mobile carrier. Carriers can move in space with the help of vehicles, as is the case with letters sent by mail. This method ensures complete reliability of information transmission, since the addressee receives the original message, but requires a significant amount of time for transmission. Since the middle of the 19th century, methods of transmitting information have become widespread, using a naturally propagating carrier of information - electromagnetic oscillations(electrical vibrations, radio waves, light). The implementation of these methods requires:

Preliminary transfer of the information contained in the message to the carrier - encoding;

Ensuring the transmission of the signal thus obtained to the addressee via a special communication channel;

Reverse conversion of the signal code into the message code - decoding.

The use of electromagnetic media makes the delivery of a message to the addressee almost instantaneous, however, it requires additional measures to ensure the quality (reliability and accuracy) of the transmitted information, since real communication channels are subject to natural and artificial interference. Devices that implement the process of data transmission form communication systems. Depending on the method of presenting information, communication systems can be divided into sign (telegraph, telefax), sound (telephone), video and combined systems (television). The most developed communication system in our time is the Internet.

Data processing

Since information is not material, its processing consists in various transformations. Processing processes include any transfer of information from a medium to another medium. The information to be processed is called data. The main type of processing of primary information received by various devices is the transformation into a form that ensures its perception by the human senses. Thus, space photographs obtained in X-rays are converted into ordinary color photographs using special spectrum converters and photographic materials. Night vision devices convert an image obtained in infrared (thermal) rays into an image in the visible range. For some communication and control tasks, it is necessary to convert analog information. For this, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog signal converters are used.

The most important type of semantic information processing is the determination of the meaning (content) contained in a certain message. Unlike primary semantic information, it does not have statistical characteristics, that is, a quantitative measure - either there is a meaning or it is not. And how much of it, if any, is impossible to establish. The meaning contained in the message is described in an artificial language that reflects the semantic relationships between the words of the source text. A dictionary of such a language, called a thesaurus, resides in the message receiver. The meaning of words and phrases of the message is determined by referring them to certain groups of words or phrases, the meaning of which has already been established. Thesaurus, thus, allows you to establish the meaning of the message and, at the same time, is replenished with new semantic concepts. The described type of information processing is used in information retrieval systems and machine translation systems.

One of the widespread types of information processing is the solution of computational problems and problems automatic control with the help of computers. Information processing is always done with a purpose. To achieve it, the order of actions on information, leading to a given goal, must be known. This procedure is called an algorithm. In addition to the algorithm itself, you also need some device that implements this algorithm. In scientific theories, such a device is called an automaton. It should be noted as the most important feature of information that, due to the asymmetry of information interaction, new information arises during information processing, and the original information is not lost.

Analog and digital information

Sound is wave vibrations in a medium, such as air. When a person speaks, the vibrations of the throat ligaments are converted into wave vibrations of the air. If we consider sound not as a wave, but as oscillations at one point, then these oscillations can be represented as air pressure changing over time. Using a microphone, you can pick up pressure changes and convert them into electrical voltage. There was a transformation of air pressure into electrical voltage fluctuations.

Such a transformation can occur according to various laws, most often the transformation occurs according to a linear law. For example, like this:

U(t)=K(P(t)-P_0),

where U(t) is the electrical voltage, P(t) is the air pressure, P_0 is the mean air pressure and K is the conversion factor.

Both electrical voltage and air pressure are continuous functions in time. The functions U(t) and P(t) are information about the vibrations of the throat ligaments. These functions are continuous and such information is called analog. Music is a special case of sound and it can also be represented as some function of time. This will analog representation music. But music is also recorded in the form of notes. Each note has a duration that is a multiple of a predetermined duration, and a pitch (do, re, mi, fa, sol, etc.). If this data is converted into numbers, then we get a digital representation of music.

Human speech is also a special case of sound. It can also be represented in analog form. But just as music can be broken down into notes, speech can be broken down into letters. If each letter is given its own set of numbers, then we will get a digital representation of speech. The difference between analog information and digital information is that analog information is continuous, while digital information is discrete. The transformation of information from one type to another, depending on the type of transformation, is called differently: simply "conversion", such as digital-to-analog conversion, or analog-to-digital conversion; complex transformations are called "encoding", eg delta coding, entropy coding; the transformation between characteristics such as amplitude, frequency or phase is called "modulation", for example, amplitude-frequency modulation, pulse-width modulation.

Usually, analog conversions are quite simple and can be easily handled by various devices invented by man. A tape recorder converts magnetization on film into sound, a voice recorder converts sound into magnetization on film, a video camera converts light into magnetization on film, an oscilloscope converts electrical voltage or current into an image, and so on. Converting analog information to digital is much more difficult. Some transformations cannot be performed by the machine or can be done with great difficulty. For example, converting speech into text, or converting a recording of a concert into notes, and even by its nature a digital representation: it is very difficult for a machine to convert text on paper into the same text in computer memory.

Why, then, use the digital representation of information, if it is so difficult? The main advantage of digital information over analog is noise immunity. That is, in the process of copying information, digital information is copied as it is, it can be copied almost an infinite number of times, while analog information is noisy during copying, its quality deteriorates. Usually, analog information can be copied no more than three times. If you have a two-cassette audio tape recorder, you can make such an experiment, try re-recording the same song from cassette to cassette several times, after a few such re-recordings you will notice how much recording quality has deteriorated. The information on the cassette is stored in analog form. You can rewrite music in mp3 format as many times as you like, and the quality of the music does not deteriorate. The information in an mp3 file is stored digitally.

Amount of information

A person or some other receiver of information, having received a portion of information, resolves some uncertainty. Let's take a tree as an example. When we saw the tree, we resolved a number of uncertainties. We learned the height of the tree, the type of tree, the density of the foliage, the color of the leaves, and if it is a fruit tree, then we saw the fruits on it, how ripe they were, etc. Before we looked at the tree, we did not know all this, after we looked at the tree, we resolved the uncertainty - we got information.

If we go out into the meadow and look at it, we will get a different kind of information, how big the meadow is, how tall the grass is, and what color the grass is. If a biologist enters the same meadow, he will, among other things, be able to find out: what varieties of grass grow in the meadow, what type of meadow this is, he will see which flowers have bloomed, which ones will just bloom, whether the meadow is suitable for grazing cows, etc. That is, he will receive more information than we do, since he had more questions before he looked at the meadow, the biologist will resolve more uncertainties.

The greater the uncertainty was resolved in the process of obtaining information, the more information we received. But this is a subjective measure of the amount of information, and we would like to have an objective measure. There is a formula for calculating the amount of information. We have some uncertainty, and we have N-th number of cases of resolution of uncertainty, and each case has some probability of resolution, then the amount of information received can be calculated using the following formula that Shannon suggested to us:

I = -(p_1 \log_(2)p_1 + p_2 \log_(2)p_2 + ... +p_N \log_(2)p_N), where

I is the amount of information;

N is the number of outcomes;

p_1, p_2, ..., p_N - outcome probabilities.

The amount of information is measured in bits - an abbreviation for the English words BInary digiT, which means a binary digit.

For equiprobable events, the formula can be simplified:

I = \log_(2)N, where

I is the amount of information;

N is the number of outcomes.

Take, for example, a coin and throw it on the table. It will land either heads or tails. We have 2 equally likely events. After we tossed a coin, we got \log_(2)2=1 bit of information.

Let's try to find out how much information we get after we roll the die. The cube has six sides - six equally likely events. We get: \log_(2)6 \approx 2.6. After we rolled the die on the table, we got approximately 2.6 bits of information.

The chance of seeing a Martian dinosaur when we leave our house is one in ten in a billion. How much information will we get about the Martian dinosaur after we leave the house?

-\left(((1 \over (10^(10))) \log_2(1 \over (10^(10))) + \left(( 1 - (1 \over (10^(10))) ) \right) \log_2 \left(( 1 - (1 \over (10^(10))) )\right)) \right) \approx 3,4 \cdot 10^(-9) bits.

Suppose we tossed 8 coins. We have 2^8 coin drop options. So after tossing coins we get \log_2(2^8)=8 bits of information.

When we ask a question and are equally likely to get a yes or no answer, then after answering the question we get one bit of information.

Surprisingly, if we apply the Shannon formula for analog information, then we will get an infinite amount of information. For example, the voltage at a point in an electrical circuit can take on an equiprobable value from zero to one volt. The number of outcomes we have is infinity, and by substituting this value into the formula for equiprobable events, we get infinity - an infinite amount of information.

Now I'll show you how to encode "War and Peace" with just one notch on any metal rod. Let's encode all the letters and signs found in "War and Peace" using two-digit numbers - they should be enough for us. For example, we will give the letter “A” the code “00”, the letter “B” - the code “01”, and so on, we will encode punctuation marks, Latin letters and numbers. We recode "War and Peace" using this code and get a long number, for example, this is 70123856383901874..., add a comma and zero before this number (0.70123856383901874...). The result is a number from zero to one. Let's put a risk on a metal rod so that the ratio of the left side of the rod to the length of this rod is exactly equal to our number. Thus, if we suddenly want to read War and Peace, we simply measure the left side of the rod to the risks and the length of the entire rod, divide one number by another, get the number and recode it back into letters (“00” to “A”, "01" in "B", etc.).

In reality, we will not be able to do this, since we will not be able to determine the lengths with infinite accuracy. Some engineering problems prevent us from increasing the measurement accuracy, and quantum physics shows us that after a certain limit, quantum laws will already interfere with us. Intuitively, we understand that the lower the measurement accuracy, the less information we receive, and the greater the measurement accuracy, the more information we receive. Shannon's formula is not suitable for measuring the amount of analog information, but there are other methods for this, which are discussed in Information Theory. In computer technology, a bit corresponds to the physical state of the information carrier: magnetized - not magnetized, there is a hole - no hole, charged - not charged, reflects light - does not reflect light, high electrical potential - low electrical potential. In this case, one state is usually denoted by the number 0, and the other by the number 1. Any information can be encoded by a sequence of bits: text, image, sound, etc.

Along with a bit, a value called a byte is often used, usually it is equal to 8 bits. And if the bit allows you to choose one equally likely option out of two possible, then the byte is 1 out of 256 (2 ^ 8). To measure the amount of information, it is also customary to use larger units:

1 KB (one kilobyte) 210 bytes = 1024 bytes

1 MB (one megabyte) 210 KB = 1024 KB

1 GB (one gigabyte) 210 MB = 1024 MB

In reality, the SI prefixes kilo-, mega-, giga- should be used for factors of 10^3, 10^6 and 10^9, respectively, but the practice of using factors with powers of two has historically developed.

A Shannon bit and a computer bit are the same if the probabilities of a zero or one occurring in a computer bit are equal. If the probabilities are not equal, then the amount of information according to Shannon becomes less, we saw this in the example of the Martian dinosaur. The computer amount of information gives an upper estimate of the amount of information. Volatile memory, after power is applied to it, is usually initialized with some value, for example, all ones or all zeros. It is clear that after power is supplied to the memory, there is no information there, since the values ​​in the memory cells are strictly defined, there is no uncertainty. Memory can store a certain amount of information, but after power is supplied to it, there is no information in it.

Disinformation is deliberately false information provided to an adversary or business partner for more effective combat operations, cooperation, checking for information leakage and direction of its leakage, detection potential clients black market. Also, disinformation (also misinformed) is the very process of manipulating information, such as: misleading someone by providing incomplete information or complete, but no longer necessary information, distortions of the context, distortions of a piece of information.

The purpose of such an impact is always the same - the opponent must act as the manipulator needs. The act of the object against which disinformation is directed may consist in making the decision necessary for the manipulator or in refusing to make a decision that is unfavorable for the manipulator. But in any case, the ultimate goal is the action that will be taken by the opponent.

Disinformation, therefore, is a product of human activity, an attempt to create a false impression and, accordingly, push for desired actions and / or inaction.

Types of disinformation:

Misleading a specific person or group of persons (including an entire nation);

Manipulation (by the actions of one person or a group of persons);

Creating public opinion about some problem or object.

Misrepresentation is nothing more than outright deception, the provision of false information. Manipulation is a method of influence aimed directly at changing the direction of people's activity. There are the following levels of manipulation:

Strengthening the values ​​(ideas, attitudes) that exist in the minds of people that are beneficial to the manipulator;

Partial change of views on a particular event or circumstance;

A radical change in life attitudes.

The creation of public opinion is the formation in society of a certain attitude towards the chosen problem.

Sources and links

en.wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia Wikipedia

youtube.com - YouTube video hosting

images.yandex.ua - Yandex pictures

google.com.ua - google pictures

en.wikibooks.org - wikibook

inf1.info – Planet of Informatics

old.russ.ru – Russian Journal

shkolo.ru - Information guide

5byte.ru - Informatics website

ssti.ru Information Technology

klgtu.ru - Informatics

informatika.sch880.ru - website of the computer science teacher O.V. Podvintseva

bibliofond.ru - digital library Library fund

life-prog.ru - programming