| 释义 |
information|ɪnfəˈmeɪʃən|
Forms: α. 4–6 enformacion, (-ioun, -ione, -yon), 6–7 enformation. β. 4–6 informacion, (-ioun, -yon), 6– information.
[a. OF. enformacion, informacion (mod.F. information), ad. L. informātiōn-em outline, concept, idea, in med.Schol.L. the action of ‘informing’ matter, n. of action from informāre to inform. Conformed to the L. spelling in 16th c. The L. n. had a very restricted use; the Eng. senses represent all the senses of the verb; but the chronological appearance of these does not accord with the logical order.]
I.
1. a. The action of informing (in sense 4 of the verb); formation or moulding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge. Now rare or Obs.
1387Trevisa Higden (Rolls) VI. 33 Þere is i-write þat fyve bookes com doun from heven for informacioun of mankynde. 1390Gower Conf. III. 145 A tale, which is evident Of trouthe in commendacion, Toward their enformacion. 1450–1530Myrr. our Ladye 140 Athanasius..made thys psalme..to comforte and enformacion of them that were in trew byleue. 1526Tindale Eph. vi. 4 Brynge them vppe with the norter and informacion off the lorde. 1597Hooker Eccl. Pol. v. xx. §11 Their [apocryphal books'] fitnesse for the publique information of life and manners. 1663J. Spencer Prodigies (1665) 20 To lead them to the light by a faithful information of their Judgments. 1736Butler Anal. ii. vii. 357 Our reason and affections, which God has given us for the information of our judgment and the conduct of our lives. 1813Jefferson Writ. (1830) IV. 182 The book I have read with extreme satisfaction and information.
†b. with an and pl. An item of training; an instruction. Obs.
c1386Chaucer Melib. ⁋904 Whanne Melibee hadde herd the grete skiles and resons of Dame Prudence, and hire wise informacions and techynges. 1553N. Grimalde Cicero's Offices Ep., Paines taking here to enriche themselves, with enformations of vertue. 1760Law Spir. Prayer i. 12 A most kind and loving information given by the God of love to his new-born offspring.
†c. Divine instruction, inspiration. Obs.
14..Circumcision in Tundale's Vis. (1843) 96 A prophete by holy enformacion. 1526Pilgr. Perf. (W. de W. 1531) 199 The holy apostles makyng this Crede by the instinccyon & informacyon of the holy goost. 1559Primer in Priv. Prayers (1851) 30 O God, which by the information of the Holy Ghost hast instructed the hearts of thy faithful.
d. Capacity of informing; instructiveness. rare.
1712J. Henley in Spect. No. 518 ⁋7 With a Number of Circumstances of equal Consequence and Information.
2. The action of informing (in sense 5 of the verb); communication of the knowledge or ‘news’ of some fact or occurrence; the action of telling or fact of being told of something.
1390Gower Conf. III. 66 This night for enformation Ye shall have an avision. c1400Mandeville (1839) v. 60, I haue vndirstonden be informacioun, that his lampe quencheþe. 1513More in Grafton Chron. (1568) II. 759 This I have by credible informacion learned. 1555Eden Decades To Rdr. (Arb.) 50 The autoure..hath seene a greate parte him selfe..and gathered the residewe partly by information. 1664–94South Twelve Serm. II. 113 By way of Information or Notification of the Thing to Him. 1794Paley Evid. (1825) II. 318 Difficulties always attend imperfect information. 1843Borrow Bible in Spain xlix. 282/1 For your information, however, I will tell you that it is not.
3. a. Knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event; that of which one is apprised or told; intelligence, news. spec. contrasted with data.
c1450Lydg. & Burgh Secrees 1695 Ferthere to geve the Enformacioun, Of mustard whyte the seed is profitable. 1464J. Gresham in Paston Lett. No. 482 II. 144, I have spoken onto Catesby, and delyvered hym your enfromacion. 1555Eden Decades 63 Muche otherwyse then Zamudius information. 1662Stillingfl. Orig. Sacr. ii. ii. §1 That he have sufficient information concerning the things he undertakes to write of. 1727Swift Gulliver iii. ii, It was necessary to give the reader this information. 1895Law Times Rep. LXXIII. 651/1 If the underwriters wanted to know more, they ought to have asked for information. 1970[see datum 1 d]. 1970O. Dopping Computers & Data Processing i. 14 In administrative data processing, a distinction is sometimes made between data and information by calling raw facts in great quantity ‘data’, and using the word ‘information’ for highly concentrated and improved data derived from the raw facts.
attrib.1890M. Townsend U.S. Pref. 1 The mass of curious facts, coincidences, and information-items from which this book is evolved. 1891Daily News 2 Oct. 4/7 Information agent at the German Exhibition.
†b. with an and pl. An item of information or intelligence; a fact or circumstance of which one is told. In earlier use, An account, relation, narrative (of something). Obs.
1527R. Thorne in Hakluyt Voy. (1589) 252 An information of the parts of the world discouered by him. a1533Ld. Berners Gold. Bk. M. Aurel. (1546) Ll viij b, I..haue herde of the a longe informacion. 1624(title) A Briefe information of the Affaires of the Palatinate. 1666Marvell Corr. Wks. 1872–5 II. 190 Many informations are daily brought in to the two Committees about the Fire of London. 1724Swift Drapier's Lett. Wks. 1755 V. ii. 61 All the assistance I had, were some informations from an eminent person. 1748Chesterfield Lett. (1792) I. 327 The informations I have lately received in your favour from Mr. Harte. 1845Carlyle Schiller (ed. 2) Pref., Great changes in our notions, informations, in our relations to the Life of Schiller.
c. Separated from, or without the implication of, reference to a person informed: that which inheres in one of two or more alternative sequences, arrangements, etc., that produce different responses in something, and which is capable of being stored in, transferred by, and communicated to inanimate things.
Information in this sense may at the same time be, or be regarded as, information in the following sense.
1937Discovery Nov. 329/1 The whole difficulty resides in the amount of definition in the [television] picture, or, as the engineers put it, the amount of information to be transmitted in a given time. 1944Jrnl. Sci. Instrum. XXI. 133/2 Information is conveyed to the machine by means of punched cards. 1953J. C. Eccles Neurophysiol. Basis Mind i. 1 We may say that all ‘information’ is conveyed in the nervous system in the form of coded arrangements of nerve impulses. 1953Watson & Crick in Nature 30 May 965/2 In a long molecule many different permutations are possible, and it therefore seems likely that the precise sequence of the bases is the code which carries the genetical information. 1958Spectator 4 July 22/3 The complex molecules carrying genetic information from one generation to the next. 1961New Scientist 26 Jan. 201/2 The colour information is added to a conventional black-and-white signal on an amplitude and phase modulated sub-carrier located in the vision band. 1962Listener 10 May 817/2 The fertilized ovum of a particular animal is not, in any obvious way, like that animal; yet its development will proceed along certain lines only. It contains the information characteristic of that particular kind of animal. 1962Times 5 July 15/7 A disc is apt to give slightly inferior quality towards the centre, where the information is more crowded. 1971R. M. Dowben Cell Biol. v. 97 Genetically transmitted information precisely determines the amino acid composition of all proteins synthesized by each cell.
d. As a mathematically defined quantity (see quots.); now esp. one which represents the degree of choice exercised in the selection or formation of one particular symbol, sequence, message, etc., out of a number of possible ones, and which is defined logarithmically in terms of the statistical probabilities of occurrence of the symbol or the elements of the message.
The latter sense (introduced by Shannon, quot. 19482, though foreshadowed earlier) is that used in information theory, where information is usually regarded as synonymous with entropy.
1925R. A. Fisher in Proc. Cambr. Philos. Soc. XXII. 709 What we have spoken of as the intrinsic accuracy of an error curve may equally be conceived as the amount of information in a single observation belonging to such a distribution. Ibid. 710 If p is the probability of an observation falling into any one class, the amount of information in the sample is S{ob}(∂m/∂θ)2/m{cb} where m = np, is the expectation in any one class [and θ is the parameter]. 1928R. V. L. Hartley in Bell Syst. Techn. Jrnl. VII. 540 What we have done then is to take as our practical measure of information the logarithm of the number of possible symbol sequences. Ibid. 541 The information associated with 100 characters will be 500 log 2. 1935R. A. Fisher in Jrnl. R. Statistical Soc. XCVIII. 47 One could, therefore, develop a mathematical theory of quantity of information from these properties as postulates, and this would be a normal mathematical procedure. Ibid., As a mathematical quantity information is strikingly similar to entropy in the mathematical theory of thermo-dynamics. 1948N. Wiener Cybernetics iii. 76 Thus a reasonable measure of the amount of information associated with the curve f1(x) is: ∫∞- ∞ (log2f1(x))f1(x) dx. The quantity we here define as amount of information is the negative of the quantity usually defined as entropy in similar situations. The definition..is not the one given by R. A. Fisher for statistical problems, although it is a statistical definition. 1948C. E. Shannon in Bell Syst. Techn. Jrnl. XXVII. 392 We have represented a discrete information source as a Markoff process. Can we define a quantity which will measure, in some sense, how much information is ‘produced’ by such a process, or better, at what rate information is produced? Suppose we have a set of possible events whose probabilities of occurrence are p1, p2,{ddd}, pn. These probabilities are known but that is all we know concerning which event will occur. Can we find a measure of how much ‘choice’ is involved in the selection of the event or of how uncertain we are of the outcome? If there is such a measure, say H(p1, p2,{ddd}, pn), it is reasonable to require of it the following properties: [etc.]. Ibid. 394 We shall call H = - σpi log pi the entropy of the set of probabilities p1{ddd}, pn... The quantity H has a number of interesting properties which further substantiate it as a reasonable measure of choice or information. 1949W. Weaver in Shannon & Weaver Math. Theory Communication 99 The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information. Ibid. 100 Information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. 1953D. Gabor in W. Jackson Communication Theory i. 2 ‘Information’ in the exact sense of communication theory is far more restricted than the vague concept which goes by this name in everyday life. It may also be mentioned that this definition has nothing to do with the value of information. It is a measure of the minimum effort or cost by which the message can be transmitted, not of its importance or consequences. 1953J. B. Carroll Study of Lang. vii. 200 Information (in the special sense required in communication theory) may be measured in bits. 1953C. F. Hockett in Saporta & Bastian Psycholinguistics (1961) 45/2 The keynote of the quantification of information is the matter of choice of any message, for actual transmission at a given time, from a fixed repertory of possible messages. 1956L. Brillouin Sci. & Information Theory p. x, Information is a function of the ratio of the number of possible answers before and after, and we choose a logarithmic law in order to insure additivity of the information contained in independent situations... This definition cannot distinguish between information of great importance and a piece of news of no great value for the person who receives it. 1957Kendall & Buckland Dict. Statistical Terms 138 In a specialised sense in the theory of estimation, the amount of information about a parameter θ from a sample of n independent observations drawn at random from a population with a frequency function f(x, θ) is defined as nE(∂ log f/∂θ)2 ≡ n ∫∞-∞ (∂ log f(x, θ)/∂θ)2f(x, θ)dx. 1968J. Lyons Introd. Theoret. Ling. ii. 84 Another important statistical notion has to do with the amount of information carried by a linguistic unit in a given context; and this also is determined by (or is generally held to be determined by) its frequency or occurrence in that context. 1968P. A. P. Moran Introd. Probability Theory i. 53 In statistical theory ‘information’ is usually ‘information about a particular parameter’ of a probability distribution, and is measured by the reciprocal of the square of the standard deviation of some estimator of that parameter. 1970O. Dopping Computers & Data Processing i. 19 Any language with different frequency of occurrence of different symbols has less information per symbol than another (hypothetical) language with the same number of symbol values but with equal probability of occurrence of them all.
4. The action of informing against, charging, or accusing (a person).
(Originally the general sense whence 5 arises; now Obs., exc. as transf. from 5: cf. also 6.)
1480Caxton Chron. Eng. ccxliii. (1482) 288 A grete part of the peple..weren in grete errour and grutchyng ayenst the kyng thurgh Informacyon of lyes and fals lesyng that this Serle has made. 1535Joye Apol. Tindale (Arb.) 24 Besydis this condempnacion of me by hearsaye or enformacion of hys faccyon. 1550Crowley (title) An informacion and Peticion agaynst the oppressours of the pore Commons of this Realme. 1565Golding Cæsar 16 Here vppon hee called Dumnorix aside..laying before him what informations were put vp against him. 1613Shakes. Hen. VIII, v. iii. 110 In seeking tales and Informations Against this man.
5. spec. in Eng. Law.
a. A complaint or charge against a person lodged with or presented to a court or magistrate, in order to the institution of criminal proceedings without formal indictment.
The original object of this procedure was to dispense with the previous finding of a grand jury. Criminal informations are laid (a) in any criminal court, partly at suit of the Crown, partly at suit of an individual, to enforce a penalty under a penal statute (the penalty being paid partly to the use of the Crown, partly to the informer); (b) in the Queen's Bench Division, in the name of the Crown alone, being either ex officio informations for misdemeanours dangerous to the government, e.g. seditious libel, or informations filed by the Master of the Crown Office, on the complaint of a private individual, for gross misdemeanours; (c) before a Justice of Peace, in matters that may be dealt with summarily, being a statement of the facts by the prosecutor, verbally or in writing, with or without oath. Most of these uses exist also in the law of the United States, where the most common sense is ‘An official criminal charge presented, usually, by the prosecuting officers of the state, without the interposition of a grand jury’.
1629in Cobbett State Trials (1809) III. 300 This matter [against Elliot, Hollis and Valentine] is brought in this court by way of Information, where it ought to be by way of Indictment. 1898Encycl. Laws Eng. (Renton) VI. 446 The distinction between an Information and an Indictment is that an Indictment is an accusation found by the oath of twelve men.., whereas an Information is only the allegation of the officer who exhibits it.
(a)1467–8Rolls of Parlt. V. 633/1 That..every such Infourmer..be admitted to sue for the Kyng and hym self Actions..uppon the same by Enformation to be ȝeven or made in eny of the seid Courtes. 1523Act 14 & 15 Hen. VIII, c. 1 The person..that will first sue for the same, by originall of dette, bill, plainte, or informacion, in any of the kynges courtes. 1647May Hist. Parl. i. i. 13 They were also vexed with informations in inferiour Courts; where they were sentenced, and fined for matters done in Parliament. 1742Johnson Deb. Parlt. (1787) II. 407 The prospect of raising money by detecting their practices incited many to turn information into a trade. 1769Blackstone Comm. IV. xxiii. (1809) 308 1838 Dickens O. Twist liii, The gentleman being accommodated with threepennyworth of brandy to restore her, lays an information next day, and pockets half the penalty. 1875T. S. Pritchard Quarter Sess. Pract. iv. §4. 173 Prosecutions by information at the quarter sessions can only be instituted in cases where, by a penal statute, an informer is allowed to take this course to recover the penalty; but this proceeding is generally disused.
(b)1482Rolls Parlt. VI. 208/1 If the Kyngs Attourney Generall of his said Duchie..put a Bill into eny of the Kyngs Courtes by wey of enformation..the Justices of the same Court..shall have power [etc.]. 1537Act 28 Hen. VIII in Bolton Stat. Irel. (1621) 167 And that the kings suit by writ, bill, plaint, enditement, and enformation in that behalfe be commenced. 1588–9Act 31 Eliz. c. 5 §3 Suche officer[s] of recorde as have in respecte of their offices heretofore laufullye used to exhibite informacions or sue upon penall lawes. 1769Blackstone Comm. IV. xxiii. §3 (1809) 309 The objects of the other species of informations, filed by the master of the crown-office upon the complaint or relation of a private subject, are any gross and notorious misdemesnors, riots, batteries, libels, and other immoralities of an atrocious kind, not peculiarly tending to disturb the government. 1803Mackintosh Def. Peltier Wks. 1846 III. 291 No prosecutions,—no Criminal Informations followed the liberty and the boldness of the language then employed. 1827Hallam Const. Hist. (1876) II. viii. 4 The attorney-general..exhibited an information against Sir John Eliot for words uttered in the house. 1883Sir J. F. Stephen Hist. Crim. Law Eng. ix. I. 294 A criminal information..may be preferred only for misdemeanours, and only by the Attorney or Solicitor General, or by the Master of the Crown Office acting under the orders of the Queen's Bench Division, upon a motion made in open court.
(c)1733J. Harvey (title) Orders, Warrants, Informations, and variety of Precedents for Justices of the Peace. 1802M. Edgeworth Moral T. (1816) I. xv. 122 A magistrate, with whom informations had been lodged. 1897C. M. Atkinson Magistrate's Ann. Pract. ii. 22 The mode of commencing proceedings before justices of the peace is by preferring a complaint or an information..[It] is called an information when it is the foundation for summary proceedings of a criminal nature, which are followed either by a conviction or an acquittal.
b. A complaint of the Crown in respect of some civil claim, in the form of a statement of the facts by the attorney general or other proper officer, either ex officio, or on the relation or report of a private individual.
Civil informations are or have been laid: † (a) in Chancery, on behalf of the crown or government, or of those of whom the crown has custody, as Idiots (obs.); (b) in the Exchequer, under the equitable jurisdiction of the court (called English information from its resemblance to a complaint in equity formerly called an English bill); now transferred to the Queen's Bench Division; (c) at Common Law, for Intrusion or trespass on crown lands; Purpresture or encroachment on crown or public lands; in personam, for money due to the crown; in rem, for goods, derelicts, etc. belonging to the crown, and for default in payment of excise duties.
1624Act 21 Jas. I, c. 14 (title) An Act to admit the Subject to plead the General Issue in Informations of Intrusion brought on the Kings behalf, and to retain his possession till Trial. 1768Blackstone Comm. III. xvii. (1809) 261 An information on behalf of the crown, filed in the exchequer by the king's attorney general. 1819Wightwick Rep. 167 marg., The Prince of Wales may file an English information of intrusion by his Attorney General, for lands parcel of the Dutchy of Cornwall. 1838Meeson & Welsby Rep. II. 23 An information of intrusion, to recover possession of certain encroachments on the wastes of the Crown. 1865Act 28 & 29 Vict. c. 104 §6 An information, styled an English information, exhibited in the Court of Exchequer. 1883Rules Sup. Crt. i. i, All actions which..were commenced by bill or information in the High Court of Chancery..shall be instituted in the High Court of Justice by a proceeding to be called an action. 1888Daily News 4 Dec. 5/2 By an exercise of the Royal prerogative an ancient method of procedure, known as an English information, is adopted for the settlement of these foreshore disputes between the Crown and its subjects.
c. information quo warranto (superseding the ancient Writ of Quo warranto): the step by which proceedings are commenced to remedy the usurpation of an office or franchise.
1765Blackstone Comm. I. xviii. (1809) 485 An information in the nature of a writ of quo warranto, to enquire by what warrant the members now exercise their corporate power. 1827Hallam Const. Hist. (1876) II. xii. 453 An information, as it is called, quo warranto, was accordingly brought into the court of King's bench against the corporation.
6. In other legal systems.
a. In Civil Law. (See quot.)
1774S. Hallifax Anal. Rom. Civil Law (1795) 125 Informations are arguments urged before the Judge by the Advocates on both sides, after the Pleadings and Proofs are concluded. 1863H. Cox Instit. ii. iv. 404.
b. In Scots Law. (a) in Civil Procedure: A written argument upon a case ordered either by a Lord Ordinary in the Court of Session when reporting the case to the Inner House (obs.), or by the Court of Justiciary in a case where difficult questions of law or relevancy are raised before it (now rare). (b) in Criminal Procedure: A statement or complaint in writing in which a person is specifically charged with a criminal offence, upon which a warrant of commitment to gaol for trial may proceed.
1681Stair Inst. Law Scot. iv. xxxix. 14 (1832) 690 All informations and bills relating to interlocutors given, or to be given. 1701Sc. Acts Will. III, c. 6 Enacts and ordains that all Informers shall signe their Informations. 1752J. Louthian Form of Process (ed. 2) 102 The Clerk..reads the Prosecutor's Information, with the Information on or Answers thereto for the Pannel, off the Book; and after all is read, the Preses resumes the Heads of the Information and Answers to the Lords, and desires their Opinion. 1754Erskine Princ. Sc. Law (1828) iv. iv. §85 No person can be imprisoned in order to trial for any crime, without a warrant in writing, expressing the cause, and proceeding upon a signed information. 1768in D. Hume Comm. Law Sc. II. x. §4 In the information on the part of the pannel very alarming consequences are endeavoured to be grafted on the doctrine pled in behalf of the prosecutor in this case.
c. Applied also to similar proceedings in foreign systems of judicature, ancient or modern.
1601R. Johnson Kingd. & Commw. (1603) 57 [He] is forced to answer presently to the information of his adversarie if he be present. 1625Gonsalvio's Sp. Inquis. 1 Whensoeuer any denunciation (as they terme it) or rather information is giuen against any person..the Inquisitors accustomably vse this kind of practice. 1770Langhorne Plutarch (1879) II. 909/2 The information was first laid under the archonship of Chœrondas. 1781Gibbon Decl. & F. xvii. II. 60 The terrors of a malicious information, which might select them as the accomplices, or even as the witnesses, perhaps, of an imaginary crime, perpetually hung over the heads of the principal citizens of the Roman world. 1875Jowett Plato (ed. 2) III. 107 Then follow informations and convictions for treason.
II.
†7. The action of ‘informing’ with some active or essential quality (see inform v. 3); the giving of a form or character to something; inspiration, animation (e.g. of the body by the soul).
1646Sir T. Browne Pseud. Ep. vi. i. 274 There was a seminality and contracted Adam in the rib, which by the information of a soule, was individuated into Eve. 1669Clarendon Ess. Tracts (1727) 117 That..no information of pride may enter into us to make us believe that we are better than other men. 1701Norris Ideal World ii. ii. 72 To be always in a separate state would be violent and unnatural to spirits made apt for the information of bodies, to which therefore they would naturally require to be united. 1870Emerson Soc. & Solit., Works & Days Wks. (Bohn) III. 65 There does not seem any limit to these new informations of the same Spirit that made the elements at first.
III. 8. attrib. and Comb., as information content, information desk, information explosion [explosion 4 b], information flow, information gap [gap n.1 6 a], information office, information service, information storage, information system, information transfer, information work; information-carrying, information-gathering (so information gatherer), information-giving, information-seeking vbl. ns. and ppl. adjs.; information bureau, an office where information is given and questions are answered; also fig.; information officer, a person engaged in the provision of specialized information; information processing, the processing of information so as to yield new or more useful information; data processing; information retrieval, the tracing of information stored in books, computers, or other collections of reference material; information revolution, the increase in the availability of information and the changes in the ways it is stored and disseminated that have occurred through the use of computers; information room (see quot. 1958); information science, (that branch of knowledge which is concerned with) the procedures by which information, esp. that relating to technical or scientific subjects, is stored, retrieved, and disseminated; hence information scientist, a person employed in providing an information service, or one who studies the methods used to do so; information technology, the branch of technology concerned with the dissemination, processing, and storage of information, esp. by means of computers. Also information theory.
1922E. Wallace Flying Fifty-Five vii. 44 Well, Jebson... You're a pretty fine *information bureau! You told me that Patience hadn't a ghost of a chance. 1926Aslib Prospectus, The objects of the Association are..to develop the usefulness and efficiency of special libraries and information bureaux under whatever title they may function. 1968Listener 4 July 31/3 The information bureau of the Disabled Living Activities Group.
1962Science Survey IV. 68 The *information-carrying capacity of a wave depends directly on the frequency. 1971J. Z. Young Introd. Study Man p. v, The spectacular recent information that biochemistry has provided about the large molecules in the body, and especially about the information-carrying properties of the nucleic acids.
1928Bell Syst. Techn. Jrnl. VII. 541 For example, in the Baudot System..the number s of primary symbols is..2 and the *information content of one selection is log 2. 1937J. C. Wilson Television Engin. xii. 426 The information-content of a television image has been evaluated solely from the point of view of what is transmitted. 1965Language XLI. 385 This decomposition, or normal form, is of special interest because of various correlations with vocabulary, information-content, etc.
1967Economist 11 Nov. 627/3 A national Referral Centre for Science and Technology is trying to build up a world-wide ‘*information desk’ for advice on where and how to obtain information. 1973D. MacKenzie Postscript to Dead Let. 23, I..put the key in an envelope marked to be called for and left it at the Information Desk.
1964New Statesman 13 Mar. 396/2 The ‘population explosion’ has collided with the ‘*information explosion’. Vastly more people and more kinds of people are chasing vastly more information about more kinds of things. 1972Jrnl. Librarianship IV. 161 The advent of ISR roughly coincided with the first commercial applications of computers and it was then thought that very rapid handling of coded data was all that was needed to cope with the ‘information explosion’.
1953C. F. Hockett in Saporta & Bastian Psycholinguistics (1961) 64/1 Energy flow is power; *information-flow is entropy; money-flow (at least in one direction) is income. 1965H. I. Ansoff Corporate Strategy (1968) i. 19 Product-market characteristics create operating needs, and these, in turn, determine the structure of authority, responsibility, work flows, and information flows within the firm.
1969Daily Tel. 11 Jan. 12/8 Bold human causes..will not be served by ignoring the new technologies which space research is encouraging; and Britain would be well advised to close the *information gap which seems to be developing. 1971K. Hopkins Hong Kong iii. 95 Mr. Woo's speech was an example of the many and repeated expressions of concern by members of the public and of Government about a so-called ‘information gap’ between Government and the people.
1964M. McLuhan Understanding Media (1967) ii. xxviii. 302 Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as *information-gatherer. 1971J. Z. Young Introd. Study Man xxiv. 317 One of man's many paradoxes is that although with him each individual organism is more important than in other animals as an information-gatherer for the species, yet his manner of life is largely controlled by his fellows.
1964M. McLuhan Understanding Media (1967) ii. xiv. 149 In the age of instant information man..assumes the role of *information-gathering. 1967Cox & Grose Organiz. Bibliogr. Rec. by Computer 70 A subject-specialist studies the information needs and information-gathering habits of a group of teachers.
1908Westm. Gaz. 1 July 6/3 The first products of Canada, states one of the numerous *information-giving tablets, are worth thirty million dollars a year. 1927J. Adams Errors in School iv. 122 Instruction must be distinguished from mere information-giving.
1890W. Booth In Darkest Eng. App. p. xiv, We shall also be glad, through the *information office of Labour Department, to give you..further information.
1918E. S. Farrow Dict. Mil. Terms 310 *Information officers..send to their own commanders all information of military importance to them. 1935Aslib Rep. Proc. 12th Conf. 38 (heading) B. Fullman... (Information Officer, British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association). 1947Jrnl. Documentation II. 240, I am not a librarian at all; I am not even a trained information officer. 1970Aslib Proc. XXII. ix. p. ii (Advt.), Vacancy for Scientific Information Officer at the Commonwealth Forestry Bureau.
1958Automation Mar. 65 (heading) *Information processing. 1959Unesco Bull. Libr. XIII. 226 Nearly 2,000 electronic computer experts took part in the International Conference on Information Processing organized by Unesco in Paris from 15 to 20 June. 1964T. W. McRae Impact of Computers on Accounting vii. 190 Even today few companies segregate ‘information processing’ or even ‘data processing’ under a separate cost head. 1970O. Dopping Computers & Data Processing i. 11 Many speak of the advent of mechanized information processing as the second industrial revolution. Ibid. 15 When both input and output are data, that is, digital information consisting of a great number of records in standardized layout, the information processing is usually called data processing.
1950C. N. Mooers Theory Digital Handling Non-Numerical Information (Zator Techn. Bull. No. 48) 5 The requirements of *information retrieval, of finding information whose location or very existence is a-priori unknown, now requires that it be possible by some efficient technique to specify a selection of complexes Cj by means of any set or combination of descriptors chosen in any way from the vocabulary ((aj)). 1958Listener 11 Dec. 983/1 Only a week or two ago there was a conference on information retrieval in Washington. 1963Publishers' Weekly 23 Sept. 34/2 At the Oxford store, the feature which so far has attracted the most attention is the free bibliographical information retrieval service. 1963Cambr. Rev. 12 Oct. 24/1 A book miscatalogued..is a book lost: and they [sc. librarians] thereby justify greater and greater expenditure on more and more elaborate systems of ‘information retrieval’. 1972Computers & Humanities VII. 61 Prof. D. Raj Reddy offers a set of exercises in statistics, natural language processing, language translation, poetry concordance, and information retrieval to interested readers.
1969SIAM Jrnl. Appl. Math. XVII. 1203 The recent advent of large scale, high-speed computers has produced an ‘*information revolution’. 1983Listener 23 June 22/1 Societies are about to become divided between inner-city poor and small-town rich—a new Two Nations created by the information revolution.
1934J. Moylan Scotland Yard (ed. 2) v. 132 At Scotland Yard there are *Information and Operation Rooms from which the wireless cars are directed. 1940R. Morrish Police & Crime-Detection ii. 28 Every Force has its ‘Information Room’, to which members of the public should report by telephone anything suspicious. 1958A. Garfitt Bk. for Police I. iii. 77 An Information Room is established at some [police] headquarters and is the centre through which information, particularly as to crime and suspected crime, can be disseminated by wireless, teleprinter or telephone. 1970P. Laurie Scotland Yard i. 16 The first floor carries the electronic complexities of the Information Room.
1960Computers & Automation IX. 39/2 Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania... Prof. Saul Gorn, Chairman, Computer and *Information Sciences Curriculum. 1962Conf. on Training Science Information Specialists 1961–62 (Georgia Inst. Technol.) 115 Information science..investigates the properties and behavior of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability. 1963Library Jrnl. LXXXVIII. 4161/1 The information sciences are conceived as: 1) the study of the properties, structure, and transmission of specialized knowledge; and 2) the development of methods for its useful organization and dissemination. 1971C. W. Hanson Introd. Science-Information Work 2 ‘Information science’ can be used to imply..the exploitation of scientific and technical information of all kinds... On the other hand, it is often used to imply the application of science and technology..to handling information generally.
1958Nature 4 Jan. 20/1 A meeting will be held on January 23..to discuss terms of inauguration of an Institute of *Information Scientists. The aims of the proposed Institute would include the promotion of high standards in scientific and technical information work, the promotion of educational courses, and the establishment of qualifications for those engaged in such information work. 1963Aslib Proc. XV. 100 These are post-graduate courses for those about to become information scientists. 1972Jrnl. Librarianship IV. 169 The American protagonists of IS generally say that people involved in this science should be called information scientists.
1956J. Klein Study of Groups x. 140 The whole elaborate process of *information-seeking, evaluation and decision.
1935E. S. Hedges in Aslib Rep. Proc. 12th Conf. 35 An *information service which distributes in-coming information to interested quarters can be more effective than one which merely renders the information available on request. 1950N.Y. Times 20 Apr. 1/8 Mr. Kolarek..has been in Czechoslovakia since September, 1945, serving first as assistant and later as chief press attache and information service director. 1968B. E. Holm How to manage your Information iii. 55 The Dow Chemical Company is one of the many organizations which provides information services to its engineers.
1950*Information storage [see information transfer below]. 1972Jrnl. Librarianship IV. 161 Somewhat later, it was realized that, to ‘retrieve’ information from a place, it obviously had to be stored prior to the retrieval, so the term was augmented to ‘Information storage and retrieval’ (ISR).
1953C. F. Hockett in Saporta & Bastian Psycholinguistics (1961) 64/2 If it is necessary to maintain some analogy between an *information-system and a power-system, then entropy can better be compared to voltage. 1964T. W. McRae Impact of Computers on Accounting iii. 82 The objective of an information system..is to note all of the events happening within the organization being controlled, to extract those events which require to be reported and to report them to the controlling authority fast enough for compensating action to be possible. 1969D. C. Hague Managerial Econ. i. 18 The information system [of a firm]..will be partly a rather mechanical system for providing routine reports about things like production, costs, sales or profits. It will also be partly a much less formal arrangement whereby those within the firm pass on information..to those who need it.
1958Leavitt & Whisler in Harvard Business Rev. XXXVI. 41/1 The new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it *information technology. 1979London Rev. Bks. 25 Oct. 21/1 Attali is a French economist..who writes..studies of, for example, music (Bruits) and information technology. 1984Nat. Westminster Bank Q. Rev. Aug. 13 The development of cable television was made possible by the convergence of telecommunications and computing technology (..generally known in Britain as information technology).
1950Amer. Scientist XXXVIII. 278/2 A consideration of the effects of information storage and *information transfer on physical, chemical, biological, psychological, and sociological systems..may help in understanding and predicting many of the aspects of our universe. 1964G. H. Haggis et al. Introd. Molecular Biol. x. 279 Each operator with its associated structural genes forms a coordinated unit of information-transfer to which Jacob and Monod have given the name operon.
1935B. Fullman in Aslib Rep. Proc. 12th Conf. 38 Organised *information work is at present only in its infancy. 1959Aslib Proc. XI. 290 The role of the textbook in technical information work is usually a fundamental one. 1972Jrnl. Librarianship IV. 111 (inside front cover), The Journal of Librarianship is an independent quarterly journal dealing with all aspects of library and information work.
▸ information overload n. exposure to or provision of too much information; a problematic situation or state of mental stress arising from this (cf. information fatigue n.).
1962R. L. Meier Communications Theory of Urban Growth vii. 132 (heading) The threat of *information overload... The problems of widespread saturation in communications flow may arise within the next half century. 1996Independent (Electronic ed.) 15 Oct. The report..found that half of the managers already complained of information overload, partly caused by ‘enormous’ amounts of unsolicited information, and the same proportion expected the Internet to become a prime cause of the problem in the next two years. 2001C. Glazebrook Madolescents 81 Thank you, Mickey. No need for information overload.
▸ information-poor n. and adj. (a) n. (with the and pl. concord) people who lack adequate access to information (esp. that considered important for full participation in society or politics), as a class; (b) adj. lacking access to such information; (also) containing or providing little information.
1970E. B. Parker in H. Sackman & N. Nie Information Utility & Social Choice 53 Will the information utilities..be utilized..to exacerbate the serious tensions in our society by further widening the gulf between the information-rich and the *information-poor? 1974G. G. Unruh & W. M. Alexander Innovations in Secondary Educ. (ed. 2) i. 6 Schools..continue to design their programs for an information-poor society. 1985Ann. Statistics 13 436 The more interesting PP methods are able to ignore irrelevant (i.e. noisy and information-poor) variables. 2000Sunday News (Dar-es-Salaam) 26 Mar. 2/5 Ironical, isn't it, that the so-called information poor may be sitting on a gold mine of information stored in the DNA of the plants they use daily.
▸ information-rich adj. and n. (a) adj. containing, providing, or possessing a great deal of information; (also) having easy access to information (esp. that considered important for full participation in society or politics); (b) n. (with the and pl. concord) people who have access to such information, as a class.
1959C. B. Anfinsen Molecular Basis of Evol. x. 205 These two cellular components are somehow linked in the process of establishing *information-rich biosynthetic machinery in the cytoplasm. 1970E. B. Parker in H. Sackman & N. Nie Information Utility & Social Choice 53 Will the information utilities..be utilized..to exacerbate the serious tensions in our society by further widening the gulf between the information-rich and the information-poor? 1972Psychol. Today Feb. 73 Two aspects of the communications structure of information-rich open societies are destroying two classical functions of the school. 2000Independent on Sunday 2 Jan. i. 21/2 The information-rich among us will move further into the virtual world made possible by information technology.
▸ information superhighway n. Computing and Telecomm. a route or network for the high-speed transfer of information; esp. (a) a proposed national fibre-optic network in the United States; (b) the Internet; also in extended use.
1983Newsweek 3 Jan. 40/1 Two *information superhighways being built of fiber-optic cable will link Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. 1993N.Y. Times 26 Oct. c9/1 One of the technologies Vice President Al Gore is pushing is the information superhighway, which will link everyone at home or office to everything else. 2000Daily Tel. 16 Mar. (Connected section) 10/5 Schools using telephone modems or ISDN digital phone lines for connecting to the internet are discovering that traffic along the information superhighway often slows down to a crawl. 2001N.Y. Mag. 19 Mar. 105/1 The spinal cord, the body's information superhighway.
▸ information war n. a war during which the reporting or manipulation of information is particularly important or notable; a conflict over the possession or distribution of information; (also) an instance or period of information warfare (now the usual sense).
1966Information War (title of transcript) At Issue 69: The *Information War, National Educational Television. 1974T. L. Stoddard et al. Area Handbk. for Finland 95 The information war continued into the early 1970s. The influence of the media, like that of the educational system, was just being fully explored. 1982Financial Times (Nexis) 26 May 17 The Argentines have..been winning the information war hands down... Millions of viewers in friendly and neutral countries..have by default been receiving a one-sided anti-British picture so far as actuality material goes. 2002D. Verton Hacker Diaries viii. 178 Undoubtedly, the programs were also stored as part of a virtual cyberarsenal for possible use in a future information war.
▸ information warfare n. the strategic use of information or information technology for intelligence-gathering or military purposes; the deliberate disruption of information and communications systems, esp. by a terrorist or subversive group.
1981N.Y. Times 5 Feb. a23/3 A form of *information warfare develops, with an escalation in the number of leaks, and with foreign intelligence establishments learning a great deal about America's military capabilities. 1993A. Toffler & H. Toffler War & Anti-war iv. xvi. 140 In the office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense there is a unit..whose primary task is weighing the relative strength of opposing military forces... This unit has shown a strong interest in information warfare and what might be called info-doctrine. 1997Daily Tel. (Electronic ed.) 25 May Police and the security services are increasingly worried about the potential of information warfare and are working to combat the threat. |