信管专业英语教程英文课文 人民邮电出版社

Information management English

Content

Unit 1 ...................................................... 4

Text A About Information .................................................................. 4

Text B What Is information？ ............................................................ 9

Reading material ................................................................................ 13

Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom...................................... 13

Unit2 ..................................................... 19

Text A How Is Information Organized? ............................................... 19

Unit2 Text B What Is Information Design? ....................................... 22

Reading material ................................................................................ 27

Information management .................................................................. 27

Unit 3 .................................................... 32

Text A Information Technology ........................................................ 32

Text B Network ................................................................................ 35

Reading Material ................................................................................ 39

What is database? .............................................................................. 39

Unit 4 .................................................... 45

Text A Internet Introduction ............................................................ 45

TEXT B Internet Service ................................................................... 49

Reading material ................................................................................ 53

Internetworking Basics ....................................................................... 53

Unit5 ..................................................... 59

Text A Electronic Commerce (1) ...................................................... 59

Text B Electronic Commerce (ii) .......................................................... 63

Reading Material ................................................................................ 69

E-commerce shifting to Industrial Segmentation ............................... 69

Unite 6 .................................................. 73

Text A Information Economy .............................................................. 73

Text B GIS (geographic information system) ....................................... 76

Reading material ................................................................................ 81

Information Security Tips ................................................................... 81

Unit7 ..................................................... 87

Text A Security Technology ................................................................. 87

Text B Internet Vulnerabilities ............................................................ 92

Reading Material ................................................................................ 97

Information Security Glossary ............................................................ 97 Unit8 ................................................... 104

Text A Introduction to Networking and Terminology ........................ 104 Text B The difference between intranet and internet design ............ 108 Reading material .............................................................................. 113 Introduction to TCP/IP ...................................................................... 113 Unit 9 .................................................. 118

Text A Management Information Systems ................................... 118 Text B Data-Driven DSS .................................................................. 123 Reading material .............................................................................. 127 The Management Information Value Chain ...................................... 127 Unit 10 ................................................ 132

Text A E-Government ....................................................................... 132 Text B What is ERP？ ...................................................................... 135 Reading material .............................................................................. 140 Are E-books in Your Future? ............................................................. 141

Unit 1

Text AAbout Information

1. Information Society

An information society is a society in which the creation，distribution，diffusion，use，and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political，and cultural activity. The knowledge economy is its economic counterpart whereby wealth is created through the economic exploitation of understanding.

Specific to this kind of society is thecentral position informationtechnology has for production，economy，and society at large. Information society is seen as the successor to industrial society .Closely related concepts are the post-industrial society，post-modern society，knowledge society，telematic society，information revolution，and network society.

2. Information science

information science（also information studies）is an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the collection，classification，manipulation，storage，retrieval and dissemination of rmation science is by some regarded as synonym with library ，while others maintain the two terms cover different fields.

information science studies the application and usage of knowledge in

organizations，and the interaction between people ，organizations and information systems. It is often（mistakenly)considered a branch of computer science.It is actually a broad,interdisciplinary field，incorporating not only aspects of computer science ，but also mathematics，library science， cognitive science，and the social science.

Information science focuses on understanding problems from the perspective of the stakeholders involved and then applying information and other technologies as needed. inthe other words，ittackles systemic problems first rather than individual pieces of technology within that system. In this respect，information science can be seen as a response to technological determinism，the belief that technology “develops by its own laws，that it realizes its own potential ，limited only by the material resources available，and must therefore be regarded as an autonomous system controlling and ultimately permeating all other subsystems of society.” Within information science，attention has been given in recent years to human-computer interaction, groupware, the semantic web, value sensitive design, iterative design processed and the ways people generate, use, and find information. Today this field is called the Field of Information, and there are a growing number of schools and colleges of information.

Information science should not be confused with information theory, the study of a particular mathematical concept of information, or with library science, a field related to libraries which use some of the principles of information science.

3．Information Technology

Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology

Association of America (ITAA), is “the study,design,development,implementation,support or management of computer-based information systems,particularly software applications and computer Hardwar.”IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store,protect,process, transmit, and securely retrieve information

Today, the term information technology has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term is more recognizable than ever before. The information technology umbrella can be quite large, covering many fields. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management,networking,engineering computer hardware,database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems. When computer and communications technologies are combined, the result is information technology. Information Technology(IT) is a general term that describes any technology that helps to produce，manipulate，store，communicate，and/or disseminate information. Presumably，when speaking of Information Technology (IT) as a whole，it is noted that the use of computers and information are associated.

4. Information Theory

The main concepts of information theory can be grasped by considering the most widespread means of human communication: language. Two important aspects of a good language are as follows: First, the most

common words (e.g.，a”，“the”，“I”）should be shorter than less common words (e.g.,“benefit”,“generation”,“mediocre”), so that sentences will not be too long. Such a tradeoff in word length is analogous to data compression and is the essential aspect of source coding. Second, if part of a sentence is unheard or misheard due to noise----e.g., a passing car ----the listener should still be able to glean the meaning or the underlying message. Such robustness is as essential for an electronic communication system as it is for a language; properly building such robustness into communications is done by channel coding. Source coding and channel coding are the fundamental concerns of information theory.

Note that these concerns have nothing to do with the important of messages. For example, a platitude such as“Thank you! Come again” takes about as long to say or write as the urgent plea “Call an ambulance!”, while clearly the latter is more important and more meaningful. Information theory, however, does not consider message important or meaning, as these are matters of the quality of data rather than the quantity and readability of data, the latter of which is determined solely by probabilities.

Information theory is generally considered to have been founded in 1948 by Claude Shannon in his seminal work “A Mathematical theory of Communication”. The central paradigm of classical information theory is the engineering problem of the transmission of information over a noisy channel. The most fundamental results of this theory are Shannon’s source coding theorem, which establish that, on average, the number of bits needed to represent the result of an uncertain event is given by its entropy; and Shannon’s noisy-channel coding theorem which states that reliable communication is possible over noisy channels provided that the rate of

communication is below a certain threshold called the channel capacity can be approached in practice by using appropriate encoding and decoding systems.

Information theory is closely associated with a collecting of pure and applied disciplines that have been investigated and reduced to engineering practice under a verity of rubrics throughout the world over the past half century or more: adaptive systems, anticipatory systems, artificial intelligence, complex systems, complexity science, cybernetics, informatics, machine learning, along with systems sciences of many descriptions. Information theory is a broad and deep mathematical theory, with equally broad and deep applications, amongst which is the vital field of coding theory.

Coding theory is concerned with finding explicit methods, called codes, of increasing the efficiency and reducing the net error rate of data communication over a noisy channel to near the limit that Shannon proved is the maximum possible for that channel. These channel to near the limit that data compression (source coding) and error-correction (channel coding) techniques. In the latter case, it took many years to find the methods Shannon’s work proved were possible. A third class of information theory codes are cryptographicalgorithms (both codes and ciphers). Concepts, methods and results from coding theory and information theory are widely used in cryptography and cryptanalysis.

Information theory is also used in information retrieval, intelligence gathering, statistics, and even in musical composition.

Text BWhat Is information？

Now, although differences in such cases are virtual only, the information itself is not. It is just another type of information – indeed, the most elementary one. I will subsequently call it parainformation (by contrast, the hitherto discussed “juxtaposition-type” information will be called structural information).

There are many systems which can deal with parainformation only. Let us examine some of them briefly.

Photocell-operated systems (doors, elevators, etc.) discriminate just two states—“open electrical circuit” and “closed circuit” –disjunctively present. And (Para) information occurs whenever one state changes into another.

In homeostatic devices the alphabet also consists of two states, e.g., “above some preset value” and “below it”, as in the case of a thermostat. Parainformation is the virtual difference between the actual temperature and the preset one.

Biological cells can also handle situations where only parainformation is available. Let us consider what is called a “genetic code”. The alphabet consists here of four nucleotides (commonly abbreviated as C, A,G,U)which can be discriminated by some enzyme. The code here is any liner sequence of the nucleotides in a DNA or RNA chain.At that structural levels no information whatever is present. Information enters the scene only when the double helix splits and the enzyme polymerize detects which one of the four nucleotides occurs at a particular place in the chain, and then adds to it

a complementary one(the processes of replication and transcription).what is involved is thus parainformation, for no concurrent states are detected.

What about translation, where we are told that most of possible 64 triplets of nucleotides in the messenger-RNA, created during transcription of the DNA’s structure, ”encode” one of the 20 amino acids necessary to build any protein? At first it may seem that what must be detected here are differences between concomitant states, i.e., between particular nucleotides within a triplet. A closer examination of the mechanisms involved during codon detection reveals, however, that this is not the case. The particular condon is detected by the complementary triplet in the transfer-RNA, which then adds a specific associated amino acid to the polypeptide under construction. What follows is that there is no detection of difference between particular nucleotides in a codon, but only detection of virtual differences between different codons as wholes .This is, therefore, also a case of parainformation.

Finally, consider computers. In computer the alphabet consists of just two states (say, 0V and 5V, usually referred to as 0 and 1, the so called “bits”). For simplicity’s sake, let us limit ourselves to consideration of 8-bit computers. Then. The code is any 8-bitsequence of bits (a ‘byte”), and the repertoire consists of 256 possible bytes. What is the information involved here? Is it the differences between zeros and ones in a byte? No, bytes are the smallest operational units here, for they stand for programming languages and data (letters, numbers, production marks). It would be silly, then, to independently progress bits within a byte----standing, say, for the letter “a”. Differences detected in computers are therefore not, say,

11/0/1/00/1/0, but are rather either between subsequent bytes (say, 11101001/11111101) --- that is, of juxtaposition-type--- or virtual, selection-type difference referring back to the repertoire (otherwise, if two subsequent bytes were identical, as is often the case, there would be no information for the computer, which is not the case). In other words, there is both parainformation and structural information in computers

Para information is the elemental, primordial type of information, for it is the simplest one and it is the building block of any other type of information. There can be no structural information without underlying parainformation. We can therefore say in general that structural information is composed of pieces of parainformation. This suggests the concept of orders of information. Code can be said to be zero-order information, for it represents only a potential to become information. Consequently, parainformation is first-order information, composed of selections from the code; and structural information is second-order information, for juxtaposed members of appropriate difference are themselves pieces of parainformation.

The question arises whether there is higher-order information. The answer is yes-it is what I call median information

Due to the fact that information is a collection of difference, i.e. a set in the collective sense (and there for any subset of such a collection is its element, which does not hold for sets regarded in the distributive sense),it is an additive entity: a sum of information is still information. Separate pieces of information can thus merge to create more information-e.g., when we slowly raise our eyelids allowing more and more data to be received.

But there is another possible case,where combined pieces of

information do not extensively merge into a bigger whole,but instead become associated while keeping separate. Notice that all the above presented cases concerned information as currently received receptors, and then processed. There is, however, another important possibility beyond this,namely,when a system adds previously received information from its own resources (memory) to the current inflow of receptor-based information. If, says, my auditory system detects a series of phonemes“c-a-t”, it is information-a collection of differences between adjacent pitches. butif hearing this causes me to imagine a four-legged, furry creature with vibrissae, it is also a kind of information, although my sensory apparatus detected no such creature in its perceptual field. It is added to what is detected by the sense organs, that newly formed, resultant information is an association of separate pieces of information. I call this type of information metainformation because of two reasons. First, it is a collection of collections, and second because it “come after”

The three types of information ——parainformation, structural information and metainformation ——emerged stepwise during the evolutional process, which started with organisms anle to handle parainformation only (cells, multicellcular organisms, plants, primitive animals), then developed creatures able to deal with structure information (more advanced animals like insects, with centre nervous system but without plastic memory yet), and finally produced creatures capable of making use of median information (of which a prerequisite is having a RAM-type memory).

With these three types of information at hand, we can explain and understand the operation and behavior of all intelligent systems—— from a

single cell to human beings and computers.

Reading material

Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom

There is probably no segment of activity in the world attracting as much attention at present as that of knowledge management. Yet as I entered this arena of activity I quickly found there didn't seem to be a wealth of sources that seemed to make sense in terms of defining what knowledge actually was,and how was it differentiated from data, information, and wisdom. What follows is the current level of understanding I have been able to piece together regarding data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. I figured to understand one of them I had to understand all of them.

According to Russell Ackoff, a systems theorist and professor of organizational change, the content of the human mind can be classified into five categories:

Data: symbols Information: data that are processed to be useful: provides answers to "who", "what", "where", and "when" questions

Knowledge: application of data and information; answers "how" questions

Understanding: appreciation of "why" Wisdom: evaluated understanding

Ackoff indicates that the first four categories relate to the past; they deal with what has been or what is known. Only the fifth category, wisdom, deals with the future because it incorporates vision and design. With

wisdom, people can create the future rather than just grasp the present and past. But achieving wisdom isn't easy; people must move successively through the other categories.

A further elaboration of Ackoff's definitions follows:

Data： Data is raw. It simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself. In computer parlance, a spreadsheet generally starts out by holding data.

Information: information is data that has been given meaning by way of relational connection. This "meaning" can be useful, but does not have to be. In computer parlance, a relational database makes information from the data stored within it.

Knowledge: knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, such that its intent is to be useful. Knowledge is a deterministic process. When someone "memorizes" information (as less-aspiring test-bond students often do), then they have amassed knowledge. This knowledge has useful meaning to them, but it does not provide for, in and of itself, an integration such as would infer further knowledge. For example, elementary school children memorize, or amass knowledge of the "times table". They can tell you that 2×2=4 because they have amassed that knowledge (it being included in the times table). But when asked what is 1267×300, they cannot respond correctly because that entry is not in their times table. To correctly answer such a question requires a true cognitive and analytical ability that is only encompassed in the next level understanding. In computer parlance, most of the applications we use (modeling, simulation, etc.) exercise some types of stored knowledge.

Understanding: understanding is an interpolative and probabilistic process. It is cognitive and analytical. It is the process by which I can take knowledge and synthesize new knowledge from the previously held knowledge. The difference between understanding and knowledge is the difference between "learning" and "memorizing". People who have understanding can undertake useful actions because they can synthesize new knowledge, or in some cases, at least new information, from what is previously known (and understood). That is, understanding can build upon currently held information, knowledge and understanding itself. In computer parlance, AI systems possess understanding in the sense that they are able to synthesize new knowledge from previously stored information and knowledge.

Wisdom: wisdom is an extrapolative and non-deterministic, non-probabilistic process. It calls upon all the previous levels of consciousness, and special types of human programming (moral,ethical codes,etc.) it beckons to give us understanding. And in doing so, goes far beyond understanding itself. It is the essence of philosophical probing .unlike the previous four levels, it asks questions to which there is no (easily-achievable) answer,and in some cases, to which there can be no human-known answer period. Wisdom is therefore ,the process by which we also discern, or judge ,between right and wrong , good and bad .i personally believe that computers do not have ,and will never have the ability to possess wisdom requires one to have a soul , for it resides as mush in the heart as in the mind. And a soul is something machines will never possess (or perhaps i should reword that to say a soul is something that, in general , will never posses a machine)

Personally I contend that the sequence is a bit less involved than described by Ackoff.The following diagram represents the transitions from data,to information,to knowledge,and finally to wisdom,and it is understanding that supports the transition from each stage to the next.Understanding is not a separate level of its own.

Connectednesss Wisdom

principles

Knowledge

patterns

Understanding

Data relations

Understanding

Data represents a fact or statement of event without relation to other things.

Ex: It is raining.

Information embodies the understanding of a relationship of some sort,possibly cause and effect.

Ex: The temperature dropped 15 degrees and then it started raining.

Knowledge represents a pattern that connects and generally provides a high level of predictability as to what is described or what will happen next.

Ex: If the humidity is very high and the temperature drops substantially,the atmosphere is often unlikely to be able to hold the moisture,so it rains.

Wisdom embodies more of an understanding of fundamental principles embodied within the knowledge that are essentially the basis for the

knowledge being what it is .Wisdom is essentially systemic.

Ex: It rains because it rains. And this encompasses an understanding of all the interactions that happen between raining,evaporation,air currents,temperature gradients,changes,and raining.

Yet,there is still a question regarding when it is pattern knowledge and when it is noise.

It is quite likely this sequence represents 100% novelty,which means it’s equivalent to noise.There is no foundation for you to connects with the pattern,yet to me the statements are quite meaningful as I understand the translation which reveals that they are in fact Newton’s 3 laws of motion.Issomething knowledge if you can’t understand it?

Now consider the following:

I have a box. The box is 3’wide,3’deep,and 6’high The box is very heavy. The box has a door on the front of it. When I open the box it has food in it. It’s colder inside the box than it is outside. You usually find the box in the kitchen. There is a smaller compartment inside the box with ice in it. When you open the door the door the light comes on. When you move this box you usually find lots of dirtunderneath it. Junk has a real habit of collecting on top of this box.

What is it?

A refrigerator .You knew that,right?At some point in the sequence you connected with the pattern and understood it was a description of a

refrigerator.From that point on each statement only added confirmation to your understanding.

If you lived in a society that had never seen a refrigerator, you might still be scratching your head as to what the sequence of statements referred to.

Also,realize that I could have provided you with the above statements in any order and still at some point the pattern would have connected.When the pattern connected the sequence of statements represented knowledge to you.To me all the statements convey nothing as they are simply 100% confirmation of what I already knew as I knew what I was describing even before I started.

Unit2

Text A How Is Information Organized?

As you are reading the materials that we’ve gathered together for this course,you are assimilating information.What you’ve just read is information that you will keep in short term memory until you decide if it is worth keeping for a longer time.Regardless of how long you keep it ,we will keep it available for you to return to later or for future students to read and assimilate at a later date.We’ve made arrangements in a computer system to organize and store our information so that it is available for later use.This isn’t always the case with information,thought.Not everything is stored online,and,even if it is stored online,there is no guarantee that the information that you see today will still be there next week,and there is no guarantee that the material will be organized in a logical manner that will facilitate your finding it again.

Wow!Information sure is difficult to deal with,isn’t it?

Well,let’s not worry about how difficult it is to deal with information storage and retrieval at this stage of the game.Right now,let’s just look at what information is and how libraries and solid research skills help you get the information you need

1、What is information

Well,in human terms and in the broadest sense, information is anything that you are capable of perceiving.This can include written communications,photographs,art, music,and nearly anything that is perceptible.This really includes an enormous assortment of stimuli,but,

realistically,everything we come in contact with is capable of providing and dose provide us with some sort of information. So we are essentially minute organisms afloat in a sea of information.

For this course,and for the academic climate in which you are now situated,we’ll focus on information as materials that have been stored in one manner or another that can educate us to a better understanding of our rmation,then, is anything that can be documented in any form that can then be referred to later as means to understanding and to building new information.This course,for example, provides you with information that will help you to find,sort through,and interpret other information.In sort we have quite an undertaking ahead of us,since there is so much information to be bad.But, take heart.We will succeed in our endeavors.

2．How is information organized?

If we consider information in the sense of all stimuli as information, then we can’t really find organization in all cases. Your experience of the world may have some organization to it in that you plan trips and relationships and other daily activities, but you still have litter control over what information you will receive even with the best planning and even in the most controlled environments. Information is one thing that no one has ever figured out how to kill.

If we examine information in the sense discussed here, Then we can limit our focus and find patters of organization for most of the information that we will need to find and use.

Traditionally, in libraries, information was contained in books, periodicals, newspapers, other types of recorded media. It was accessible through a library’s catalog and with the assistance of indexes, in the case

of periodical and newspaper articles, much of this is still true ,but the means by which we discover organization have changed .we no longer consult a card catalog for information about a library’s collection of information. we no longer consult a printed “Reader’s Guide” for information on where to find articles about a certain subject , most of these previously time-consuming takes have been step up by computerized “information system”. We still find information stored in libraries,and other media and these sources of information have their own systems of organization. The problem for most researchers is not that the information doesn’t exist in a library or in a journal or in a magazine or in a motion picture, but that they have yet to discover the organizing principles that are designed to help them find the information they need.

For library materials,the organizing principle is a detailed subject classification system available for searching in an online “catalog” . For journal articles, the organizing mechanism is typical an online indexing and /or abstracting system that allows researchers to access information by subject or by some other scheme .For newspaper articles,the organizing mechanism is typically an online indexing and/or abstracting system that allows researchers access in a variety of means. The one thing common to all of these access to all the stored information that they can get their hands on in order to make it searchable and pointing and accessible to other people . In short, accessing good information is not just an simple as pointing your browser to AltaVista or HotBot. Computer can help us to organize information and can even automate indexing and cataloging,but all of our accesses are ultimately created by other people. In short, finding information deliberately rather then serendipitously relies on many people

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