Dear All
7F00,0000,0000> I am struggling with a somehow related question on measuring cultural
> homegeneity/heterogeneity of human societies. say we have got only two signals
..
> addition to this two axioms I would like to cover the intuition that
a society
7F00,0000,0000> in which the population is split 50% to 50% according to both signals ranks
> lower on this scale than a society in which 96 % belong to one group and the
> remaining 4% is split into say 2 groups according to both signals. (for
This is clearly a question close to what ecologists call 'diversity'.
The best reference here is:
0100,0100,0100Times New RomanMagurran AE (1991). Ecological diversity and its measurement.
Chapman & Hall, London.
ArialBut my pennysworth would be that the commonly used Shannon
diversity index (often mis-named Shannon-Weaver) is in fact a
measure of entropy. This index is defined as
h = -sum(Pi*Log(Pi)) where Pi is the proportion of the ith species
(/language/religion etc). If the log base is 2 this becomes a
measure of information, though most students use log10 - which is
fine as long as you say so in the methods!
Hope this helps
Peter Shaw
Dr Peter Shaw
Senior Lecturer
Environmental Studies
University of Surrey Roehampton
School of Life Sciences,
Whitelands Campus,
West Hill,
LONDON SW15 3SN
tel. 0181 392 3457
fax. 0181 392 3527
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For PGP keys and much more visit my website at
http://www.chezshaw.demon.co.uk/
The School's website - http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/social/life/life.htm
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