The informative act and its aftermath: Toward a predictive science of information

The paradigm statement for a predictive science of semantic information is presented in the form of an informative act, a one-sentence concatenation of a performative preamble with one bit of perceived “hard” information. Such sentences produce stress in the receiver which can be measured subjectively using the Holmes-Rahe stress scale. A unit called the whomp is introduced which describes the net effect of receiving a message with both hard information and human stress points. Such messages can be said to “produce” records. In an extension of the concept of the informative act to a major personage, such as a Head of State, we examine the public records in the form of books produced. Although the prediction is not as refined as we would like, we project somewhere between 16 and 32 titles to be listed in Cumulative Book Index under the subject heading “Nixon, Richard M.” during the twenty-year period 1974-1994, all other things being equal.