
36 Human factors engineering and ergonomics
The fourth aspect of noise is statistical. Some statisticians use it as a
synonym for “error variance” or “measurement error,” often with the
implication that it could contain more structure, and therefore meaning,
than what is captured by a particular statistical or deterministic model.
3.1.2 Quantifying information
A bit of information is the amount of information required to make a binary
decision. Given that a system can take on two states, A and B, only one bit
of information is required to know whether the state is A or B.
If the system can take on N possible states, we would need N − 1 bits ...