Hi everyone.

I'm on the outlook for a classic journal publication that I have problems finding since it was featured in the Bell Syst. Tech. J. It is the well-known paper by Bennett on quantization that led to the additive noise approximation and the "6dB per bit" rule; Bennett,W.R., ‘Spectra of quantized signals’, Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol.27, pp.446-472 (1948).

I would really have liked to read this paper to study his approach to deriving his approximation. If anyone can point me to it, I would be grateful.

Thanks

I can't believe it, as a Ph.D. student you should be proficient with at least the basics of academic work, i.e. carrying out bibliographic search. Do people these days think 60-years-old publications can be found on emule, or what??

Move your butt to the Technical Main Library located at Høgskoleringen 1. Under sigil TEK, t-saml, 621.39(05) B49, you will find the volumes 1 (1922) up to 62 (1983). Then make copies, and - wow, you won't have a PDF, but hold real paper in your hands!!1!

If you happen to be to lazy, they will charge you 40 crowns for makings copies (of up to 30 pages); you can place the order and they will probably send it to you.

Best, G.W.



BTW: I'm not enrolled at NTNU, my findings were a result of a 20-minute search.

It's a pity that information, no matter how valuable, that is not easily available in digital format is more likely to stay unnoticed.
I wonder if this is symptomatic for new generation science and what its implications might be for "old" knowledge.

Thank you mom. I am aware of the campus library, but yeah I'm "new school", preferring to keep my documents on disk. If I need some benevolent justification, it's out of, uh, environmental concerns.

There is BTW an ongoing project to catalogize digitally available BSTJ papers.

Actually, most journals do have a digital library that goes way, way back (AES, IEEE, JASA, etc). You either have to pay for the digital copies individually, be a member of the organization that publishes the journal, or you can get access through most major universities if you go through their libraries' web portal. That's how it works in most major universities in the US. I get all my papers in PDF format through these sources, and I frequently get stuff from as far back as the 60's.

It's nice, as researchers today, we can find information much faster than researchers could 40 years go.

Free sign-up, and it (might) be here:

http://online.sagepub.com

Or here:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com

As its Friday night and I've had a few too many, you're on your own in searching these two massive databases... :-)

Andrew D.

www.cdnav.com

Indeed. Most of the classical works are easily available, from the patents of Edison to the Gordon Moore magazine article or the papers by Shannon, Nyquist and Kotelnikov (trying to track down the Kotelnikov paper 40 years ago would probably be a risky affair). The majority of societies seem to have digitized most of or all their journal back-catalogues by now, the notable exception being the BSTJ of which papers are scattered pretty randomly around the net. The indexing project at crinkydoodle is a nice effort.

Anyway, thanks to all who have replied, I'll drag my butt to the library one of these days, and scan a pdf.

So I have scanned it now finally. If anyone is interested in a copy, I've put it up on Rapidshare:

http://rapidshare.com/files/96977316/Bennett1948.pdf

I also compiled a small pack of some of the most seminal papers in information theory and such and such (the two first are more of general interest to the fields of audio and electronics respectively):

1. H.Fletcher and W.A.Munson, “Loudness, its Definition, Measurement and Calculation”, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., vol.5, pp.82-108, (1933 May)
2. G.E.Moore, “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits”, Electronics Magazine, vol.38, no.8, (1965)
3. H.Nyquist, “Certain Topics in Telegraph Transmission Theory", Trans. AIEE, vol. 47, pp. 617-644, (1928 Apr.)
4. V.A.Kotelnikov, “On the Carrying Capacity of the Ether and Wire in Telecommunications”, 1st All-Union Conference on Questions of Communication, Izd. Red. Upr. Svyazi RKKA, Moscow, (1933)
5. C.E.Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Bell System Tech. J., vol.27, pp.379–423, 623–656, (1948)
6. C.E.Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of Noise", Proc. Institute Radio Eng., vol.37, no.1, pp.10-21, (1949 Jan.)
7. W.R.Bennett, "Spectra of Quantized Signals," Bell System Tech. J., vol.27, pp.446-471, (1948 July)

http://rapidshare.com/files/96980490/Classics.zip

Cheers.

Thanks for your great work, ilo.

BTW: There's a "classic papers" series in Proc. IEEE, including an introductory comment. You might find other stuff there at IEEE XPlore, elimating the need to scan the original articles.

Best, G.W.

Thanks ilo, that's a really nice collection of papers.

That we should make digital copies of as much old research as possible as quickly as possible, I'd say.

It's been my experience lately that information in peer-reviewed journals that are not electronically available is regarded as nonexistant, both in terms of citations for new papers and in places like Wikipedia, where if it's not on the net, it doesn't exist.

There is a wealth of information that is simply being ignored, and more than a bit of the ignorance seems to be both deliberate and steadfast, i.e. "If I can't find it on the web, it doesn't exist".

This is typical of the audio industry, in particular, where knowledge that dates back to Helmholtz and Fletcher, to name two basic researchers, is still often ignored.

You are right, and it's very sad. The reason that non-electronic resources are often ignored is that finding and managing electronic resources is extremely easy, whereas finding and managing paper resources effectively is fairly difficult. I have about 400 digital papers, which I can find easily, manage easily, search easily, etc. I have about 100 paper papers, which are hard to find (even with well indexed files), hard to have multiple copies (one for home and one for work), impossible to search, etc.

While there is a wealth of knowledge on paper that can't be ignored, the right solution is to digitize (with OCR) these papers as soon as possible. The wrong solution and is to stamp our feet and say "kids these days don't know how to use a library." Having said that, it's equally (if not more so) important that we archive paper copies of all electronic resources.