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Author: Steven G. Vick
Publisher: ASCE Publications
Published: 2002-01-01
Total Pages: 469
ISBN-13: 0784470863
DOWNLOAD EBOOKObserving at a risk analysis conference for civil engineers that participants did not share a common language of probability, Vick, a consultant and geotechnic engineer, set out to not only examine why, but to also bridge the gap. He reexamines three elements at the core of engineering the concepts
Author: Dr. Stephen D. Unwin
Publisher: Forum Books
Published: 2004-10-26
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 1400054788
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDoes God exist? This is probably the most debated question in the history of mankind. Scholars, scientists, and philosophers have spent their lifetimes trying to prove or disprove the existence of God, only to have their theories crucified by other scholars, scientists, and philosophers. Where the debate breaks down is in the ambiguities and colloquialisms of language. But, by using a universal, unambiguous language—namely, mathematics—can this question finally be answered definitively? That’s what Dr. Stephen Unwin attempts to do in this riveting, accessible, and witty book, The Probability of God. At its core, this groundbreaking book reveals how a math equation developed more than 200 years ago by noted European philosopher Thomas Bayes can be used to calculate the probability that God exists. The equation itself is much more complicated than a simple coin toss (heads, He’s up there running the show; tails, He’s not). Yet Dr. Unwin writes with a clarity that makes his mathematical proof easy for even the nonmathematician to understand and a verve that makes his book a delight to read. Leading you carefully through each step in his argument, he demonstrates in the end that God does indeed exist. Whether you’re a devout believer and agree with Dr. Unwin’s proof or are unsure about all things divine, you will find this provocative book enlightening and engaging. “One of the most innovative works [in the science and religion movement] is The Probability of God...An entertaining exercise in thinking.”—Michael Shermer, Scientific American “Unwin’s book [is] peppered with wry, self-deprecating humor that makes the scientific discussions more accessible...Spiritually inspiring.”--Chicago Sun Times “A pleasantly breezy account of some complicated matters well worth learning about.”--Philadelphia Inquirer “One of the best things about the book is its humor.”--Cleveland Plain Dealer “In a book that is surprisingly lighthearted and funny, Unwin manages to pack in a lot of facts about science and philosophy.”--Salt Lake Tribune
Author: Sanjoy Mahajan
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2014-11-07
Total Pages: 409
ISBN-13: 0262526549
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTools to make hard problems easier to solve. In this book, Sanjoy Mahajan shows us that the way to master complexity is through insight rather than precision. Precision can overwhelm us with information, whereas insight connects seemingly disparate pieces of information into a simple picture. Unlike computers, humans depend on insight. Based on the author's fifteen years of teaching at MIT, Cambridge University, and Olin College, The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering shows us how to build insight and find understanding, giving readers tools to help them solve any problem in science and engineering. To master complexity, we can organize it or discard it. The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering first teaches the tools for organizing complexity, then distinguishes the two paths for discarding complexity: with and without loss of information. Questions and problems throughout the text help readers master and apply these groups of tools. Armed with this three-part toolchest, and without complicated mathematics, readers can estimate the flight range of birds and planes and the strength of chemical bonds, understand the physics of pianos and xylophones, and explain why skies are blue and sunsets are red. The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering will appear in print and online under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Share Alike license.
Author: Martin Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-11-17
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 0191071633
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMartin Smith explores a question central to philosophy—namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In the present book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it—roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond, including the relation between justification and knowledge, the force of statistical evidence, the problem of scepticism, the lottery and preface paradoxes, the viability of multiple premise closure, the internalist/externalist debate, the psychology of human reasoning, and the relation between belief and degrees of belief. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here.
Author: Jim Albert
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: 2019-12-06
Total Pages: 553
ISBN-13: 1351030132
DOWNLOAD EBOOKProbability and Bayesian Modeling is an introduction to probability and Bayesian thinking for undergraduate students with a calculus background. The first part of the book provides a broad view of probability including foundations, conditional probability, discrete and continuous distributions, and joint distributions. Statistical inference is presented completely from a Bayesian perspective. The text introduces inference and prediction for a single proportion and a single mean from Normal sampling. After fundamentals of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are introduced, Bayesian inference is described for hierarchical and regression models including logistic regression. The book presents several case studies motivated by some historical Bayesian studies and the authors’ research. This text reflects modern Bayesian statistical practice. Simulation is introduced in all the probability chapters and extensively used in the Bayesian material to simulate from the posterior and predictive distributions. One chapter describes the basic tenets of Metropolis and Gibbs sampling algorithms; however several chapters introduce the fundamentals of Bayesian inference for conjugate priors to deepen understanding. Strategies for constructing prior distributions are described in situations when one has substantial prior information and for cases where one has weak prior knowledge. One chapter introduces hierarchical Bayesian modeling as a practical way of combining data from different groups. There is an extensive discussion of Bayesian regression models including the construction of informative priors, inference about functions of the parameters of interest, prediction, and model selection. The text uses JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler) as a general-purpose computational method for simulating from posterior distributions for a variety of Bayesian models. An R package ProbBayes is available containing all of the book datasets and special functions for illustrating concepts from the book. A complete solutions manual is available for instructors who adopt the book in the Additional Resources section.
Author: Hannes Leitgeb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-03-24
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 0191047015
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn everyday life we normally express our beliefs in all-or-nothing terms: I believe it is going to rain; I don't believe that my lottery ticket will win. In other cases, if possible, we resort to numerical probabilities: my degree of belief that it is going to rain is 80%; the probability that I assign to my ticket winning is one in a million. It is an open philosophical question how all-or-nothing belief and numerical belief relate to each other, and how we ought to reason with them simultaneously. The Stability of Belief develops a theory of rational belief that aims to answer this question. Hannes Leitgeb develops a joint normative theory of all-or-nothing belief and numerical degrees of belief. While rational all-or-nothing belief is studied in traditional epistemology and is usually assumed to obey logical norms, rational degrees of belief constitute the subject matter of Bayesian epistemology and are normally taken to conform to probabilistic norms. One of the central open questions in formal epistemology is what beliefs and degrees of belief have to be like in order for them to cohere with each other. The answer defended in this book is a stability account of belief: a rational agent believes a proposition just in case the agent assigns a stably high degree of belief to it. Leitgeb determines this theory's consequences for, and applications to, learning, suppositional reasoning, decision-making, assertion, acceptance, conditionals, and chance. The volume builds new bridges between logic and probability theory, traditional and formal epistemology, theoretical and practical rationality, and synchronic and diachronic norms for reasoning.
Author: Franz Huber
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2008-12-21
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 1402091982
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis anthology is the first book to give a balanced overview of the competing theories of degrees of belief. It also explicitly relates these debates to more traditional concerns of the philosophy of language and mind and epistemic logic.
Author: Ronald R. Yager
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2008-01-22
Total Pages: 813
ISBN-13: 354044792X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a collection of classic research papers on the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions. The book is the authoritative reference in the field of evidential reasoning and an important archival reference in a wide range of areas including uncertainty reasoning in artificial intelligence and decision making in economics, engineering, and management. The book includes a foreword reflecting the development of the theory in the last forty years.
Author: Sarah Moss
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 0198792158
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSarah Moss argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. She introduces the notion of probabilistic content and shows how it plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language. Just you can believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents.
Author: Ellery Eells
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1994-11-25
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780521453592
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEssays on the state of research investigating the relationship between conditionals and conditional probabilities.
