Books about Plausible from Amazon.com

Here the author of How to Solve It explains how to become a "good guesser " Marked by G. Polya's simple, energetic prose and use of clever examples from a wide range of human activities, this two-volume work explores techniques of guessing, inductive reasoning, and reasoning by analogy, and the role they play in the most rigorous of deductive disciplines..
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The follow-up to the author's best-selling Rush to Judgment, which criticized the Warren Commission's report on the Kennedy assassination, attempts to demonstrate that the CIA helped plan the president's murder. Reprint 75,000 first printing. Tour..
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Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems is a complete and accessible account of the theoretical foundations and computational methods that underlie plausible reasoning under uncertainty. The author provides a coherent explication of probability as a language for reasoning with partial belief and offers a unifying perspective on other AI approaches to uncertainty, such as the Dempster-Shafer formalism, truth maintenance systems, and nonmonotonic logic.

The author distinguishes syntactic and semantic approaches to uncertainty--and offers techniques, based on belief networks, that provide a mechanism for making semantics-based systems operational. Specifically, network-propagation techniques serve as a mechanism for combining the theoretical coherence of probability theory with modern demands of reasoning-systems technology: modular declarative inputs, conceptually meaningful inferences, and parallel distributed computation. Application areas include diagnosis, forecasting, image interpretation, multi-sensor fusion, decision support systems, plan recognition, planning, speech recognition--in short, almost every task requiring that conclusions be drawn from uncertain clues and incomplete information.

Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems will be of special interest to scholars and researchers in AI, decision theory, statistics, logic, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and the management sciences. Professionals in the areas of knowledge-based systems, operations research, engineering, and statistics will find theoretical and computational tools of immediate practical use. The book can also be used as an excellent text for graduate-level courses in AI, operations research, or applied probability.

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This book presents the rationale and historical context of experimental mathematics, and includes a series of examples that best portray the experimental methodology.

This revised and updated second edition maintains the content and spirit of the first edition and includes a new chapter, Recent Experiences, that provides examples of experimental mathematics that have come to light since the publication of the first edition in 2003. For more examples and insights, Experimentation in Mathematics: Computational Paths to Discovery is a highly recommended companion..
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In Critical Thinking About Psychology: Hidden Assumptions and Plausible Alternatives contributors examine the unquestioned givens of psychology and suggest other ways of looking at them. Psychologists are taught early in their careers to use their research findings to examine common myths and debunk false beliefs. Yet, in spite of this emphasis on critical analysis, psychologists do not typically subject psychology itself to such evaluation. In this fascinating volume, experts from varied subdisciplines critique assumptions peculiar to their specialty and then propose alternatives to replace the original assumptions. The book covers six major psychology subdisciplines, ranging from clinical psychology to neuropsychology. Contributors critique unquestioned tenets of the field such as the dualism between mind and body, the truth of efficient causation, and the discrete unit known as the individual. Authors then provide alternative ways of seeing the field, such as nondualistic models of the self and a moral vision of human development, effectively creating new conceptual ground for psychology. In analyzing what is taken for granted, this volume teaches critical thinking skills at the same time that it moves psychology in exciting new directions..
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When Kurt Vonnegut needed protagonist Billy Pilgrim to time-travel in Slaughterhouse Five, he simply had him become "unstuck" in time--still perhaps the most poetic way to trip the chronological fantastic yet devised in literature. But electric engineering professor and science fiction writer Paul Nahin doesn't want you taking short cuts in your epoch-journeying yarns--at least, not because you were lazy about research. Subtitled A Writer's Guide to the Real Science of Plausible Time Travel, this is a tasty blend of quantum theory, worm holes, causal loops, and the famous "grandfather paradox"--the better to sell your heroine's time-skipping to even the most skeptical suspender of disbelief..
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One of the longest-running jokes on the scientific scene, the "Daedalus" column began in New Scientist in the mid-1960s and transferred to Nature in the 1980s. Each week it offers a new scheme to challenge accepted notions of scientific principles, schemes that are neither feasible nor completely absurd. Always entertaining, the Daedalus schemes often have a serious purpose and raise crucial questions about science (sample title: "A Womb with a View, or At Least a Phone").
This delightful book compiles roughly one hundred of David Jones's popular columns, each of which exhibits a keen and approachable mixture of entertaining and thought-provoking material. Like the collection of articles that came before it, this work will appeal to a broad audience of the scientifically curious..
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