Download or read book Chance Order Change The Course of International Law General Course on Public International Law written by James Crawford and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chance, Order, Change: The Course of International Law, General Course on Public International Law by J. Crawford The course of international law over time needs to be understood if international law is to be understood. This work aims to provide such an understanding. It is directed not at topics or subject headings — sources, treaties, states, human rights and so on — but at some of the key unresolved problems of the discipline. Unresolved, they call into question its status as a discipline. Is international law “law” properly so-called? In what respects is it systematic? Does it — can it — respect the rule of law? These problems can be resolved, or at least reduced, by an imaginative reading of our shared practices and our increasingly shared history, with an emphasis on process. In this sense the practice of the institutions of international law is to be understood as the law itself. They are in a dialectical relationship with the law, shaping it and being shaped by it. This is explained by reference to actual cases and examples, providing a course of international law in some standard sense as well.
Download or read book What Is Random written by Edward Beltrami and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, mathematician Ed Beltrami takes a close enough look at randomness to make it mysteriously disappear. The results of coin tosses, it turns out, are determined from the start, and only our incomplete knowledge makes them look random. "Random" sequences of numbers are more elusive, but Godels undecidability theorem informs us that we will never know. Those familiar with quantum indeterminacy assert that order is an illusion, and that the world is fundamentally random. Yet randomness is also an illusion. Perhaps order and randomness, like waves and particles, are only two sides of the same (tossed) coin.
Download or read book Constraining Chance written by Alison James and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-03 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text examines the representation and staging of chance in literature through the study of a specific case - the work of the 20th-century French writer Georges Perec (1936-82).
Download or read book A Philosophical Guide to Chance written by Toby Handfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a commonplace that scientific inquiry makes extensive use of probabilities, many of which seem to be objective chances, describing features of reality that are independent of our minds. Such chances appear to have a number of paradoxical or puzzling features: they appear to be mind-independent facts, but they are intimately connected with rational psychology; they display a temporal asymmetry, but they are supposed to be grounded in physical laws that are time-symmetric; and chances are used to explain and predict frequencies of events, although they cannot be reduced to those frequencies. This book offers an accessible and non-technical introduction to these and other puzzles. Toby Handfield engages with traditional metaphysics and philosophy of science, drawing upon recent work in the foundations of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics to provide a novel account of objective probability that is empirically informed without requiring specialist scientific knowledge.
Download or read book The Truth and Other Stories written by Stanislaw Lem and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, nine of them never before published in English. Of these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first "new" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are thought provoking and scathingly funny. Written from 1956 to 1993, the stories are arranged in chronological order. In the title story, "The Truth," a scientist in an insane asylum theorizes that the sun is alive; "The Journal" appears to be an account by an omnipotent being describing the creation of infinite universes--until, in a classic Lem twist, it turns out to be no such thing; in "An Enigma," beings debate whether offspring can be created without advanced degrees and design templates. Other stories feature a computer that can predict the future by 137 seconds, matter-destroying spores, a hunt in which the prey is a robot, and an electronic brain eager to go on the lam. These stories are peak Lem, exploring ideas and themes that resonate throughout his writing.
Download or read book Dialogues written by Stanislaw Lem and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English translation of a nonfiction work by Stanisław Lem, which was "conceived under the spell of cybernetics" in 1957 and updated in 1971. In 1957, Stanisław Lem published Dialogues, a book "conceived under the spell of cybernetics," as he wrote in the preface to the second edition. Mimicking the form of Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Lem's original dialogue was an attempt to unravel the then-novel field of cybernetics. It was a testimony, Lem wrote later, to "the almost limitless cognitive optimism" he felt upon his discovery of cybernetics. This is the first English translation of Lem's Dialogues, including the text of the first edition and the later essays added to the second edition in 1971. For the second edition, Lem chose not to revise the original. Recognizing the naivete of his hopes for cybernetics, he constructed a supplement to the first dialogue, which consists of two critical essays, the first a summary of the evolution of cybernetics, the second a contribution to the cybernetic theory of the "sociopathology of governing," amending the first edition's discussion of the pathology of social regulation; and two previously published articles on related topics. From the vantage point of 1971, Lem observes that original book, begun as a search for methods "that would increase our understanding of both the human and nonhuman worlds," was in the end "an expression of the cognitive curiosity and anxiety of modern thought."
Download or read book Chance written by Robert B. Parker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1997-04-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mafia princess Shirley Meeker wants her husband back. So does her father the kingpin and a few other shady characters. Spenser and hawk head to Vegas to find Anthony Meeker and to confirm their suspicion that all these people aren't just missing Anthony's smile. And Spenser has to make some sense of some very disorganized crime...
Download or read book Order and Chance written by Geoffrey Bremner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-09-08 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study discovers a pattern to Diderot's thinking, a fundamental dualism attributable largely to the attitudes and assumptions of the time and giving a common structure to his ideas and writing. Geoffrey Bremner draws widely on Diderot's works in studying his ideas on perception and action, aesthetics, ethics and politics, as well as his plays and fiction. The subtlety of the textual analysis and the analogies Dr Bremner draws provide a convincing and illuminating argument for his interpretation. He supports this but emphasising the intellectual circumstances in which Diderot wrote and demonstrating his links to other eighteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. His study will therefore make a valuable contribution to the reassessment of the period that is currently underway, as well as to the central, elusive problem presented by Diderot's thought itself.
Download or read book Ten Great Ideas about Chance written by Persi Diaconis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gamblers and mathematicians transformed the idea of chance from a mystery into the discipline of probability, setting the stage for a series of breakthroughs that enabled or transformed innumerable fields, from gambling, mathematics, statistics, economics, and finance to physics and computer science. This book tells the story of ten great ideas about chance and the thinkers who developed them, tracing the philosophical implications of these ideas as well as their mathematical impact.
Download or read book Nothing By Chance written by Richard Bach and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Nothing by Chance, Richard Bach shares the adventure of one magical summer he spent as an old-fashioned barnstormer flying an antique biplane. The journey is another soaring adventure of wonder and insight from the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Download or read book Empire of Chance written by Anders Engberg-Pedersen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anders Engberg-Pedersen shows how the Napoleonic Wars inspired a new discourse on knowledge in the West. Soldiers returning from battle were forced to reconsider what it is possible to know and how decisions are made in a fog of imperfect knowledge. Chance no longer appeared exceptional but normative—a prism for understanding the modern world.
Download or read book Chance in Evolution written by Grant Ramsey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating volume explores the effects of chance on evolution, covering diverse perspectives from scientists, philosophers, and historians. The evolution of species, from single-celled organisms to multicellular animals and plants, is the result of a long and highly chancy history. But how profoundly has chance shaped life on earth? And what, precisely, do we mean by chance? Bringing together biologists, philosophers of science, and historians of science, Chance in Evolution is the first book to untangle the far-reaching effects of chance, contingency, and randomness on the evolution of life. The book begins by placing chance in historical context, starting with the ancients and moving through Darwin to contemporary biology. It documents the shifts in our understanding of chance as Darwin’s theory of evolution developed into the modern synthesis, and how the acceptance of chance in Darwinian theory affected theological resistance to it. Other chapters discuss how chance relates to the concepts of genetic drift, mutation, and parallel evolution—as well as recent work in paleobiology and the experimental evolution of microbes. By engaging in collaboration across biology, history, philosophy, and theology, this book offers a comprehensive overview both of the history of chance in evolution and of our current understanding of the impact of chance on life.
Download or read book China and the Credit Crisis written by Giles Chance and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The western world attributed China’s role as world’s largest financer of the developed world and third largest economy in the world to new economic efficiencies, a revolution in risk management and its own wise policies. China and the Credit Crisis argues that if the extent of the role played in the new prosperity by an emerging China, and the fundamental nature of the changes it brought had been better understood, more appropriate policies and actions would have been adopted at the time which could have avoided the crash, or at least limited its impact. China’s Credit Crisis examines the larger role that China will play in the recovery from the current credit crisis and in the post-crisis world. It addresses the major questions which arise from the financial crisis and discuss the landscape of the post-credit crisis world, initially by continuing to provide growth to a world deep in recession, and later by sharing global economic and political leadership
Download or read book Introduction to Probability written by Joseph K. Blitzstein and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developed from celebrated Harvard statistics lectures, Introduction to Probability provides essential language and tools for understanding statistics, randomness, and uncertainty. The book explores a wide variety of applications and examples, ranging from coincidences and paradoxes to Google PageRank and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Additional application areas explored include genetics, medicine, computer science, and information theory. The print book version includes a code that provides free access to an eBook version. The authors present the material in an accessible style and motivate concepts using real-world examples. Throughout, they use stories to uncover connections between the fundamental distributions in statistics and conditioning to reduce complicated problems to manageable pieces. The book includes many intuitive explanations, diagrams, and practice problems. Each chapter ends with a section showing how to perform relevant simulations and calculations in R, a free statistical software environment.
Download or read book Time and Chance written by David Z Albert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.
Download or read book The Accidental Mail Order Bride written by Ruth Ann Nordin and published by Ruth Ann Nordin. This book was released on 2016-08-27 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Johnson’s real mail order bride shows up later than expected, and she quickly learns he is already married. Now Allie Jones is stuck in a small Colorado town with no way to leave. She must either marry the only suitable bachelor or risk being sold to the saloon’s owner to be one of the soiled doves. Seeing she has no real choice, she agrees to marry the bachelor. Rumored as being a monster by the people in town, Travis Martin is content to live alone, sheltered in the wooded area of the mountainside. The last thing he expects is a preacher when there’s a knock on the door. With great hesitation, he agrees to the marriage. He can’t confine such a beautiful young lady to the saloon, but he knows the marriage won’t be a happy one for her, not when she could have had someone so much better. So the best thing he can do is keep his distance and leave her alone. She, however, can't help but be intrigued by her new husband. Is he the ugly beast the people in town claim, or is there something beautiful worth loving just beneath the surface?
Download or read book Aristotle s Concept of Chance written by John Dudley and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark book is the first to provide a comprehensive account of Aristotle's concept of chance. Chance is invoked by many to explain order in the universe, the origins of life, even human freedom and happiness. An understanding of Aristotle's concept of chance is indispensable for an appreciation of his views on nature and ethics, views which have had a tremendous influence on the development of Western philosophy. Author John Dudley analyzes Aristotle's account of chance in the Physics, the Metaphysics, in his biological and ethical treatises, and in a number of his other works as well. Important complementary considerations such as Aristotle's criticism of Presocratic philosophers, particularly Empedocles and Democritus, Plato's concept of chance, the chronology of Aristotle's works, and the relevance of Aristotle's work to evolution and quantum theory are also covered in depth. This is an essential book for scholars and students of Western philosophy.
