Download or read book Probability and Opinion written by Edmund F. Byrne and published by Springer. This book was released on 1968 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern physics has accustomed us to consider events which cannot give rise to certainty in our knowledge. A scientific knowledge of such events is nevertheless possible. The method which has enabled us to obtain a stable and exact knowledge about uncertain events consists in a kind of changing of plane and in the replacing of the study of indi vidual phenomena by the study of statistical aggregates to which those phenomena can give rise. A statistical aggregate is not a collection of real phenomena, among which some would happen more often, others more rarely. It is a set of possibilities relative to a certain object or to a certain type of phenomenon. For example, we could consider the differ ent ways in which a die, thrown in given conditions, can fall: they are the possible results of a certain trial, the casting of the die (in the fore seen conditions). The set of those results constitutes effectively a set of possibilities, relative to a phenomenon of a certain type, the fall of the die in specified circumstances. Similarly, it is possible to consider the different velocities which can affect a molecule in a volume of gas; the set of those velocities constitutes effectively a set of possible values which a physical property, namely the velocity of a molecule, can have.

Download or read book The Probability of God written by Dr. Stephen D. Unwin and published by Forum Books. This book was released on 2004-10-26 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does 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

Download or read book Probability and Bayesian Modeling written by Jim Albert and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probability 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.

Download or read book The Debate on Probable Opinions in the Scholastic Tradition written by Rudolf Schuessler and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Debate on Probable Opinions in the Scholastic Tradition, Rudolf Schuessler portrays scholastic approaches to a qualified disagreement of opinions. The book outlines how scholastic regulations concerning the use of opinions changed in the early modern era, giving rise to an extensive debate on the moral and epistemological foundations of reasonable disagreements. The debate was fueled by probabilism and anti-probabilism in Catholic moral theology and thus also serves as a gateway to these doctrines. All developments are outlined in historical context, while special attention is paid to the evolution of scholastic notions of probability and their importance for the emergence of modern probability.

Download or read book Probability written by Jim Pitman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a text for a one-quarter or one-semester course in probability, aimed at students who have done a year of calculus. The book is organised so a student can learn the fundamental ideas of probability from the first three chapters without reliance on calculus. Later chapters develop these ideas further using calculus tools. The book contains more than the usual number of examples worked out in detail. The most valuable thing for students to learn from a course like this is how to pick up a probability problem in a new setting and relate it to the standard body of theory. The more they see this happen in class, and the more they do it themselves in exercises, the better. The style of the text is deliberately informal. My experience is that students learn more from intuitive explanations, diagrams, and examples than they do from theorems and proofs. So the emphasis is on problem solving rather than theory.

Download or read book The Emergence of Probability written by Ian Hacking and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-31 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical records show that there was no real concept of probability in Europe before the mid-seventeenth century, although the use of dice and other randomizing objects was commonplace. First published in 1975, this edition includes an introduction that contextualizes his book in light of developing philosophical trends.

Download or read book Probability Theory written by Daniel W. Stroock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-31 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of Daniel W. Stroock's text is suitable for first-year graduate students with a good grasp of introductory, undergraduate probability theory and a sound grounding in analysis. It is intended to provide readers with an introduction to probability theory and the analytic ideas and tools on which the modern theory relies. It includes more than 750 exercises. Much of the content has undergone significant revision. In particular, the treatment of Levy processes has been rewritten, and a detailed account of Gaussian measures on a Banach space is given.

Download or read book Chances Are written by Michael Kaplan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-02-27 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling journey through history, mathematics, and philosophy, charting humanity’s struggle against randomness Our lives are played out in the arena of chance. However little we recognize it in our day-to-day existence, we are always riding the odds, seeking out certainty but settling—reluctantly—for likelihood, building our beliefs on the shadowy props of probability. Chances Are is the story of man’s millennia-long search for the tools to manage the recurrent but unpredictable—to help us prevent, or at least mitigate, the seemingly random blows of disaster, disease, and injustice. In these pages, we meet the brilliant individuals who developed the first abstract formulations of probability, as well as the intrepid visionaries who recognized their practical applications—from gamblers to military strategists to meteorologists to medical researchers, from blackjack to our own mortality.

Download or read book Experts in Uncertainty written by Roger M. Cooke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-10-24 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an extensive survey and critical examination of the literature on the use of expert opinion in scientific inquiry and policy making. The elicitation, representation, and use of expert opinion is increasingly important for two reasons: advancing technology leads to more and more complex decision problems, and technologists are turning in greater numbers to "expert systems" and other similar artifacts of artificial intelligence. Cooke here considers how expert opinion is being used today, how an expert's uncertainty is or should be represented, how people do or should reason with uncertainty, how the quality and usefulness of expert opinion can be assessed, and how the views of several experts might be combined. He argues for the importance of developing practical models with a transparent mathematic foundation for the use of expert opinion in science, and presents three tested models, termed "classical," "Bayesian," and "psychological scaling." Detailed case studies illustrate how they can be applied to a diversity of real problems in engineering and planning.

Download or read book Probability Theory written by and published by Allied Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probability theory

Download or read book The Emergence of Probability written by Ian Hacking and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-06-21 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes an introduction, contextualizing his book in light of developing philosophical trends.

Download or read book Introduction to Probability written by David F. Anderson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-02 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classroom-tested textbook is an introduction to probability theory, with the right balance between mathematical precision, probabilistic intuition, and concrete applications. Introduction to Probability covers the material precisely, while avoiding excessive technical details. After introducing the basic vocabulary of randomness, including events, probabilities, and random variables, the text offers the reader a first glimpse of the major theorems of the subject: the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. The important probability distributions are introduced organically as they arise from applications. The discrete and continuous sides of probability are treated together to emphasize their similarities. Intended for students with a calculus background, the text teaches not only the nuts and bolts of probability theory and how to solve specific problems, but also why the methods of solution work.

Download or read book Probability Essentials written by Jean Jacod and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction can be used, at the beginning graduate level, for a one-semester course on probability theory or for self-direction without benefit of a formal course; the measure theory needed is developed in the text. It will also be useful for students and teachers in related areas such as finance theory, electrical engineering, and operations research. The text covers the essentials in a directed and lean way with 28 short chapters, and assumes only an undergraduate background in mathematics. Readers are taken right up to a knowledge of the basics of Martingale Theory, and the interested student will be ready to continue with the study of more advanced topics, such as Brownian Motion and Ito Calculus, or Statistical Inference.

Download or read book Probability and Literary Form written by Douglas Lane Patey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-04-12 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly original and penetrating study explores fundamental intellectual predispositions and concepts which underpin the literature and thought of the Augustan period in England. By examining in particular Augustan notions of probability and the way they provided a framework for thinking about and organising experience, Dr Patey reconstructs a characteristically eighteenth-century theory of literature which offers a much more satisfactory account of the work of Pope, Johnson, Fielding and others than the Romantic literary categories already in existence. The scope of this study is encyclopaedic and it will be an essential reference work for all scholars of eighteenth-century English literature and intellectual history, as well as historians of ideas.

Download or read book Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty written by Thomas D. Nielsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-04-07 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2003, held in Aalborg, Denmark in July 2003. The 47 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited survey articles were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations of uncertainty concepts, Bayesian networks, algorithms for uncertainty inference, learning, decision graphs, belief functions, fuzzy sets, possibility theory, default reasoning, belief revision and inconsistency handling, logics, and tools.

Download or read book An Epistemic Theory of Democracy written by Robert E. Goodin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-26 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy has many attractive features. Among them is its tendency to track the truth, at least under certain idealized assumptions. That basic result has been known since 1785, when Condorcet published his famous jury theorem. But that theorem has typically been dismissed as little more than a mathematical curiosity, with assumptions too restrictive for it to apply to the real world. In An Epistemic Theory of Democracy, Goodin and Spiekermann propose different ways of interpreting voter independence and competence to make jury theorems more generally applicable. They go on to assess a wide range of familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, to determine what constellation of them might most fully exploit the truth-tracking potential of majoritarian democracy. The book closes with a discussion of how epistemic democracy might be undermined, using as case studies the Trump and Brexit campaigns.

Download or read book Texture in the Work of Ian Hacking written by María Laura Martínez Rodríguez and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a systematized overview of Ian Hacking's work. It presents Hacking’s oeuvre as a network made up of four interconnected key nodes: styles of scientific thinking & doing, probability, making up people, and experimentation and scientific realism. Its central claim is that Michel Foucault’s influence is the underlying thread that runs across the Canadian philosopher’s oeuvre. Foucault’s imprint on Hacking’s work is usually mentioned in relation to styles of scientific reasoning and the human sciences. This research shows that Foucault’s influence can in fact be extended beyond these fields, insofar the underlying interest to the whole corpus of Hacking’s works, namely the analysis of conditions of possibility, is stimulated by the work of the French philosopher. Displacing scientific realism as the central focus of Ian Hacking’s oeuvre opens up a very different landscape, showing, behind the apparent dispersion of his works, the far-reaching interest that amalgamates them: to reveal the historical and situated conditions of possibility for the emergence of scientific objects and concepts. This book shows how Hacking’s deployment concepts such as looping effect, making up people, and interactive kinds, can complement Foucauldian analyses, offering an overarching perspective that can provide a better explanation of the objects of the human sciences and their behaviors.