Uncertain

Is the world warming due to the Greenhouse Effect? Can nuclear weapon arsenals be relied upon without periodic testing? Is the world running out of oil? What action should be taken against an outbreak of foot-and-mouth or BSE? Why can't scientists provide certain answers to these and many other questions? The uncertainty of science is puzzling. It arises when scientists have more than one answer to a problem or disagree amongst themselves. In this engaging book, Henry Pollack guides the reader through the maze of contradiction and uncertainty, acquainting them with the ways that uncertainty arises in science, how scientists accommodate and make use of uncertainty, and how in the face of uncertainty they reach their conclusions. Taking examples from recent science headlines and every day life, Uncertain Science … Uncertain World enables the reader to evaluate uncertainty from their own perspectives, and find out more about how science actually works.

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Nie

Historians have long understood that the notion of "the cold war" is richly metaphorical, if not paradoxical. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was a war that fell ambiguousl

"In this provocative walking meditation, forest ranger and writer William Tweed takes us to California's spectacular High Sierra to discover a new vision for our national parks as they approach their

"Community-based adaptation is a new concept whose meaning is still to be fully understood. Most agree that communities should be supported to respond to the challenges they face, and some see this as

This volume revisits the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow’s classic 1963 essay “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care” in light of the many changes in American health care s

On average, black Americans are sicker and die earlier than white Americans. Uncertain Suffering provides a richly nuanced examination of what this fact means for health care in the United States thro

Unwilling Warrior began the saga of the McCabe Family series that continues with book two, Uncertain Heart. A farmer is the last man Sarah wants to marry! After all, if Sarah McCabe had wanted to marr

View our feature on Mark Del Franco's Uncertain Allies. After a night of riots and fires, the Boston neighborhood known as the Weird is in ruins. And when a body is found drained of its essence, ex-Gu

Coping with uncertainty is a necessary part of ordinary life and is crucial to an understanding of how the mind works. For example, it is a vital element in developing artificial intelligence that will not be undermined by its own rigidities. There have been many approaches to the problem of uncertain inference, ranging from probability to inductive logic to nonmonotonic logic. Thisbook seeks to provide a clear exposition of these approaches within a unified framework. The principal market for the book will be students and professionals in philosophy, computer science, and AI. Among the special features of the book are a chapter on evidential probability, which has not received a basic exposition before; chapters on nonmonotonic reasoning and theory replacement, matters rarely addressed in standard philosophical texts; and chapters on Mill's methods and statistical inference that cover material sorely lacking in the usual treatments of AI and computer science.

From the author of Redeployment and Missionaries, an astonishing fever graph of the effects of twenty years of war in a brutally divided AmericaWhen Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences―for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war―from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did the current wars say about who we are as a country, and how should we respond as citizens?Unlike in previous eras of war, relatively few Americans have had to do any real grappling with the endless, invisible conflicts of the post-9/11 world; in fact, increasingly few people are even aware they are still going on. It is as if these wars are a dark star with a strong gravitational force that draws a re

Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate terms relevant to critical studies of big data, from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability.This pathbreaking work offers an interdisci

This book argues that Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA was a grave mistake, as the accord was a significant diplomatic achievement that usefully curtailed Iran’s nuclear programme, and Iran wa