The previous chapters of this book have presented rheostasis in terms of the phenomena observed rather than in terms of underlying mechanisms. They have described changes in regulated level and said that there has been a change in set-point when it appears "as if" such a change had taken place. Taking this approach, one may find enough examples of rheostasis to become convinced that the body is...

Statistical literacy studies statistics used as evidence in everyday arguments. This paper studies those aspects of chance that seem most relevant to statistical literacy. Web prevalences of chance-related terms are used to select chance topics relevant to statistical literacy such as ‘better than chance’, ‘due to chance’, chance in evolution, the Law of Very Large Numbers, Trojan numbers, info...

The question if poker is a game of skill or a game of chance received a considerable amount of attention mainly because of its potential legal implications. See, for example, [3] and its many references. Most of the material dealing with the subject focuses on legal issues, and only briefly touches the question from a purely scientific point of view. In the present article we address the questi...

Fairness is a mathematical abstraction used in the modeling of a wide range of phenomena, including concurrency, scheduling, and probability. In this paper, we study fairness in the context of probabilistic systems, and we introduce probabilistic fairness, a novel notion of fairness that is itself deened in terms of probability. The deenition of probabilistic fairness makes it invariant with re...

This is a discussion of Richard Pettigrew’s Accuracy and the Laws of Credence. I target Pettigrew’s application of the accuracy framework to derive chance-credence principles. My principal contention is that Pettigrew’s preferred version of the argument might, in one sense, be circular. To support this (but also as an objection in its own right), I argue that Pettigrew’s premises have content t...

We offer a new argument for the claim that there can be non-degenerate objective chance in a deterministic world. Using a formal model of the relationship between different levels of description of a system, we show how objective chance at a higher level can coexist with its absence at a lower level. Unlike previous arguments for the level-specificity of chance, our argument shows, in a precise...

When a mother learns her baby is mentally handicapped the news comes as a knock-out blow. She, and her family, need time to digest the shock; they also need sympathy and practical help which is not as readily available as it should be.

When designing or upgrading a communication network, operators are faced with a major issue, as uncertainty on communication demands makes it difficult to correctly provision the network capacity. When a probability on traffic matrices is given, finding the cheapest capacity allocation that guarantees, within a prescribed level of confidence, that each arc can support the traffic demands peaks ...

Consideration of quality implicitly introduces the need to adjust inputs in order to obtain desired output. Output evaluation must consider quality as well as cost. Real decisions may involve other objectives as well. Production problems often involve a dynamic situation where the relationship between cost and quality must be experimentally developed. The proposed method is to use regression as...