links promised in today's class

1. The Martian life "paradox" (and how you can avoid the paradox by assessing only enough probabilities to avoid internal inconsistency)  
      see http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/gardner-indifference.pdf


2. Causality and graphical models -- a nice talk by Judea Pearl:

   http://singapore.cs.ucla.edu/IJCAI99/index.html
 
  (has the great example of "a suitcase with two locks")

3. Atul Gawande (a practising doctor who proves that good writing doesn't have to be associated with non-technical professions ;-) talks about the inevitable progress of medicine where machines become doctors and doctors become machines:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/03/30/1998_03_30_074_TNY_LIBRY_000015236
(only an abstract is available online. If you are interested, I can dig out a hard copy, or you can plunk for his book
http://www.amazon.com/Complications-Surgeons-Notes-Imperfect-Science/ in which this article appears as
"The Computer and the Hernia Factory" )


(I forgot what other references I promised to send you--if you recall, remind me)

Rao