Volume 92 | Number 2 | March-April 2004

Honesty in Inference

Tommaso Toffoli

Thanks to the late E. T. Jaynes, every schoolchild and scholar can approach inference unhampered by absurd probability myths

The Revolution Will Be Digitized

Stephan Mertens

Paradigm shifts are preceded by inventions that let us "see things that could not be seen before," says Douglas S. Robertson, and now the computer is generating an information explosion that is bringing about dramatic changes in almost every field

Ape Abilities

Nathan Emery

Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn's Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings is difficult to categorize and thus hard to recommend, but its detailed account of technological advances in the testing of primate learning and cognition is rewarding

Hot Topic

Maureen Christie

Spencer Weart's history of global warming is "selective, subjective and somewhat episodic," which keeps it "readable and interesting"

Dirty Work: An Excerpt from Dreams of Iron and Steel: Seven Wonders of the Nineteenth Century, from the Building of the London Sewers to the Panama Canal, by Deborah Cadbury