Lawyers for the families said the judge overseeing the release lacked authority to impose restrictions on it, and the judge, in disagreement, ended the proceedings and walked out of the courtroom."
Gretel C. Kovach & Kirk Johnson, "Deal to Return Children to Sect Breaks Down," NYTimes (May 31, 2008)
In the same issue Amit Pundik continues his philosophical discussion of evidence of prior convictions. See id. p. 3.
But what does the construction of robots have to do with the validity of different logical theories? Answer: How the mind works and must work should ultimately be tested against "reality." The attempt -- or, in any event, thinking very, very carefully carefully about how we would would have to proceed -- to build a working robot with the intelligence of a human being, a robot that actually mimics some of the intelligences of the human animal, is a better constraint than pure armchair theorizing, don't you think?I find it interesting that McCarthy, working from a starting point different than Lotfi Zadeh's, agrees with Zadeh that many of the concepts that we human beings use and must use to make sense of our word and to make our way through and in the world are "approximate" in a way that the standard probability calculus cannot capture. See, e.g., John McCarthy, Approximate Objects and Approximate Theories (Feb. 2, 2000)
