Need an introduction to artificial intelligence?

Stanford is offering a free course here, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Norvig in particular is one of the biggest names in AI - the textbook that he and Stuart Russell wrote, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, is essentially the classic in the field - (Thrun is also ridiculously highly cited, even if I'm less familiar with his work) and the syllabus for the course looks like it covers a lot of ground.

Registration is open until the 9th of October, with the class actually starting on the 10th of October, so sign up if you're interested!

Jane Austen was a Bayesian

... well, no, she wasn't, actually (as far as I'm aware), although the quirkily named paper Prior and Prejudice [PDF] in August's issue of Nature Neuroscience introduces Bayesian inference by appeal to her work. It's an interesting overview of two studies which appeared in the August and July issues of Nat. Neuroscience, and "create convincing links between psychophysical performance and neuronal representations using the formalism of Bayesian inference"; Fischer and Pena's Owl's Behavior and Neural Representation Predicted by Bayesian inference and Girschick et al.'s Cardinal rules: visual orientation perception reflects knowledge of environmental statistics.