In this note we observe that the recent MCMC methods of Papaspiliopoulos & Roberts (2008) and Walker (2007) for Dirichlet mixture models are intrinsically connected and can be naturally combined to yield an algorithm which is better (in terms of mixing), faster (in terms of execution time) and easier (in terms of implementation and coding) than either of them. Some keywords: Retrospective sampl...

Broken sidewalks have become an important legal issue since 2002 when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act ADA applies to sidewalks. As one way to comply with the ADA, cities can require property owners to repair any broken sidewalk fronting their property before they sell the property. Before any real estate is sold, the city i...

The Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST/RO) has been used to observe 78 of the IRAS point sources identified by Bronfman et al. (1996) as likely ultracompact HII regions. Results for the CO J = 4 → 3 line at 461.041GHz are presented. The 74 sources detected are bright and in many cases compact, making them potentially suitable as pointing calibrators for single dish su...

It is indeed difficult to say that analogue controllers are definitely better than digital controllers. The point is, they both work. Analogue controllers are based on mechanical parts that cause changes to the process via the final control element. Again like final control elements, these moving parts are subjected to wear and tear over time and that causes the response of the process to be so...

Pointing is a foundational building block of human communication, but does it take the same form from one culture to the next? Index finger pointing is often assumed to be universally privileged. Use of non-manual pointing morphologies has been attested around the world but it has never been clear how central these variants are in the communities in which they occur. Using a novel referential c...

This paper describes a system for detecting and estimating the properties of multiple travel lanes in an urban road network from calibrated video imagery and laser range data acquired by a moving vehicle. The system operates in real-time in several stages on multiple processors, fusing detected road markings, obstacles, and curbs into a stable non-parametric estimate of nearby travel lanes. The...

The increased frequency of sudden cardiac death after earthquakes and bombings has long proposed that emotional distress plays a role in acute coronary syndromes and arrhythmias. Since the 1960s, several controlled, prospective, epidemiological studies have reported emotional distress as a major risk factor for the onset and worsening of coronary heart disease (CHD) [1]. The Interheart study, a...

We develop a nonparametric Bayesian method that explores the infinite space of latent features and finds the best subset in the sense of posterior probability. When the data appear in several groups, there should be different measures reflecting the differences between the groups. We formalize this as a nested Indian buffet process (nIBP) by assuming different measures according to the specific...