Dr Gareth Owen

Owen Holland Editorial

In May 2001, the Swartz Foundation sponsored a workshop called ‘Can a machine be conscious?’ at the Banbury Center in Long Island (http://www. swartzneuro.org/banbury_2001.cfm). Around twenty psychologists, computer scientists, philosophers, physicists, neuroscientists, engineers, and industrialists spent three days in a mixture of short presentations and long and lively discussions. At the end...

Robert Owen And

HE Co-operative Movement was in its early days described by William Hazlitt as “a slip of Owenism grafted upon a stock of common sense”. This metaphor is not merely more apt, but also more accurate, than to call Owen the “father” of Co-operation. For one thing, there were co-operatives in Britain before Owen enunciated his plan of a new society, and even before he was born. Voluntary associatio...

Richard Owen: Victorian naturalist

Among the visitors who throng the British Museum of Natural History, to stand in awe before its spectacular displays, or marvel at its architecture, few give a thought to Richard Owen, the man who inspired the establishment of the greatest Victorian "cathedral of science". Some will notice Owen's statue and perhaps wonder what it is doing there. For surely this noble building must have been a t...

Edwin Goodall; Owen Berkeley-Hill

Examples of Adaptive MCMC by Gareth

We investigate the use of adaptive MCMC algorithms to automatically tune the Markov chain parameters during a run. Examples include the Adaptive Metropolis (AM) multivariate algorithm of Haario et al. (2001), Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithms for non-conjugate hierarchical models, regionally adjusted Metropolis algorithms, and logarithmic scalings. Computer simulations indicate that the algori...