Engineering a smoother ride

A distributed Kalman smoother

Kalman smoothers obtain state estimates in a system with stochastic dynamics and measurement noise. We consider the smoothing problem in a distributed setting, present a cooperative smoothing algorithm for Gauss-Markov linear models, and provide a convergence analysis for the algorithm. An extension of the algorithm that maximizes the likelihood with respect to a sequence of state vectors subje...

A fat ride

JCB • VOLUME 169 • NUMBER 4 • 2005 550 A fat ride he Wingless (Wg) and Hedgehog (Hh) morphogens spread beween cells by catching a ride on lipoprotein particles, say Daniela Panáková, Hein Sprong, Christoph Thiele, Suzanne Eaton, and colleagues (Max Planck, Dresden, Germany). The group had earlier spotted unidentified intercellular signaling particles that they dubbed argosomes. Argosomes are no...

Hitching a ride

Taken for a Ride

by Michael Meacher Longman, ?6.75 Despite the rather gimmicky title, this is a serious book written by a former social gerontologist on the frequently neglected subject of the placement of the 'confused' elderly person in our society. The author has made a study in depth of five types of institution which house 'confused' elderly people. The aim of the study is to evaluate how these people fare...

Friedman’s Super Smoother

Friedman’s super smoother is a nonparametric regression estimator based on local linear regression with adaptive bandwidths (Friedman [1984]). The basic idea is to first estimate a number of fixed bandwidth smooths by local linear regression. The leave-one-out cross-validated residuals from each of those initial estimates are then smoothed using a constant bandwidth. Based on the smoothed resid...