Severe Allergic Reactions to Food in Norway: A Ten Year Survey of Cases Reported to the Food Allergy Register

The Norwegian Food Allergy Register was established at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in 2000. The purpose of the register is to gain information about severe allergic reactions to food in Norway and to survey food products in relation to allergen labelling and contamination. Cases are reported on a voluntary basis by first line doctors, and submitted together with a serum sample for specific IgE analysis. The register has received a total of 877 reports from 1 July, 2000 to 31 December, 2010. Two age groups, small children and young adults are over-represented, and the overall gender distribution is 40:60 males-females. The legumes lupine and fenugreek have been identified as two “new” allergens in processed foods and cases of contamination and faults in production of processed foods have been revealed. The highest frequency of food specific IgE is to hazelnuts and peanuts, with a marked increase in reactions to hazelnuts during the last three years. The Food Allergy Register has improved our knowledge about causes and severity of food allergic reactions in Norway. The results show the usefulness of population based national food allergy registers in providing information for health authorities and to secure safe food for individuals with food allergies

A Stochastic Search on the Line-Based Solution to Discretized Estimation

Recently, Oommen and Rueda [11] presented a strategy by which the parameters of a binomial/multinomial distribution can be estimated when the underlying distribution is nonstationary. The method has been referred to as the Stochastic Learning Weak Estimator (SLWE), and is based on the principles of continuous stochastic Learning Automata (LA). In this paper, we consider a new family of stochastic discretized weak estimators pertinent to tracking time-varying binomial distributions. As opposed to the SLWE, our proposed estimator is discretized , i.e., the estimate can assume only a finite number of values. It is well known in the field of LA that discretized schemes achieve faster convergence speed than their corresponding continuous counterparts. By virtue of discretization, our estimator realizes extremely fast adjustments of the running estimates by jumps, and it is thus able to robustly, and very quickly, track changes in the parameters of the distribution after a switch has occurred in the environment. The design principle of our strategy is based on a solution, pioneered by Oommen [7], for the Stochastic Search on the Line (SSL) problem. The SSL solution proposed in [7], assumes the existence of an Oracle which informs the LA whether to go “right” or “left”. In our application domain, in order to achieve efficient estimation, we have to first infer (or rather simulate ) such an Oracle. In order to overcome this difficulty, we rather intelligently construct an “Artificial Oracle” that suggests whether we are to increase the current estimate or to decrease it. The paper briefly reports conclusive experimental results that demonstrate the ability of the proposed estimator to cope with non-stationary environments with a high adaptation rate, and with an accuracy that depends on its resolution. The results which we present are, to the best of our knowledge, the first reported results that resolve the problem of discretized weak estimation using a SSL-based solution

En studie av forsøket med en miljø- og naturressursplan i MIK kommunene 1987- : studie av forsøket med en miljø- og naturressursplan i MIK kommunene 1987-

EN STUDIE AV FORSØKET MED EN MILJØ- OG NATURRESSURSPLAN I MIK KOMMUNER 1987. I et brev av 28.07.87 fra Miljøverndepartementet og Norske Kommuners Sentralforbund (KS) ble det gitt en offisiell invitasjon til å delta i prosjektet " Miljøvern i kommuner" (MIK). Dette er et omfattende utviklingsprogram for å styrke kommunalt miljøvernarbeid og omfatter blant annet forsøk med miljøvernplanlegging. I denne oppgaven ser jeg først på hvordan dette planforsøket er mottatt i MIK kommunene og så hvordan denne planen ligger til grunn for to kommuners miljøverntiltak. Med hensyn til hvordan gjennomføringen av selve planutarbeidelsen har gått ser jeg om miljøvernorganiseringen og miljøvernkonsulentens funksjon har noen effekt. Likedant om kommunestørrelsen og representasjon av grønne partier i de kommunale politiske organ påvirker ferdigstillelsen av en slik plan. I andre analysedel som tar for seg bruk av miljøvernplanen i to kommuner ser jeg på om miljøvernorganiseringen, økonomiske ressurser og statlig miljøpolitikk har innvirkning på typen kommunale miljøverntiltak. Ligger kommunens miljøvernplan til grunn for tiltak eller styrer staten gjennom ulike virkemidler hvilke typer tiltak som gjennomføres. Planstatus for MIK kommunene i 1990 viser en liten overvekt av kommuner som ikke har utarbeidet en plan. De tre uavhengige variablene som jeg mener kan forklare fremdrift i planarbeidet har ulik betydning. Mht. organisering av miljøvernet ser det ut for at politiske løsningene som et tverrsektoriellt utvalg og formannskapet kan være noe heldigere enn andre mht. planfremdriften. Angående administrativ organisering gav min analyse utslag for at miljøvern under rådmannsstaben og eget hovedutvalg kan fungere best mht. miljøvernplan utarbeidelsen. Hvis miljøvernkonsulenten er en pådriver og pedagog for miljøvernarbeidet er dette heldig for planutarbeidelsen. Når det gjelder kommunestørrelsen gir dette ikke et entydig mønster. Mellomgruppen skiller seg ut og dette kan ikke gis noen logisk forklaring. Mht. miljøvennlige partier viser materialet at jo høyere sosialistisk representasjon det er i kommunestyre, jo mindre antall ferdige miljøplaner eksisterer. Av de tre partiene V, SV og DNA er V og SV mindre planorientert og mer handlingsorientert enn DNA. Når det gjelder forklaring til gjennomføring av miljøverntiltak i andre analysedel viser materialet at vel så viktig som effekter av de ulike organiseringsmodeller er at det finnes en åpen kommunikasjon mellom de ulike organ i kommuneorganisasjonen og at rådmannen viser prioritering av miljøvernet. Om de økonomiske forholdene er det klart en fordel at kommunene har en egen miljøvernpost på budsjettet. Om ikke disse midlene kan dekke hele finansieringen av tiltak fungerer de som egenkapital ved lån og tildelingssøknader. Staten styrer miljøvernet gjennom ulike virkemidler. Ved rettslige påbud kontrollerer de særlig forurensningssektoren men i mindre grad den grønne sektor. Denne styres derimot gjennom finansielle og verdimessige virkemidler

The use of weak estimators to achieve language detection and tracking in multilingual documents

This paper deals with the problems of language detection and tracking in multilingual online short word-of-mouth (WoM) discussions. This problem is particularly unusual and difficult from a pattern recognition perspective because, in these discussions, the participants and content involve the opinions of users from all over the world. The nature of these discussions, consisting of multiple topics in different languages, presents us with a problem of finding training and classification strategies when the class-conditional distributions are nonstationary. The difficulties in solving the problem are many-fold. First of all, the analyst has no knowledge of when one language stops and when the next starts. Further, the features which one uses for any one language (for example, the n-grams) will not be valid to recognize another. Finally, and most importantly, in most real-life applications, such as in WoM, the fragments of text available before the switching, are so small that it renders any meaningful classification using traditional estimation methods almost futile. Earlier, the authors [B. J. Oommen and L. Rueda, Patt. Recogn. 39(1) (2006) 328-341.] had recommended that for a variety of problems, the use of strong estimators (i.e. estimators that converge with probability 1) is sub-optimal. In this vein, we propose to solve the current problem using novel estimators that are pertinent for nonstationary environments. The classification results obtained for various data sets which involve as many as eight languages demonstrates that our proposed methodology is both powerful and efficient

Tracking the preferences of users using weak estimators

Since a social network, by definition, is so diverse, the problem of estimating the preferences of its users is becoming increasingly essential for personalized applications which range from service recommender systems to the targeted advertising of services. However, unlike traditional estimation problems where the underlying target distribution is stationary, estimating a user’s interests, typically, involves non-stationary distributions. The consequent time varying nature of the distribution to be tracked imposes stringent constraints on the “ unlearning ” capabilities of the estimator used. Therefore, resorting to strong estimators that converge with probability 1 is inefficient since they rely on the assumption that the distribution of the user’s preferences is stationary. In this vein, we propose to use a family of stochastic-learning based Weak estimators for learning and tracking user’s time varying interests. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed paradigm outperforms some of the traditional legacy approaches that represent the state-of-the-art