Serum eosinophil cationic protein (ECP):reference values in healthy nonatopic children

BACKGROUND: Although serum ECP concentrations have been reported in normal children, there are currently no published upper cutoff reference limits for serum ECP in normal, nonatopic, nonasthmatic children aged 1-15 years.
METHODS: We recruited 123 nonatopic, nonasthmatic normal children attending the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children for elective surgery and measured serum ECP concentrations. The effects of age and exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) on the upper reference limits were studied by multiple regression and fractional polynomials.
RESULTS: The median serum ECP concentration was 6.5 microg/l and the 95th and 97.5 th percentiles were 18.8 and 19.9 microg/l. The median and 95th percentile did not vary with age. Exposure to ETS was not associated with altered serum ECP concentrations (P = 0.14).
CONCLUSIONS: The 95th and 97.5 th percentiles for serum ECP for normal, nonatopic, nonasthmatic children (aged 1-15 years) were 19 and 20 microg/l, respectively. Age and exposure to parental ETS did not significantly alter serum ECP concentrations or the normal upper reference limits. Our data provide cutoff upper reference limits for normal children for use of serum ECP in a clinical or research setting.
PMID: 10604557 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Sliding window two-thermocouple sensor characterization for variable flow environments

A two-thermocouple sensor characterization method for use in variable flow applications is proposed. Previous offline methods for constant velocity flow are extended using sliding data windows and polynomials to accommodate variable velocity. Analysis of Monte-Carlo simulation studies confirms that the unbiased and consistent parameter estimator outperforms alternatives in the literature and has the added advantage of not requiring a priori knowledge of the time constant ratio of thermocouples. Experimental results from a test rig are also presented. © 2008 The Institute of Measurement and Control.

Forward and backward least angle regression for nonlinear system identification

A forward and backward least angle regression (LAR) algorithm is proposed to construct the nonlinear autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (NARX) that is widely used to describe a large class of nonlinear dynamic systems. The main objective of this paper is to improve model sparsity and generalization performance of the original forward LAR algorithm. This is achieved by introducing a replacement scheme using an additional backward LAR stage. The backward stage replaces insignificant model terms selected by forward LAR with more significant ones, leading to an improved model in terms of the model compactness and performance. A numerical example to construct four types of NARX models, namely polynomials, radial basis function (RBF) networks, neuro fuzzy and wavelet networks, is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in comparison with some popular methods.

Three dimensional Sklyanin algebras and Gröbner bases

We consider Sklyanin algebras $S$ with 3 generators, which are quadratic algebras over a field $\K$ with $3$ generators $x,y,z$ given by $3$ relations $pxy+qyx+rzz=0$, $pyz+qzy+rxx=0$ and $pzx+qxz+ryy=0$, where $p,q,r\in\K$. this class of algebras has enjoyed much attention. In particular, using tools from algebraic geometry, Feigin, Odesskii \cite{odf}, and Artin, Tate and Van Den Bergh, showed that if at least two of the parameters $p$, $q$ and $r$ are non-zero and at least two of three numbers $p^3$, $q^3$ and $r^3$ are distinct, then $S$ is Artin--Schelter regular. More specifically, $S$ is Koszul and has the same Hilbert series as the algebra of commutative polynomials in 3 indeterminates (PHS). It has became commonly accepted that it is impossible to achieve the same objective by purely algebraic and combinatorial means like the Groebner basis technique. The main purpose of this paper is to trace the combinatorial meaning of the properties of Sklyanin algebras, such as Koszulity, PBW, PHS, Calabi-Yau, and to give a new constructive proof of the above facts due to Artin, Tate and Van Den Bergh. Further, we study a wider class of Sklyanin algebras, namely
the situation when all parameters of relations could be different. We call them generalized Sklyanin algebras. We classify up to isomorphism all generalized Sklyanin algebras with the same Hilbert series as commutative polynomials on
3 variables. We show that generalized Sklyanin algebras in general position have a Golod–Shafarevich Hilbert series (with exception of the case of field with two elements).