This paper delves into the intricacies of synthetic data, emphasizing its growing significance in the realm of finance and more notably, sustainable finance. Synthetic data, artificially generated to ...simulate real-world data, is being recognized for its potential to address risk management, regulatory compliance, and the innovation of financial products. Especially in sustainable finance, synthetic data offers insights into modeling environmental uncertainties, assessing volatile social and governance scenarios, enhancing data availability, and protecting data confidentiality. This critical review attempts first ever classification of synthetic data production methods, when applied to sustainable finance data gaps, elucidates the methodologies behind its creation, and examines its assurance and controls. Further, it identifies the unique data needs of green finance going forward and breaks down potential risks tied to synthetic data utilization, including challenges from generative AI, input quality, and critical ethical considerations like bias and discrimination.
Predicting floods with Flickr tags Tkachenko, Nataliya; Jarvis, Stephen; Procter, Rob
PloS one,
02/2017, Letnik:
12, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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Increasingly, user generated content (UGC) in social media postings and their associated metadata such as time and location stamps are being used to provide useful operational information during ...natural hazard events such as hurricanes, storms and floods. The main advantage of these new sources of data are twofold. First, in a purely additive sense, they can provide much denser geographical coverage of the hazard as compared to traditional sensor networks. Second, they provide what physical sensors are not able to do: By documenting personal observations and experiences, they directly record the impact of a hazard on the human environment. For this reason interpretation of the content (e.g., hashtags, images, text, emojis, etc) and metadata (e.g., keywords, tags, geolocation) have been a focus of much research into social media analytics. However, as choices of semantic tags in the current methods are usually reduced to the exact name or type of the event (e.g., hashtags '#Sandy' or '#flooding'), the main limitation of such approaches remains their mere nowcasting capacity. In this study we make use of polysemous tags of images posted during several recent flood events and demonstrate how such volunteered geographic data can be used to provide early warning of an event before its outbreak.
Semantic drift is a well-known concept in distributional semantics, which is used to demonstrate gradual, long-term changes in meanings and sentiments of words and is largely detectable by studying ...the composition of large corpora. In our previous work, which used ontological relationships between words and phrases, we established that certain kinds of semantic micro-changes can be found in social media emerging around natural hazard events, such as floods. Our previous results confirmed that semantic drift in social media can be used to for early detection of floods and to increase the volume of 'useful' geo-referenced data for event monitoring. In this work we use deep learning in order to determine whether images associated with 'semantically drifted' social media tags reflect changes in crowd navigation strategies during floods. Our results show that alternative tags can be used to differentiate naïve and experienced crowds witnessing flooding of various degrees of severity.
This study scrutinizes the enduring effects of racial and gender biases that contribute to the consistent underrepresentation of minority women in leadership roles within American private, public, ...and third sector organizations. We adopt a behavioural data science approach, merging psychological schema theory with sociological intersectionality theory, to evaluate the enduring implications of these biases on female leadership development using mixed methods including machine learning and econometric analysis. Our examination is concentrated on Black female leaders, employing an extensive analysis of leadership rhetoric data spanning 200 years across the aforementioned sectors. We shed light on the continued scarcity of minority female representation in leadership roles, highlighting the role of intersectionality dynamics. Despite Black female leaders frequently embracing higher risks to counter intersectional invisibility compared to their White counterparts, their aspirations are not realized and problems not solved generation after generation, forcing Black female leaders to concentrate on the same issues for dozens and, sometimes, hundreds of years. Our findings suggest that the compound influence of racial and gender biases hinders the advancement of minority female leadership by perpetuating stereotypical behavioral schemas, leading to persistent discriminatory outcomes. We argue for the necessity of organizations to initiate a cultural transformation that fosters positive experiences for future generations of female leaders, recommending a shift in focus from improving outcomes for specific groups to creating an inclusive leadership culture.
Autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD) is one of the most common endocrinopathies and is more prevalent in women. It becomes evident that the circulating antithyroid antibodies that often follow AITD have ...effects on many tissues, including ovaries, and therefore that this common morbidity might have an impact on female fertility, the investigation of which is the aim of the present research. Ovarian reserve, ovarian response to stimulation and early embryo development in infertile patients with thyroid autoimmunity were assessed in 45 women with thyroid autoimmunity and 45 age-matched control patients undergoing infertility treatment. It was demonstrated that the presence of anti-thyroid peroxidase antibodies is associated with lower serum anti-Müllerian hormone levels and antral follicle count. Further investigation revealed the higher prevalence of sub-optimal response to ovarian stimulation in TAI-positive women, lower fertilization rate and lower number of high-quality embryos in this group of patients. The cut-off value for follicular fluid anti-thyroid peroxidase antibody affecting the above-mentioned parameters was determined to be 105.0 IU/mL, highlighting the necessity of closer monitoring in couples seeking infertility treatment with ART.
Recent studies demonstrate that people are increasingly looking online to assess their health, with reasons varying from personal preferences and beliefs to inability to book a timely appointment ...with their local medical practice. Records of these activities represent a new source of data about the health of populations, but which is currently unaccounted for by disease surveillance models. This could potentially be useful as evidence of individuals' perception of bodily changes and self-diagnosis of early symptoms of an emerging disease. We make use of the Experian geodemographic Mosaic dataset in order to extract Type 2 diabetes candidate risk variables and compare their temporal relationships with the search keywords, used to describe early symptoms of the disease on Google. Our results demonstrate that Google Trends can detect early signs of diabetes by monitoring combinations of keywords, associated with searches for hypertension treatment and poor living conditions; Combined search semantics, related to obesity, how to quit smoking and improve living conditions (deprivation) can be also employed, however, may lead to less accurate results.
Mohr-Tranebjaerg syndrome (MTS) is an X-linked recessive disorder caused by
loss of function. It is characterized by sensorineural hearing loss in childhood, progressive optic atrophy in early ...adulthood, early onset dementia and psychiatric symptoms of variable expressivity. We present a family with 4 affected males, explore age-related and interfamilial variability and review the literature.
A 31 years-old male developed psychiatric symptoms at age 18 and presented early onset dementia. Sensorineural hearing loss had been diagnosed in childhood. At 28yo, he developed dysarthria, dysphonia, dysmetria, limb hyperreflexia, dystonia, and spasticity following an acute encephalopathic crisis. WES revealed a hemizygous novel likely pathogenic variant in
, c.45_61dup p.(His21Argfs
11), establishing the diagnosis of MTS. Genetic counseling of the family allowed the diagnosis of three other symptomatic relatives -3 nephews (11yo and two 6yo twins), children of a carrier sister. The oldest nephew had been followed since 4yo due to speech delay. Sensorineural hearing loss was diagnosed at 9yo, and hearing aids were prescribed. The two other nephews were monozygotic twins, and both had unilateral strabismus. One of the twins had macrocephaly and hypoplasia of the anterior temporal lobe, as disclosed by an MRI performed due to febrile seizures. Both had developmental delays, with the language being the most affected area. Their audiograms confirmed hearing loss. All three nephews were hemizygous for the familial
variant.
Hearing loss, an early sign of MTS due to auditory neuropathy, can often be overlooked until more severe features of the disorder manifest. Recurrence risk is high for female carriers, and reproductive options should be offered. Early monitoring of hearing and vision loss and neurological impairment in MTS patients is mandatory since early interventions may positively impact their development. This family showcases the importance of performing a timely etiological investigation of hearing loss and its impact on genetic counseling.
Abstract
Cement producers and their investors are navigating evolving risks and opportunities as the sector’s climate and sustainability implications become more prominent. While many companies now ...disclose greenhouse gas emissions, the majority from carbon-intensive industries appear to delegate emissions to less efficient suppliers. Recognizing this, we underscore the necessity for a globally consolidated asset-level dataset, which acknowledges production inputs provenance. Our approach not only consolidates data from established sources like development banks and governments but innovatively integrates the age of plants and the sourcing patterns of raw materials as two foundational variables of the asset-level data. These variables are instrumental in modeling cement production utilization rates, which in turn, critically influence a company’s greenhouse emissions. Our method successfully combines geospatial computer vision and Large Language Modelling techniques to ensure a comprehensive and holistic understanding of global cement production dynamics.
13q12.3 microdeletion syndrome is a rare cause of syndromic intellectual disability. Identification and genetic characterization of patients with 13q12.3 microdeletion syndrome continues to expand ...the phenotypic spectrum associated with it. Previous studies identified four genes within the approximately 300 Kb minimal critical region including two candidate protein coding genes: KATNAL1 and HMGB1. To date, no patients carrying a sequence‐level variant or a single gene deletion in HMGB1 or KATNAL1 have been described. Here we report six patients with loss‐of‐function variants involving HMGB1 and who had phenotypic features similar to the previously described 13q12.3 microdeletion syndrome cases. Common features included developmental delay, language delay, microcephaly, obesity and dysmorphic features. In silico analyses suggest that HMGB1 is likely to be intolerant to loss‐of‐function, and previous in vitro data are in line with the role of HMGB1 in neurodevelopment. These results strongly suggest that haploinsufficiency of the HMGB1 gene may play a critical role in the pathogenesis of the 13q12.3 microdeletion syndrome.
We deploy a prompt-augmented GPT-4 model to distill comprehensive datasets on the global application of debt-for-nature swaps (DNS), a pivotal financial tool for environmental conservation. Our ...analysis includes 195 nations and identifies 21 countries that have not yet used DNS before as prime candidates for DNS. A significant proportion demonstrates consistent commitments to conservation finance (0.86 accuracy as compared to historical swaps records). Conversely, 35 countries previously active in DNS before 2010 have since been identified as unsuitable. Notably, Argentina, grappling with soaring inflation and a substantial sovereign debt crisis, and Poland, which has achieved economic stability and gained access to alternative EU conservation funds, exemplify the shifting suitability landscape. The study's outcomes illuminate the fragility of DNS as a conservation strategy amid economic and political volatility.
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