Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The first consistent inventory of rock glaciers and their hydrological catchments of the Austrian Alps

Abstract A first consistent and homogenized polygon-based inventory of rock glaciers of the Austrian Alps is presented. Compiling previous inventories and updating them by using digital elevation models (1 m grid resolution) derived from airborne laser scanning yield a dataset of 5769 rock glaciers in a ca. 48400 km2 large area. A consistent methodological approach for assigning attributes, stored in a detailed attribute table, was developed and applied here to improve comparability and reproducibility. The majority (60 %) of the studied landforms is considered to be relict (no permafrost); the remaining 40 % may still contain permafrost ice and are thus classified as intact. Rock glaciers range in elevation from 476 to 3312 m a.s. l. and cover a total area of 303 km2. The distribution of rock glaciers is mainly related to the topography of the Austrian Alps and related effects such as past glaciation history. In addition, a comprehensive analysis of the hydrological catchment areas of all individual rock glaciers was carried out. A hydrological catchment analysis in rock glacier areas is of great interest for sustainable water management issues in alpine catchments as these landforms represent shallow aquifer systems with a relatively high storage and thus buffer capability, especially in crystalline bedrock areas. A total area of almost 1280 km2 is drained through rock glaciers. The presented rock glacier and rock glacier catchment inventories provide an important basis for further research, particularly for a better understanding of the hydrogeology and geomorphology of alpine catchments and their potential alteration in the light of climate change, but also in terms of paleoglaciation and deglaciation in the Alpine Lateglacial to Holocene period. As such, the inventories are seen as an important base to stimulate further research.
Measuring Information Coupling between the Solar Wind and the Magnetosphere–Ionosphere System

The interaction between the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetosphere–ionosphere system is very complex, being essentially the result of the interplay between an external driver, the solar wind, and internal processes to the magnetosphere–ionosphere system. In this framework, modelling the Earth’s magnetosphere–ionosphere response to the changes of the solar wind conditions requires a correct identification of the causality relations between the different parameters/quantities used to monitor this coupling. Nowadays, in the framework of complex dynamical systems, both linear statistical tools and Granger causality models drastically fail to detect causal relationships between time series. Conversely, information theory-based concepts can provide powerful model-free statistical quantities capable of disentangling the complex nature of the causal relationships. In this work, we discuss how to deal with the problem of measuring causal information in the solar wind–magnetosphere–ionosphere system. We show that a time delay of about 30–60 min is found between solar wind and magnetospheric and ionospheric overall dynamics as monitored by geomagnetic indices, with a great information transfer observed between the z component of the interplanetary magnetic field and geomagnetic indices, while a lower transfer is found when other solar wind parameters are considered. This suggests that the best candidate for modelling the geomagnetic response to solar wind changes is the interplanetary magnetic field component Bz. A discussion of the relevance of our results in the framework of Space Weather is also provided.
Conditional Rényi Divergences and Horse Betting

Motivated by a horse betting problem, a new conditional Rényi divergence is introduced. It is compared with the conditional Rényi divergences that appear in the definitions of the dependence measures by Csiszár and Sibson, and the properties of all three are studied with emphasis on their behavior under data processing. In the same way that Csiszár’s and Sibson’s conditional divergence lead to the respective dependence measures, so does the new conditional divergence lead to the Lapidoth–Pfister mutual information. Moreover, the new conditional divergence is also related to the Arimoto–Rényi conditional entropy and to Arimoto’s measure of dependence. In the second part of the paper, the horse betting problem is analyzed where, instead of Kelly’s expected log-wealth criterion, a more general family of power-mean utility functions is considered. The key role in the analysis is played by the Rényi divergence, and in the setting where the gambler has access to side information, the new conditional Rényi divergence is key. The setting with side information also provides another operational meaning to the Lapidoth–Pfister mutual information. Finally, a universal strategy for independent and identically distributed races is presented that—without knowing the winning probabilities or the parameter of the utility function—asymptotically maximizes the gambler’s utility function.
Generalizations of Fano’s Inequality for Conditional Information Measures via Majorization Theory †

Fano’s inequality is one of the most elementary, ubiquitous, and important tools in information theory. Using majorization theory, Fano’s inequality is generalized to a broad class of information measures, which contains those of Shannon and Rényi. When specialized to these measures, it recovers and generalizes the classical inequalities. Key to the derivation is the construction of an appropriate conditional distribution inducing a desired marginal distribution on a countably infinite alphabet. The construction is based on the infinite-dimensional version of Birkhoff’s theorem proven by Révész [Acta Math. Hungar. 1962, 3, 188–198], and the constraint of maintaining a desired marginal distribution is similar to coupling in probability theory. Using our Fano-type inequalities for Shannon’s and Rényi’s information measures, we also investigate the asymptotic behavior of the sequence of Shannon’s and Rényi’s equivocations when the error probabilities vanish. This asymptotic behavior provides a novel characterization of the asymptotic equipartition property (AEP) via Fano’s inequality.
Sovereign Credit Default Swap and Stock Markets in Central and Eastern European Countries: Are Feedback Effects at Work?

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the relationship between sovereign Credit Default Swap (CDS) and stock markets in nine emerging economies from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), using daily data over the period January 2008–April 2018. The analysis deploys a Vector Autoregressive model, focusing on the direction of Granger causality between the credit and stock markets. We find evidence of the presence of bidirectional feedback between sovereign CDS and stock markets in CEE countries. The results highlight a transfer entropy of risk from the private to public sector over the whole period and respectively, from the public to private transfer entropy of risk during the European sovereign debt crisis only in Romania and Slovenia. Another finding that deserves particular attention is that the linkage between the CDS spreads and stock markets is time-varying and subject to regime shifts, depending on global financial conditions, such as the sovereign debt crisis. By providing insights on the inter-temporal causality of the comovements of the CDS–stock markets, the paper has significant practical implications for risk management practices and regulatory policies, under different market conditions of European emerging economies.
Applying the Bell’s Test to Chinese Texts

Search engines are able to find documents containing patterns from a query. This approach can be used for alphabetic languages such as English. However, Chinese is highly dependent on context. The significant problem of Chinese text processing is the missing blanks between words, so it is necessary to segment the text to words before any other action. Algorithms for Chinese text segmentation should consider context; that is, the word segmentation process depends on other ideograms. As the existing segmentation algorithms are imperfect, we have considered an approach to build the context from all possible n-grams surrounding the query words. This paper proposes a quantum-inspired approach to rank Chinese text documents by their relevancy to the query. Particularly, this approach uses Bell’s test, which measures the quantum entanglement of two words within the context. The contexts of words are built using the hyperspace analogue to language (HAL) algorithm. Experiments fulfilled in three domains demonstrated that the proposed approach provides acceptable results.
Applications of Information Theory Methods for Evolutionary Optimization of Chemical Computers

It is commonly believed that information processing in living organisms is based on chemical reactions. However, the human achievements in constructing chemical information processing devices demonstrate that it is difficult to design such devices using the bottom-up strategy. Here I discuss the alternative top-down design of a network of chemical oscillators that performs a selected computing task. As an example, I consider a simple network of interacting chemical oscillators that operates as a comparator of two real numbers. The information on which of the two numbers is larger is coded in the number of excitations observed on oscillators forming the network. The parameters of the network are optimized to perform this function with the maximum accuracy. I discuss how information theory methods can be applied to obtain the optimum computing structure.
Information Graphs Incorporating Predictive Values of Disease Forecasts

Diagrammatic formats are useful for summarizing the processes of evaluation and comparison of forecasts in plant pathology and other disciplines where decisions about interventions for the purpose of disease management are often based on a proxy risk variable. We describe a new diagrammatic format for disease forecasts with two categories of actual status and two categories of forecast. The format displays relative entropies, functions of the predictive values that characterize expected information provided by disease forecasts. The new format arises from a consideration of earlier formats with underlying information properties that were previously unexploited. The new diagrammatic format requires no additional data for calculation beyond those used for the calculation of a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. While an ROC curve characterizes a forecast in terms of sensitivity and specificity, the new format described here characterizes a forecast in terms of relative entropies based on predictive values. Thus it is complementary to ROC methodology in its application to the evaluation and comparison of forecasts.
Human Wharton’s Jelly—Cellular Specificity, Stemness Potency, Animal Models, and Current Application in Human Clinical Trials

Stem cell therapies offer a great promise for regenerative and reconstructive medicine, due to their self-renewal and differentiation capacity. Although embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, their utilization involves embryo destruction and is ethically controversial. Therefore, adult tissues that have emerged as an alternative source of stem cells and perinatal tissues, such as the umbilical cord, appear to be particularly attractive. Wharton’s jelly, a gelatinous connective tissue contained in the umbilical cord, is abundant in mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) that express CD105, CD73, CD90, Oct-4, Sox-2, and Nanog among others, and have the ability to differentiate into osteogenic, adipogenic, chondrogenic, and other lineages. Moreover, Wharton’s jelly-derived MSCs (WJ-MSCs) do not express MHC-II and exhibit immunomodulatory properties, which makes them a good alternative for allogeneic and xenogeneic transplantations in cellular therapies. Therefore, umbilical cord, especially Wharton’s jelly, is a promising source of mesenchymal stem cells.
Chemical Constituents with GNMT-Promoter-Enhancing and NRF2-Reduction Activities from Taiwan Agarwood Excoecaria formosana

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is considered to be a silent killer, and was the fourth leading global cause of cancer deaths in 2018. For now, sorafenib is the only approved drug for advanced HCC treatment. The introduction of additional chemopreventive agents and/or adjuvant therapies may be helpful for the treatment of HCC. After screening 3000 methanolic extracts from the Formosan plant extract bank, Excoecaria formosana showed glycine N-methyltransferase (GNMT)-promoter-enhancing and nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (NRF2)-suppressing activities. Further, the investigation of the whole plant of E. formosana led to the isolation of a new steroid, 7α-hydroperoxysitosterol-3-O-β-d-(6-O-palmitoyl)glucopyranoside (1); two new coumarinolignans, excoecoumarin A (2) and excoecoumarin B (3); a new diterpene, excoeterpenol A (4); and 40 known compounds (5–44). Among them, Compounds 38 and 40–44 at a 100 μM concentration showed a 2.97 ± 0.27-, 3.17 ± 1.03-, 2.73 ± 0.23-, 2.63 ± 0.14-, 6.57 ± 0.13-, and 2.62 ± 0.05-fold increase in GNMT promoter activity, respectively. In addition, Compounds 40 and 43 could reduce NRF2 activity, a transcription factor associated with drug resistance, in Huh7 cells with relative activity of 33.1 ± 0.2% and 45.2 ± 2.5%. These results provided the basis for the utilization of Taiwan agarwood for the development of anti-HCC agents.
Mediterranean Diet Nutrients to Turn the Tide against Insulin Resistance and Related Diseases

Insulin resistance (IR), defined as an attenuated biological response to circulating insulin, is a fundamental defect in obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D), and is also linked to a wide spectrum of pathological conditions, such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), cognitive impairment, endothelial dysfunction, chronic kidney disease (CKD), polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and some endocrine tumors, including breast cancer. In obesity, the unbalanced production of pro- and anti-inflammatory adipocytokines can lead to the development of IR and its related metabolic complications, which are potentially reversible through weight-loss programs. The Mediterranean diet (MedDiet), characterized by high consumption of extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO), nuts, red wine, vegetables and other polyphenol-rich elements, has proved to be associated with greater improvement of IR in obese individuals, when compared to other nutritional interventions. Also, recent studies in either experimental animal models or in humans, have shown encouraging results for insulin-sensitizing nutritional supplements derived from MedDiet food sources in the modulation of pathognomonic traits of certain IR-related conditions, including polyunsaturated fatty acids from olive oil and seeds, anthocyanins from purple vegetables and fruits, resveratrol from grapes, and the EVOO-derived, oleacein. Although the pharmacological properties and clinical uses of these functional nutrients are still under investigation, the molecular mechanism(s) underlying the metabolic benefits appear to be compound-specific and, in some cases, point to a role in gene expression through an involvement of the nuclear high-mobility group A1 (HMGA1) protein.
L-OPU in Goat and Sheep—Different Variants of the Oocyte Recovery Method

Simple summary In this study, minimally invasive laparoscopic methods of recovering oocytes in goat and sheep (L-OPU, laparoscopic ovum pick-up) were developed and improved. Applying the laparoscopic technique allows animal welfare to be significantly improved while still maintaining high effectiveness of the method. The method allows a high number of good quality oocytes to be obtained and additionally reduces the invasiveness of the method and tissue damage which occurs during the operation to a minimum. It requires a short time and allows animals to return to the herd immediately after the operation has been completed. Additionally, it also gives the opportunity for maximum use of the animal’s genetic capability. The limitation of using the L-OPU method in goats is its variable and changing effectiveness. That is why it is crucial to develop an effective and repeatable method. The study compared several variants of the method including varying techniques of conducting the operation, various tools for recovering oocytes, and different plans of hormonal stimulation. As a result, an optimal method of recovering oocytes was developed. The research may be of great importance in improving the welfare of animals and increasing the effectiveness of biotechnological methods used in goat and sheep breeding as well as in the area of research. Abstract The laparoscopic method of recovering oocytes in goats and sheep is one of the minimally invasive methods used in the biotechnology of animal reproduction. It allows for good quality oocytes that are suitable for in vitro maturation and fertilization to be recovered. The limitation of using the laparoscopic ovum pick-up (L-OPU) method in goat and sheep is its changing effectiveness and the lack of repeatability of results, as well as the varying effectiveness of different variants of the method. Therefore, it is necessary to develop effective non-invasive techniques allowing for multiple good quality oocyte recovery that would be suitable for in vitro maturation and fertilization. In this study, four different L-OPU variants were described in goats and sheep. Various techniques of recovering oocytes were discussed, including the techniques of conducting the operation, various tools for recovering oocytes, and different plans of hormonal stimulation. Recovery rates were 35% (Variant I), 57% (Variant II), 72% (Variant III), and 67% (Variant IV). After evaluation, 94% (both Variant I and II), 93% (Variant III), and 84% (Variant IV) of the oocytes were qualified for in vitro maturation. The results of the study show that the proposed technique of laparoscopic recovery of oocytes allows a sufficient number of ovarian cells suitable for in vitro culture to be obtained and as a consequence it makes them useful in in vitro maturation/in vitro fertilization (IVM/IVF) programs or cloning. The method allows for a fast and effective conduct of the operation in a living donor with minimal invasiveness while preserving the excellent condition of animals.
Lung Function Trajectories Leading to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease as Predictors of Exacerbations and Mortality.

RATIONALE Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) can develop through a lung function trajectory dominated by an accelerated decline of forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) from normal maximally attained FEV1 in early adulthood (normal maximally attained FEV1 trajectory), but also through a trajectory with FEV1 below norm in early adulthood (low maximally attained FEV1 trajectory). OBJECTIVE To test whether the long-term risk of exacerbations and mortality differs between these two subtypes of COPD. METHODS The cohort included 1170 young adults enrolled in Copenhagen City Heart Study during the 1970s and 1980s. In 2001-3, which served as baseline for present analyses, 79 participants had developed COPD through normal maximally attained FEV1 trajectory, 65 through low maximally attained FEV1 trajectory, and 1026 did not have COPD. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS From 2001 until 2018, we observed 139 severe exacerbations of COPD and 215 deaths, of which 55 were due to non-malignant respiratory disease. In Cox models, there was no difference with regard to risk of severe exacerbations between the two trajectories, but individuals with normal maximally attained FEV1 had an increased risk of non-malignant respiratory disease mortality (using inverse probability censoring weighting with adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 6.20; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.09-18.37; P=0.001) and all-cause mortality (adjusted HR, 1.93; 95% CI, 1.14-3.26; P=0.01) compared to individuals with low maximally attained FEV1. CONCLUSIONS COPD developed through normal maximally attained FEV1 trajectory is associated with an increased risk of respiratory and all-cause mortality compared to COPD developed through low maximally attained FEV1 trajectory.
Steady-State Design of Large-Dimensional Boolean Networks

Analysis and design of steady states representing cell types, such as cell death or unregulated growth, are of significant interest in modeling genetic regulatory networks. In this article, the steady-state design of large-dimensional Boolean networks (BNs) is studied via model reduction and pinning control. Compared with existing literature, the pinning control design in this article is based on the original node’s connection, but not on the state-transition matrix of BNs. Hence, the computational complexity is dramatically reduced in this article from <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(2^{n}\times 2^{n})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(2\times 2^{r})$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of nodes in the large-dimensional BN and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$r< n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the largest number of in-neighbors of the reduced BN. Finally, the proposed method is well demonstrated by a T-LGL survival signaling network with 18 nodes and a model of survival signaling in large granular lymphocyte leukemia with 29 nodes. Just as shown in the simulations, the model reduction method reduces 99.98% redundant states for the network with 18 nodes, and 99.99% redundant states for the network with 29 nodes.
Hypersphere-Based Weight Imprinting for Few-Shot Learning on Embedded Devices

Weight imprinting (WI) was recently introduced as a way to perform gradient descent-free few-shot learning. Due to this, WI was almost immediately adapted for performing few-shot learning on embedded neural network accelerators that do not support back-propagation, e.g., edge tensor processing units. However, WI suffers from many limitations, e.g., it cannot handle novel categories with multimodal distributions and special care should be given to avoid overfitting the learned embeddings on the training classes since this can have a devastating effect on classification accuracy (for the novel categories). In this article, we propose a novel hypersphere-based WI approach that is capable of training neural networks in a regularized, imprinting-aware way effectively overcoming the aforementioned limitations. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using extensive experiments on three image data sets.
Sex Hormone-Dependent Physiology and Diseases of Liver

Sexual dimorphism is associated not only with somatic and behavioral differences between men and women, but also with physiological differences reflected in organ metabolism. Genes regulated by sex hormones differ in expression in various tissues, which is especially important in the case of liver metabolism, with the liver being a target organ for sex hormones as its cells express estrogen receptors (ERs: ERα, also known as ESR1 or NR3A; ERβ; GPER (G protein-coupled ER, also known as GPR 30)) and the androgen receptor (AR) in both men and women. Differences in sex hormone levels and sex hormone-specific gene expression are mentioned as some of the main variations in causes of the incidence of hepatic diseases; for example, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is more common in men, while women have an increased risk of autoimmune liver disease and show more acute liver failure symptoms in alcoholic liver disease. In non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), the distinction is less pronounced, but increased incidences are suggested among men and postmenopausal women, probably due to an increased tendency towards visceral fat accumulation.