Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The evolution of large-bodied theropod dinosaurs during the Mesozoic in Asia

The fossil record of large-bodied, apex carnivorous theropod dinosaurs in Eastern Asia is now among the best understood in the world, thanks to new discoveries and reinterpretations of long-neglected fossils. Asia boasts the most complete record of Middle Jurassic theropods globally, as well as one of the best-studied Late Cretaceous theropod faunas, and new research is helping to fill what was previously a 60-million-year gap in the Early-mid Cretaceous fossil record of large Asian predators. In general, the bio-geographic affinities of large-bodied Asian theropods over time were intimately related to physical geography, and progressively more derived theropod clades evolved large body size and occupied the apex predator niche throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous. During the Middle Jurassic, largely endemic clades of basal tetanurans were prevalent in Asia, whereas during the Late Jurassic mid Cretaceous more derived “intermediate” tetanuran theropods with cosmopolitan affinities occupied the large predator role, including sinraptorids, spinosauris, and carcharodontosaurians. Finalli, during the final 20 million years of the Cretaceous, more derived, bird-like coelurosaurs attained large body size. Foremost among these were the tyrannosaurids, a radiation of northern (Asian and North American) megapredators whose ascent into the apex predator niche was a delayed event restricted to the Campanian-Masastrichian. As Asia is the focus of intense ongoing dinosaur fieldwork, our undestarnding of large-bodied theropod evolution will continue to be refined with future discoveries.
Correction of meshless FPM interpolation sub-domains using genetic algorithms

This work describes a technique that allows the correction of interpolation sub-domains, using metaheuristics for the implementation of Meshless Methods in the resolution of Partial Differential Equations. A combined strategy has been used based on a specifically developed Genetic Algorithm (GA), and searching and optimization technique. Three sample problems were solved in this work. Results show a decrease in the global error as well as in the quantity of points needed to form the domain.
Low-Cost Entry, Inter-Firm Rivalry, and Welfare Implications in Large U.S. Air Markets

In this paper we analyze empirically the patterns of inter-firm rivalry between low-cost carriers (LCCs) and full-service carriers (FSCs) by carrier and airport base, and demonstrate what the social welfare gains were, using 1163 samples of U.S. cross-sectional data of 1998. Our main findings are: (1) that both LCCs and FSCs maintained higher price-cost margins especially when LCCs used secondary airports, (2) that total gains of welfare were 25.5 million USD for our dataset, and 90% of welfare gains came from the gain in consumer surplus, and (3) that LCCs sometimes set more-than-monopoly prices instead of profit-maximizing ones.
Similarly different: a comparison of HRM practices in MNE subsidiaries and local firms in Turkey

This study provides some important insights on identifying the underlying characteristics of HRM practices that are likely to be adapted to the local cultural and institutional milieu by subsidiaries of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Further insights are provided on the distinctive characteristics of HRM practices pursued by local firms that are more likely to converge to the practices pursued by subsidiaries of MNEs. Our findings support the idea that HRM practices that are easy to diffuse, control and manage, and reflect a core organizational value will not be adapted to the local context. Our results provide evidence of the emergence of an established set of global best practices in MNEs. We also identify some instances where MNEs are more likely to adapt their HRM practices to the local context. We posit that this is more likely with regard to HRM practices that are difficult to diffuse, control and manage, and require sensitivity to local institutional pressures.
Preliminary Evaluation of the FRIENDS for Life Program on Students' and Teachers' Emotional States for a School in a Low Socio-Economic Status Area.

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the FRIENDS for Life program on students' and teachers' emotional outcomes in a school serving a high-poverty population. The focus of the intervention was to train/coach teachers with strategies to develop social and emotional skills for students. A single group, pre/post-test design was used to conduct a preliminary investigation of the intervention to improve participants' social and emotional outcomes. At the end of the intervention, students who were at risk showed significant decrease in their anxiety levels and teacher's demonstrated significant improvements on their emotional resilience.
How effective and selective is traditional Red Fox snaring?

We followed a red fox culling campaign that employed traditional cable snares to control numbers in a hunting estate in the Serranía de Ronda (Andalusia, southern Spain). We assessed abundance and presence of carnivore species within the area where fox culling took place by means of faecal counts within regularly walked paths. Twenty animals of four different taxa were snared during 238 nights in 36 locations. Through interviews with informed locals we established there were eight carnivore species present in the study area. Capture efficiency was 1.52 foxes per 1,000 trap-nights; the ISO-selectivity was 65% and the negative specific selectivity 50%. Despite daily checks of snares, there was a very high mortality (>80%) of target and non-target species. Moreover, a large proportion of the animals were caught by the neck. Our results suggest that this traditional method (snares without stops) of predator control should not be used.
Interactive comment on “Chemical characteristics of brown carbon in atmospheric particles at a suburban site near Guangzhou, China” by

The manuscript by Qin et al. discusses the possible source of brown carbon at Guanzhou, China. The major finding includes 1) biomass burning is the most important source of brown carbon in the region, and 2) importance of nitrogen containing compounds on brown carbon. The topic will attract the interest of the readers of the journal. The manuscript is clearly written, and easy to understand. I suggest publication of the manuscript after addressing the following comments.
Construction and Validation of the Self-Conscious Emotions at Work Scale

The present study reports on the construction and validation of a new assessment instrument for self-conscious emotions in the work context, namely the Self-Conscious Emotions at Work Scale (SCEWS). In eight typical self-conscious work scenarios respondents have to indicate their emotional reaction in terms of 20 appraisals, subjective experiences, and action tendencies that are relevant and representative for the domain of self-conscious emotions. In total 512 students and 467 working adults completed the SCEWS and reported the frequency of positive emotions, anger, anxiety and sadness. In both samples a three-factorial structure emerged with a guilt, a shame/humiliation, and an anger in self-conscious situations factor. These three self-conscious emotion factors correlated differentially and in a predicted way with the frequency of emotions. Guilt-proneness was predicted to be psychologically constructive and correlated to the frequency of positive emotions. The proneness to shame/humiliation was expected to relate to internalising psychopathological tendencies, and positively correlated to a frequency of anxiety and sadness. Proneness to anger in self-conscious situations was expected to relate to externalising psychopathological tendencies and correlated with the frequency of anger in general. The present study demonstrates that self-conscious emotions can be validly measured in the work context. The new instrument allows for the systematic study of the role of self-conscious emotions in work and organisational behaviour.
Towards an on-Line Student Assistant within a CSCL Framework

The CSCL framework of this work aims at reinforcing knowledge by rebuilding and representing it synthetically in form of a network of concepts, which is built through exchanged messages using a chat and a graphical tool. We have found that during the collaborative learning sessions important troubles bring about deadlocks affecting the learning process. The hypothesis of this work states that significant troubles are expressed by students in form of assistance requests originating behavior patterns associated with certain phases defined within the collaborative learning sessions. Analysis of dialogs of real collaborative learning sessions confirmed this hypothesis, whose results point towards the development of on-line assistance system that aims at breaking the deadlocks caused by troubles expressed in the form of assistance requests. Derived from an analysis of 55 dialogs of a course of databases, we defined three phases characterized by particular assistance requests occurring during the collaborative learning sessions: a) a bootstrap phase characterized by requests about doubts of the use of tools; b) a work phase, wherein requests are related with the construction of the network concepts; c) the goodbye phase wherein requests reflect doubts about the final deliverable network.
A Simple Model of Multiple Equilibria and Default

This Working Document by Daniel Gros presents a simple model that incorporates two types of sovereign default cost: first, a lump-sum cost due to the fact that the country does not service its debt fully and is recognised as being in default status, by ratings agencies, for example. Second, a cost that increases with the size of the losses (or haircut) imposed on creditors whose resistance to a haircut increases with the proportional loss inflicted upon them. One immediate implication of the model is that under some circumstances the creditors have a (collective) interest to forgive some debt in order to induce the country not to default. The model exhibits a potential for multiple equilibria, given that a higher interest rate charged by investors increases the debt service burden and thus the temptation to default. Under very high debt levels credit rationing can set in as the feedback loop between higher interest rates and the higher incentive to default can become explosive. The introduction of uncertainty makes multiple equilibria less likely and reduces their range.
A Comprehensive Survey on Human Skin Detection

Human Skin detection is one of the most widely used algorithms in vision literature which has been numerously exploited both directly and indirectly in multifarious applications. This scope has received a great deal of attention specifically in face analysis and human detection/tracking/recognition systems. As regards, there are several challenges mainly emanating from nonlinear illumination, camera characteristics, imaging conditions, and intra-personal features. During last twenty years, researchers have been struggling to overcome these challenges resulting in publishing hundreds of papers. The aim of this paper is to survey applications, color spaces, methods and their performances, compensation techniques and benchmarking datasets on human skin detection topic, covering the related researches within more than last two decades. In this paper, different difficulties and challenges involved in the task of finding skin pixels are discussed. Skin segmentation algorithms are mainly based on color information; an in-depth discussion on effectiveness of disparate color spaces is elucidated. In addition, using standard evaluation metrics and datasets make the comparison of methods both possible and reasonable. These databases and metrics are investigated and suggested for future studies. Reviewing most existing techniques not only will ease future studies, but it will also result in developing better methods. These methods are classified and illustrated in detail. Variety of applications in which skin detection has been either fully or partially used is also provided.
Big Data, Tacit Knowledge and Organizational Competitiveness

In the process of conducting everyday business, organizations generate and gather a large number of information about their customers, suppliers, competitors, processes, operations, routines and procedures. They also capture communication data from mobile devices, instruments, tools, machines and transmissions. Much of this data possesses an enormous amount of valuable knowledge, exploitation of which could yield economic benefit. Many organizations are taking advantage of business analytics and intelligence solutions to help them find new insights in their business processes and performance. For companies, however, it is still a nascent area, and many of them understand that there are more knowledge and insights that can be extracted from available big data using creativity, recombination and innovative methods, apply it to new knowledge creation and produce substantial value. This has created a need for finding a suitable approach in the firm’s big data related strategy. In this paper, the authors concur that big data is indeed a source of firm’s competitive advantage and consider that it is essential to have the right combination of people, tool and data along with management support and data‐oriented culture to gain competitiveness from big data. However, the authors also argue that organizations should consider the knowledge hidden in the big data as tacit knowledge and they should take advantage of the cumulative experience garnered by the companies and studies done so far by the scholars in this sphere from knowledge management perspective. Based on this idea, a big data oriented framework of organizational knowledge‐based strategy is proposed here.
Determinant and Inverse of Skew Circulant Matrix with the Fibonacci Numbers

and Applied Analysis 3 2. Determinant and Inverse of Skew Circulant Matrix with the Fibonacci Numbers In this section, let B r,n = SCirc(F r+1 , . . . , F r+n ) be a skew circulant matrix. Firstly, we give a determinant explicit formula for the matrix B r,n . Afterwards, we prove that B r,n is an invertible matrix for n ≥ 2, and then we find the inverse of the matrix B r,n . In the following, let
Long-term invasibility patterns in Mediterranean grasslands of varying initial diversities

This paper reports the findings of a long-term natural invasibility field study, in experimental Mediterranean grasslands of varying initial diversities and compositions. The study aims to explore the relationship between the initial planted species richness and composition, and the various invasibility components five years after the cessation of weeding of communities. During our experiment, the local species pools of communities with 1, 2, 4, 8, and 18 plant species were kept closed for three years and subsequently opened to natural invasion. Species richness, density and biomass of initial and invading species were monitored in the communities. Values of the Jaccard similarity index of all species in communities decreased over time and their turnover rate increased. External invader cohorts became more similar over time, with their similarity significantly reduced in high species richness plots. Invasibility components significantly declined across the initial species richness gradient. Invasion patterns across the initial richness gradient were constant during the time of the experiment as no significant ‘initial species richness x year’ interactions were observed. Initial species richness significantly affected external invader biomass. Canopy height eliminated the effect of initial species richness on external invader biomass. Invasion significantly declined with an increase in initial species dominance (i.e. their absolute and fractional biomass). Differences in initial species dominance across the experimental speciesrichness gradient fully explained the effect of initial species richness on invasibility. Consequently, species-rich communities supporting a taller and denser canopy and a higher initial species biomass than species-poor ones are less prone to invasions as they represent stronger competitive environments.
Studying the Design and Verification of 5-axis NC program under the Manufacturing System

NC programming, based on part profiles, is the conventional theory involved in the NC codes creating tasks; this is not wrong but far from satisfying the needs of the 5-axis NC cutting jobs. Viewing from the manufacturing system level and taking the transmission lower tank cut job on the 5-axis MC (machine center) as an example, the author deeply investigated and summarized the technique principles and algorithms of all works involved from a manufacturing system preparation to the 5-axis NC program verification with the help of computer aided technologies. The program design for the 5-axis NC machining is achieved with the CAM methods, and the correctness of the NC codes is guaranteed with the Post-NC verifying. All these principles and algorithms are general and practical, and can be applied by the 5-axis MC users to promote their production quality, efficiency and cost targets.
The Risk Propensity Task (PTR): A proposal for a behavioral performance-based computer test for assessing risk propensity

La evaluacion de las diferencias individuales en la tendencia al riesgo ha sido tradicionalmente realizada en base a instrumentos de auto-informe. Estos estan sujetos a una serie de sesgos y distorsiones que son dificiles de sortear. Este trabajo presenta un nuevo instrumento de evaluacion objetiva de la propension al riesgo basado en la ejecucion comportamental ante una tarea: la Prueba de Tendencia al Riesgo (PTR). En el primer estudio (N = 234) se explora la fiabilidad y dimensionalidad de la tarea. Los resultados muestran una alta consistencia interna (alpha = .94) y una adecuada dimensionalidad congruente con el diseno de la prueba. En el segundo estudio (N = 59) se analiza la validez convergente e incremental de la prueba utilizando para ello un cuestionario sobre busqueda de sensaciones, constructo relacionado con la tendencia al riesgo (SSS-V), autoinformes de comportamientos de riesgo (RTI, SRB) y un test comportamental (BDT). Los resultados muestran correlaciones significativas en mayor o menor medida entre la PTR y las demas pruebas utilizadas. La PTR incrementa en un 6.7% el porcentaje de varianza explicada en estos comportamientos por las otras medidas utilizadas en el estudio. Los resultados indican que la PTR puede ser una herramienta util para la evaluacion de la propension al riesgo.
ARC-Pad: A Mobile Device for Ecient Cursor Control on Large Displays

I present ARC-Pad, a cursor positioning technique for large displays. It allows us to use a touchscreen-enabled phone as a mobile touchpad, and has a hybrid pointing technique to quickly reach distant targets. Users can tap to instantly transport the cursor to a location onscreen, then slide for fine positioning, as with a regular touchpad. This combination makes ARC-Pad especially suited to large displays, even when the touchpad is very small. I develop several modifications to ARC-Pad and evaluate them, including sending screenshots of the desktop to the phone’s touchscreen and using accelerometer data to dynamically modify control-display gain. I perform a series of experiments to compare ARC-Pad to existing cursor positioning systems, and show that ARC-Pad achieves a higher throughput in a target selection task. Finally, I extend ARC-Pad for 3D object positioning, and show that ARC-Pad comes very close to the performance of a 6DOF input device. 0.1 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Pourang Irani, and Myron Semegen from the Industrial Technology Center for their support and financial assistance. I would also like to thank my fellow lab members for their input and assistance, and the participants who volunteered in the experiments. Finally, I would like to thank Karen Kembel, for her faith and support.
The last interglacial (Eemian) climate simulated by LOVECLIM and CCSM3

Abstract. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the climate of the last interglacial simulated by two climate models of different complexities, CCSM3 (Community Climate System Model 3) and LOVECLIM (LOch-Vecode-Ecbilt-CLio-agIsm Model). The simulated surface temperature, hydrological cycle, vegetation and ENSO variability during the last interglacial are analyzed through the comparison with the simulated pre-industrial (PI) climate. In both models, the last interglacial period is characterized by a significant warming (cooling) over almost all the continents during boreal summer (winter) leading to a largely increased (reduced) seasonal contrast in the Northern (Southern) Hemisphere. This is mainly due to the much higher (lower) insolation received by the whole Earth in boreal summer (winter) during this interglacial. The Arctic is warmer than PI through the whole year, resulting from its much higher summer insolation, its remnant effect in the following fall-winter through the interactions between atmosphere, ocean and sea ice and feedbacks from sea ice and snow cover. Discrepancies exist in the sea-ice formation zones between the two models. Cooling is simulated by CCSM3 in the Greenland and Norwegian seas and near the shelves of Antarctica during DJF but not in LOVECLIM as a result of excessive sea-ice formation. Intensified African monsoon is responsible for the cooling during summer in northern Africa and on the Arabian Peninsula. Over India, the precipitation maximum is found further west, while in Africa the precipitation maximum migrates further north. Trees and grassland expand north in Sahel/Sahara, more clearly seen in LOVECLIM than in CCSM3 results. A mix of forest and grassland occupies continents and expands deep into the high northern latitudes. Desert areas reduce significantly in the Northern Hemisphere, but increase in northern Australia. The interannual SST variability of the tropical Pacific (El-Nino Southern Oscillation) of the last interglacial simulated by CCSM3 shows slightly larger variability and magnitude compared to the PI. However, the SST variability in our LOVECLIM simulations is particularly small due to the overestimated thermocline's depth.