Hydrologic homogeneous regions using monthly Streamflow in Turkey

Cluster analysis of gauged streamflow records into homogeneous and robust regions is an important tool for the characterization of hydrologic systems. In this paper we applied the hierarchical cluster analysis to the task of objectively classifying streamflow data into regions encompassing similar streamflow patterns over Turkey. The performance of three standardization techniques was also tested, and standardizing by range was found better than standardizing with zero mean and unit variance. Clustering was carried out using Ward’s minimum variance method which became prominent in managing water resources with squared Euclidean dissimilarity measures on 80 streamflow stations. The stations have natural flow regimes where no intensive river regulation had occurred. A general conclusion drawn is that the zones having similar streamflow pattern were not be overlapped well with the conventional climate zones of Turkey; however, they are coherent with the climate zones of Turkey recently redefined by the cluster analysis to total precipitation data as well as homogenous streamflow zones of Turkey determined by the rotated principal component analysis. The regional streamflow information in this study can significantly improve the accuracy of flow predictions in ungauged watersheds

Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events

This paper investigates bias in coverage between Western and Arab media on Twitter after the November 2015 Beirut and Paris terror attacks. Using two Twitter datasets covering each attack, we investigate how Western and Arab media differed in coverage bias, sympathy bias, and resulting information propagation. We crowdsourced sympathy and sentiment labels for 2,390 tweets across four languages (English, Arabic, French, German), built a regression model to characterize sympathy, and thereafter trained a deep convolutional neural network to predict sympathy. Key findings show: (a) both events were disproportionately covered (b) Western media exhibited less sympathy, where each media coverage was more sympathetic towards the country affected in their respective region (c) Sympathy predictions supported ground truth analysis that Western media was less sympathetic than Arab media (d) Sympathetic tweets do not spread any further. We discuss our results in light of global news flow, Twitter affordances, and public perception impact.Comment: In Proc. CHI 2018 Papers program. Please cite: El Ali, A., Stratmann, T., Park, S., Sch\"oning, J., Heuten, W. & Boll, S. (2018). Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.317413

Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events

This paper investigates bias in coverage between Western and Arab media on Twitter after the November 2015 Beirut and Paris terror attacks. Using two Twitter datasets covering each attack, we investigate how Western and Arab media differed in coverage bias, sympathy bias, and resulting information propagation. We crowdsourced sympathy and sentiment labels for 2,390 tweets across four languages (English, Arabic, French, German), built a regression model to characterize sympathy, and thereafter trained a deep convolutional neural network to predict sympathy. Key findings show: (a) both events were disproportionately covered (b) Western media exhibited less sympathy, where each media coverage was more sympathetic towards the country affected in their respective region (c) Sympathy predictions supported ground truth analysis that Western media was less sympathetic than Arab media (d) Sympathetic tweets do not spread any further. We discuss our results in light of global news flow, Twitter affordances, and public perception impact.Comment: In Proc. CHI 2018 Papers program. Please cite: El Ali, A., Stratmann, T., Park, S., Sch\"oning, J., Heuten, W. & Boll, S. (2018). Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.317413

The Revival of the Classical Racist Discourse in Europe: A Critical Discursive Analysis of Racism in the Context of Russia-Ukraine War

With the rise of critical theories and legal regulations that criminalize racism and accentuate tolerant and liberal values, racist discourses turned to be articulated indirectly (Essed, 1990; van Dijk & Wodak, 2000; Wodak, 2008), and a neo-racist discourse replaced classical racism to be ostensibly respectable and democratic with reference to cultural, rather than racial, difference (Barker 1981; Jayasuriya, 2002; van Dijk, 1997, 2000). However, a blatant and essentialist racist discourse has found its way back to the public sphere in light of the Russia-Ukraine war. Racist remarks have been documented in different types of texts directed to the masses. Therefore, this paper investigates the discursive strategies through which classical racism normalizes its reappearance in a supposedly liberal and democratic political environment. To achieve its objectives, the study adopts the Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak, 2008) to analyse 18 texts of politicians and media reporters and commentators that include racist and discriminatory remarks in justifying the classification of refugees into \u27like us\u27 and \u27different\u27 categories. The study finds that the racist discourse uses special rhetoric in order to adapt to the current socio-political realities by combining classical elements of racism, including those of culture, race, and religion, with spatial proximity. The result is that the close White Christian Europeans are the only social actors who belong in the in- (superior) group

From transnational to multinational education: emerging trends in international higher education

Transnational, or cross-border, education is attracting increasing interest, as universities extend their reach across borders to open up huge new markets. Based on analysis of case students of transnational partnerships, this paper argues that the current definition of transnational education, namely that the degree-awarding university is in a different country from the students being educated, fails to do justice to the multidimensional nature of contemporary transnational partnerships. It argues that the location of the degree-awarding body is, increasingly, of peripheral interest. Of much greater interest is the multinational nature of transnational providers’ stakeholders – the owners, managers, staff, students and regulatory and accrediting bodies. It concludes that it is time to retitle the leading edge in the internationalisati on of higher education as 'multinational education'

A CENTURY OF ARAB-AMERICANS: FROM IMMIGRANTS TO CITIZENS

The United States of America has been the land of immigration that experienced successive waves of immigration since the 17th century. The Arab immigration is a part of that history. This paper looks at the history of Arab immigrants in the USA. It illustrates how these immigrants became American citizens within a century focusing on political, social, and economic factors that have pushed these immigrants out of their original homelands. It draws attention to the distinctive waves of the Arab immigration and how each wave had contributed in the formation of an Arab-American identity. Most of the previous researches on Arab-Americans concentrate on their literary works examining issues such as hybridization, 'double consciousness', and the feeling of being "out of place". This paper, however, introduces the idea of how the Arab-Americans, through different generations and circumstances, have achieved their goal in creating an official existence that formed 'a nation within a nation', despite the fact that they have been shattered and traumatized by social and political issues both in the 20th century and the new millennium. Hence, this paper highlights the importance of history in transforming the Arab-American identity from an Arab immigrant to an American citizen. However, it concludes that this new nation might return to being a nation of immigrants at the end of the road with the new presidency and its extreme chauvinistic politics

Particularismo político alrededor del mundo

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se presenta un nuevo conjunto de datos sobre sistemas electorales y se bosqueja sus usos potenciales en nuevas investigaciones sobre las conexiones entre los sistemas electorales y los resultados económicos. El conjunto de datos brinda indicadores del grado al que políticos individuales pueden promover sus carreras apelando, por un lado, a grupos de electores de zonas geográficas reducidas o a simpatizantes de su partido por el otro.