Evaluation of Remotely-Sensed and Model-Based Soil Moisture Products According to Different Soil Type, Vegetation Cover and Climate Regime Using Station-Based Observations over Turkey

This study evaluates the performance of widely-used remotely sensed- and model-based soil moisture products, including: The Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT), the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E), the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI), the Antecedent Precipitation Index (API), and the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS-NOAH). Evaluations are performed between 2008 and 2011 against the calibrated station-based soil moisture observations collected by the General Directorate of Meteorology of Turkey. The calibration of soil moisture observing sensors with respect to the soil type, correction of the soil moisture for the soil temperature, and the quality control of the collected measurements are performed prior to the evaluation of the products. Evaluation of remotely sensed- and model-based soil moisture products is performed considering different characteristics of the time series (i.e., seasonality and anomaly components) and the study region (i.e., soil type, vegetation cover, soil wetness and climate regime). The systematic bias between soil moisture products and in situ measurements is eliminated by using a linear rescaling method. Correlations between the soil moisture products and the in situ observations vary between 0.57 and 0.87, while the root mean square errors of the products versus the in situ observations vary between 0.028 and 0.043 m(3) m(-3). Overall, according to the correlation and root mean square error values obtained in all evaluation categories, NOAH and ESA-CCI soil moisture products perform better than all the other model- and remotely sensed-based soil moisture products. These results are valid for the entire study time period and all of the sub-categories under soil type, vegetation cover, soil wetness and climate regime

Reduced motor cortex inhibition and a \u27cognitive-first\u27 prioritisation strategy for older adults during dual-tasking

It is well established that older adults are less able to perform attentionally demanding motor tasks, placing them at greater risk of accident-related injury. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate whether the interplay between prefrontal and motor cortex activity could predict such age-related performance deficits. Using a dual-task (DT) paradigm, 15 younger and 15 older adults participated in experiment 1, where brain activity was simultaneously measured using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Experiment 1 demonstrated poorer performance for the older group across a range of DTs combining visuomotor arm tracking with a secondary cognitive or motor task. Interestingly however, older adults' DT performance error was isolated to the motor component of DTs. TMS data revealed reduced motor cortex (M1) inhibition during DTs for older adults, and a trend for this correlating with poorer performance. In contrast, poorer performing younger adults showed significantly higher M1 inhibition. Experiment 2 was conducted given a high amount of movement artifact in experiment 1 fNIRS data. Using fNIRS to measure prefrontal, premotor, and motor cortex activity in an additional 15 older adults, we found no evidence of an interplay between these regions predicting DT performance. Nevertheless, performance data replicated experiment 1 in showing that DT error was isolated to motor tasks in older adults, with no significant cognitive task error. Overall, this study shows that older adults seemed to adopt a ‘cognitive-first’ prioritisation strategy during the DTs involved in our study, and that deficits in DT performance may be related to the modulation of M1 inhibitory mechanisms. We propose that clinicians advise older adults to allocate greater attention to motor tasks during activities where they may be at risk of accident-related injury

Twitter and politics: identifying Turkish opinion leaders in new social media

Online platforms now provide a valuable medium for political socialization and mobilization. Recent events such as the Gezi Park protests, the Occupy Wall Street, or the anti-government protests in Iran demonstrate how effective social media can be in shaping an individual’s political attitudes and actions. Traditional public opinion research does not acknowledge this emerging data source to its fullest extent. In the following study, findings from the I-POST project, which has been collecting and exploring Twitter data to define how the online political debates are shaped in Turkey, are presented. Having identified over ten million active Turkish Twitter users and produced a social network graph of these users, this study identifies public opinion leadership in the Turkish online discussion space. The findings suggest that who these opinion leaders are may not follow the conventional expectations, but these leaders employ various tactics in managing their online presence and disseminating their ideas. This research endeavor as well as the findings suggests that engaging in cross-disciplinary research with scholars from different backgrounds can advance Turkish studies, in terms of both content and methodology. Most importantly, such interdisciplinary research can render significant leverage towards making Turkey more globally salient for scholarly debates

Aroma, Sugar and Anthocyanin Profile of Fruit and Seed of Mahlab (Prunus mahaleb L.): Optimization of Bioactive Compounds Extraction by Simplex Lattice Mixture Design

In the present study, bioactive properties of black mahlab fruit and seed were investigated. Simplex lattice mixture design was used to determine the best solvent composition for the extraction of bioactive compounds of the samples. The content of total phenolics, total flavonoids, condensed tannins, total anthocyanins, and antiradical efficiency of mahlab fruit and seed extracts were investigated by spectrophotometric methods. Moreover, major sugar composition, individual anthocyanins, fatty acids, and aroma profile of the samples were determined by chromatographic methods. Effect of temperature on degradation of anthocyanins was also investigated, and degradation kinetic model parameters were calculated. Finally, the constructed simplex lattice mixture design model was optimized to estimate the optimum solvent mixtures that would yield maximum total phenolic content. The best solvent mixture was found to be 36% of acetone and 64% of water. It was concluded that the experimental and predicted values were in good agreement. Total phenolics and flavonoids of the fruit were 2,266 mg gallic acid equivalent/100 g of dry sample and 946.57mg catechin equivalent/100 g of dry sample, respectively. Total anthocyanin content of the fruit was 505.7 mg/100 g of dry sample. Temperature showed a significant degradation effect on the anthocyanins