DOES REAL EXCHANGE RATE MATTER FOR EMERGING MARKETS’ INTERNATIONAL TRADE? A GRAVITY MODEL APPROACH FOR TURKEY

From its perspective, we apply the gravity panel data model (log of OLS and REM models) to Turkey’s bilateral trade flows over 1990-2005, using annual data. In our augmented gravity model, we test the model for the effects of real exchange rate (RER), and a set of dummy variables (Costum Union (COSTUM), The crisis of 1994 (D_94) and 2001 (D_01), either facilitating or restricting trade between pairs of countries, on trade performance of Turkey, as well as the core variables; distance (DIST), incomes (GDPs or PPP) and populations (POPs) of the trading countries, as quoted in standart models

Topoloji Optimizasyonunda Eleman Silme Metodunun Uygulanmasi

Konferans Bildirisi -- Teorik ve Uygulamalı Mekanik Türk Milli Komitesi, 2008Conference Paper -- Theoretical and Applied Mechanical Turkish National Committee, 2008Makine parçalarında en iyi malzeme dağılımını sağlayabilmek için çeşitli optimizasyon yöntemleri geliştirilmiştir. Bu yöntemlerden birisi de topoloji optimizasyonudur. Topoloji optimizasyonunda en önemli sorun, çözüm için gereken uzun süredir. Bu çalışmada topoloji optimizasyonunda eleman silme metodu irdelenmiş ve metodun, topoloji optimizasyonunda uzun çözüm süresi için bir çıkış yolu olabileceği gösterilmiştir.To obtain the best material distribution in machine parts, some optimization techniques are developed by many researchers. Among these techniques topology optimization algorithms are discussed. These algorithms are useful for determining initial possible shape of structures. An important drawback of the topology optimization is time consumption. In this study, element deletion during topology optimization is discussed and it is shown that the method may be a solution to time consumption problem of topology optimization

THE PRINCIPAL’S INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERSHIP ABILITY IN STRENGTHENING THE CHARACTER OF JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS OF MUHAMMADIYAH

Purpose of the study: This study aims to determine the ability of the principal in carrying out Instructional Leadership to improve teachers' teaching performance so that it has an impact on improving the character of students. Methodology: The type of this research is evaluative descriptive. The subjects selected by purposive sampling and triadic included 15 principals, 150 teachers, and 450 students in Yogyakarta. The data collection techniques using observation, interviews, questionnaires, and documentation. The data analysis techniques using mixed methods. The quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and linear regression. In contrast, the qualitative data were analyzed using Miler and Huberman's theory, which included four stages: reduction, display, triangulation, and conclusion. Main Findings: First, mild juvenile delinquency is still practiced by students. Secondly, character strengthening is done through an extracurricular program, orderly book socialization, cooperation with external parties. Third, the instructional leadership ability of principals is still low. Fourth, the magnitude of the influence of Instructional Leadership in changing students' characters obtained a percentage of 12%, while other factors influence 78 %; and the inhibiting factor for instructional leadership of school principals is the lack of collaboration between schools and parents. Applications of this study: The results of this study can provide significant benefits in the discipline of character education and educational psychology. The school leaders can use the findings in this study to tackle juvenile delinquency in junior high school. Novelty/Originality of this study: It turns out that to reduce and eliminate juvenile delinquency is not enough just with Instructional Leadership. The most significant factor that can help minimize adolescent familiarization is the existence of good cooperation between parents and teachers or the school

Genetic diversity and relationship among indigenous Turkish Karayaka sheep subpopulations

The Karayaka is the most populous sheep breed in the Black Sea region of Turkey. In the present study, we investigated the intra- and inter-population genetic relationships among indigenous Karayaka sheep subpopulations. Nine microsatellites were genotyped for 64 individuals from Samsun, Ordu, Giresun and Tokat provinces. The average number of alleles (N-a), allelic richness (A(r)), observed heterozygosity (H-o), expected heterozygosity (H-e), polymorphism information content (PIC) and inbreeding coefficient (F-IS) for all subpopulations were estimated as N-a = 16.44, A(r) = 9.887, H-o = 0.303, H-e = 0.886, PIC = 0.866 and F-IS = 0.630, respectively. The observed and expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.171 (Giresun) to 0.376 (Ordu) and 0.757 (Samsun) to 0.845 (Ordu), respectively. It was determined that a 10.5 % of total genetic variation (F-IT = 66.9 %) in Karayaka sheep corresponded to genetic differences among subpopulations (F-ST), whereas 63.0 % was explained by genetic difference among individuals (F-IS). This study gives the first evidence about genetic relationships of Karayaka subpopulations. The results show that Karayaka sheep subpopulations are genetically different from each other. These findings revealed that the Karayaka breed has discrete subpopulations and should be taken into consideration when preparing conservation programs and future breeding strategies

On controlled poisson processes

We consider a special class of two-dimensional Markov processes, finding the relationship between transition probabilities of two such classes.Publisher's Versio

Graphical User Authentication Algorithms Based on Recognition: A survey

In cyber security, the most crucial subject in information security is user authentication. Robust text-based password methods may offer a certain level of protection. Strong passwords are hard to remember, though, so people who use them frequently write them on paper or store them in file for computer .Numerous of computer systems, networks, and Internet-based environments have experimented with using graphical authentication techniques for user authentication in recent years. The two main characteristics of all graphical passwords are their security and usability. Regretfully, none of these methods could adequately address both of these factors concurrently. The ISO usability standards and associated characteristics for graphical user authentication and possible attacks on nineteen recognition-based authentication systems were discussed. In this study, differentiation table of attack patterns for all recognition-based techniques is shown. Finally, the positive and negative aspects of nineteen methods were explained in the form of a detailed table

Declarative Programming Techniques for Hardware Synthesis of Image Processing Applications

Traditional hardware description languages (HDLs), such as VHDL and Verilog, are widely used for designing digital electronic circuits, e.g., application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or programming field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). However, using HDLs for implementing complex algorithms or maintaining large projects is tedious and time-consuming, even for experts. This also prevents the widespread use of FPGAs. As a solution, High-Level Synthesis (HLS) has been studied for decades to increase productivity by, ultimately, taking a behavioral description of an algorithm (what the circuit does?) as design entry and automatically generating a register-transfer level (RTL) implementation. Commercial HLS tools start from well-known programming languages (e.g., C, C++ or OpenCL), which were initially developed for programmable devices with an instruction set architecture (ISA). Yet, these tools deliver a satisfactory quality of hardware synthesis results only when programmers describe hardware-favorable implementations for their applications (how the circuit is built?) exploiting, e.g., a specific memory architecture, control path, and data path. This requires an in-depth understanding of hardware design principles. To adopt software programming languages for hardware design, each HLS tool uses its own language dialect and introduces a non-standard set of pragmas. The mixed-use of software and hardware language abstractions hinders a purely behavioral design and makes optimizations hard to understand since the expected code is neither a pure hardware description nor a regular software implementation. Furthermore, a code optimized for one HLS tool has to be changed significantly to target another HLS tool and performs poorly on an ISA. We believe that the next step in HLS will be on the language side, overcoming productivity, portability, and performance hurdles caused by behavioral design deficiencies of existing tools. This dissertation presents and evaluates three distinct solutions to separate the description of the behavior (what?) of an algorithm from its implementation (how?) while providing high-quality hardware synthesis results for the class of image processing applications. This is achieved by generating highly optimized target-specific input code to commercial HLS tools from high-level abstractions that capture parallelism, locality, and memory access information of an input application. In these approaches, an image processing application is described as a set of basic building blocks, namely point, local and global operators, without low-level implementation concerns. Then, optimized input code is generated for the selected HLS tool (Vivado HLS or Intel OpenCL SDK for FPGAs) using one of the following different programming techniques: (i) a source-to-source compiler developed for an image processing domain-specific language (DSL), or (ii) template metaprogramming to specialize input C++ programs at compile time, (iii) a partial evaluation technique for specializing higher-order functions. We present the first source-to-source compiler that generates optimized input code for Intel OpenCL SDK for FPGAs from a DSL. We use Heterogeneous Image Processing Acceleration (Hipacc), an image processing DSL and a source-to-source compiler initially developed for targeting graphics processing units (GPUs). The Hipacc DSL offers high-level abstractions for point, local, and global operators in form of language constructs. During code generation, the compiler front end transforms input DSL code to an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation using Clang/LLVM compiler infrastructure. By leveraging domain knowledge captured from input DSL code, our backend applies several transformations to generate a description of a streaming hardware pipeline. At the final step, Hipacc generates OpenCL code as input to Intel’s HLS compiler. The quality of our hardware synthesis results rivals with those obtained from Intel’s hand-optimized OpenCL code examples in terms of throughput and resource usage. Furthermore, Hipacc’s code generation achieves significantly higher throughput and uses fewer resources compared to Intel’s parallelization intrinsic. Second, we present an approach based on template metaprogramming for developing modular and highly parameterizable function libraries that also deliver high-quality hardware synthesis results when compiled with HLS tools. In this approach, the library application programming interface (API) consists of high-level generic functions for declaring building blocks of image processing applications, e.g., point, local, global operators, unlike typical libraries that offer functions for complete algorithms, e.g., OpenCV. The library is optimized with Vivado HLS best practices as well as hardware-centric design techniques such as deep pipelining, coarse-level parallelization, and bit-level optimizations. The library contains more than one template design for each algorithmic instance to be able to utilize implementations optimized for input parameters. For example, it includes multiple implementations of image border handling and coarse-level parallelization strategies considered for different input parameters of a local operator specification. Furthermore, a compile-time selection algorithm is proposed for selecting the most suitable implementation according to an analytical model derived for resource usage, speed, and latency. In this way, low-level implementation details are hidden from users. In addition to the presented advantages of using high-level abstractions for raising the abstraction level in HLS, we show that this approach is beneficial for achieving performance portability across different computing platforms. Similar to FPGAs, the performance capabilities of central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs can fully be leveraged only when application programs are tuned with low-level architecture-specific optimizations. These optimizations are based on fundamentally different programming paradigms and languages. As a solution, Khronos released OpenVX as the first industrial standard for graph-based specification of computer vision (CV) applications. The graph-based specification allows optimizing memory transfers between different CV functions from a device-specific backend. Furthermore, the standard hides low-level implementation details from the algorithm description. For instance, memory hierarchy and device synchronization are not exposed to the user. However, the OpenVX standard supports only a small set of computer vision functions and does not offer a mechanism to incorporate user code as part of an OpenVX graph. As the next step, HipaccVX is presented as an OpenVX implementation and extension, supporting code generation for a wide variety of computing platforms. HipaccVX leverages OpenVX’s standard API and graph specification while offering new language constructs to describe algorithms using high-level abstractions that adhere to distinct memory access patterns (e.g., local operators). Thus, it supports the acceleration of user-defined code as well as OpenVX’s CV functions. In this way, HipaccVX combines the benefits of DSL design techniques with an industrial standard specification. Finally, AnyHLS, a novel approach to raise the abstraction level in HLS by using partial evaluation as a core compiler technology is presented. Solely one language and one function library are used to generate target-specific input code for two commercial HLS tools, namely Xilinx Vivado HLS and Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL. Hardware-centric optimizations requiring code transformations are implemented as higher-order functions, without using tool-specific pragma extensions. Extending AnyHLS with new functionality does not require modifications to a compiler or a code generator written in a different (host) language. Contrary to metaprogramming, the well-typedness of a residual program is guaranteed. As a result, significantly higher productivity than the existing techniques and an unprecedented level of portability across different HLS tools are achieved. Productivity, modularity, and portability gains are demonstrated by presenting an image processing library as a case study

Economic and political instability and MNC production: The Turkish automotive case, 1972-1992

Ankara : Department of International Relations and Institute of Economics and Social Sciences, Bilkent University, 1995.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1995.Includes bibliographical references.111 tlie beginning, people lived in closed societies and survived through the exchange of goods. After the first money was coined, it took on an important role in one's life and with the peculiarities of liquidity, confidence and adjustment, it became mi indispansible factor. After World War II, tlie globalization process began: within this process multinational corporations have been the main actors in transboundary interactions. Multinational corporations are the engines of national economies and, with their complicated structures, they continue to exist and exert influence on national economies, d'here tu'e many aiguments related with the pros and cons of multinational corporations, their existence, supply, money, labor, management styles and the like. At the same time, there are several theories which look at multinational corporations from difterent points of view. Global homogenization is a rather peaceful process when it is compared to the confrontations and wars taking place in today's world. Mutual tolerance by the multinational corporations and host country governments leads to a better understanding of the function of multinational corporations and eventually accomplishes a wealthy and healthy national economy.Kaya, M. AkifM.S

Integrin α2β1 Expression Regulates Matrix Metalloproteinase-1-Dependent Bronchial Epithelial Repair in Pulmonary Tuberculosis.

Pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) is caused by inhalation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which damages the bronchial epithelial barrier to establish local infection. Matrix metalloproteinase-1 plays a crucial role in the immunopathology of TB, causing breakdown of type I collagen and cavitation, but this collagenase is also potentially involved in bronchial epithelial repair. We hypothesized that the extracellular matrix (ECM) modulates M. tuberculosis-driven matrix metalloproteinase-1 expression by human bronchial epithelial cells (HBECs), regulating respiratory epithelial cell migration and repair. Medium from monocytes stimulated with M. tuberculosis induced collagenase activity in bronchial epithelial cells, which was reduced by ~87% when cells were cultured on a type I collagen matrix. Matrix metalloproteinase-1 had a focal localization, which is consistent with cell migration, and overall secretion decreased by 32% on type I collagen. There were no associated changes in the specific tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases. Decreased matrix metalloproteinase-1 secretion was due to ligand-binding to the α2β1 integrin and was dependent on the actin cytoskeleton. In lung biopsies, samples from patients with pulmonary TB, integrin α2β1 is highly expressed on the bronchial epithelium. Areas of lung with disrupted collagen matrix showed an increase in matrix metalloproteinases-1 expression compared with areas where collagen was comparable to control lung. Type I collagen matrix increased respiratory epithelial cell migration in a wound-healing assay, and this too was matrix metalloproteinase-dependent, since it was blocked by the matrix metalloproteinase inhibitor GM6001. In summary, we report a novel mechanism by which α2β1-mediated signals from the ECM modulate matrix metalloproteinase-1 secretion by HBECs, regulating their migration and epithelial repair in TB