DEVOTION AND FRIENDSHIP THROUGH FACEBOOK: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO LANGUAGE, COMMUNITY, AND IDENTITY PERFORMANCES OF YOUNG TURKISH-AMERICAN WOMEN

This dissertation explores the incorporation of Facebook into everyday live activities and practices of a group of young Turkish-American women affiliated with a faith-based movement, known as the Hizmet (volunteer\u27s service) movement. In particular, I examine the emergent communicative practices and performances of these young women and how they create a sense of identity and community and mediate these via this online medium in their diverse geographical localities. I start my analysis by investigating several instances of discourse and within these I focus on metacommunicative, metapragmatic, and metadiscursive acts in aiming to understand their semiotic performances on and off Facebook. I found that these young Turkish-American women, after being dispersed to different geographical localities, began to see Facebook as a vital means to maintain their group ties. Furthermore, their use of Facebook from 2008 to 2011 became more and more for Hizmet purposes. Stepping into the ideological realm, I understand that the notion of friendship is highly influenced by a semiotic ideology of tefani (gloss). That is, true/religious brotherhood is one of the important principles of gaining ikhlas (sincerity) and hence a way to establish good relations with God, and these young women see Facebook as a means to further their relationship with their sisters and thus establish a good relationship with God. I observed that they rely heavily on their unique ways of speaking to mark their in-groupness. I argue that, in the absence of several resources exploited by mainstream youths in the US, these young women employ and exploit their ingroup language features as a means to construct their coolness and otherness . In addition, through playing with several languages and language varieties and playing with several generated intertexts, these young women make their interactions somewhat invisible to outsiders through drawing from their shared stock of knowledge and communicative repertoires developed in prior in. Influenced by several competing ideologies, these young women negotiated the use and incorporation of Facebook into their everyday life and especially its pros and cons in terms of their religiosity. Through differentiating their Facebook use from its popular uses, they transform it to a Vefabook (Loyaltybook) and hence employ it as a medium of/for vefa (loyalty) through which they practice uhuvvet (religious brotherhood) and tefani. Their unique ways of speaking and circulation of stretches of discourse contribute to transforming Facebook into a vefa space where they mainly interact with their sisters in their group

Synthesis and biological evaluation of optically active conjugated gamma- and delta-lactone derivatives

WOS: 000308046800010PubMed ID: 22902655An efficient synthesis of racemic and both enantiomeric forms of heteroaryl substituted gamma- and delta-lactone derivatives derived from allyl and homoallyl alcohol backbones has been accomplished via ring closing metathesis reaction. 2-Heteroaryl substituted allyl and homoallyl alcohols have been efficiently resolved through enzymatic method with high ee (97-99%) and known stereochemistry. Antimicrobial and antioxidant activities of target lactones were evaluated. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Turkish Scientific and Technical Research CouncilTurkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK) [TBAG-108T072]We are grateful to the Turkish Scientific and Technical Research Council for a Grant (No. TBAG-108T072). We thank Nese Ozgazi and Umran Aydemir Sezer for their help in antimicrobial tests

GENETIC STRUCTURE OF POWDERY MILDEW DISEASE PATHOGEN BLUMERIA GRAMINIS F. SP HORDEI IN THE BARLEY FIELDS OF CUKUROVA IN TURKEY

WOS: 000395724300043This work was conducted in order to investigate the frequency of virulence genes, gene complexities, and pathotype frequencies of powdery mildew (Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei) populations on two different barley production fields in the Cukurova Region. For this purpose, the barley leaves, prior to the pre-harvest period, which were infected with pathogen at the sexual period developmental stage as Cleistothecium were collected in 2007 and stored in the laboratory at room temperature. Pathogenic isolates were obtained in laboratory conditions with the aid of susceptible control variety (Bulbul-89) by stimulating ascospore output from each foliar. Every isolate was further purified through multiplying from a single spore. A total of 138 Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei single spores were obtained. The differential isogenic lines of 25, each possessing a single resistance genes were inoculated with the single spore isolates obtained from Cleistothecium. The aggressiveness of gene frequencies and virulence gene complexities, and pathotype frequencies of the isolates were determined according to the scale 0-4, developed by Welz. The pathotypes were established through the formula developed by Habgood. Virulence gene frequencies varied from 0 % to 94.33 % in powdery mildew populations. Gene frequencies of Val, (Va7+Vk) were at 0.0 % in both populations. In the populations of Adana and Hatay 47 and 56 pathotypes were obtained, respectively. The isolate with Habgood pathotype index of 04667601 showed 14.8 % gene frequency in Adana population.DOSAP Program of METU; State Planning Organization, DPTTurkiye Cumhuriyeti Kalkinma Bakanligi [DPT2004K120750]We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Mogens S. Hovmoller and ICARDA for providing the Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei races and Barley differential lines, respectively. We also thank to Adnan Menderes University for using their facilities. This work was funded by the DOSAP Program of METU and State Planning Organization, DPT (Project No. DPT2004K120750)

Corrigendum: Marital satisfaction, sex, age, marriage duration, religion, number of children, economic status, education, and collectivistic values: Data from 33 countries

Forms of committed relationships, including formal marriage arrangements between men and women, exist in almost every culture (Bell, 1997). Yet, similarly to many other psychological constructs (Henrich et al., 2010), marital satisfaction and its correlates have been investigated almost exclusively in Western countries (e.g., Bradbury et al., 2000). Meanwhile, marital relationships are heavily guided by culturally determined norms, customs, and expectations (for review see Berscheid, 1995; Fiske et al., 1998). While we acknowledge the differences existing both between- and within-cultures, we measured marital satisfaction and several factors that might potentially correlate with it based on self-report data from individuals across 33 countries. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the raw data available for anybody interested in further examining any relations between them and other country-level scores obtained elsewhere

The Associations of Dyadic Coping and Relationship Satisfaction Vary between and within Nations: A 35-Nation Study

Objective: Theories about how couples help each other to cope with stress, such as the systemic transactional model of dyadic coping, suggest that the cultural context in which couples live influences how their coping behavior affects their relationship satisfaction. In contrast to the theoretical assumptions, a recent meta-analysis provides evidence that neither culture, nor gender, influences the association between dyadic coping and relationship satisfaction, at least based on their samples of couples living in North America and West Europe. Thus, it is an open questions whether the theoretical assumptions of cultural influences are false or whether cultural influences on couple behavior just occur in cultures outside of the Western world