Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye courts: law and modernity

This article is a book review on Avi Rubin's study, titled "Ottoman Nizamiye Courts. Law and Modernity

Mustafa Bey of Radoviş (1843-1893): bureaucrat, journalist and deputy of Salonica to the first Ottoman parliament

This article elaborates the life and deeds of Mustafa Bey, who published the first private Ottoman-Turkish newspaper in Salonica in 1873 and was member of the first Ottoman parliament in 1877-1878. By analyzing his activities and ideas, the paper states that Mustafa Bey should be considered to belong to the Young Ottoman political generation

A Staged Migration to Europe: Özdamar's Perikizi and Transgenerational Trauma

Jocelyn Aksin’s research is based in Turkish-German studies with a focus on transnational memory. She has published on the role of Turkish newspapers in Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn and Bitteres Wasser by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and received her Ph. D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014 with a dissertation on representations of memory in Turkish-German novels by Zafer Şenocak, Aras Ören, Feridun Zaimoğlu, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Jocelyn began studying Turkish as a graduate student in the German program at Washington University, and was awarded a fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey for advanced Turkish language study at Boğaziçi University (Bosphorus University). After spending nearly eight years in Istanbul where she completed her dissertation and worked as a language teacher, Jocelyn relocated to Greensboro, N.C. and joined the German Program at UNCG as a lecturer in 2018

To Sell or Not To Sell: Determining the Tradeoffs between Service and Sales in Retail Banking Phone Centers

Throughout the financial services industry, the call center is being recognized as a critical delivery channel, helping firms to keep existing customers, expand their business, and control costs. For banks, call centers provide a cost effective means of servicing in customer requests, and are essential in retaining customers. The traditional role of the call center as a question and answer base for the customer is still a strong motivator for their existence, There is, however, a growing tendency to blend sales related activities with traditional transaction based activities at a financial service firm's phone center. Institutions view the opportunity to sell additional products as the key to a successful phone center operation. While service-oriented businesses in other sectors of the economy are experiencing a similar proliferation in call centers, the dichotomy of a service center and a sales center is much more apparent in banking. Other sectors do not fully blend service and sales in the call center operation as fully as is the desire of financial services firms. The move to sales elsewhere in the financial services industry has been ongoing for some time. The last decade has seen a growing number of banks implementing cross-sell programs across their branch networks in an effort to become higher profit, sales-driven organizations that leverage the delivery system expense structure. Today, these sales efforts in the branches are being extended to alternative delivery channels, a major one of which is the phone center. Lack of management focus, poor hiring practices, lack of training, ineffective organization for marketing, poor service, and not knowing customers or products are only a selection of some of the barriers between resources and sales in banking that have been documented. This paper identifies some of these roadblocks in the context of retail banking phone centers. The authors show that the nature of phone center operations makes them extremely susceptible to the increasing and changing resource needs of a sales organization. The authors provide a snapshot of retail banking phone centers, a review of related literature, and then present an analytical approach to characterize the tradeoffs between service and sales in phone centers. The situation at a specific phone center is described and analyzed. The authors demonstrate that cross-selling costs. In addition to its visible costs, such as training and technology, cross-selling is shown to have detrimental effects on customer service because of the additional burdens and operational load it creates on the system. With a move to more selling, capacity needs sharply increase in terms of customer service representatives and information processing resources. These capacity implications can be easily overlooked, since they are less visible than what one would expects to encounter. The authors show how restaffing can overcome some of the congestion related problems induced by additional sales activity. The authors use a performance model described in the paper in conjunction with an optimization model to determine economically optimal staffing levels for call centers. However, they note that staffing is not the only factor to be considered. Design of customer request processes and human resource practices that support the design are equally important in determining the success of a cross-sell program. The authors intend a second phase of this study a detailed filed study of call center operations across the entire financial services industry.

Computing Performance Measures in a Multi-Class Multi-Resource Processor-Shared Loss System

This paper develops methods to compute performance measures in a specific type of loss system with multiple classes of customers sharing the same processor. Such systems arise in the modeling of a call center, where the performance measures of interest are blocking the probability of a call and the reneging probability of customers that are put on hold. Expressions for these performance measures have been derived in previous work by the authors. Given the difficulty of computing these performance measures for realistic systems, this paper proposes two different approaches to simplify this computation. The first method introduces the idea of multi-dimensional convolutions, and uses this approach to compute exact blocking and reneging probabilities. The second method establishes an adaptation of the Monte Carlo summation technique in order to obtain good estimates of blocking and reneging probabilities in large systems along with their associated confidence intervals.Queuing; loss system; processor sharing; computational analysis; approximation

A Staged Migration to Europe: Özdamar's Perikizi and Transgenerational Trauma

Jocelyn Aksin’s research is based in Turkish-German studies with a focus on transnational memory. She has published on the role of Turkish newspapers in Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn and Bitteres Wasser by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and received her Ph. D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014 with a dissertation on representations of memory in Turkish-German novels by Zafer Şenocak, Aras Ören, Feridun Zaimoğlu, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Jocelyn began studying Turkish as a graduate student in the German program at Washington University, and was awarded a fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey for advanced Turkish language study at Boğaziçi University (Bosphorus University). After spending nearly eight years in Istanbul where she completed her dissertation and worked as a language teacher, Jocelyn relocated to Greensboro, N.C. and joined the German Program at UNCG as a lecturer in 2018

Berita Bohong (Hoax) Perspektif Hukum Islam

Dewasa kini, perkembangan teknologi informasi dan komunikasi  bertumbuh sangat cepat. Layaknya jamur di musim hujan, informasi tentang segala macam hal sangatlah mudah dijumpai. Alur komunikasi yang lancar pada saat ini, sangatlah mendukung dalam penyebaran informasi. Hampir di seluruh aspek kehidupan, sangat bergantung pada penyebaran informasi. Hal tersebut bisa dikaitkan dalam berbagai macam bidang, seperti halnya bidang ekonomi, kesehatan, pendidikan hingga politik serta unsur kenegaraan. Seiring berkembangnya zaman, media informasi juga mengalami berbagai macam perkembangan. Tidak hanya melalui koran, televisi maupun radio, kini informasi juga dapat diperoleh melalui jaringan yang lebih luas. Berbagai macam artikel, jurnal, berita maupun bentuk-bentuk media informasi lainnya sangat mudah didapatkan dan juga sangat mudah untuk disebarkan. Selain itu, berbagai informasi tersebut juga dapat kita ubah, baik dari segi redaksi maupun ilustrasi pendukungnya. Sehingga jika kita telaah kembali, terdapat beberapa hal yang patut kita garisbawahi. Hal tersebut adalah, bahwasanya informasi yang ada pada saat ini tidak seluruhnya merupakan informasi yang bersifat aktual. Tidak dapat dipungkiri, informasi tersebut dapat mengandung berbagai hal yang tidak berdasarkan fakta yang ada dan tidak jarang pula berisi suatu hal yang berlebihan. informasi yang tidak berdasarkan fakta tersebut, kini kita kenal sebagai berita palsu (hoax). Hoax yang telah tersebar pada masyarakat dalam bentuk informasi, nantinya akan sangat mudah untuk dijadikan konsumsi umum serta bahan referensi. Isinya yang sangat tidak dapat dipertanggungjawabkan akan menimbulkan beberapa efek negatif. Negara sudah tentu memiliki beberapa kebijakan untuk menanggulangi serta menanggapi fenomena hoax tersebut, melalui peraturan perundang-undangan maupun kebijakan lainnya. Adapun perihal hoax dalam agama Islam, sudah tentu merupakan perbuatan yang dilarang. Ajaran di dalam Islam, selalu berlandaskan pada nilai-nilai kejujuran serta keadilan, membawa hal yang haq serta menghindarkan dari berbagai macam hal yang bathil. Islam juga telah memiliki beberapa aturan dan cara dalam bertukar informasi. Melalui media dakwah, umat Islam dapat memperoleh berbagai macam informasi dan ilmu. Selain itu, juga terdapat media musyawarah dimana di dalam kegiatan tersebut umat Islam dapat saling bertukar informasi. Seluruh kegiatan tersebut sudah tentu harus berlandaskan pada etika yang baik, sehingga hoax akan dapat dihindari. Senantiasa memilih serta mencermati sebuah ilmu maupun informasi yang diterima, juga merupakan bagian dari tata cara bertukar ilmu maupun informasi dalam Islam