Essays on the Convergence of Consumer Spending Patterns across National Markets

The international marketing literature has a common assumption that consumers across countries are becoming more similar in their consumption behavior over time. However, this assumption of global convergence of consumer spending has not been empirically tested in the literature. In this dissertation, we examine the convergence hypothesis across a heterogeneous set of countries and multiple product categories. In the first essay, we develop a conceptual framework of convergence of consumer spending behavior. In the second essay, we empirically test whether convergence is observed across markets and product categories over time. Finally, in the third essay, we investigate the effect of global convergence of consumer spending on market concentration and firms’ market shares. Using the four-firm concentration ratio, we compute the market concentration by industry in each market to investigate the effect of convergence on market concentration. We also examine the effect of convergence on market shares of individual firms, considering the moderating effects of country of origin, country of operation, and the degree of internationalization of the firm. We model the dependent variables, market concentration and market shares, using the fractional logit model. Our results show that there is an overall convergence trend across product categories and countries over time. Moreover, we find that convergence increases the market shares of the largest firms in a market. The findings of this study have theoretical and managerial implications on major marketing areas including global marketing strategy, internationalization, and market segmentation

Focusing on the ethnobotanical uses of plants in Mersin and Adana provinces (Turkey)

This paper presents the result of a study on the herbal drugs in the herbal markets in Mersin and Adana. The data were collected through direct interviews with herbalists and customers between 2002–2005 and the popular medicinal plants were investigated. A total of 107 species belonging to 56 families were investigated and the samples were listedwith their local and Latin names. The investigation includes cross-checking the disorders and their herbal cures and their recommended use stated by the local herbalists, by the parts used, and by the preparations. The cultivated species and their ethno botanical uses, are documented and extensive inventory is presented. As a result, we observed that these plants are used especially for intestinal digestive disorders of the gastrointestinal tract, (21.68%), respiratory tract system disorders (10.43%), heart-blood circulatory system disorders (8.48%), urinary tract system disorders (7.70%), skin disorders (6.48%) and others

Socio-Scientific Issues as a Context for STEM Education: A Case Study Research with Pre-Service Science Teachers

This study was designed as a case study. Participants were 12 senior pre-service science teachers (PSTs), who took theoretical and practical courses about STEM education and socio-scientific issues (SSIs) during their education at a state university. For the study, in the first 4 weeks, theoretical courses on SSIs and STEM education were carried out. Afterwards, PSTs were asked to choose a SSI and configure this issue as a problem statement to perform a STEM activity. Participants were given a total of 3 weeks to determine the issue and prepare the STEM activity, and the researchers of the study gave systematic feedback during this period. Then, starting from the fifth week of the study, groups started to implement their STEM activities in the class, where their peers were assigned as their students. The activity plans they prepare, the field notes taken by the researchers during the implementation of the activities and the semi-structured interviews about the opinions of the PSTs on the use of SSI in STEM education were the data sources of the study. Findings revealed that PSTs found establishing STEM problem situations over SSIs suitable since they provide features such as conformity to real life, having multiple criteria and providing compatibility with other disciplines. Moreover, after their practices, they pointed out that the activities enabled both the teaching of the SSI and the integrated teaching to be carried out. As a conclusion, it is recommended to use socio-scientific problem situations to perform STEM education

Global production and free access to Landsat-scale Evapotranspiration with EEFlux and eeMETRIC

EEFlux (Earth Engine Evapotranspiration Flux) is a version of the METRIC (mapping evapotranspiration at high resolution with internal calibration) application that operates on the Google Earth Engine (EE). EEFlux has a web-based interface and provides free public access to transform Landsat images into 30 m spatial evapotranspiration (ET) data for terrestrial land areas around the globe. EE holds the entire Landsat archive to power EEFlux along with NLDAS/CFSV2 gridded weather data for estimating reference ET. EEFlux is a part of the upcoming OpenET platform (https://openetdata.org/ ) that has leveraged nonprofit funding to provide ET information to all of the lower 48 states for free, as a means to foster water exchange between agriculture, cities and environment (Melton et al., 2020). The METRIC version in OpenET is named eeMETRIC, and includes cloud detection and time integration of ET snapshots into monthly ET estimates. EEFlux and eeMETRIC employ METRIC’s “mountain” algorithms for estimating aerodynamics and solar radiation in complex terrain. Calibration is automated and ET images are computed for download in seconds using EE’s large computational capacity

Sensitivity of evapotranspiration retrievals from the METRIC processing algorithm to improved radiometric resolution of Landsat 8 thermal data and to calibration bias in Landsat 7 and 8 surface temperature

We made an assessment on the use of 12-bit resolution of Landsat 8 (L8) on evapotranspiration (ET) retrievals via the METRIC process as compared to using 8-bit resolution imagery of previous Landsat missions. METRIC (Mapping Evapotranspiration at high Resolution using Internalized Calibration) is an ET retrieval system commonly used in water and water rights management where the surface energy balance process is coupled with an extreme- end point calibration process to remove most impacts of systematic bias in remotely sensed inputs. We degraded L8 thermal images by grouping sequential digital numbers to reduce the apparent numerical resolution and then recomputed ET using METRIC and compared to nondegraded ET products. The use of 8-bit thermal data did not substantially impair the accuracy of ET retrievals derived from METRIC, as compared to the use of 12-bit thermal data. The largest error introduced into ET was \u3c1%. We also compared ET retrieved from images processed during the L8 and Landsat 7 (L7) March 2013 underfly to assess differences in ET caused by differences in signal to noise ratio (SNR) and scaling of the two systems. We evaluated the impact of bias in land surface temperature (LST) retrievals on ET determination using the CIMEC calibration approach (Calibration using Inverse Modeling using Extreme Member Calibration) employed in METRIC by introducing globally systematic biases into LST retrievals from L7 and L8 and comparing to ET from non-biased retrievals. The impacts of the introduction of both additive and multiplicative biases into surface temperature on ET were small for the three regions of the US studied, and for both L7 and L8 satellite systems. An independent study showed that METRIC-produced ET compared to within 3% of measured ET for the California site. The study assessed the impact of the February 2014 recalibration of L8 thermal data that caused a 3 K downward shift in LST estimation and changed reflectance values by about 0.7%. We found that the use of the recalibrated LST and shortwave data sets in METRIC did not change the accuracy of ET retrievals due to the automatic compensation for systematic biases employed by METRIC

Chemerin as a marker of subclinical cardiac involvement in psoriatic patients

Background: Chemerin has been associated with psoriasis and inflammation, but there are no studies demonstrating an association between chemerin and subclinical cardiac involvement in psoriatic patients. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate whether psoriatic patients with increased epicardial fat tissue, impaired flow-mediated dilatation, and diastolic dysfunction have higher serum chemerin levels than a healthy control group. Methods: The study included 60 psoriatic patients and 32 healthy controls. Echocardiographic parameters, epicardial fat tissue, flow-mediated dilatation, and chemerin levels were recorded for both groups. Results: The serum levels of chemerin in the psoriatic patients were significantly higher than in the control group. The diastolic function parameters, including isovolumic contraction and relaxation time, E’/A’ (early diastolic mitral annular velocity/late diastolic mitral annular velocity), and E/E’ (early diastolic peak velocity of mitral inflow/early diastolic mitral annular velocity) values, differed significantly between the groups. Epicardial fat tissue was significantly higher and flow-mediated dilatation was significantly lower in psoriatic patients than in the controls. Chemerin was significantly positively correlated with age, body mass index, systolic and diastolic blood pressures, waist circumference, E/E’, and epicardial fat tissue. Serum chemerin was significantly negatively correlated with E’, E’/A’, and flow-mediated dilatation. A multiple linear regression analysis showed that chemerin was independently correlated with E/E’. Conclusions: Psoriatic patients exhibit early subclinical atherosclerosis and diastolic dysfunction. Chemerin can be used as a marker to screen for patients with subclinical cardiac involvement

The effect of sarcopenia on erlotinib therapy in patients with metastatic lung adenocarcinoma

Erlotinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, has been shown to improve the survival of patients with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-mutated non-small cell lung cancer. Sarcopenia is a status with increasing importance in lung cancer, and it may predict a poor prognosis. We aimed to evaluate the impact of sarcopenia on erlotinib therapy and prognosis in patients with EGFR-mutated (exon 19 or 21 L858R) metastatic lung adenocarcinoma. Sarcopenia was defined as skeletal muscle index ≤39 cm2/m2 for women and ≤55 cm2/m2 for men. The patient characteristics, inflammation parameters, clinical and survival outcomes of the erlotinib therapy were examined according to sarcopenia status. We also analyzed the erlotinib treatment-related toxicity. Seventy-two patients were included in our retrospective study, and the mean age of the patients was 63.7 years. A total of 39 (54.2%) patients were diagnosed with sarcopenia. Patients with sarcopenia had a poor prognosis and had a shorter median progression-free survival (PFS) than patients without sarcopenia (10.5 months vs. 21.8 months, p=0.002). Sarcopenia (HR 2.08) and C-reactive protein > 6.5 mg/L (HR 2.57) were determined as independent poor prognostic factors for PFS of erlotinib therapy. Treatment-related toxicity occurred in 34.7% of patients treated with erlotinib, and sarcopenia did not significantly affect treatment-related toxicity. We also found that sarcopenia significantly affected the response to erlotinib. The expected survival outcomes may be low when erlotinib therapy is used in patients with sarcopenia and metastatic lung adenocarcinoma. This study showed that survival and clinical outcomes could be better predicted by detecting sarcopenia in patients with lung cancer using erlotinib

Utility investigation of automated techniques in hematopoietic progenitor cell count and viability assessment in the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) settingg

Aim: To compare our parameters as regards: i) cell count via two different automated cell count techniques, and ii) viability via automated trypan blue exclusion and 7-aminoactinomycin D (7-AAD) staining. Method: We used the trypan blue exclusion technique and an automated cell counter and for viability testing, and the trypan blue exclusion technique and the 7-AAD evaluation by flow cytometry. The trypan blue exclusion and the radio frequency techniques were used for automated cell counting. Flow cytometric analysis was performed by evaluating the yielded cellular products for 7-AAD uptake during the cell count of CD34+ cells. Results: The mean values for cell count were estimated as 3.44±1.22x106/ml (range, 2.48-5.71x106/ml) and 4.14±1.94x106/ml (range, 1.77-7.43x106/ml) for the trypan blue exclusion and radio frequency techniques, respectively. Additionally, the mean values for viability analyses via the automated trypan blue exclusion and 7-AAD were 93.38±6.09% (range, 79.00-98.00%) and 99.49±0.60% (range, 98.40-100.00%), respectively. Conclusions: Our study has responded to two fundamental questions: whether the results of both of the automated techniques for cell count correspond with each other, and whether the results of the automated viability assessment conform those of the 7-AAD technique during the manufacturing processes of cellular therapy products intended for clinical use. Even though we have the opportunity to use the hemocytometer in our laboratory setting, the automated trypan blue exclusion technique gives cell count results in concordance within the range of the expectations of our Quality Management System (QMS)

MIR376A is a regulator of starvation-induced autophagy

Background: Autophagy is a vesicular trafficking process responsible for the degradation of long-lived, misfolded or abnormal proteins, as well as damaged or surplus organelles. Abnormalities of the autophagic activity may result in the accumulation of protein aggregates, organelle dysfunction, and autophagy disorders were associated with various diseases. Hence, mechanisms of autophagy regulation are under exploration. Methods: Over-expression of hsa-miR-376a1 (shortly MIR376A) was performed to evaluate its effects on autophagy. Autophagy-related targets of the miRNA were predicted using Microcosm Targets and MIRanda bioinformatics tools and experimentally validated. Endogenous miRNA was blocked using antagomirs and the effects on target expression and autophagy were analyzed. Luciferase tests were performed to confirm that 3’ UTR sequences in target genes were functional. Differential expression of MIR376A and the related MIR376B was compared using TaqMan quantitative PCR. Results: Here, we demonstrated that, a microRNA (miRNA) from the DlkI/Gtl2 gene cluster, MIR376A, played an important role in autophagy regulation. We showed that, amino acid and serum starvation-induced autophagy was blocked by MIR376A overexpression in MCF-7 and Huh-7 cells. MIR376A shared the same seed sequence and had overlapping targets with MIR376B, and similarly blocked the expression of key autophagy proteins ATG4C and BECN1 (Beclin 1). Indeed, 3’ UTR sequences in the mRNA of these autophagy proteins were responsive to MIR376A in luciferase assays. Antagomir tests showed that, endogenous MIR376A was participating to the control of ATG4C and BECN1 transcript and protein levels. Moreover, blockage of endogenous MIR376A accelerated starvation-induced autophagic activity. Interestingly, MIR376A and MIR376B levels were increased with different kinetics in response to starvation stress and tissue-specific level differences were also observed, pointing out to an overlapping but miRNA-specific biological role. Conclusions: Our findings underline the importance of miRNAs encoded by the DlkI/Gtl2 gene cluster in stress-response control mechanisms, and introduce MIR376A as a new regulator of autophagy

Analysis of the common genetic component of large-vessel vasculitides through a meta- Immunochip strategy

Giant cell arteritis (GCA) and Takayasu's arteritis (TAK) are major forms of large-vessel vasculitis (LVV) that share clinical features. To evaluate their genetic similarities, we analysed Immunochip genotyping data from 1,434 LVV patients and 3,814 unaffected controls. Genetic pleiotropy was also estimated. The HLA region harboured the main disease-specific associations. GCA was mostly associated with class II genes (HLA-DRB1/HLA-DQA1) whereas TAK was mostly associated with class I genes (HLA-B/MICA). Both the statistical significance and effect size of the HLA signals were considerably reduced in the cross-disease meta-analysis in comparison with the analysis of GCA and TAK separately. Consequently, no significant genetic correlation between these two diseases was observed when HLA variants were tested. Outside the HLA region, only one polymorphism located nearby the IL12B gene surpassed the study-wide significance threshold in the meta-analysis of the discovery datasets (rs755374, P?=?7.54E-07; ORGCA?=?1.19, ORTAK?=?1.50). This marker was confirmed as novel GCA risk factor using four additional cohorts (PGCA?=?5.52E-04, ORGCA?=?1.16). Taken together, our results provide evidence of strong genetic differences between GCA and TAK in the HLA. Outside this region, common susceptibility factors were suggested, especially within the IL12B locus