Risky neighborhoods? House appreciation in underserved areas

This research project will investigate house price appreciation trends in traditionally underserved areas. The primary goal is to develop and test a methodology to determine what part of a home (appreciation)is due to structural and neighborhood effects, and what part may be attributable to other factors such as homeowners actions (including repair, maintenance, and upgrades). We will employ a space-time modeling framework to measure appreciation varying influences of structural and neighborhood, and other factors on appreciation overtime. We will compare appreciation trends across different submarkets (underserved and conventional) and for both high risk and low risk borrowers. The empirical analysis will employ thr TRW-REDI housing transaction data set for Miami MSA (USA) for the 1985-1993 period in conjunction with Census and American Housing Survey (AHS) data.

Value Relevance of Accounting Data in an Emerging Market: Did Accounting Reforms Make a Difference?

This study investigates the association of accounting earnings (NI) and book value of equity (BV) with stock prices in Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE), currently Borsa Istanbul (BIST), during the 1992–2006 period. We also explore the effect of accounting reforms on value relevance that is measured as the strength of the association between a firm’s NI and BV and its market value. We specifically investigate the impact of the Turkish Uniform Chart of Accounts (1994), mandatory inflation accounting, consolidations and voluntary (2003–2004), and the mandatory (2005) adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). We hypothesize that these reforms have reduced information asymmetry and thus are expected to enhance the value relevance of accounting information. We find strong evidence that the Ohlson model is a valid model, and BV is more value relevant than NI in BIST. We also find that inflation accounting and consolidations have enhanced the value relevance of BV, while IFRS has increased the value relevance of NI, but reduced that of BV. We contribute to the debate by exploiting the unique sequence of reforms, to come up with comparative value relevance testing designs and interesting results for all major reforms, which we believe will be instructive for researchers and for all emerging and developed economies undergoing similar reforms and best practices

Adaptive Power and Resource Management Techniques for Multithreaded Workloads

Abstract-As today's computing trends are moving towards the cloud, meeting the increasing computational demand while minimizing the energy costs in data centers has become essential. This work introduces two adaptive techniques to reduce the energy consumption of the computing clusters through power and resource management on multi-core processors. We first present a novel power capping technique to constrain the power consumption of computing nodes. Our technique combines Dynamic Voltage-Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and thread allocation on multi-core systems. By utilizing machine learning techniques, our power capping method is able to meet the power budgets 82% of the time without requiring any power measurement device and reduces the energy consumption by 51.6% on average in comparison to the state-of-the-art techniques. We then introduce an autonomous resource management technique for consolidated multi-threaded workloads running on multi-core servers. Our technique first classifies applications according to their energy efficiency measure, then proportionally allocates resources for co-scheduled applications to improve the energy efficiency. The proposed technique improves the energy efficiency by 17% in comparison to state-of-the-art co-scheduling policies. I. INTRODUCTION Energy-related costs are among the major contributors to the total cost of ownership of today's data centers and high performance computing (HPC) clusters. Therefore, future computing clusters are required to be energy-efficient in order to be able to meet the continuously increasing computational demand. Moreover, administration and management of the data center resources has become significantly complex, due to increasing number of servers installed on data centers. Therefore, designing autonomous techniques to optimally manage the limited data center resources is essential to achieve sustainability in the cloud era. The achievable maximum performance of a computing cluster is determined by (1) infrastructural/cost limitations (e.g, power delivery, cooling capacity, electricity cost) and/or (2) available hardware resources (e.g., CPU, disk size). Optimizing the performance under such constraints (i,e., power, resource) is critically important to improve the energy efficiency, therefore to reduce to cost of computing. Moreover, the emergence of multi-threaded applications on cloud resources bring additional challenges for optimizing the performanceenergy tradeoffs under resource constraints, due to their complex characteristics such as performance scalability and intercore communication. In this work, we present two adaptive management techniques for multi-threaded workloads to improve the energ

The protective effect of an aqueous extract from Smilax excelsa l. against carbon tetrachloride-induced liver injury in rats

Background: Because reactive oxygen species (ros) contribute to the pathogenesis of various acute and chronic liver diseases, dietary antioxidants and drugs from herbal origins have been proved to be beneficial as therapeutic agents in reversing hepatotoxicity and oxidative stress. The objective of this study was to investigate the protective effect of an aqueous extract from smilax excelsa l. Shoots and leaves against acute ccl4-induced liver injury as well as the changes in antioxidative defense system in female wistar albino rats.Materials and Methods: S. Excelsa extract was administered orally in doses of 100, 200 and 400 mg/kg body weight, once daily for 9 days. Acute hepatic toxicity was induced by intraperitoneal injection of ccl4 (1 ml/kg) on the 10th day. 24 h after ccl4 intoxication, biochemical and histopathological analyses were undertaken on sera and liver tissues.Results: Ccl4 challenge caused significant increases in the activities of liver enzymes as well as the levels of bilirubin, malondialdehyde and nitric oxide, while total serum protein levels and antioxidant defense system parameters were reduced significantly compared to the normal group. Administration of s. Excelsa extract at a dose of 400 mg/kg resulted in a suppression of ccl4-induced lipid peroxidation and altered oxidative stress parameters to nearly normal values in comparison to ccl4-treated rats. Nevertheless the extract did not reduce the extent of ccl4-induced mild liver injury, as seen by the histopathology of liver damage.Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that s. Excelsa could protect the liver tissues against ccl4-induced oxidative stress probably by increasing antioxidative defense activities.Keywords: Antioxidant enzymes, carbon tetrachloride, liver injury, smilax excelsa, hepatoprotective activit

Findings From A Specialized Child Psychiatry Unit For Care of Refugee Children in Istanbul

Objective: Turkey is the leading refugee hosting country in the world by hosting more than 3,5 million people whom almost half of them are children under age 18. We aimed to investigate psychiatric disorders that seen among kids applied to 'Migrant Children Outpatient Treatment Unit' of Marmara University Pendik Training and Research Hospital which is speacilized to provide psychiatric care for refugee children. Method: We investigated follow up files of 41 children applied to 'Migrant Child Outpatient Treatment Unit' between May 2017 to November 2017 retrospectively. Socio-demographical data and diagnoses of children according to DSM-5 classification system were analyzed. Results: Of the 41 children 16 (30,3 %) were girl and 25 (69,7 %) were boy. The average age and time after resettlement were 9.4+4 years and 30.2+15 months respectively. Seventy five percent of parents stated that a person close to them has died, while 87.9 % reported that their children have witnessed to clashes during war. 45 % children stated to have seen a dead or injured person in Syria. Of the children 13 (31.7 %) were diagnosed with anxiety disorders, 13 (31.7 %) with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, 10 (24.4 %) with major depressive disorder, 9 (22.0 %) with post-traumatic stress disorder, 8 with (19.5 %) speech disorders, 7 (17.1 %) with enuresis and 4 (9.8 %) with autism spectrum di-sorder. Discussion: Our findings indicating that refugee children suffer from a wide range of psychiatric disorders which may deteriorate their social and academical functionality and entegration to the new culture years after ressetlement

THE PROTECTIVE EFFECT OF AN AQUEOUS EXTRACT FROM SMILAX EXCELSA L. AGAINST CARBON TETRACHLORIDE-INDUCED LIVER INJURY IN RATS

Background: Because reactive oxygen species (ros) contribute to the pathogenesis of various acute and chronic liver diseases, dietary antioxidants and drugs from herbal origins have been proved to be beneficial as therapeutic agents in reversing hepatotoxicity and oxidative stress. The objective of this study was to investigate the protective effect of an aqueous extract from smilax excelsa l. Shoots and leaves against acute ccl4-induced liver injury as well as the changes in antioxidative defense system in female wistar albino rats. Materials and Methods: S. Excelsa extract was administered orally in doses of 100, 200 and 400 mg/kg body weight, once daily for 9 days. Acute hepatic toxicity was induced by intraperitoneal injection of ccl4 (1 ml/kg) on the 10th day. 24 h after ccl4 intoxication, biochemical and histopathological analyses were undertaken on sera and liver tissues. Results: Ccl4 challenge caused significant increases in the activities of liver enzymes as well as the levels of bilirubin, malondialdehyde and nitric oxide, while total serum protein levels and antioxidant defense system parameters were reduced significantly compared to the normal group. Administration of s. Excelsa extract at a dose of 400 mg/kg resulted in a suppression of ccl4-induced lipid peroxidation and altered oxidative stress parameters to nearly normal values in comparison to ccl4-treated rats. Nevertheless the extract did not reduce the extent of ccl4-induced mild liver injury, as seen by the histopathology of liver damage. Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that s. Excelsa could protect the liver tissues against ccl4-induced oxidative stress probably by increasing antioxidative defense activities

The evaluation of serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor levels in pregnant women with hyperemesis gravidarum

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is considered a cause of conditions such as depression and eating disorders, and hyperemesis gravidarum (HG). Material and methods: This study was conducted as a prospective study at Ankara Ataturk Training and Research Hospital in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The study included 73 pregnant women with singleton pregnancies (32 pregnant women with HG and 41 pregnant women without hyperemesis). Serum BDNF levels were compared between the two groups. Results: The mean age of the study group was 27.3 ± 3.5 years and the body mass index (BMI) was 22.4 ± 2.7 kg/m2. There is no statistically significant difference between the study group and the control group in terms of demographic data (p > 0.05). The pregnant women with HG were found to have significantly higher serum BDNF levels compared to the control group (349.1 ± 94.6 pg/mL vs 292. 3± 86.01, p = 0.009) Conclusions: Serum BDNF levels that are low in psychiatric disorders such as depression or anxiety were found as high in pregnant women with HG