A general outlook on Turkish librarianship and libraries

Turkey has a rich book and library tradition going back centuries. This article presents an overview of Turkish libraries and librarianship by providing information specifically on the library tradition in Turkey, public and special libraries, librarianship education, professional associations and publications, and recent developments including some special projects run by the state and NGOs

From credit crunch to credit boom: transitional challenges in Bulgarian banking, 1999-2006

New econometric evidence is provided to identify the determinants of the rapid credit growth in Bulgaria and evaluate whether the credit boom has increased bank fragility, based on a panel data analysis of 30 Bulgarian banks over the 1999-2006 period. Employing Fixed effects and GMM estimation techniques to explore the link between credit and capital base in a partial adjustment framework, the study provides evidence for the growing risks of credit expansion and assesses the potential for banking distress in Bulgaria. The paper argues that after a period of severe credit crunch during 1997-1999, foreign-owned Bulgarian banks have financed a credit boom, especially since 2003 but this indicated growing risk in lending and increasing vulnerability to a systemic banking crisis as banks reduced their capital base and registered an increase in non-performing loans. Aggressive lending by less-capitalized banks without appropriate loan loss provisioning has also been verified empirically in a number of panel specifications. While well-capitalized banks have tended to expand credit in proportion to their capital base, banks with weak capital base engaged in excessive risk taking, and expanded credit despite growing ratio of non-performing loans. Hence, the credit boom has come at the expense of increased banking fragility in Bulgaria, raising the probability of bank failure in the event of a downturn in global financial flows which became a disturbing reality in 2008.Bulgarian banking, GMM estimation, credit boom, credit crunch

Jets and Missing Transverse Energy Reconstruction with CMS

We report on the current simulation studies regarding the reconstruction of Jets and Missing Transverse Energy (MET) with the CMS detector at the CERN proton-proton LHC accelerator. The performance of various jet algorithms is compared, when using calorimeter energy deposits as inputs to the algorithm. The plan for obtaining jet energy corrections is outlined and data-driven correction methods are described. Finally, the performance of MET reconstruction is summarized.Comment: 6 page

W and Z boson Productions in CMS at LHC startup

We report on potential for measurement of W and Z boson production, as well as the production in association with jets. Of particular interest are jet multiplicity and $P_{\rm T}$ distributions. The 10 to $100 {\rm pb}^{-1}$ datasets expected in the startup year of operation of LHC are likely to already provide information beyond the reach of the Tevatron collider both in jet multiplicity and $P_{\rm T}$ range. We are especially interested in understanding the ratios of W+jets to Z+jets distributions by comparing them to next-to-leading order Monte Carlo generators, as these processes present a formidable background for searches of new physics phenomena.Comment: 5 page

The Effects of Electronic Access to Scientific Literature in the Consortium of Turkish University Libraries

Purpose: To provide some insight to the sharp increase in the scientific publications originating from Turkish academic and research institutions in the last few years. The underlying reasons, widespread access to literature through electronic databases being the most important, are also investigated. Design/methodology/approach: Although it is difficult to gauge national scientific productivity, number of publications in electronic databases which index thousands of scientific journals can give an idea. Web of Science is one of them, and it is provided to the Turkish academic community along with several other databases by the national library consortium. Based on the Web of Science data, a comparative analysis was performed to investigate publications originated from Turkey and other countries. Findings: The analysis revealed sharp increase in publications from Turkish institutions in the last few years. Considering the highest publishing 30 countries out of 190, the increase between 2001 and 2003 is 53.48 percent for Turkey, followed by 34.00 percent for China and 26.87 percent for South Korea. Research limitations: Although one of the largest, only one of several databases was analyzed. Additionally, there are also several other indicators of scientific productivity such as books published and citations received. Originality and value of the paper: The paper provides some insight to the importance of library consortia and efficient literature access it provides to the researchers

Working with the Diaspora for Development Policy Perspectives from India

CARIM-India: Developing a knowledge base for policymaking on India-EU migrationHuman resource mobility is an essential feature of today’s globalised world where integrated world markets, networks and technologies are all contributing to the increasing movement of labour, students, professionals and families. The migrants of today are the Diaspora of tomorrow - and those of yesteryears, that of today. The Indo-European Diaspora represents a significant population in its size, spread and depth. Yet it is argued that their engagement – economic, social and cultural– with India is currently short of its potential relative to their counterparts in North America. This paper examines that relationship and suggests how both India and the EU must draw upon the Indian strategy to widen and strengthen the bridge that the Indian Diaspora represents. The paper focuses on a five select countries in the EU for this analysis, i.e. Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, being countries that not only have the largest presence of Overseas Indians in mainland Europe but are also strategically important for India. The paper examines the link between Diaspora and development and concludes that it’s a relationship that needs to be nurtured for mutual benefit. It argues that the Indo-European Diaspora has contributed to the economies of the host countries and now is in a position to play a part in India’s developmental efforts. For this a conducive framework needs to be in place. The Indian Government’s policies and programmes are steps in this direction and the time is opportune for the Diaspora to evolve mutually beneficial strategies with both host and home countries to carry forward the relationship.CARIM-India is co-financed by the European University Institute and the European Union

ELICA: An Automated Tool for Dynamic Extraction of Requirements Relevant Information

Requirements elicitation requires extensive knowledge and deep understanding of the problem domain where the final system will be situated. However, in many software development projects, analysts are required to elicit the requirements from an unfamiliar domain, which often causes communication barriers between analysts and stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a requirements ELICitation Aid tool (ELICA) to help analysts better understand the target application domain by dynamic extraction and labeling of requirements-relevant knowledge. To extract the relevant terms, we leverage the flexibility and power of Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFSTs) in dynamic modeling of natural language processing tasks. In addition to the information conveyed through text, ELICA captures and processes non-linguistic information about the intention of speakers such as their confidence level, analytical tone, and emotions. The extracted information is made available to the analysts as a set of labeled snippets with highlighted relevant terms which can also be exported as an artifact of the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. The application and usefulness of ELICA are demonstrated through a case study. This study shows how pre-existing relevant information about the application domain and the information captured during an elicitation meeting, such as the conversation and stakeholders' intentions, can be captured and used to support analysts achieving their tasks.Comment: 2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshop

EXPERIANTIAL MARKETING TO CREATE CUSTOMER VALUE

Development in information and communication technologies within the globalization concern to cause strategical importance of competition. So, to be successful in today’s competitive world, firms concentrated on competitive superiority gained by using information. Increase in usage of information, number of competitors and changes in customer needs and wants make the firms to adopt customer oriented marketing concepts instead of traditional marketing concepts. Because of those changes traditional marketing concepts which focus on main characteristics of the good, customer needs and situation of competitors replace its place to new marketing concepts which focus on the information, brand, communication and experience. In this new customer oriented economic environment, one of the new concepts developed to find customers in a high competitive area, satisfy and obtain their loyalty, is experiential marketing which construct sensitive relationship with the customer, attract them mentally, in short communicate and dialogue with them. Experiential marketing is creating difference by applying customers five senses with the products. Differences occur in not only the product’s benefit but also creating and presenting experience. In this study; experimental marketing which gets the customers appreciation by creating high value for them, touch their senses and mental activities is presented as a solution suggestion to the firms to be successful in the competitive environment with their rivals

The Methodology of Stress Tests for the Kazakh Banking System

In this paper, we describe the results for the section Stress Testing Methodology forKazakh Banking System which is part of the Development of an Early Warning Systemfor Kazakhstan project. The participating Kazakh institutions are the National Bank ofKazakhstan (NBRK), the Financial Supervisory Agency (FSA) and the National AnalyticalCentre of the Government and the National Bank of Kazakhstan (NAC). In this section,we apply different methodologies for developing stress testing tools for the Kazakhbanking system: the bottom-up and top-down approaches. The bottom-up approachis based on questionnaires we have transmitted to Kazakh banks asking them to calculatetheir own risk positions under stress. The collected results and the analyses show thatbanks tend to underestimate the decline in real estate prices and to overestimate currencydevaluation. In the top-down approach, we apply methodologies for portfolio andmacro stress tests to raw data collected by FSA and estimate the impact of the externalmacroeconomic shocks on the expected losses of financial institutions. In the portfoliostress test, the change in the expected losses under stress ranges between 34 percent and86 percent relative to the unconditional expected losses. In the macro stress test, we findan average change of 26 percent in the ratio of bad loans to total loans under stressscenario 1 and an average change of 80 percent under scenario 2 relative to the baselinescenario

The Determinants of NPLs in Emerging Europe, 2000-2011

The emerging Europe has been hardest hit by the surge in the non-performing loans (NPLs) in the aftermath of the global financial turbulence and the crisis-induced recession. The surge in the NPLs generated a severe banking distress, and left a legacy of a debt overhang that dramatically constrained bank lending and served as a drag on economic growth in the post-crisis period. We quantitatively study the determinants of loan losses in static and dynamic panel models with a focus on the linkages between the macro-financial vulnerabilities and a wide range of bank specific variables in 20 emerging European countries during 2000-2011. Our results indicate that the NPL dynamics have been particularly sensitive to real GDP growth, and inflation, while bank profitability as a proxy for management quality plays a significant role in constraining loan defaults. By contrast, higher lending rates may lead to adverse selection problems, and hence reduces loan quality. There is also some weak evidence that rapid credit growth as a measure of excessive risk taking in lending serves as a precursor to worsening loan portfolio quality. We observe, based on a unique data set, that banks in the region increasingly employ advanced risk management regimes (Internal Rating Based, IRB) with the potential to better monitor and evaluate loan quality and hence, rein on problem loans