Religiosity and Public Attitudes toward Abortion among Turkish Adults: from an Islamic Perspective

For several decades, a handful of studies have examined the relationship between religion and abortion; they particularly pay attention to public attitudes. However, fewer quantitative studies have considered Muslims' attitudes toward abortion. This study explores a new religious and traditional perspective that comes from Islam and also enhances the existing literature on the topic of religion and abortion. The significance of this study is based on the fact that Turkey, as well as its importance of geographical location and cultural heritage in today's world, is one of two Muslim-populated countries in which performing abortion is legal. In order to measure the pulse of the public about this topic, we used data from the fourth wave of the European Value Study (2008). Our purpose is to display how religious factors influence people’s attitudes toward practicing abortion in the cases, "Women who are not married" and "A couple who does not want more children." The findings indicate that people who have a high level of religiosity are more likely to disapprove of the practice of abortion. This finding also can be a considerable indicator of public attitudes regarding abortion to contribute to probable changes in the abortion policy of Turkey

Political relations between Turkey and Georgia in the post-soviet era

Georgia and Turkey has become important partners in the Caucasus region after independence of Georgia in 1991. Two countries preferred to follow pro-West policies in their foreign policy against Russian factor. They have geopolitical importance and geostrategic location for Russia throughout history. This article analyzes foreign policies of Georgia and Turkey and examines Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Crude Oil Pipeline as a common foreign policy between them. The paper found out that this kind of projects between Georgia and Turkey would make them important actors rising from regional level to global level in the future

Prediction of groundwater levels from lake levels and climate data using ann approach

There are many environmental concerns relating to the quality and quantity of surface and groundwater. It is very important to estimate the quantity of water by using readily available climate data for managing water resources of the natural environment. As a case study an artificial neural network (ANN) methodology is developed for estimating the groundwater levels (upper Floridan aquifer levels) as a function of monthly averaged precipitation, evaporation, and measured levels of Magnolia and Brooklyn Lakes in north-central Florida. Groundwater and surface water are highly interactive in the region due to the characteristics of the geological structure, which consists of a sandy surficial aquifer, and a highly transmissive limestoneconfined aquifer known as the Floridan aquifer system (FAS), which are separated by a leaky clayey confining unit. In a lake groundwater system that is typical of many karst lakes in Florida, a large part of the groundwater outflow occurs by means of vertical leakage through the underlying confining unit to a deeper highly transmissive upper Floridan aquifer. This providesa direct hydraulic connection between the lakes and the aquifer, which creates fast and dynamic surface water/groundwater interaction. Relationships among lake levels, groundwater levels, rainfall, and evapotranspiration were determined using ANN-based models and multiple-linear regression (MLR) and multiple-nonlinear regression (MNLR) models. All the models were fitted to the monthly data series and their performances were compared. ANN-based models performed better than MLR and MNLR models in predicting groundwater levels.Keywords: groundwater, surface water, interaction, artificial neural networ

Determining The Effect of Catering Companies' Attitudes Toward Customer Complaints on Customer Loyalty

Catering companies are organizations that provide catering services with a pre-agreed menu and price, prioritizing public health. This study aimed to determine the effect of catering companies' attitudes toward customer complaints coming to customer satisfaction management systems on customer loyalty. For this purpose, 175 customer complaints, the corrective and preventive action reports, and customer loss reports that came to three catering companies for twelve months between 2021 and 2022 were examined by the document review method, and all data were subjected to content analysis. As a result of the content analysis, customer complaints were categorized into four themes: (1) food safety problems, (2) food quality problems, (3) delivery problems, and (4) service quality problems. It was determined that the themes on which the complaints were mostly concentrated were respectively 40.57% food safety problems, 38.29% food quality problems, 19.42% shipping problems, and 1.71% service quality problems. According to the corrective and preventive action reports and customer loss reports, satisfaction levels after solving customer problems (92%) and customer loyalty (79%) were found to be high. These results show that companies that are aware of their mistakes and try to correct them are more successful. Another result of the content analysis applied to the documents is that (1) the competence of the company personnel, (2) the understanding of customer requests, and (3) the establishment of relational communication with the customers reduce complaints and ensure customer loyalty. Overall, it was determined that the attitudes of catering companies towards customer complaints were positive but insufficient, and a positive attitude also positively affected customer loyalty.Catering companies are organizations that provide catering services with a pre-agreed menu and price, prioritizing public health. This study aimed to determine the effect of catering companies' attitudes toward customer complaints coming to customer satisfaction management systems on customer loyalty. For this purpose, 175 customer complaints, the corrective and preventive action reports, and customer loss reports that came to three catering companies for twelve months between 2021 and 2022 were examined by the document review method, and all data were subjected to content analysis. As a result of the content analysis, customer complaints were categorized into four themes: (1) food safety problems, (2) food quality problems, (3) delivery problems, and (4) service quality problems. It was determined that the themes on which the complaints were mostly concentrated were respectively 40.57% food safety problems, 38.29% food quality problems, 19.42% shipping problems, and 1.71% service quality problems. According to the corrective and preventive action reports and customer loss reports, satisfaction levels after solving customer problems (92%) and customer loyalty (79%) were found to be high. These results show that companies that are aware of their mistakes and try to correct them are more successful. Another result of the content analysis applied to the documents is that (1) the competence of the company personnel, (2) the understanding of customer requests, and (3) the establishment of relational communication with the customers reduce complaints and ensure customer loyalty. Overall, it was determined that the attitudes of catering companies towards customer complaints were positive but insufficient, and a positive attitude also positively affected customer loyalty

The Analysis of Articles Related to Curriculum and Instruction Field in Educational Researcher Journal (2005 - 2016)

The purpose of this study is to reveal the research tendencies in the articles related to curriculum and instruction published in Educational Researcher Journal during the last ten years (2005-2016). Descriptive survey model and document analysis were used to conduct the study. A content analysis approach was used to analyse the data obtained. By making general evaluation in the analysed articles according to their subjects, research design and methods, data collection tools, sampling types, genders of the researchers and the publishing years of the articles, the tendency in this field was aimed to be determined. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the subjects of the articles are mostly related to instruction levels curriculum, tendencies in education, teacher training, education reform, and teaching approaches. The main research design used in this article is the literature review. The research method used is qualitative, and the document analysis was employed as a data collection tool

MMSR: Multiple-Model Learned Image Super-Resolution Benefiting From Class-Specific Image Priors

Assuming a known degradation model, the performance of a learned image super-resolution (SR) model depends on how well the variety of image characteristics within the training set matches those in the test set. As a result, the performance of an SR model varies noticeably from image to image over a test set depending on whether characteristics of specific images are similar to those in the training set or not. Hence, in general, a single SR model cannot generalize well enough for all types of image content. In this work, we show that training multiple SR models for different classes of images (e.g., for text, texture, etc.) to exploit class-specific image priors and employing a post-processing network that learns how to best fuse the outputs produced by these multiple SR models surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art generic SR models. Experimental results clearly demonstrate that the proposed multiple-model SR (MMSR) approach significantly outperforms a single pre-trained state-of-the-art SR model both quantitatively and visually. It even exceeds the performance of the best single class-specific SR model trained on similar text or texture images.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE ICIP 2022 Conferenc

Evaluation Of COVID-19 Patients Admitted To Pediatric Emergency Department

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) rapidly spread all around the world and was declared a worldwide pandemic by World Health Organization in March 2020. We aimed to investigate the clinical, demographic and laboratory characteristics of COVID-19 in children admitted to the pediatric emergency triage. Epidemiological, clinical, laboratory, and radiological data of children were collected retrospectively and analyzed to compare by symptoms. A total of 213 pediatric cases with COVID-19 were included. The main clinical features were mild symptoms including fever (7.5%), cough (6.5%), myalgia (6.3%) or no (63.8%). Ground‐like opacities were common radiological findings (25%). Symptomatic patients had higher lymphopenia rate (p=0.03), higher CRP and procalcitonin (PCT) values ( p=0.04), lower age (p=0.000) and lower neutrophil count (p=0.01). The rate of neutropenia and leukopenia were higher in asymptomatic patients(p=0.15, p=0.05, respectively). The most common cause of transmission in children is family contact. Home isolation was recommended for 89.6% of the patients, 10.3% were hospitalized, 2.3% needed an intensive care unit (ICU). Only one death was reported. We found found that children with COVID‐19 are generally mild severe or asymptomatic clinic. Young children were relatively more symptomatic than older children, and those with underlying diseases often needed intensive care unit. The most important laboratory findings difference between symptomatic and asymptomatic patients are lymphopenia, increased CRP and PCT values

Measurements of axial length and radius of corneal curvature in the rabbit eye

The axial length of the eye, the radius of the anterior corneal surface, and the diameter of the cornea were measured on 40 eyes of 20 New Zealand White rabbits. The ultrasonographic measurements of the axial length of the eye showed a mean value of 15.12 ± 0.51mm (15.33 ± 0.50mm in males, 14.96 ± 0.46mm in females). The mean corneal radius was 7.26 ± 0.26mm (7.18 ± 0.9mm in males, 7.32 ± 0.33 mm in females); the mean value of the difference in corneal curvature between two principle meridians was 0.21 ± 0.12mm; and the mean horizontal and vertical diameters of the cornea were 13.41 ± 0.34mm and 13.02 ± 0.30mm, respectively. Although the diameter of the cornea of rabbits was bigger than that of humans (average, horizontal 11.75mm, vertical 10.55mm), the axial length of the eye was 0.7 times that of humans (23-24mm), and the radius of corneal curvature was relatively smaller than that in humans (7.7-7.8mm).</p