Institutional Profiles and Entrepreneurship Orientation: A Case of Turkish Graduate Students

In this study I aimed to describe and explain which factors affect entrepreneurship orientation. I expect that proactivity and entrepreneurial behavior is directly related, and country’s institutional factors play very important role on the entrepreneurship orientation. Therefore, I defined institutional profiles and entrepreneurship's characteristics. Institutional profiles are classified into three main dimensions which are based on Kostava’s (1997) research; cognitive, regulatory and, normative dimensions. On the other hand, following Kostova, I modified questionnaire to adopt Turkish culture and I articulated and measured these dimensions. To define operationally the perceived institutional profiles for entrepreneurship, I generated a large pool of items, as well. The institutional profile dimensions include thirty-four items; eleven for regulatory dimension, eight for cognitive dimension and fifteen items for normative dimension. On the other hand, my focus in this study is on the measurement and correlation of proactive behavior as a personal disposition relative to the stable behavioral tendency. Proactive person searches for opportunities, takes initiative, acts, but the proactive dimension of behavior is essentially rooted in people's needs to manipulate and control the environment. At the same time, the prospective entrepreneur's interpretation of the environment is also moderated by his/her beliefs about the environment. From this point of view, I selected my research sample among graduate students who are included 170 person, accepting them as potential investors. For the proactive personality measurement, which includes seventeen items, Bateman and Crant's (1993) questionnaire was used. Furthermore, data reliability was tested before the analysis has begun. To conclude, the findings of the research were discussed.Entrepreneurship orientation, institutional profiles, culture

FAME: Face Association through Model Evolution

We attack the problem of learning face models for public faces from weakly-labelled images collected from web through querying a name. The data is very noisy even after face detection, with several irrelevant faces corresponding to other people. We propose a novel method, Face Association through Model Evolution (FAME), that is able to prune the data in an iterative way, for the face models associated to a name to evolve. The idea is based on capturing discriminativeness and representativeness of each instance and eliminating the outliers. The final models are used to classify faces on novel datasets with possibly different characteristics. On benchmark datasets, our results are comparable to or better than state-of-the-art studies for the task of face identification.Comment: Draft version of the stud

Team Effectiveness and Leadership Roles

In this study we aim to explain the patterns of leadership roles for team effectiveness in non economic organizations compared to economic organizations. For this purpose, we studied three successful organization types, i.e the amateur sports clubs (football, basketball), theater companies and, regional folk groups. Our basic hypothesis is that the relationship between the type of organization (specially teams) and the role of leadership is not random. Therefore, we believe that an empirical approach is necessary to test the assumptions about leadership and team effectiveness. Also these empirical results are supposed to lead to professional managers in economic organizations. First, we constructed thirteen key dimension variables for leadership behavior as follows: coaching, effective communication, encouraging teamwork, establishing high standards and getting results, effective delegation, rewarding performance, developing and releasing employees, building consensus, supporting reasonable risk- taking, forecast thinking, improving the organization, managing diversity, and overall effectiveness . Second, we defined team standards and effectiveness in twenty items. And finally, we tried to emphasize factors affecting leadership roles and team effectiveness. In this study, Natemeyer and Babko (1992) Management Practices Survey data are used. Data reliability are tested before the analysis and results are discussed at the end of the study.Team effectiveness, Leadership; Roles

The Effects of Using Security Frames on Global Agenda Setting and Policy Making

Why do transnational advocacy campaigns on environmental, health, human rights or humanitarian causes sometimes (but not always) frame these problems as security issues? This is an important question because there is an under-analyzed assumption made by some transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and securitization studies scholars that framing an issue as a security threat has an overall positive effect on convincing states to take actions in addressing transnational social problems. The lack of systematic comparison across cases limits our ability to reveal the advocates’ motivations in adopting security frames and the contrasting effects that securitization might have at various stages of advocacy campaigns. It is crucial to address this question as it will help us better understand the sources of transnational advocacy campaigns’ influence over states as well as the inner dynamics of advocacy strategies. The study conducts a systematic comparative analysis of thirty-eight transnational advocacy campaigns to test whether the assumed correlation between using security frames and reaching advocacy success would hold when analyzed comparatively. The study then takes a closer look at the question by conducting a comparative analysis of nine cases and an illustrative analysis of a securitized campaign (Conflict Diamonds) to address the similarities between securitization and other acts of framing as well as to shed light onto the inner dynamics of securitization. Based on this analysis, the study argues that rather than being unique and correlated to transnational advocacy success, as argued by the literature, security frames operate like any other frame, and in order for such framing decisions to translate into advocacy success they need to coexist with an enabling strategic environment. The study also provides insights into the conditions that shape advocates’ framing choices. In addition to the widely cited role of the broader political context, the study also finds the advocacy networks’ own dynamics as well as the advocates’ previous experiences and their fields of expertise to be important in shaping their framing choices. The study also argues that advocates engage in multivocalization, which refers to the inclination of the advocates to invoke multiple frames simultaneously to reach out not only to targets of influence but also to potential allies with the goal of strengthening their networks. The analysis also reveals that the motivations behind adopting security frames are more complex than appreciated by the securitization literature in two ways: (i) a security frame does not have to be tailored toward states or security organizations, it can also be crafted to get the attention and the cooperation of non-state actors; and (ii) a security frame might appeal to an audience not necessarily because of the security threat it voices but because of the non-security concerns it silences

A new pose-based representation for recognizing actions from multiple cameras

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We address the problem of recognizing actions from arbitrary views for a multi-camera system. We argue that poses are important for understanding human actions and the strength of the pose representation affects the overall performance of the action recognition system. Based on this idea, we present a new view-independent representation for human poses. Assuming that the data is initially provided in the form of volumetric data, the volume of the human body is first divided into a sequence of horizontal layers, and then the intersections of the body segments with each layer are coded with enclosing circles. The circular features in all layers (i) the number of circles, (ii) the area of the outer circle, and (iii) the area of the inner circle are then used to generate a pose descriptor. The pose descriptors of all frames in an action sequence are further combined to generate corresponding motion descriptors. Action recognition is then performed with a simple nearest neighbor classifier. Experiments performed on the benchmark IXMAS multi-view dataset demonstrate that the performance of our method is comparable to the other methods in the literature. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Interesting faces: A graph-based approach for finding people in news

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this study, we propose a method for finding people in large news photograph and video collections. Our method exploits the multi-modal nature of these data sets to recognize people and does not require any supervisory input. It first uses the name of the person to populate an initial set of candidate faces. From this set, which is likely to include the faces of other people, it selects the group of most similar faces corresponding to the queried person in a variety of conditions. Our main contribution is to transform the problem of recognizing the faces of the queried person in a set of candidate faces to the problem of finding the highly connected sub-graph (the densest component) in a graph representing the similarities of faces. We also propose a novel technique for finding the similarities of faces by matching interest points extracted from the faces. The proposed method further allows the classification of new faces without needing to re-build the graph. The experiments are performed on two data sets: thousands of news photographs from Yahoo! news and over 200 news videos from TRECVid2004. The results show that the proposed method provides significant improvements over textbased methods. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserve

Avrupalılaşma, Avrupa'dan uzaklaşma ve işlemselcilik arasında Romanların sosyal içermesi

The European Union (EU) has been developing a framework for Roma inclusion, equality and participation since the 1990s, and it has been urging the accession countries to follow these policies. While the EU accession process has been instrumental in prioritising Roma inclusion on the political agenda in Turkey, the broader changes in Turkey-EU relations have contributed to the limited progress the Roma inclusion initiatives have made over time. This article argues that rather than approaching it as an isolated event, reading it through the lenses of de-Europeanisation and the rise of transactionalism in Turkey’s foreign policy helps us understand the stalemate that the Roma inclusion policies have reached.Avrupa Birliği (AB), 1990'lardan bu yana Romanların eşitlik, katılım ve sosyal içermesine ilişkin bir çerçeve geliştirmekte ve katılım sürecindeki ülkeleri bu politikalara uymaya çağırmaktadır. AB'ye katılım süreci, Türkiye’de Romanların sosyal içermesine siyasi gündemde öncelik verilmesinde katkı sağlamakla birlikte Türkiye-AB ilişkilerindeki dönüşüm, bu girişimlerinin zaman içinde kaydettiği sınırlı ilerlemede etkili olmuştur. Bu makale, münferit bir olay olarak yaklaşmak yerine, ilgili gelişmeleri Avrupa'dan uzaklaşma ve Türkiye'nin dış politikasında artan işlemselcilik merceklerinden okumanın, Romanlara yönelik sosyal içerme politikalarının içine girdiği çıkmazı anlamamızda yardımcı olacağını savunmaktadır

Histogram of oriented rectangles: A new pose descriptor for human action recognition

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Most of the approaches to human action recognition tend to form complex models which require lots of parameter estimation and computation time. In this study, we show that, human actions can be simply represented by pose without dealing with the complex representation of dynamics. Based on this idea, we propose a novel pose descriptor which we name as Histogram-of-Oriented-Rectangles (HOR) for representing and recognizing human actions in videos. We represent each human pose in an action sequence by oriented rectangular patches extracted over the human silhouette. We then form spatial oriented histograms to represent the distribution of these rectangular patches. We make use of several matching strategies to carry the information from the spatial domain described by the HOR descriptor to temporal domain. These are (i) nearest neighbor classification, which recognizes the actions by matching the descriptors of each frame, (ii) global histogramming, which extends the idea of Motion Energy Image proposed by Bobick and Davis to rectangular patches, (iii) a classifier-based approach using Support Vector Machines, and (iv) adaptation of Dynamic Time Warping on the temporal representation of the HOR descriptor. For the cases when pose descriptor is not sufficiently strong alone, such as to differentiate actions "jogging" and "running", we also incorporate a simple velocity descriptor as a prior to the pose based classification step. We test our system with different configurations and experiment on two commonly used action datasets: the Weizmann dataset and the KTH dataset. Results show that our method is superior to other methods on Weizmann dataset with a perfect accuracy rate of 100%, and is comparable to the other methods on KTH dataset with a very high success rate close to 90%. These results prove that with a simple and compact representation, we can achieve robust recognition of human actions, compared to complex representations. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A line-based representation for matching words in historical manuscripts

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this study, we propose a new method for retrieving and recognizing words in historical documents. We represent word images with a set of line segments. Then we provide a criterion for word matching based on matching the lines. We carry out experiments on a benchmark dataset consisting of manuscripts by George Washington, as well as on Ottoman manuscripts. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved