Between Religion and Secularity in Turkey: A Qualitative Enquiry into the Understandings and Experiences of Turkish University Students

This research explores the ways in which young Turkish university students understand, express and negotiate religious practice versus secularism in the public and private spheres as these have emerged in the early twenty-first century, in light of the historical polarization between Islamism and secularism in Turkey. Data was collected using qualitative research methodologies, including participant observation and in-depth interviews with forty-five university students in Istanbul, Turkey. This latter method allowed participants to express their perceptions and experiences about the relationship between Islam and secularity in the context of Turkey’s move to democracy, and the success of the AKP religious party in democratic elections. The thesis begins with a review of relevant scholarly literature; first, debates on the relationship between Islam and the secular state, and secularist policies of Turkey; second, social and cultural conceptions of the relationship between Islam and secularity in Turkey; third, philosophical and conceptual debates on Islam and secularity. Examining this issue, I explore (1) the perceptions and views of university students on secularism and Islamism, the secularist state and the Islamic state; (2) their understanding and experience of religiosity and secularity; (3) the impact of religious groups in Turkey on the relationship of university students with religion, secularity and modernity; (4) the divisions or cohesion of Turkish society based on religion, culture, and lifestyle. I then move on to present and examine one of the most prominent public events of Turkish politics in 2013, the Gezi Park Protests, in terms of the subject of my thesis. The thesis concludes that Turkish university students, both secular and religiously oriented, do successfully negotiate the secular spaces of the public sphere, and have developed new kinds of religiosity and Islamic understanding that stress individual choice and shape their attitudes towards the state, politics, and fellow students who choose to embrace different lifestyles

Peridynamic simulations of nanoindentation tests to determine elastic modulus of polymer thin films

This study combines atomic force microscope (AFM) nanoindentation tests and peridynamic (PD) simulations to extract the elastic moduli of polystyrene (PS) films with varying thicknesses. AFM nanoindentation tests are applied to relatively hard PS thin films deposited on soft polymer (polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)) substrates. Linear force versus deformation response was observed in nanoindentation experiments and numerical simulations since the soft PDMS substrate under the stiff PS films allowed bending of thin PS films instead of penetration of AFM tip towards the PS films. The elastic moduli of PS thin films are found to be increasing with increasing film thickness. The validity of both the simulation and experimental results is established by comparison against those previously published in the literature

Dual Cross-Attention for Medical Image Segmentation

We propose Dual Cross-Attention (DCA), a simple yet effective attention module that is able to enhance skip-connections in U-Net-based architectures for medical image segmentation. DCA addresses the semantic gap between encoder and decoder features by sequentially capturing channel and spatial dependencies across multi-scale encoder features. First, the Channel Cross-Attention (CCA) extracts global channel-wise dependencies by utilizing cross-attention across channel tokens of multi-scale encoder features. Then, the Spatial Cross-Attention (SCA) module performs cross-attention to capture spatial dependencies across spatial tokens. Finally, these fine-grained encoder features are up-sampled and connected to their corresponding decoder parts to form the skip-connection scheme. Our proposed DCA module can be integrated into any encoder-decoder architecture with skip-connections such as U-Net and its variants. We test our DCA module by integrating it into six U-Net-based architectures such as U-Net, V-Net, R2Unet, ResUnet++, DoubleUnet and MultiResUnet. Our DCA module shows Dice Score improvements up to 2.05% on GlaS, 2.74% on MoNuSeg, 1.37% on CVC-ClinicDB, 1.12% on Kvasir-Seg and 1.44% on Synapse datasets. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/gorkemcanates/Dual-Cross-AttentionComment: Code: https://github.com/gorkemcanates/Dual-Cross-Attentio

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

Search for heavy resonances decaying to two Higgs bosons in final states containing four b quarks

A search is presented for narrow heavy resonances X decaying into pairs of Higgs bosons (H) in proton-proton collisions collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC at root s = 8 TeV. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb(-1). The search considers HH resonances with masses between 1 and 3 TeV, having final states of two b quark pairs. Each Higgs boson is produced with large momentum, and the hadronization products of the pair of b quarks can usually be reconstructed as single large jets. The background from multijet and t (t) over bar events is significantly reduced by applying requirements related to the flavor of the jet, its mass, and its substructure. The signal would be identified as a peak on top of the dijet invariant mass spectrum of the remaining background events. No evidence is observed for such a signal. Upper limits obtained at 95 confidence level for the product of the production cross section and branching fraction sigma(gg -> X) B(X -> HH -> b (b) over barb (b) over bar) range from 10 to 1.5 fb for the mass of X from 1.15 to 2.0 TeV, significantly extending previous searches. For a warped extra dimension theory with amass scale Lambda(R) = 1 TeV, the data exclude radion scalar masses between 1.15 and 1.55 TeV

Search for supersymmetry in events with one lepton and multiple jets in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

Peer reviewe

Measurement of the top quark forward-backward production asymmetry and the anomalous chromoelectric and chromomagnetic moments in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV

Abstract The parton-level top quark (t) forward-backward asymmetry and the anomalous chromoelectric (d̂ t) and chromomagnetic (μ̂ t) moments have been measured using LHC pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, collected in the CMS detector in a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb−1. The linearized variable AFB(1) is used to approximate the asymmetry. Candidate t t ¯ events decaying to a muon or electron and jets in final states with low and high Lorentz boosts are selected and reconstructed using a fit of the kinematic distributions of the decay products to those expected for t t ¯ final states. The values found for the parameters are AFB(1)=0.048−0.087+0.095(stat)−0.029+0.020(syst),μ̂t=−0.024−0.009+0.013(stat)−0.011+0.016(syst), and a limit is placed on the magnitude of | d̂ t| < 0.03 at 95% confidence level. [Figure not available: see fulltext.

Measurement of the top quark mass using charged particles in pp collisions at root s=8 TeV

Peer reviewe

Measurement of t(t)over-bar normalised multi-differential cross sections in pp collisions at root s=13 TeV, and simultaneous determination of the strong coupling strength, top quark pole mass, and parton distribution functions

Peer reviewe