Europeanisation of change in foreign policy : transformation of Turkish foreign policy in the EU accession process

The aim of this research is to investigate the influence of Turkey’s European Union (EU) candidature on its foreign policy towards its non-EU neighbours, namely Iran and Syria. It argues that EU conditionality and adaptation pressure for the convergence and alignment of Turkey’s authoritarian political regime to the EU acquis communautaire have produced unintended outcomes in Turkey’s foreign policy towards its non-EU neighbours, in addition to the intended outcomes in Turkey’s domestic politics. To investigate these phenomena, this study poses the following questions: how, to what extent and in what direction has Turkey’s foreign policy changed towards its non-EU neighbours during the country’s EU candidature, and how has Turkey’s EU candidature to the EU played a role in this? This study utilises Europeanization, and the rational choice and historical versions of the new institutionalist theory as its theoretical framework. Interview and case study methods were employed to answer this research question, and triangulation and the creation of counterfactual scenarios were used to substantiate the validity of the study’s findings and interpretation. The findings indicate that, first, Turkish foreign policy towards its non-EU neighbours has undergone a deep transformation from being merely security-oriented disengagement to politically and economically-oriented engagement. Secondly, although 1) due to the nature of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), the literature on Europeanisation in the field of foreign policy primarily addresses socialisation and experimental learning related to the impact of the EU on member and/or non-member states’ foreign policies, and 2) due to the nature of EU-Turkey relations, the literature on the impact of the EU on Turkey’s foreign policy mostly focus on Turkey’s foreign policy towards Turkey’s EU neighbours and primarily addresses EU conditionality and adaptation pressure in the field of foreign policy as it is related to the impact of the EU on Turkey’s foreign policy, the findings of this research show that, in fact, EU conditionality and adaptation pressure in the fields of democracy and the rule of law, and in the economic realm, has unintentionally left a very visible influence on Turkish foreign policy towards Turkey’s non-EU neighbours by: (a) changing the institutions, institutional structures and institutional power relations, (b) empowering the governmentand civil society against the military–bureaucratic elites in political decision making, (c) accomplishing political and economic stability and growth, (d) increasing respect for and protection of religious and minority rights, and transferring domestic religious and minority issues into the realm of normal politics, and thus (e) changing the institutions, interests, preferences and demands that are involved in foreign policy-making towards Turkey’s non-EU neighbours

Near Source Effects and Engineering Implications of Recent Earthquakes in Turkey

The variation of both structural and geotechnical consequences of near-source effects are shown for densely populated environments, Kocaeli and Düzce (Turkey), situated on an alluvial fan at the western part of the 1500 km long North Anatolian fault (NAF) that resembles the San Andreas fault in California with its right-lateral and strike slip faulting mechanism as well as remarkably similar length and capability of generating damaging earthquakes. Recordings from two recent destructive earthquakes occurred in 1999 on the NAF suggest that nearsource impulse type ground motions may generate large input energy demands that have to be dissipated with few large displacement excursions. The discussion is therefore focused on the seismic wave propagation mechanism related to the unexpected damages at the nearfield sites. The observation results proved the high intensity velocity at the damage suffering areas due to the soil layer resonance and, furthermore, due to the bump effect by wave interferences traveling vertically and horizontally. While there are potentially other factors contributing to damage (such as topographic and basin effects, liquefaction, ground failure, or structural deficiencies), the amplification of ground motion due to local site conditions plays an important role in exacerbating the seismic damages in disaster belt area. The field observations regarding this phenomenon supplemented with the near-field strong motion interpretations are presented, and significance of local soil effects in the near-field region is assessed in the course of this study

Behavior of Reinforced Wall System During the 1999 Kocaeli (Izmit), Turkey, Earthquake

A four-span bridge together with a 10 m-high and 100 m-long bridge approach fill was one of the highway facilities damaged due to surface faulting along the Trans-European Motorway during 1999 Kocaeli Earthquake (Mw 7.4). The fault rupture crossed beneath an overpass bridge within a few meters away from the bridge abutment while damaging the approach fill which was reinforced with a double-faced mechanically stabilized earth wall (MSEW) system. The faulting-induced excessive tectonic ground deformations including near-field seismic shakings were the main sources of damage in the walls. Such effects, along with the others, caused cracks and panel separations in wall faces as a result of a liquefaction-induced differential settlement in the cross section. The performance of the reinforced walls was satisfactory that there was no significant structural damage despite the total collapse of the bridge decks. The wall system provided a unique case history under extreme loading conditions, while proving that they are flexible and can withstand large ground deformations. This paper discusses how the walls performed based on post-earthquake reconnaissance studies. The faulting activity, geology of the site, strong ground motions and damage states in the reinforced wall are discussed in details

Learning Context on a Humanoid Robot using Incremental Latent Dirichlet Allocation

In this article, we formalize and model context in terms of a set of concepts grounded in the sensorimotor interactions of a robot. The concepts are modeled as a web using Markov Random Field, inspired from the concept web hypothesis for representing concepts in humans. On this concept web, we treat context as a latent variable of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is a widely-used method in computational linguistics for modeling topics in texts. We extend the standard LDA method in order to make it incremental so that (i) it does not re-learn everything from scratch given new interactions (i.e., it is online) and (ii) it can discover and add a new context into its model when necessary. We demonstrate on the iCub platform that, partly owing to modeling context on top of the concept web, our approach is adaptive, online and robust: It is adaptive and online since it can learn and discover a new context from new interactions. It is robust since it is not affected by irrelevant stimuli and it can discover contexts after a few interactions only. Moreover, we show how to use the context learned in such a model for two important tasks: object recognition and planning.Scientific and Technological Research Council of TurkeyMarie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship titled “Towards Better Robot Manipulation: Improvement through Interaction

Learning and Using Context on a Humanoid Robot Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation

2014 Joint IEEE International Conferences on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-Epirob), Genoa, Italy, 13-16 October 2014In this work, we model context in terms of a set of concepts grounded in a robot's sensorimotor interactions with the environment. For this end, we treat context as a latent variable in Latent Dirichlet Allocation, which is widely used in computational linguistics for modeling topics in texts. The flexibility of our approach allows many-to-many relationships between objects and contexts, as well as between scenes and contexts. We use a concept web representation of the perceptions of the robot as a basis for context analysis. The detected contexts of the scene can be used for several cognitive problems. Our results demonstrate that the robot can use learned contexts to improve object recognition and planning.Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBiTAK

Evaluation of the effect of mitral stenosis severity on the left ventricular systolic function using isovolumic myocardial acceleration

Background: Isovolumic acceleration (IVA) is a new tissue Doppler parameter in the as­sessment of systolic function of both left and right ventricles. It remains unaffected with the changes in pre- and after-load within the physiological range. The aim of our study was to assess the effect of mitral stenosis degree, which is determined by echocardiography, on the left ventricular (LV) function using IVA. Methods: A total number of 62 patients with mitral stenosis (MS) and 32 healthy controls were examined. The severity of MS (mild, moderate, and severe) was determined on the basis of mitral valve area (MVA) and the mean diastolic mitral gradient findings. The peak myocardial velocities during isovolumic contraction, systole, early diastole and late diastole were measured by using tissue Doppler imaging (TDI). Results: All TDI-derived global LV basal wall systolic (peak myocardial isovolumic contra­ction velocity, peak myocardial systolic velocity and IVA), and diastolic velocities (peak early and late diastolic velocities) were significantly decreased in the patients with MS, compared to the healthy patients (p < 0.001, for all). However, IVA was not different when the degree of MS was evaluated (p = 0.114). In addition, IVA was not correlated with the MVA (r = 0.185, p = 0.150). Conclusions: Left ventricular function is impaired in patients with MS regardless of the severity of the disease.

Evaluation of High-Precision Sensors in Structural Monitoring

One of the most intricate branches of metrology involves the monitoring of displacements and deformations of natural and anthropogenic structures under environmental forces, such as tidal or tectonic phenomena, or ground water level changes. Technological progress has changed the measurement process, and steadily increasing accuracy requirements have led to the continued development of new measuring instruments. The adoption of an appropriate measurement strategy, with proper instruments suited for the characteristics of the observed structure and its environmental conditions, is of high priority in the planning of deformation monitoring processes. This paper describes the use of precise digital inclination sensors in continuous monitoring of structural deformations. The topic is treated from two viewpoints: (i) evaluation of the performance of inclination sensors by comparing them to static and continuous GPS observations in deformation monitoring and (ii) providing a strategy for analyzing the structural deformations. The movements of two case study objects, a tall building and a geodetic monument in Istanbul, were separately monitored using dual-axes micro-radian precision inclination sensors (inclinometers) and GPS. The time series of continuous deformation observations were analyzed using the Least Squares Spectral Analysis Technique (LSSA). Overall, the inclinometers showed good performance for continuous monitoring of structural displacements, even at the sub-millimeter level. Static GPS observations remained insufficient for resolving the deformations to the sub-centimeter level due to the errors that affect GPS signals. With the accuracy advantage of inclination sensors, their use with GPS provides more detailed investigation of deformation phenomena. Using inclinometers and GPS is helpful to be able to identify the components of structural responses to the natural forces as static, quasi-static, or resonant

ÇIRAK: Montaj işçileri için uyumlu robot manipülatör desteği

Proje fabrikalardaki montaj hatlarında çalışan işçilerin işlerini daha hızlı yapabilmeleri için onlara ?çırak? olarak yardım edecek bir işbirlikçi robotik manipülatör - Kobot sistemi geliştirmeyi hedeflemiştir. Bu kapsamda işçinin hareketlerini takip eden, montaj sırasında ihtiyacı olan parça ve aletleri zamanı geldiğinde ona uzatan, ve kullanımı bitenleri yerlerine geri götüren ve işçi ile daha doğal bir insan-robot iletişimi kurabilen bir sistem geliştirilmiştir. Daha net ifade etmek gerekirse; 1. İşçinin hareketlerini, parçaları ve parçaların montajında kullanılan aletleri gerçek-zamanlı olarak algılayabilen, 2. Montajın hangi aşamasında olduğunu takip edip, buna dayanarak hangi parça/aleti alması/vermesi gerektiğine karar verebilen, 3. İşçiye gereksinim duyduğu parça ve aletleri doğru zamanda uzatabilen, 4. İşçi ile doğal bir insan-robot etkileşimi kurabilen, 5. İşçi ile etkileşimi sırasında uygulanan hareketlerin güvenli olduğunu teyit edebilen, bir sistem geliştirilmiş ve bir sandalye montaj senaryosunda gösterimi yapılmıştır