Democratic vs. Capitalist Peace: A Test in the Developing World

This paper aims to test the capitalist and democratic peace arguments within the developing world. Notwithstanding the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence which indicate two different dynamics of interstate conflict in the developing and the developed worlds, the proponents of both “democratic peace” and “capitalist peace” arguments did not take into account the distinction between developing and developed countries and tested their hypotheses within samples that included “all dyads” in different time periods. This study aims to fill this gap by testing capitalist and democratic peace arguments within the developing world. It tests the capitalist and democratic peace arguments through statistical analysis (logistic regression) of the militarized interstate disputes in the developing world between 1951 and 2000. The results support the “capitalist peace” argument and suggest that, within the developing world, economic development leads to interstate peace, whereas democracy does not. The findings are robust to different measures of conflict, democracy and economic development

Marazi bir durum olarak Türkiye’de niyet siyaseti: Türkiye’de toplumsal güven eksikliği ve bunun siyasal sonuçları

In this article, I analyze social polarization in Turkey and offer suggestions as to how to ameliorate it. I first review the literature on the relationship between social trust and democracy and then draw the current picture of social and political trust in Turkey using data from the World Values Survey. Then I explain political distrust and polarization in Turkey utilizing the concept of 'politics of intentions' and elaborate on the negative consequences of this type of politics, which is very much dominant in contemporary Turkish politics. Finally, I evaluate the options and tools available to Turkish people and politicians for fighting high social distrust and polarization in Turkey.Bu makalede Türkiye'deki toplumsal kamplaşmanın hem sebepleri incelenmekte hem de toplumsal kamplaşmanın azaltılmasına yönelik somut öneriler üretilmektedir. Bunu yaparken önce toplumsal güven ile demokrasi ve siyaset arasındaki ilişkiyi irdeleyen literatürün bir özeti sunulup sonra da yakın zamanda yapılan Dünya Değerleri Anketi'nin (World Values Survey) verileri kullanılarak Türkiye'deki toplumsal ve siyasal güvenin bir resmi çekilmektedir. Daha sonra da Türkiye'deki siyasal güvensizlik ve kamplaşma "niyet siyaseti" kavramı etrafında açıklanıp bunun sebep olduğu zararlı sonuçlar üzerinde durulmaktadır. Son olarak, Türkiye'deki toplumsal güvensizliğin azaltılmasında istifade edilebilecek araçların bir değerlendirmesi yapılıp bireylere, kitlelere ve özellikle de siyasilere düşen görevler üzerinde fikir yürütülmekte ve veri analizi yapılmaktadır

Prognostic impact of BCL2, BCL6 and MYC status in de novo diffuse large B-cell lymphoma: a regional study of 43 patients

Background: Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is an aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma with marked biologic heterogeneity. We aimed to evaluate the status of MYC, BCL2, BCL6 in patients with DLBCL.Methods: Herein, we have investigated the prognostic relevance of MYC, BCL2 and BCL6 from 43 de novo DLBCL patients.Results: In this study, protein overexpression of BCL2 and BCL6 was encountered in 46.5% (n=20) and 27.9% (n=12) of the tumors, respectively.  Rearrangements in MYC, BCL6, and BCL2 were detected in 9.3% (n=4), 25.6% (n=11), and 4.7% (n=2) of the cases, respectively. Any statistically significant difference could not be found between Bcl-2, Bcl-6 expression, C-MYC rearrangement and the survival.Conclusions: We concluded that C-MYC and BCL2 may contribute to aggressive transformation, so more mechanism-based therapy should be explored. A larger study is warranted to better understand the immunophenotypic and molecular features of DLBCL and their respective impact on patient survival

Strategic argumentation: A game theoretical investigation

Argumentation is modelled as a game where the payoffs are measured in terms of the probability that the claimed conclusion is, or is not, defeasibly provable, given a history of arguments that have actually been exchanged, and given the probability of the factual premises. The probability of a conclusion is calculated using a standard variant of Defeasible Logic, in combination with standard probability calculus. It is a new element of the present approach that the exchange of arguments is analysed with game theoretical tools, yielding a prescriptive and to some extent even predictive account of the actual course of play. A brief comparison with existing argument-based dialogue approaches confirms that such a prescriptive account of the actual argumentation has been almost lacking in the approaches proposed so far

A context aware model for autonomous agent stochastic planning

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are not able to make use of domain information effectively due to their representational limitations. The lacking of elements which enable the models be aware of context, leads to unstructured representation of that problem such as raw probability matrices or lists. This causes these tools significantly less efficient at determining a useful policy as the state space of a task grows, which is the case for more realistic problems having localized dependencies between states and actions. In this paper, we present a new state machine, called Context-Aware Markov Decision Process (CA-MDP) based on MDP for the purpose of representing Markovian sequential decision making problems in a more structured manner. CA-MDP changes and augments MDP facilities by integrating causal relationships between actions and states thereby enabling structural, hence compact if possible, representation of the tasks. To show the expressive power of CA-MDP, we give the theoretical bounds for complexity of conversion between MDP and CA-MDP to demonstrate the expressive power of CA-MDP. Next, to generate an optimal policy from CA-MDP encoding by exploiting those newly defined facilities, we devised a new solver algorithm based on value iteration (VI), called Context-Aware Value Iteration (CA-VI). Although regular dynamic programming (DP) based algorithms is successful at effectively determining optimal policies, they do not scale well with respect to state-action space, making both the MDP encoding and related solver mechanism practically unusable for real-life problems. Our solver algorithm gets the power of overcoming the scalability problem by integrating the structural information provided in CA-MDP. First, we give theoretical analysis of CA-VI by examining the expected number of Bellman updates being performed on arbitrary tasks. Finally, we present our conducted experiments on numerous problems, with important remarks and discussions on certain aspects of CA-VI and CA-MDP, to justify our theoretical analyses empirically and to assess the real performance of CA-VI with CA-MDP formulation by analysing the execution time by checking how close it gets to the practical minimum runtime bound with respect to VI performance with MDP encoding of the same task

Comparative analysis of fingolimod versus teriflunomide in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis

Background: Fingolimod and teriflunomide are commonly used in the treatment of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS). These have not been compared in controlled trials, but only in observational studies, with inconclusive results. Comparison of their effect on relapse and disability in a real-world setting is therefore needed

The Turkish experience of COVID-19 infection in people with NMOSD and MOGAD: A milder course?

Background: COVID-19 is a multisystemic infection with variables consequences depending on individual and comorbid conditions. The course and outcomes of COVID-19 during neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorders (NMOSD) and myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody-associated disorders (MOGAD) are not clearly known. Objective/methods: The aim of this study was to examine the features and outcomes of COVID-19 infection in NMOSD and MOGAD patients. The patients' demographic and clinical factors, disease modifying treatment (DMT) used and disease information of COVID-19 infection were recorded. Conditions leading to hospitalization and severe exposure to COVID-19 infection were also analyzed. Results: The study included 63 patients from 25 centers. Thirty-two patients (50.8%) belong to AQP-4 seropositive group, 13 (20.6%) and 18 (28.6%) were in MOG-positive and double-seronegative groups, respectively. Risk factors for severe COVID-19 infection and hospitalization were advanced age, high disability level and the presence of comorbid disease. Disease severity was found to be high in double-seronegative NMOSD and low in MOGAD patients. No statistically significant effect of DMTs on disease severity and hospitalization was found. Conclusion: In NMOSD and MOGAD patients, advanced age, high disability and presence of comorbid disease pose risks for severe COVID-19 infection. There was no direct significant effect of DMTs for COVID-19 infection. © 2021 Elsevier B.V