Towards a pedagogy for critical security studies: politics of migration in the classroom

International Relations (IR) has increasingly paid attention to critical pedagogy. Feminist, post-colonial and poststructuralist IR scholarship, in particular, have long been advancing the discussions about how to create a pluralist and democratic classroom where ‘the others’ of politics can be heard by the students, who can critically reflect upon complex power relations in global politics. Despite its normative position, Critical Security Studies (CSS) has so far refrained from joining this pedagogical conversation. Deriving from the literatures of postcolonial and feminist pedagogical practices, it is argued that an IR scholar in the area of CSS can contribute to the production of a critical political subject in the 'uncomfortable classroom', who reflects on violent practices of security. Three pedagogical methods will be introduced: engaging with the students’ life worlds, revealing the positionality of security knowledge claims, and opening up the class-room to the choices about how the youth’s agency can be performed beyond the classroom. The argument is illustrated through the case of forced migration with specific reference to IR and Politics students’ perceptions of Syrian refugees in Turkey. The article advances the discussions in critical IR pedagogy and encourages CSS scholarship to focus on teaching in accordance with its normative position

Performance comparison of ASN.1 encoder/decoders using FTAM

Abstract Syntax Notation-One (ASN.1) is a standard external data representation language used to define messages of application layer protocols. Its encoding rules, the Basic Encoding Rules (BER), are also international standards that define the encoding/decoding of data values into/from a transfer syntax. Various approaches to automating BER encoding/decoding are examined; in particular, two widely used software packages (ISODE and CASN 1) are studied. A hardware BER encoder/decoder called VASN 1 is presented. Performance of software and hardware approaches are evaluated on real instances of file transfer using a standard FTAM protocol. Benchmarks obtained from running CASN 1 on one of the fastest workstations and from running VHDL simulations of VASN 1 indicate the superiority of the hardware approach. © 1993

Estimation of nasal cavity and conchae volumes by stereological method

Background: Studies evaluating the mean volumes of nasal cavity and concha are very rare. Since there is little date on the mentioned topic, we aimed to carry out the presented study to obtain a volumetric index showing the relation between the nasal cavity and concha. Material and methods: The volumes of the nasal cavity and concha were measured in 30 males and 30 females (18&#8211;40 years old) on computed tomography images using stereological methods. Results: The mean volumes of nasal cavity, concha nasalis media, and concha nasalis inferior were 5.95 &#177; 0.10 cm3, 0.56 &#177; 0.22 cm3, and 1.45 &#177; 0.68 cm3; 7.01 &#177; 0.18 cm3, 0.67 &#177; 0.31 cm3 and 1.59 &#177; 0.98 cm3 in females and males, respectively. There were statistically significant differences in the volume of the nasal cavity and concha nasalis media (p < 0.05) between males and females, except for concha nasalis inferior (p > 0.05). Conclusions: Our results could provide volumetric indexes for the nasal cavity and concha, which could help the physician to manage surgical procedures related to the nasal cavity and concha

Estimation of Fiber Orientations Using Neighborhood Information

Data from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) can be used to reconstruct fiber tracts, for example, in muscle and white matter. Estimation of fiber orientations (FOs) is a crucial step in the reconstruction process and these estimates can be corrupted by noise. In this paper, a new method called Fiber Orientation Reconstruction using Neighborhood Information (FORNI) is described and shown to reduce the effects of noise and improve FO estimation performance by incorporating spatial consistency. FORNI uses a fixed tensor basis to model the diffusion weighted signals, which has the advantage of providing an explicit relationship between the basis vectors and the FOs. FO spatial coherence is encouraged using weighted l1-norm regularization terms, which contain the interaction of directional information between neighbor voxels. Data fidelity is encouraged using a squared error between the observed and reconstructed diffusion weighted signals. After appropriate weighting of these competing objectives, the resulting objective function is minimized using a block coordinate descent algorithm, and a straightforward parallelization strategy is used to speed up processing. Experiments were performed on a digital crossing phantom, ex vivo tongue dMRI data, and in vivo brain dMRI data for both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. The results demonstrate that FORNI improves the quality of FO estimation over other state of the art algorithms.Comment: Journal paper accepted in Medical Image Analysis. 35 pages and 16 figure

Escaping the Big Brother: an empirical study on factors influencing identification and information leakage on the Web

This paper presents a study on factors that may increase the risks of personal information leakage, due to the possibility of connecting user profiles that are not explicitly linked together. First, we introduce a technique for user identification based on cross-site checking and linking of user attributes. Then, we describe the experimental evaluation of the identification technique both on a real setting and on an online sample, showing its accuracy to discover unknown personal data. Finally, we combine the results on the accuracy of identification with the results of a questionnaire completed by the same subjects who performed the test on the real setting. The aim of the study was to discover possible factors that make users vulnerable to this kind of techniques. We found out that the number of social networks used, their features and especially the amount of profiles abandoned and forgotten by the user are factors that increase the likelihood of identification and the privacy risks

Effective and Efficient Similarity Index for Link Prediction of Complex Networks

Predictions of missing links of incomplete networks like protein-protein interaction networks or very likely but not yet existent links in evolutionary networks like friendship networks in web society can be considered as a guideline for further experiments or valuable information for web users. In this paper, we introduce a local path index to estimate the likelihood of the existence of a link between two nodes. We propose a network model with controllable density and noise strength in generating links, as well as collect data of six real networks. Extensive numerical simulations on both modeled networks and real networks demonstrated the high effectiveness and efficiency of the local path index compared with two well-known and widely used indices, the common neighbors and the Katz index. Indeed, the local path index provides competitively accurate predictions as the Katz index while requires much less CPU time and memory space, which is therefore a strong candidate for potential practical applications in data mining of huge-size networks.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

Cultures of conflict:Protests, violent repression, and community values

What are the cultural origins of societal conflicts that revolve around democratization, women’s rights, and modern libertarian values? We propose that deep-seated differences in community-based collective values (at the micro-level) may be related to why people support anti-government protest and why they support repression of such protests (at the macro-level). The hypothesis was examined among residents of Turkey (N = 500). Cultural values, measured at the individual level and community level with the community collectivism scale, correlated with political orientation and emotions, as well as with subsequent support for anti-governmental protest or its repression. The main conclusions are that both support for protest and support for repression are related to the cultural values people hold and their subsequent political orientations and emotions. Micro-level cultural values in local communities may thus play a role in explaining macro-level socio-political divides

Mutation Frequency of the Major Frontotemporal Dementia Genes, MAPT, GRN and C9ORF72 in a Turkish Cohort of Dementia Patients

‘Microtubule-associated protein tau’ (MAPT), ‘granulin’ (GRN) and ‘chromosome 9 open reading frame72’ (C9ORF72) gene mutations are the major known genetic causes of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Recent studies suggest that mutations in these genes may also be associated with other forms of dementia. Therefore we investigated whether MAPT, GRN and C9ORF72 gene mutations are major contributors to dementia in a random, unselected Turkish cohort of dementia patients. A combination of whole-exome sequencing, Sanger sequencing and fragment analysis/Southern blot was performed in order to identify pathogenic mutations and novel variants in these genes as well as other FTD-related genes such as the ‘charged multivesicular body protein 2B’ (CHMP2B), the ‘FUS RNA binding protein’ (FUS), the ‘TAR DNA binding protein’ (TARDBP), the ‘sequestosome1’ (SQSTM1), and the ‘valosin containing protein’ (VCP). We determined one pathogenic MAPT mutation (c.1906C>T, p.P636L) and one novel missense variant (c.38A>G, p.D13G). In GRN we identified a probably pathogenic TGAG deletion in the splice donor site of exon 6. Three patients were found to carry the GGGGCC expansions in the non-coding region of the C9ORF72 gene. In summary, a complete screening for mutations in MAPT, GRN and C9ORF72 genes revealed a frequency of 5.4% of pathogenic mutations in a random cohort of 93 Turkish index patients with dementia

Erratum to: 36th International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine: Brussels, Belgium. 15-18 March 2016.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s13054-016-1208-6.]