THE EFFECT OF OIL CRISES ON ECONOMIES OF COMECON/CMEA MEMBER COUNTRIES, A FIVE-COUNTRY STUDY: CSSR, GDR, HUNGARY, POLAND, AND USSR

Economic problems in COMECON/CMEA member countries started to grow in the second half of the 1970s, which lead to radical economic and political reforms in the second half of the 1980s and resulted in demise of the economic and political system in these countries. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate whether growing economic problems in East European planned economies, or in CMEA member countries, were initially triggered by oil crises, through international trade and level of indebtedness channels, or not. Countries examined in this thesis were the CSSR, the GDR, Hungary, Poland, and the USSR; the time covered in 1960 to 1989. Two time-series econometrics methods used in this thesis to check the causal relationship between imports of CMEA member countries from different country groups, their level of indebtedness, and their national income, which are the Toda-Yamamoto version of the Granger causality tests and the VECM estimations for each country. Econometric results from four out of five countries suggest that economies of CMEA member countries were negatively affected by the oil crises. These results showed that the economies of CMEA member countries were more vulnerable to the effects of external economic fluctuations than conventionally assumed

A Comparative Study between Human Development Index and Work Accidents in Turkey and the EU Member Countries

Today work accidents constitute a major public health problem in the world. For the last two decades, Turkey has been suffering from the death toll resulting from work accidents and occupational diseases. In this study, the analysis of human development's dimensions gives the picture of reasons why Turkey is ranked as the first in Europe in terms of the number of fatal work accidents. Authors suggest that Turkey should increase the mean years of schooling and put safety and health education/training in school curricula. This will in turn reduce accidents at work and absenteeism caused by health problems; and yield increased productivity, higher quality of work, increased workforce morale and reduced employee turnover

Soduz, audio visual noise project /

In contemporary field of art and design, especially after the injection of computer into the artistic production process of art, music, sound and design, artists and designers had begun to use noise as a source thus the noise aesthetics emerged. Samples, re-arrangements of live sounds, signal processing systems, virtual studio technologies and many other systems provide different interactions between music and human. Some of those pieces produced via those systems are called laptop music, intelligent dance music (IDM), glitch, microsound, noise and breakcore; in this wide range of genres, noise as a creative source becomes their common feature. This study emerged to research and examine audiovisual noise, as well as to determinate the effects of noise in aural and visual disciplines. In addition to that, the project, the practical outcome of this study, consists of a set of works in the range of those disciplines by employing noise as a source; noise here is defined as a form which is constituted by deterritorialized sounds and images. The content of the project is derived from the analysis generated in this research; therefore it is a composition of works in both audio and visual formats

Blending science and art: An educational perspective

Art and design education enable students to find creative and logical solutions to various design problems. The use of materials, constructive analysis, craftmanship, and originality are some key criteria in the process. Size and dimensionality, the proportion analysis, expression integrity, substantiality, and presentability can vary depending on the project and the context. As one of the methods used to provide targeted experience and learning in art and design education, interdisciplinary work presents a right ground for complex design issues. The workshop we carried out together with the Tubitak National Metrology Institution (UME) named “Art’s Metrology, Metrology’s Art” aimed to transform art, design, and science together into a product. As rational, natural, and appropriate connections can be established between art and science, students were asked to develop a method to meet the objectives and criteria of both around a certain conceptual focus. An important inclusive of the workshop was to have students observe, get informed, and engage in dialogue and ultimately increase their curiosity about a certain mechanism outside of their studies. The group dynamic in the process of creating three-dimensional and displayable works within a scheduled time was supported by a scientist from the metrology department, three art and design instructors, Konca Şaher, Nur Balkır, and Gürkan Mıhçı from Kadir Has University. The finished works were then exhibited in the Tubitak-UME in Gebze compound. This study, which blends science and art, provided students with the opportunity to experiment with a science field, and to develop their predictions about their own disciplines. The paper will present the development and the outcome of the workshop

Overlapping SETBP1 gain-of-function mutations in Schinzel-Giedion syndrome and hematologic malignancies

Schinzel-Giedion syndrome (SGS) is a rare developmental disorder characterized by multiple malformations, severe neurological alterations and increased risk of malignancy. SGS is caused by de novo germline mutations clustering to a 12bp hotspot in exon 4 of SETBP1. Mutations in this hotspot disrupt a degron, a signal for the regulation of protein degradation, and lead to the accumulation of SETBP1 protein. Overlapping SETBP1 hotspot mutations have been observed recurrently as somatic events in leukemia. We collected clinical information of 47 SGS patients (including 26 novel cases) with germline SETBP1 mutations and of four individuals with a milder phenotype caused by de novo germline mutations adjacent to the SETBP1 hotspot. Different mutations within and around the SETBP1 hotspot have varying effects on SETBP1 stability and protein levels in vitro and in in silico modeling. Substitutions in SETBP1 residue I871 result in a weak increase in protein levels and mutations affecting this residue are significantly more frequent in SGS than in leukemia. On the other hand, substitutions in residue D868 lead to the largest increase in protein levels. Individuals with germline mutations affecting D868 have enhanced cell proliferation in vitro and higher incidence of cancer compared to patients with other germline SETBP1 mutations. Our findings substantiate that, despite their overlap, somatic SETBP1 mutations driving malignancy are more disruptive to the degron than germline SETBP1 mutations causing SGS. Additionally, this suggests that the functional threshold for the development of cancer driven by the disruption of the SETBP1 degron is higher than for the alteration in prenatal development in SGS. Drawing on previous studies of somatic SETBP1 mutations in leukemia, our results reveal a genotype-phenotype correlation in germline SETBP1 mutations spanning a molecular, cellular and clinical phenotype

Unemployment And Growth: Okun Coefficients For Turkish Economy

According to common interpretation of Okun Law, the main reason for increase in unemployment rate is deficiency in aggregate demand and low capacity utilization rates. In other words, this Law states a negative relation between unemployment rates and economic growth. However, the observed high unemployment rates with high growth rates in Turkey after 2001 economic crisis seems to contradict with this Law In this context, the Okun coefficient is estimated in this study for both manufacturing industry and aggregate economy The estimation results provide relatively low coefficients. In other words, the output variations are not very sensitive to unemployment changes in Turkish economy. Both the capacity utilization rate and working hours effect output level positively.Wo

An Assessment Of Output Performance In Northern Cyprus

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