The Importance, Content and Teaching of the Political Geography Course in Social Studies Undergraduate Programs

Today, big countries and other countries inside their axes have entered power wars in regions where underground and aboveground sources are important. One of the characteristics of countries where these power wars take place is them not being able to understand the current world politics and elements of political geography. These countries cannot develop modern strategies for current political needs. Like these countries, Turkey has not yet understood the importance of political geography and could not produce an effective work on today’s world politics. We cannot use our regional power in line with our interests due to policies without a specific objective and system and changeable with each government. To use and direct our regional power, tremendous responsibility falls on the shoulders of social studies teachers. Bequeathing the importance of our geopolitical location to young generations is one of the most important responsibilities of social studies teacher candidates. In addition to not being current, the content of political geography course taught in social Studies undergraduate programs are repetition of old information. Therefore, political geography subjects in these programs should be organized according to today’s word politics and more emphasis should be given to the importance of our current geopolitical location. Having an important geopolitical location and being a great power in the Middle East, in a country like Turkey, people should be more aware in this subject

Determining The Academic Knowledge Level Of Social Studies Teacher Candidates On Settlement Geography Of Turkey

Having a long history of settlement, Anatolia has a distinctive role in settlement geography. Despite the fact that people may cause changes in physical environment in various other ways, the conversion of physical geographic expression into a cultural geographic expression had been realized most vigorously where people were settled in. Therefore, through history the settlements have been the focus of all branches of the social sciences and have been researched. Most especially, it has been at the core of history and geography and has become one of their most popular research topics. Being situated at the crossroads of three continents geographically, Turkey has attracted various civilizations since ancient times and increased the significance of settlements in here. Researches of settlements as a field of social studies have been one of the significant issues those should be handed down the rising generations. Increasing the academic knowledge level of social studies teacher candidates who are to pass these issues on rising genereations, constitutes our subject matter. For that purpose, an activity was organized within the context of a technical visit of 30 third grade students from Faculty of Education Department of Elementary School Division of Social Sciences Education, 10 of which were female and 20 male, within the scope of settlement geography, a sub-branch of Human and Economic Geography of Turkey, an excursion-observation activity at Konya (Çumra) Çatalhöyük, where we have grown wheat grass beforehand. Also the students were instructed via a descriptive study which was vocalized in order to emphasize the agricultural activities that have been initialized with the historical basis of Anatolia and human settlement in here. This study is based on phenomenology research design, among the qualitative research methods. The one-sample pretest-posttest method which includes the descriptive analysis was used in this study. 6 open ended questions were prepared for pretest and posttest. This study aimed at increasing the academic level of teacher candidates on Çatalhöyük, which is considerably important with regard to settlement geography in Anatolia and thus, making the accumulation of knowledge outlast as they pass it on the rising generations

Symmetric monoidal equivalences of quantum field theories in dimension two and Frobenius algebras

We show that the canonical equivalences of categories between 2-dimensional (unoriented) topological quantum field theories valued in a symmetric monoidal category and (extended) commutative Frobenius algebras in that symmetric monoidal category are symmetric monoidal equivalences. As an application, we recover that the invariant of 2-dimensional manifolds given by the product of (extended) commutative Frobenius algebras in a symmetric tensor category is the multiplication of the invariants given by each of the algebras.Comment: 4 page

Response rate and response error in marketing research

In this study, I investigate the perspectives of marketing researchers views about the two important concepts of survey research, response rate and response bias. I specifically aimed to answer the following questions: Research Question #1: Do marketing researchers separate the concepts of response rate from response bias? Research Question #2: How exactly should data quality be measured? Is it about sample representativeness, minimizing non- response bias or just solely Increasing the response rate? Research Question #3: What are researchers doing to assess and minimize response bias? Research Question #4: Do additional efforts put forth by survey researchers, such as reminder letters and incentives, for the purpose of increasing survey response rate affect additional sampling bias? Research Question #5: Are the common techniques used by survey researchers to increase response rate equally effective? In an attempt to answer the research questions stated, I have collected both primary and secondary data. The primary data was collected from the Academy of Marketing Science active members. Eight versions of an excerpt was prepared that is taken from an actual article that was accepted for publication recently. The experimental design adopted was 2x2x2 with each treatment trying to answer one of the research questions stated in this study. The first treatment was regarding the consideration of population. The subjects were manipulated with two versions of the excerpt of which one was with a Canadian sample and the second was with a so called North American sample. The second treatment was about the manipulation of the initial number of surveys sent out which as a result would change the response rate percentage. The two different versions included 500 vs. 5000 initial surveys sent out varying the response rate from 5.1% to 50.2%. The third treatment included the manipulation of Armstrong and Overton (1977) citation. The over use of this citation in the marketing literature has been noteworthy. In an attempt to investigate this matter further, this treatment was created. First version contained a sentence that stated that the early and the late respondents were compared and no significant differences were found as evidence of no response bias including the citation of Armstrong and Overton (1977). The second version of the excerpt included a table with the expected demographics regarding the population of interest. In addition to these, the subjects were also assigned to two different conditions where they were asked to evaluate the excerpt as an author or as a reviewer. In the invitation email respondents were asked to toss a coin or to click on a web link that would toss the coin for them and select the appropriate link that corresponds with their choice. In order to assess the popular techniques of enhancing response rate, I have divided the sample into several groups as the pre-notification, the reminder and the pre- notification and reminder groups and a control group that received neither the reminder nor the pre-notification treatment. The results revealed that, according to my sample none of the techniques mentioned above, improve the response rate. The secondary data was collected from major outlets of the marketing science (Journal of Marketing-JM, Journal of Marketing Research-JMR, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science -JAMS) during the periods of 2005-2010. The final sample consisted of 68 JM, 23 JMR and 84 JAMS articles. In addition to these, I also randomly selected 31 rejected articles from the Journal of Business Research (JBR) archives. The results of the study revealed that, survey researchers do not clearly grasp the concepts of response rate and response bias. In addition, the results demonstrated that the data quality should be measured by the sample\u27s representativeness of the population and the researcher\u27s capability of decreasing the response and the non-response biases. Further, the techniques used to enhance response rate such as reminder and prenotification letters as well as incentives are not as effective and are likely to introduce additional response bias to a study. The results also showed that the optimal data collection method researchers should consider adopting is the combination method. The study ends with the discussion of the implications of these results and possible future extensions of this study

Perfil lingüístico y literario de Ferrant Sánchez de Calavera.

Sin resume

Adversarially Trained Autoencoders for Parallel-Data-Free Voice Conversion

We present a method for converting the voices between a set of speakers. Our method is based on training multiple autoencoder paths, where there is a single speaker-independent encoder and multiple speaker-dependent decoders. The autoencoders are trained with an addition of an adversarial loss which is provided by an auxiliary classifier in order to guide the output of the encoder to be speaker independent. The training of the model is unsupervised in the sense that it does not require collecting the same utterances from the speakers nor does it require time aligning over phonemes. Due to the use of a single encoder, our method can generalize to converting the voice of out-of-training speakers to speakers in the training dataset. We present subjective tests corroborating the performance of our method

Universal support for triangulated categories

We revisit a result of Gratz and Stevenson on the universal space that carries supports for objects of a triangulated category, in the absence of a tensor product.Comment: 2 page