Determinants of Intra-Industry Trade in Final Goods and Intermediate Goods between Turkey and Selected OECD Countries

The increased importance of fragmentation in world trade has created an interest among trade economists to explain the determinants of trade in intermediate goods. A significant portion of trade in intermediates between Turkey and OECD countries takes the form of intra-industry (IIT). Country-specific and industry-specific hypotheses drawn from the IIT literature are put forward to investigate the IIT in final and intermediates between Turkey and other selected OECD countries for the period of 1985-2000. To test these hypotheses, we have utilized three-way fixed effects and random effects models. The results indicate that the determinants of IIT for final goods are not much different from those for intermediate goods. Finally, the results suggest that country-specific rather than industry-specific variables are the central determinants of IIT in final and intermediate goods between Turkey and OECD.Fragmentation, Outsourcing, Final Goods, Intermediate Goods, Intra-Industry Trade, Panel Econometrics, OECD, Turkey

Does Information and Communication Technology Sustain Economic Growth? The Underdeveloped and Developing Countries Case

This paper tests the impact of ICT on economic growth for underdeveloped and developing countries by using a panel dataset for the period of 1995-2006. We first develop the theory of the relationship between ICT and economic growth. We show that ICT-capital has a positive effect both on long-run and transitional income per capita, if it is considered as a factor of production. Next, we estimate a panel data set with 131 underdeveloped and developing countries under the assumption that ICT is one of the determining factors of economic growth. We find that ICT has positive and significant effect on economic growth even after the use of some control variables.ICT, economic growth, panel data, GMM

Examining the Influence of Varied Levels of Domain Knowledge Base Inclusion in GPT-based Intelligent Tutors

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have facilitated the development of chatbots with sophisticated conversational capabilities. However, LLMs exhibit frequent inaccurate responses to queries, hindering applications in educational settings. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of integrating a knowledge base (KB) with LLM intelligent tutors to increase response reliability. To achieve this, we design a scaleable KB that affords educational supervisors seamless integration of lesson curricula, which is automatically processed by the intelligent tutoring system. We then detail an evaluation, where student participants were presented with questions about the artificial intelligence curriculum to respond to. GPT-4 intelligent tutors with varying hierarchies of KB access and human domain experts then assessed these responses. Lastly, students cross-examined the intelligent tutors' responses to the domain experts' and ranked their various pedagogical abilities. Results suggest that, although these intelligent tutors still demonstrate a lower accuracy compared to domain experts, the accuracy of the intelligent tutors increases when access to a KB is granted. We also observe that the intelligent tutors with KB access exhibit better pedagogical abilities to speak like a teacher and understand students than those of domain experts, while their ability to help students remains lagging behind domain experts

A study on antimicrobial, antioxidant and antimutagenic activities of Elaeagnus Angustifolia L. Leaves

Backround: The aim of this work was to investigate the antimicrobial, antioxidant, and antimutagenic potentials of methanol extracts from E. angustifolia.Materials and Methods: Methanol extracts were screened for antimicrobial activity against different species of 4 Gram positive and 3 Gram negative bacteria and one fungus. These bacteria included food pathogens. The leaf extract was tested using disc diffusion assay.Results: The methanol extract of E. angustifolia showed maximum inhibition zone of 16 mm against Yersinia enterocolitica. Whereas, the inhibition zone was not determined by methanol extract against Escherichia coli ATCC 1122 and Candida albicans RSKK 02029. The MIC was evaluated on plant extracts as antimicrobial activity. All of bacterial strains showed the lowest sensitivity to methanol extract of E. angustifolia (3.5 mg/mL), except Yersinia enterocolitica NCTC 11174. In addition, the plant extracts were tested against the stable DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1- picryl-hydrazyl-hydrate) free-radical. Finally, the methanol extract displayed a strong antioxidant activity (Trolox equivalent = 1.49 mM). Also, E. angustifolia methanol extracts were screened for their antimutagenic activity against sodium azide by Ames test in absence of rat microsomal liver enzyme (-S9). The results showed that E. angustifolia methanol extracts can inhibit mutagenic agents of sodium azide. The plant leaf extracts with the inhibition of 36% sodium azide showed moderate potential in decreasing mutagenic agents in Salmonella typhimurium TA100.Conclusion: E. angustifolia methanol extracts have antimicrobial, antioxidant and antimutagenic potential.Keywords: Elaeagnus, antimicrobial activity, antioxidant activity, antimutagenic activit

Patient-Centered Appointment Scheduling Using Agent-Based Simulation

Enhanced access and continuity are key components of patient-centered care. Existing studies show that several interventions such as providing same day appointments, walk-in services, after-hours care, and group appointments, have been used to redesign the healthcare systems for improved access to primary care. However, an intervention focusing on a single component of care delivery (i.e. improving access to acute care) might have a negative impact other components of the system (i.e. reduced continuity of care for chronic patients). Therefore, primary care clinics should consider implementing multiple interventions tailored for their patient population needs. We collected rapid ethnography and observations to better understand clinic workflow and key constraints. We then developed an agent-based simulation model that includes all access modalities (appointments, walk-ins, and after-hours access), incorporate resources and key constraints and determine the best appointment scheduling method that improves access and continuity of care. This paper demonstrates the value of simulation models to test a variety of alternative strategies to improve access to care through scheduling

Hardware/software approaches for reducing the process variation impact on instruction fetches

Cataloged from PDF version of article.As technology moves towards finer process geometries, it is becoming extremely difficult to control critical physical parameters such as channel length, gate oxide thickness, and dopant ion concentration. Variations in these parameters lead to dramatic variations in access latencies in Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) devices. This means that different lines of the same cache may have different access latencies. A simple solution to this problem is to adopt the worst-case latency paradigm. While this egalitarian cache management is simple, it may introduce significant performance overhead during instruction fetches when both address translation (instruction Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) access) and instruction cache access take place, making this solution infeasible for future high-performance processors. In this study, we first propose some hardware and software enhancements and then, based on those, investigate several techniques to mitigate the effect of process variation on the instruction fetch pipeline stage in modern processors. For address translation, we study an approach that performs the virtual-to-physical page translation once, then stores it in a special register, reusing it as long as the execution remains on the same instruction page. To handle varying access latencies across different instruction cache lines, we annotate the cache access latency of instructions within themselves to give the circuitry a hint about how long to wait for the next instruction to become available

The Antimicrobial Activity of Aliquidambar orientalis mill. Against Food Pathogens and Antioxidant Capacity of Leaf Extracts

Background: Medicinal plants are an important source of substances which are claimed to induce antimicrobial, antimutagenic and antioxidanteffects. Many plants have been used due to their antimicrobial treatments. Antimicrobial and antioxidant activities of L. orientalis have not beenreported to the present day. The aim of this work was to investigate of the antimicrobial and antioxidant potentials of different extracts from L.orientalis.Materials and Methods: The extracts were screened for antimicrobial activity against different food pathogens. These bacteria include 4 Grampositive and 3 Gram negative bacteria and one fungi. The leaf extracts of plant were tested by disc diffusion assay. The MIC was evaluated onplant extracts as antimicrobial activity. In addition to, the plant extracts were tested against the stable DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picryl-hydrazylhydrate) free-radical.Results: The acetone, ethanol and methanol extracts of L. orientalis showed maximum inhibition zone of 12 mm against Yersinia enterocolitica,Listeria monocytogenes and Staphylococcus aureus. In addition to, the methanol extract displayed a strong antioxidant activity (trolox equivalent= 2.23 mM).Conclusion: L. orientalis extracts have antimicrobial, and antioxidant potential. Our results support the use of this plant in traditional medicineand suggest that some of the plant extracts possess compounds with good antibacterial properties that can be used as antibacterial agents in thesearch for new drugs.Key words: Antimicrobial activity; Antioxidant activity; L. orientalis

Evolving patterns of payment methods in Turkish foreign trade

Serving the global marketplace brings many risks to the firm that they may not have on the domestic side. Apart from financing, trade finance mechanisms assist exporters and importers to mitigate or reduce their risks associated with doing business internationally. The present paper sheds lights on the structure and evaluation of payment methods in international trade as well as their changing composition due to 2008-2009 global financial crisis using a unique bilateral trade finance data from Turkey with 206 countries over the period 2002-2012 at the 2-digit level of ISIC Revision 3. Three key results emerge. First, Turkey’s exports are mainly financed via open account method while the majority of its imports were executed via cash-in advance method. Second, the shares of inter-firm trade finance (open account and cash-in advance) in Turkey’s foreign trade dramatically increased over the period 2002-2012, while the shares of the intermediate trade finance (cash against documents and letter of credit) decreased substantially. Finally, the evidence show that both exporters and importers started to use cash-in advance method, the safest method of payment, more intensively than other methods shortly after the global recession in 2008. Overall, the patterns presented in this paper highlight the fact that Turkish traders are not able to set payment terms that are highly favorable to themselves and bear all risks associated with international trade transactions

A Multidimensional Data Warehouse for Community Health Centers

Community health centers (CHCs) play a pivotal role in healthcare delivery to vulnerable populations, but have not yet benefited from a data warehouse that can support improvements in clinical and financial outcomes across the practice. We have developed a multidimensional clinic data warehouse (CDW) by working with 7 CHCs across the state of Indiana and integrating their operational, financial and electronic patient records to support ongoing delivery of care. We describe in detail the rationale for the project, the data architecture employed, the content of the data warehouse, along with a description of the challenges experienced and strategies used in the development of this repository that may help other researchers, managers and leaders in health informatics. The resulting multidimensional data warehouse is highly practical and is designed to provide a foundation for wide-ranging healthcare data analytics over time and across the community health research enterprise