Impact of health care system on socioeconomic inequalities in doctor use

This study examines the impact of health system characteristics on social inequities in health care use in Europe, using data from national surveys in 13 European countries. Multilevel logistic regression models are estimated to separate the individual level determinants of generalist and specialist use from the health system level and country specific factors. The results suggest that beyond the division between public and private funding and cost-sharing arrangements in health system, the role given to the general practitioners and/or the organization of the primary care might be essential for reducing social inequities in health care utilisation.Equity, Health system, Doctor utilisation, Multilevel, International

A Comparison of Grading Models for Neighborhood Level of Family Housing Units

More recently Turkey has witnessed fast housing development and real estate sector growth because of the mortgage preparations. With this development, property location quality has been considered important for selecting and paying them. This study uses a data set of new single family housing units in Kocaeli University Campus Area. By using 4 location quality criteria, 27 single family housing units are graded at the neighborhood level. It is aimed to examine the applications of grading property at the neighborhood level based on property location quality by testing with three methods. Traditional method and fuzzy logic method were discussed in our antecedent studies. In this study, an easy used numerical calculation method; Neural Networks (NN), is introduced. Its grading performance is compared with the previous methods. NN method is found to be more accurate and realistic than traditional grading approach where its designing stage is more practical and faster than fuzzy logic approach.

DOES HIGHER SHARE IN TOTAL TRADE STIMULATE REGIONAL LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES? THE CASE OF TURKEY

Standard trade theory relies on the assumption of long-run full-employment, thus implying that although trade can affect wage rates and change the sectoral distribution of employment, it has no effect on the overall level of employment. In the empirical literature, it is a controversial debate that trade openness is good for employment in the long-run. If so, the further question is about the poorer regions in the developing countries which are fully open to trade. Turkey is one of these countries experienced trade liberalization three decades ago. Although its regions’ connection to markets is effective due to limited lack of access to key inputs and low transport costs, their shares in total trade and labor market outcomes strikingly vary depending on the density of local economic activities. While trade volumes and employment creation capacities of some regions are quite high, relevant indicators for some others are disappointing. The aim of this paper is to explore the relation between regional trade volumes and major labor market indicators. To this end, empirical analyses are designed to test the hypothesis that more regional trade volume leads to more employment opportunities and stimulates the job creation capacities of local labor markets. The data sets used in the analyses are from Turkish Statistical Institute, one being trade statistics by province which consists of export and import volume data for 81 provinces. The other set contains individual-based micro data from Household Labor Force Survey and both of these sets are at NUTS level 2, analyzing Turkey with 26 statistical regions. Time-interval for the analyses is from the year 2004 to 2008. Since the nature of labor market data set is cross-sectional and the dependent variable created is a dummy, the methodology used in the study is based on the probit regression. The preliminary results of the paper shows that higher the trade volumes of regions generally improve the indicators of local labor markets in Turkey.

Dormantnost sjemena i morfologija bobuljastih češera i sjemena koštuničave borovice (Juniperus drupacea Labill.) u istočno mediteranskom području Turske

Syrian juniper, Juniperus drupacea Labill., is an Eastern Mediterranean tree species which belongs to the Cupressaceae family and Juniperoidae sub-family. The current geographical range of J. drupacea covers the southern parts of the Peloponnese in Greece, the southern parts of Asia Minor and the mountains of Syria and Lebanon. The main part of the species range in Turkey is divided into several centres the most important being located in the Taurus, Anti-Taurus and Amanos mountains. It is a dioecious tree, with conical crown, that reaches 10-20 (40) m in height. The fleshy cones are ovoid to globose, 20-25 mm in diameter, brownish-purple or bluish-black, glaucosus and pruniose when ripe in the second year. They mostly have 3 seeds forming a characteristic drupe-like stone. The natural regeneration of Syrian juniper is very difficult because of animal consumption, grazing and the united seeds into the woody structure. This study was carried out to determine the seed and cone morphology and seed physiology of Syrian juniper, Juniperus drupacea Labill., from three provenances (Kahramanmaraş, Mersin, Adana) in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Turkey. In total 11 morphological traits were measured. The average cone length, cone diameter, and cone weight were 22.49 mm, 20.86 mm and 4.659 g, respectively. The average seed length, width, thickness, weight and pulp weight were 10.07 mm, 3.30 mm, 2.77 mm 0.045 g and 2.220 g in order. After morphological analysis, a series of experiments was conducted to identify the best stratification treatment for breaking dormancy in Syrian juniper seeds. The highest germination percentage was obtained after warm and cold stratification (80.7%). The seeds prechilled 8 weeks and soaked 500 ppm GA3 also demonstrated high germination percentage. The current study demonstrated that J. drupacea seeds has morphophysiological dormancy.Sirijska smreka, Juniperus drupacea Labill. je istočno mediteranska vrsta stabla koja pripada porodici Cupressaceae, roduJuniperoidae. J. drupacea trenutno pokriva geografsko područje južnog dijela Peloponeza u Grčkoj, južne dijelove Male Azije te sirijske i libanonske planine. Glavni dio područja te vrste u Turskoj podijeljen je na nekoliko središta, od kojih je najvažniji smješten u Taurskom gorju, Anti-Taurus gorju te planinama Amanos. Stablo je diecično, s konusnom krošnjom koja može doseći 10-20 (40) m visine. Mesnati češeri su ovalnog do okruglog oblika, 20-25 mm u promjeru, smećkasto-ljubičaste ili plavkasto-crne boje, te žućkasti i bjelkasti kada su zreli tijekom druge godine. Uglavnom imaju 3 sjemenke koje tvore karakterističnu košticu nalik na košticu koštičavog voća. Prirodna regeneracija sirijske smreke vrlo je teška zbog konzumacije od strane životinja, ispaše i sjemenki koje su objedinjene u drvenastu strukturu. Ovo je istraživanje provedeno kako bi se odredila morfologija sjemenke i češera te fiziologija sjemenke sirijske smreke, Juniperus drupacea Labill., koja potječe iz tri provincije (Kahramanmaraş, Mersin, Adana) u istočnomediteranskoj regiji Turske. Ukupno je izmjereno 11 morfoloških obilježja. Prosječna duljina češera bila je 22,49 mm, promjer češera 20,86 mm, a težina češera 4,659 g. Prosječna duljina, širina, debljina, težina sjemenke i težina pulpe sjemenke iznosile su redom 10,07 mm, 3,30 mm, 2,77 mm, 0,045 g i 2,220 g. Nakon morfološke analize, proveden je niz eksperimenata kako bi se odredila najbolja mjera stratifikacije radi prekidanja dormantnosti sjemenki sirijske smreke. Najveći postotak klijavosti dobiven je nakon tople i hladne stratifikacije (80,7%). Sjemenke koje su se prethodno hladile 8 tjedana te su namakane u 500 ppm GA3također su pokazale velik postotak klijavosti. Ovo je istraživanje također pokazalo da sjemeJ. drupaceaposjeduje morfološku dormantnost

ATTENTION! SCHOOL BUS

This study aimed to investigate the conditions of pre-school children’s school buses. Six pre-service senior pre-school teachers interviewed twelve school bus drivers, and then took four bus rides with children from school to home and made observations while on the bus. The researchers identified three themes based on the literature: safety, social and physical environment, and communication with drivers. A content analysis approach was used to analyze the data. The findings of this study revealed that three safety rules—unfastened seat belts, use of the front seat, and use of cell phones while driving the school bus—were broken by the school bus drivers. The general social environment of the buses was positive; no conflict was observed among children during their social interactions with each other. Nevertheless, the physical condition was not as pleasing as the social environment. The buses were dirty, dusty, and had a bad smell due to the lack of fresh air. The communication between children and the drivers was fairly good. Children were eager to talk about their school day to the drivers, and the drivers were willing to listen to them. However, the drivers were not so kind during their private phone calls during the ride.  Article visualizations

Rudolf Steiner ve Waldorf Okulu

Ülkemizin eğitim sistemi geleceğin nesillerini yetiştirmede eksiklik yaşadığı bilinen bir gerçektir. Sınav maratonuna erken yaşlarda katılan çocukların başarısı not durumuna ve girdiği sıralamaya göre sonuçlanmaktadır. Çocuklarda var olan potansiyel ve onların becerileri, ilgi alanları çoğu kez görmezden gelinmektedir. Sonuç odaklı bir eğitim sistemine maruz kalan çocuklardan mutlu ve sağlıklı bir nesil beklemek mümkün değildir. Waldorf pedagojisi sağlıklı ve mutu nesiller yetiştirebilmek için 1919 yılından bu yana dünyanın birçok ülkesinde kendine sağlam ve güvenilir bir yer edinmiştir. Son yıllarda ülkemizde de adından sıkça söz ettirmeye başlayan Steiner Pedagojisi ve Waldorf Okulları ile sağlıklı ve mutlu nesiller yetiştirmede önemli bir katkı sağlayacağı bilinmektedir. Bu çalışma; alternatif eğitim yaklaşımlarından Steiner Pedagojisi ve Waldorf Okulunun incelenmesi ve ülkemizin eğitim sistemine yapabileceği katkılara dair önerilerde bulunmayı amaçlamıştır

Inegalites de recours aux soins en Europe. Quel role attribuable aux systemes de sante ?.

Cette étude évalue l’influence des caractéristiques des systèmes de santé sur l’équité horizontale du recours aux soins en Europe. L’utilisation d’un ensemble des données issues d’enquêtes nationales récentes de treize pays européens confirme l’existence d’inégalités sociales de recours aux soins, à besoin de soins égal, dans tous les pays étudiés et montre que l’ampleur des inégalités varie de manière significative entre les pays. Une analyse multiniveaux permet d’identifier différentes caractéristiques des systèmes de santé qui semblent contribuer à la réduction ou à la formation de ces inégalités. Les résultats soulignent l’importance du rôle des médecins généralistes et de l’organisation des soins primaires pour réduire ces inégalités au-delà du partage des coûts entre les sphères publique et privée.This study examines the impact of health system characteristics on social inequities in health care use in Europe, using data from national surveys in 13 European countries. Multilevel logistic regression models are estimated to separate the individual level determinants of generalist and specialist use from the health system level and country specific factors. The results suggest that beyond the division between public and private funding and cost-sharing arrangements in health system, the role given to the general practitioners and/or the organization of the primary care might be essential for reducing social inequities in health care utilisation.Économie de la santé; Soins médicaux; Pays de l'Union européenne;

Cross-Domain Sentence Modeling for Relevance Transfer with BERT

Standard bag-of-words term-matching techniques in document retrieval fail to exploit rich semantic information embedded in the document texts. One promising recent trend in facilitating context-aware semantic matching has been the development of massively pretrained deep transformer models, culminating in BERT as their most popular example today. In this work, we propose adapting BERT as a neural re-ranker for document retrieval to achieve large improvements on news articles. Two fundamental issues arise in applying BERT to ``ad hoc'' document retrieval on newswire collections: relevance judgments in existing test collections are provided only at the document level, and documents often exceed the length that BERT was designed to handle. To overcome these challenges, we compute and aggregate sentence-level evidence to rank documents. The lack of appropriate relevance judgments in test collections is addressed by leveraging sentence-level and passage-level relevance judgments fortuitously available in collections from other domains to capture cross-domain notions of relevance. Our experiments demonstrate that models of relevance can be transferred across domains. By leveraging semantic cues learned across various domains, we propose a model that achieves state-of-the-art results on three standard TREC newswire collections. We explore the effects of cross-domain relevance transfer, and trade-offs between using document and sentence scores for document ranking. We also present an end-to-end document retrieval system that integrates the open-source Anserini information retrieval toolkit, discussing the related technical challenges and design decisions

Genetic epidemiology of eating disorders

We capture recent findings in the field of genetic epidemiology of eating disorders. As analytic techniques evolve for twin, population, and molecular genetics, new findings emerge at an accelerated pace. We present the current status of knowledge regarding the role of genetic and environmental factors that influence risk for eating disorders

Steroid-induced central serous chorioretinopathy in a patient with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy

AbstractNon-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy is a result of an infarction of the small vessel at the anterior portion of the optic disc and causes acute, unilateral, painless visual loss. There is no generally accepted treatment method for this condition but some medical and surgical treatments are recommended. Earlier studies show that visual acuity recovery was better with corticosteroid medication compared to non-treated patients. However corticosteroids may cause side effects such as cataract, increased intraocular pressure and rarely central serous chorioretinopathy. This case report presents a patient with central serous chorioretinopathy secondary to corticosteroid medication