Bread and Empire: The Workings of Grain Provisioning in Istanbul During the Eighteenth Century

Provisioning of the Imperial capital Istanbul had been one of the major concerns of the Ottoman rulers from the classical age to the dawn of the modern era. Grain occupied a particularly important place in the provisioning policies of the Ottoman state due to the fact that the Ottoman sultans considered the steady supply of "people's bread" in the capital city as one of the ways to promote and reproduce their image of sovereignty in the general public opinion. This consideration remained unchanged throughout the eighteenth century during which time the Ottoman economy faltered vis-à-vis the European centered world-economy and the Ottoman polity began to gradually withdraw from the economic realm. In the face of mounting fiscal burdens, the Ottoman state limited its provisioning policies to the raw materials needed by the military industries and to the basic foods consumed by the populace. In this context, the traditional protectionist attitude of the state towards the craft guilds of the imperial capital was abandoned, leaving these organizations at the mercy of circumstances not to say the market principle. The only institutions that were insulated from the changing policy of the state were the grain-related crafts, i.e. bakers' guild. This paper argues with reference to a series of published documents that the Ottoman state continued, if not hardened, its provisioning policies of grain to the imperial capital during the eighteenth century and thereafter.Istanbul, Ottoman state, grain provision, food supply

The experience with macro-prudential policies of the central bank of the republic of Turkey in response to the global financial crisis

This brief country case study on Turkey aims to summarize the fundamental developments in the banking sector, which represents almost 90 percent of the financial sector in the country. The brief has two parts. The first covers the 2001 financial crisis and the developments until end of 2007, the year before the global financial crisis of 2008 started. The second part focuses on the macro-prudential policies applied by the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey in response to the global financial crisis in three phases: (i) full liquidity support after Lehman Brothers'collapse (September 2008), (ii) the exit strategy (April 2010), and (iii) the new policy mix (final quarter of 2010).Debt Markets,Banks&Banking Reform,Currencies and Exchange Rates,Emerging Markets,Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress

Phonetics-based Techniques in My Compositional Methodology, and Two Compositions: ŠÀ {karāz} for large ensemble and eschaton according to bēl-rē’u-šu for percussion trio

This dissertation explores various ways of working with acoustic analyses of speech in music composition. The first chapter presents an overview of whistled languages and discusses their potential to act as blueprints for optimizing phonetic data for compositional use. The second chapter details my workflow for incorporating formant and fundamental frequency analysis data from the phonetics software Praat into my compositional methodology. Broadly inspired by the ways in which whistled utterances transform spoken language, the workflow consists of an analysis phase in Praat followed by the conversion, optimization and orchestration of the extracted phonetic data in the computer-assisted composition environments OpenMusic and bach. Also included in the dissertation are two compositions that are both informed by phonetics. The first composition, ŠÀ {karāz} for large ensemble, contains, among the various ways it attempts to instrumentally imitate speech, a section that is constructed with the help of the workflow described in the second chapter. The second composition, eschaton according to bēl-rē’u-šu for percussion trio, engages in a deconstruction of the established roles of speech and instruments in my music, in which the performers are, at times, asked to imitate the sounds of percussion instruments with their voice, in an attempt to blur the line between speech as “the imitated” and instruments as “the imitators.

Adaptive Regularization for Class-Incremental Learning

Class-Incremental Learning updates a deep classifier with new categories while maintaining the previously observed class accuracy. Regularizing the neural network weights is a common method to prevent forgetting previously learned classes while learning novel ones. However, existing regularizers use a constant magnitude throughout the learning sessions, which may not reflect the varying levels of difficulty of the tasks encountered during incremental learning. This study investigates the necessity of adaptive regularization in Class-Incremental Learning, which dynamically adjusts the regularization strength according to the complexity of the task at hand. We propose a Bayesian Optimization-based approach to automatically determine the optimal regularization magnitude for each learning task. Our experiments on two datasets via two regularizers demonstrate the importance of adaptive regularization for achieving accurate and less forgetful visual incremental learning

Performance evaluation of different CRL distribution schemes embedded in WMN authentication

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising technology to provide low cost and scalable solutions for high speed Internet access and additional services. In hybrid WMNs, where mesh clients also act as relaying agents and form a mesh client network, it is important to provide users with an efficient anonymous and accountable authentication scheme. Accountability is required for the malicious users that are to be identified and revoked from the network access and related services. Promising revocation schemes are based on Certification Revocation Lists (CRLs). Since in hybrid WMNs mesh clients also authenticate other clients, distribution of these CRLs is an important task. In this paper, we propose and examine the performance of different distribution schemes of CRLs and analyze authentication performance in two scenarios: in one scenario all mesh routers and mesh clients obtain CRLs and in the second one, CRLs are held only by the mesh routers and mesh clients acting as relaying agents require CRL checking to be performed from the router in authenticating another client

Delphi-Expertenbefragung zu Smart Cities 2035

Smart City wird in der Schweiz als ein integratives Zukunftskonzept für fortschrittliche (Energie-)Städte verstanden. Bisher gibt es nur eine allgemeine Definition, eine Vielzahl von persönlichen Vorstellungen und einige Pilotprojekte. Im Rahmen einer Delphi-Befragung unter Fachexperten wurde der Begriff Smart City konkretisiert und erweitert. Die Studie zeigt u.a. die ersten Schritte auf dem Weg zu einer Smart City vom Konzept hin zur Umsetzung, die wichtigsten Akteure sowie die dabei auftretenden Treiber & Barrieren auf

Konzepte für die Zukunft : eine Delphi-Umfrage zu Smart Cities liefert konkrete Ansätze

Der Begriff «Smart City» wird in der Schweiz als ein integratives Zukunftskonzept für fortschrittliche (Energie-)Städte verstanden. Bisher existieren nur eine allgemeine Definition, eine Vielzahl von persönlichen Vorstellungen und einige Pilotprojekte. Im Rahmen einer Delphi-Befragung unter Fachexperten – durchgeführt von der ZHAW – wurde der Begriff Smart City konkretisiert und erweitert. Die Studie zeigt unter anderem die ersten Schritte auf dem Weg zu einer Smart City auf: vom Konzept zur Umsetzung, die wichtigsten Akteure sowie die dabei auftretenden Treiber und Barrieren