Assessment of Preoperative Condition and Postoperative Outcome in Nonsmall Cell Lung Cancer Surgery

Complete surgical resection still represents the main curative treatment modality for patients with early-stage nonsmall cell lung cancer. Despite tremendous advances in perioperative and postoperative care, postoperative outcome is still disappointing. Although pathological tumor stage is the most important prognostic parameter in nonsmall cell lung cancer, additional parameters are required to explain the large variability in postoperative outcome. Therefore, assessment of preoperative condition and postoperative outcome in patients undergoing surgery is a challenging area. The research summarized in this thesis describes preoperative risk assessment, including preoperative staging, and early and late postoperative outcome. This may help the clinician in clinical decision-making and treatment tailoring

An investigation about communication and cooperation between local governments and the NGOs in the case of Ankara Metropolitan Municipality and Chamber of City Planners in Turkey

Throughout this thesis research, communication and cooperation between local governments and a specific NGO called Chamber of City Planners (CCP) were investigated. Further, Ankara Metropolitan Municipality (AMM) was taken as a specific example of the local governments in Turkey, Ankara. Therefore the research and the qualitative investigation were based on those particular stakeholders, Ankara Metropolitan Municipality and Chamber of City Planners. The study includes not only different views of different stakeholders but also during qualitative investigations every interviewee had a chance to be explicit so that the results show us the level of the cooperation and communication between those two stakeholders in a much realistic way. During this degree project, the relationship between those two actors was analyzed by using both environmental communication and stakeholder management aspects. Since reaching a consensus or compromising between those two institutions, definitely, is required the application of stakeholder management principles and facilitation processes. Moreover, the effects of the results of communication and cooperation between those stakeholders were investigated and analyzed in this study. Consequently, miscommunication and lack of cooperation between the two significant actors, which has caused numerous controversies and conflicts regarding urban planning issues, were explored. Some of those deficiencies might be solved or facilitate by designing an environmental communication strategy, however it is crucial to reiterate that juridical precautions and law enforcements should introduce those strategies in order to reach participatory planning process and decline the controversies and conflicts

ArBanking77: Intent Detection Neural Model and a New Dataset in Modern and Dialectical Arabic

This paper presents the ArBanking77, a large Arabic dataset for intent detection in the banking domain. Our dataset was arabized and localized from the original English Banking77 dataset, which consists of 13,083 queries to ArBanking77 dataset with 31,404 queries in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Palestinian dialect, with each query classified into one of the 77 classes (intents). Furthermore, we present a neural model, based on AraBERT, fine-tuned on ArBanking77, which achieved an F1-score of 0.9209 and 0.8995 on MSA and Palestinian dialect, respectively. We performed extensive experimentation in which we simulated low-resource settings, where the model is trained on a subset of the data and augmented with noisy queries to simulate colloquial terms, mistakes and misspellings found in real NLP systems, especially live chat queries. The data and the models are publicly available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/arbanking77

Evaluating vendor managed inventory systems: how incentives can benefit supply chain partners

In a vendor managed inventory (VMI) system, the effects of financial incentives on the entire supply chain (SC) and on the individual firms are investigated in this study. To this end, order management, order replenishment and inventory control activities of a two-echelon SC are examined via modeling using discrete event simulation. By determining the appropriate parameters for the incentives with scenario analysis, balanced profit distribution between buyers and a supplier in VMI is established. Simulation outputs of the traditional model, VMI only and VMI with incentives models are compared based on profits with paired comparisons. In VMI with incentives, both buyers, and the supplier experience higher benefits than the traditional system. This study provides a new method which eliminates the unbalanced benefit distribution due to VMI and offers almost equal benefits to the participating firms. With financial incentives, firms are encouraged to share information with each other to work in a coordinated SC

Modeling and Forecasting Turkey’s Electricity Consumption by using Artificial Neural Network

The article describes the future projections of electricity demand in Turkey by using multiple linear regression (MLR) and artificial neural Networks (ANN). For this purpose six independent variables which are GDP, population, import, export, employment and natural gas are identified as the possible predictors of electricity consumption. We used MLR to determine which independent variables will be selected to forecast future electricity consumption with ANN. These variables are used in stepwise regression in order to identify which variables predict the dependent variable best by using 1992 - 2014 data. Four different models were identified as the result of MLR including various combinations of selected four variables that are population, import, natural gas and employment. In model 1 population, in model 2 population, import, in model 3 population, import and natural gas, in model 4 population, import, natural gas and employment are used as independent variables in ANN.  In this study to model the proposed problem of forecasting Turkey’s electricity consumption in the years 2015-2023, a feed forward multilayer perceptron neural network has been used. According to the forecasted results of four models Turkey’s electricity consumption is projected to vary between 337087.4 and 385006.6 Gwh by 2023. Forecasted results were compared with Turkish Electricity Transmission Company (TEIAS) projections. Except Model 2 our forecast results showed lower values than TEIAS estimates

The relationship between problematic smartphone use and psychiatric symptoms among adolescents who applied to psychiatry clinics

Problematic mobile phone use is an important problem which has increasing prevalence among adolescents. We should address risk factors to create intervention frameworks related to this problem. In this study, we aimed to determine the prevalence of problematic smartphone use among adolescents who were referred to clinics, its relationship to sociodemographic characteristics, psychiatric symptoms and emotion regulation problems. We included 150 adolescents aged 12–18 years who own smartphones. All participants filled out the Sociodemographic Information Form, Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and Problematic Mobile Phone Use Scale (PMPUS). Problematic smart phone use was detected in 50.6% of the sample. Adolescents with problematic use were found to be older than the others, with lower levels of maternal education and self-achievement. Regression analysis revealed that the factors predicting the risk of problematic smartphone use are somatization, interpersonal sensitivity and hostility symptoms. According to our results, we suggest psychiatrists consider the high prevalence of problematic smartphone use, address the relationship between hostility, somatic symptoms and interpersonal sensitivity (susceptibility) and the effects of this current problem on social-academic functioning while evaluating and treating adolescents

Problematic whatsApp use among adolescents: linking fear of missing out and psychiatric symptoms

Objective: WhatsApp (WA) is the most popular instant message application all over the world. Although communication has become easier and enjoyable with the help of this application, the overuse, and addiction of WA has become an important problem among adolescents. WhatsApp addiction is a part of problematic smartphone use (PSU). When we examined previous studies, we found that the samples were generally composed of young adults, but studies on adolescents who are at high risk for problematic Whatsapp use (PWU) were insufficient, and almost no studies were conducted in the clinical adolescent sample. In this study, we aimed to increase our knowledge about problematic PWU and possible risk factors including fear of missing out (FoMO), PSU, and psychiatric symptoms among adolescents who applied to outpatient psychiatry clinics.Methods: 197 adolescents (136 boys, 61 girls, age: 12-18 years) recruited the study. Problematic Mobile Phone Usage Scale (PMPUS), Bergen Whatsapp Addiction Scale, Brief Symptom Inventory, and Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) Scale were used.Results: We grouped the sample as PWU (Problematic WhatsApp use) and Normal Use group due to Bergen WA Addiction Scale. PWU group’s adolescents were significantly older than others (p=0.03), and had higher scores in all subscales of Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), FoMO and PMPUS (for all scale scores p<0.001). Regression analysis demonstrated that FoMO is a predictor of PWU. Also, paranoid ideation, psychoticism, phobic anxiety, and somatization had a positive effect (ß=1.80, 0.98, 1.26, 0.52; respectively) while obsession compulsion and depression had a negative effect on PWU (ß=-0.76, – 1.22, respectively).Conclusion: Our results demonstrated that problematic Whatsapp use is an important internet-related behavioral problem and have specific risk factors among adolescents. Adolescents use Whatsapp generally with their real friends/relatives. Adolescents who have depression, obsession-compulsion mostly have social withdrawal, and would not be interested in communicating their real social environment. On the other hand, adolescents who have phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, psychoticism and somatization symptoms would follow the changes and events more closely. The associations between different psychiatric symptoms and PWU could guide the practitioners in the psychiatric care of adolescents

Kolegij Logički dizajn temeljen na otvorenim obrazovnim materijalima

Logic Design is one of the core courses of many engineering programs and it provides a foundation for the subsequent hardware courses in the curriculum. In this study, a course design supported by open courseware for Logic Design is presented. In this regard, the syllabus, slides, laboratory manual handbook including experiment sheets and simulations, experiment videos, assignments and examples were prepared. The aim of this research is to determine the effect of supporting Logic Design course with digital open courseware on student achievement. It also aims to determine students’ opinions regarding this approach. The study follows a mixed methods approach with the pretest-posttest control group experimental research design. The study was conducted at Manisa Celal Bayar University in Turkey in spring semester of the academic year 2017-2018 with 68 computer engineering students. While the students of the experimental group took the course supported with open courseware, only regular instruction was used in the control group. The quantitative data were collected from an achievement test including open-ended questions and surveys. The qualitative data were gathered by semi-structured focus group interviews. The findings were meticulously analyzed to provide suggestions for revision of the course. Finally, future work directions are discussed.Logički dizajn jedan je od glavnih kolegija mnogih inženjerskih smjerova te predstavlja osnovu daljnjih kolegija u području hardverskih tehnologija. U ovome istraživanju prikazano je kako je nastava kolegija Logički dizajn osmišljena uz pomoć otvorenih obrazovnih materijala. U skladu s tim, pripremljen je nastavni plan i program, slajdovi, priručnik za laboratorijske vježbe s pripadajućim opisima eksperimenata i simulacija, videosnimke eksperimenata, zadaci i primjeri. Cilj je ovoga istraživanja utvrditi utjecaj provedbe kolegija Logički dizajn uz pomoć otvorenih nastavnih materijala na uspjeh studenata. Također je cilj i saznati mišljenja studenata o takvom nastavnom pristupu. Istraživanje je provedeno pomoću metode mješovitog pristupa eksperimentalnom istraživanju, s predtestom i post-testom za kontrolnu skupinu. Istraživanje je provedeno na Sveučilištu Manisa Celal Bayar u Turskoj tijekom ljetnog semestra u akademskoj godini 2017./2018., na uzorku od 68 studenata inženjerstva. Dok su studenti iz eksperimentalne skupine kroz ovaj kolegij prolazili uz pomoć otvorenih nastavnih materijala, za kontrolnu skupinu održana je samo uobičajena nastava. Kvantitativni podaci prikupljeni su pomoću testa postignuća, koji se sastojao od pitanja otvorenoga tipa i upitnika. Kvalitativni podaci prikupljeni su pomoću polustrukturiranih intervjua s fokusnom grupom. Rezultati su detaljno analizirani kako bi se dobile sugestije za reviziju kolegija. Na kraju se raspravlja o smjernicama za daljnji rad