• Imaging Science in Dentistry
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• v.52 no.1
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• pp.83-91
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• 2022

Purpose: This study assessed the associations between chronological age, dental maturation (DM), cervical vertebrae maturation (CVM), and hand-wrist maturation (HWM) in individuals aged 9-19 years. In addition, this study aimed to derive practical methods to evaluate the skeletal age using DM, CVM, or HWM for orthodontic, medical, and forensic purposes and to compare which of these 3 developmental parameters is more accurate for estimating the age of individuals in a Turkish population. Materials and Methods: Panoramic, lateral cephalometric, and hand-wrist radiographs of 284 patients aged 9-19 years were used in this study. The DM, CVM, and HWM stages were determined. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov, kappa, Wilcoxon, Kruskal-Wallis, chi-square, and Spearman correlation tests and simple linear regression analysis were used for statistical analysis. The significance level was 0.05. Results: Statistically significant differences were found between chronological age and DM, chronological age and CVM, and chronological age and HWM in both sexes (P<0.05). DM did not show statistically significant differences according to sex (P>0.05), but CVM and HWM were statistically different between males and females (P<0.05). The DM-estimated age yielded more accurate values than the other methods. Conclusion: All correlations between skeletal and dental stages were statistically significant. Our results showed that there was no statistically significant difference between chronological age and DM-estimated age. Therefore, it can be concluded that DM stages have the potential to be used for legal purposes.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.7
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• pp.2467-2474
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• 2022

Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) are the most protected facilities among all critical infrastructures (CIs). In addition to physical security, cyber security becomes a significant concern for NPPs since swift digitalization and overreliance on computer-based systems in the facility operations transformed NPPs into targets for cyber/physical attacks. Despite technical competencies, humans are still the central component of a resilient NPP to develop an effective nuclear security culture. Turkey is one of the newcomers in the nuclear energy industry, and Turkish Akkuyu NPP has a unique model owned by an international consortium. Since Turkey has limited experience in nuclear energy industry, specific multinational and multicultural characteristics of Turkish Akkuyu NPP also requires further research in terms of the Facility's prospective nuclear security. Yet, the link between "national cultures" and "nuclear security" is underestimated in nuclear security studies. By relying on Hofstede's national culture framework, our research aims to address this gap and explore possible implications of cross-national cultural differences on nuclear security. To cope with security challenges in the age of hybrid threats, we propose a security management model which addresses the need for cyber-physical security integration to cultivate a robust nuclear security culture in a multicultural working environment.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.83 no.2
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• pp.195-206
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• 2022

Significant structural damages due to earthquakes reveal the importance of seismic design provisions. This paper presents a comparison between the seismic design provisions of Albania, Croatia, Iran, and Turkey for the design of mid-rise reinforced-concrete (RC) frames. Information on the historical development of the considered provisions are given. The code provisions are compared, illustrating the main differences in the minimum requirements for column and beam detailing and analysis for mid-rise RC frames. 4-story, 5-story, and 6-story buildings are designed according to each design code, and their performance is evaluated comparatively by using a displacement-based adaptive pushover procedure and eigenvalue analysis. It is observed that recent Turkish code has the highest and Albanian code has the lowest level of requirements in terms of member size and reinforcement detailing. The considered models indicate 15%, 20% and 50%, lower period values than the Croatia, Iran and Albania buildings, respectively. Additionally, building models per Croatia, Iran and Albania codes have 30%, 35% and 65% less base shear capacity when compared to Turkish building codes. Building models per Croatia and Iran codes indicate similar properties both in terms of strength and stiffness.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.84 no.1
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• pp.85-100
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• 2022

The updated Turkish Building Earthquake Code has been significantly renovated and expanded compared to previous seismic design codes. The use of earthquake ground motion levels with different probabilities of exceedance is one of the major advances in structural mechanics with the current code. This study aims to investigate the earthquake performance of steel structure in settlements with different seismic hazards for various earthquake ground motion levels. It is focused on earthquake and structural parameters for four different ground motion levels with different probabilities of exceedance calculated according to the location of the structure by the updated Turkish Hazard Map. For this purpose, each of the seven different geographical regions of Turkey which has the same seismic zone in the previous earthquake hazard map has been considered. Earthquake parameters, horizontal design elastic spectra obtained and comparisons were made for all different ground motion levels for the seven different locations, respectively. Structural analyzes for a sample steel structure were carried out using pushover analysis by using the obtained design spectra. It has been determined that the different ground motion levels significantly affect the expected target displacements of the structure for performance criteria. It is noted that the different locations of the same earthquake zone in the previous code with the same earthquake-building parameters show significant variations due to the micro zoning properties of the updated seismic design code. In addition, the main innovations of the updated code were discussed.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.355-369
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• 2023

Since the widespread adoption of deep-learning and related distributed representation, there have been substantial advancements in part-of-speech (POS) tagging for many languages. When training word representations, morphology and shape are typically ignored, as these representations rely primarily on collecting syntactic and semantic aspects of words. However, for tasks like POS tagging, notably in morphologically rich and resource-limited language environments, the intra-word information is essential. In this study, we introduce a deep neural network (DNN) for POS tagging that learns character-level word representations and combines them with general word representations. Using the proposed approach and omitting hand-crafted features, we achieve 90.47%, 80.16%, and 79.32% accuracy on our own dataset for three morphologically rich languages: Uyghur, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz. The experimental results reveal that the presented character-based strategy greatly improves POS tagging performance for several morphologically rich languages (MRL) where character information is significant. Furthermore, when compared to the previously reported state-of-the-art POS tagging results for Turkish on the METU Turkish Treebank dataset, the proposed approach improved on the prior work slightly. As a result, the experimental results indicate that character-based representations outperform word-level representations for MRL performance. Our technique is also robust towards the-out-of-vocabulary issues and performs better on manually edited text.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.513-533
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• 2022

This study presents similarities and differences between Turkish Building Code for Steel Structures, which are TS 648 and SDCCSS (Specification for Design, Calculation and Construction of Steel Structures) in terms of the design of the members. Hot-rolled I-shaped steel sections for symmetrical and U-shaped steel sections (i.e., channels) for monosymmetric sections were elaborated in detail. The design strength of tension members under tensile load, compression members under axial load and flexural members under flexure and shear were examined separately. Connection details for tension members, slenderness for compression members and distance between lateral supports for flexural members were considered as prime variables. Analysis results revealed the design strength of the tension members where at least one of the cross-sectional parts is not connected to the connection plates, I-shaped compression members where a slenderness ratio is below 39 (𝛌<39), U-shaped compression members and flexural members where L_b is between L_p and L_r (L_pb≤L_r) designed based on TS 648 are greater than those designed based on SDCCSS 2018. Strength differences between the specification can reach 79% for tensile members, 13% for compression members and 9% for flexural members.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.235-247
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• 2023

Bingöl, a city in eastern Türkiye, is located at a very close distance to the Karlıova Region which is a junction point of the North Anatolian Fault Zone and Eastern Anatolian Fault Zone. By bilateral step over of North Anatolian Fault Zone and Eastern Anatolian Fault Zone each other there occurred NorthWest-SouthEast extended right-lateral and NorthEast-SouthWest extended left-lateral fault zones. In this paper, a typical school building located in Bingöl Çeltiksuyu was selected as the case study. Information on the school building and Bingöl Earthquake (2003) have been given in the paper. This study aimed to determine the fragility curves of the school building according to HAZUS 2022, Turkish Seismic Codes 1998, 2007 and 2018. These codes have been introduced in terms of damage limits. Incremental dynamic analysis is a parametric analysis method that has recently emerged in several different forms to estimate more thoroughly structural performance under seismic loads. Fragility analysis is commonly using to estimate the damage probability of buildings. Incremental Dynamic Analysis have performed, and 1295 Incremental Dynamic Analysis output was evaluated to obtain fragility curves. 20 different ground motion records have been selected with magnitudes between 5.6M and 7.6M. Scaling factors of these ground motions were selected between 0.1g and 2g. Comparison has been made between HAZUS 2022 and Turkish Seismic Codes 1998, 2007 and 2018 in terms of damage states and how they affected fragility curves. TSC 1998 has more conservative strictions along with TSC 2018 than TSC2007 and HAZUS moderate and extensive damage limits.

• Food Science of Animal Resources
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.390-407
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• 2024

Kuflu cheese, a popular variety of traditional Turkish mold-ripened cheeses, is characterized by its semi-hard texture and blue-green color. It is important to elucidate the microbiota of Kuflu cheese produced from raw milk to standardize and sustain its sensory properties. This study aimed to examine the bacteria, yeasts, and filamentous mold communities in Kuflu cheese using high-throughput amplicon sequencing based on 16S and ITS2 regions. Lactococcus, Streptococcus, and Staphylococcus were the most dominant bacterial genera while Bifidobacterium genus was found to be remarkably high in some Kuflu cheese samples. Penicillium genus dominated the filamentous mold biota while the yeasts with the highest relative abundances were detected as Debaryomyces, Pichia, and Candida. The genera Virgibacillus and Paraliobacillus, which were not previously reported for mold-ripened cheeses, were detected at high relative abundances in some Kuflu cheese samples. None of the genera that include important food pathogens like Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria were detected in the samples. This is the first experiment in which the microbiota of Kuflu cheeses were evaluated with a metagenomic approach. This study provided an opportunity to evaluate Kuflu cheese, which was previously examined for fungal composition, in terms of both pathogenic and beneficial bacteria.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.355-365
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• 2024

TECSolverApp is an application that calculates the total equivalent seismic load (base shear) and shows the design spectra in accordance with the Turkish Earthquake Code (TEC). TECSolverApp software can present the spectral acceleration-period graph and the base shear (in terms of unit building weight) in MATLAB and .NET Core frameworks according to TEC 2007 and TEC 2018. In the software, three different building period evaluation options were provided, as entering the period directly, empirical calculation, and using the period calculation formula. In different period calculation scenarios, particular design input parameters such as site-specific spectral acceleration coefficients, local soil class, building importance coefficient, and structural system behavior coefficient are expected. TECSolverApp was produced in two different programming languages and published in MATLAB App Designer and ASP.NET Core MVC environments. To be shared in MATLAB App Designer, it was aimed at availability through the program and distributability as a desktop application. By deploying in ASP.NET Core MVC, open-source cross-platform coding and web-based accessibility were targeted. One of the strongest aspects of TECSolverApp is its developability thanks to software architecture. In this respect, it can be foreseen that other international seismic codes can be added to the calculations in the future.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.3997-4003
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• 2014

Background: Infection with certain human papillomavirus (HPV) genotypes is the most important risk factor related with cervical cancer. The objective of the present study was to investigate the prevalence of HPV infection, the distribution of HPV genotypes and HPV E6/E7 oncogene mRNA expression in Turkish women with different cervical cytological findings in Mersin province, Southern Turkey. Materials and Methods: A total of 476 cytological samples belonging to women with normal and abnormal cervical Pap smears were enrolled in the study. For the detection and genotyping assay, a PCR/direct cycle sequencing approach was used. E6/E7 mRNA expression of HPV-16, 18, 31, 33, and 45 was determined by type-specific real-time NASBA assay (NucliSENS EasyQ$^{(R)}$HPV v1.1). Results: Of the 476 samples, 106 (22.3%) were found to be positive for HPV DNA by PCR. The presence of HPV was significantly more common (p<0.001) in HSIL (6/8, 75%) when compared with LSIL (6/14, 42.9%), ASC-US (22/74, 29.7%) and normal cytology (72/380, 18.9%). The most prevalent genotypes were, in descending order of frequency, HPV genotype 66 (22.6%), 16 (20.8%), 6 (14.2%), 31 (11.3%), 53 (5.7%), and 83 (4.7%). HPV E6/E7 oncogene mRNA positivity (12/476, 2.5%) was lower than DNA positivity (38/476, 7.9%). Conclusions: Our data present a wide distribution of HPV genotypes in the analyzed population. HPV genotypes 66, 16, 6, 31, 53 and 83 were the predominant types and most of them were potential carcinogenic types. Because of the differences between HPV E6/E7 mRNA and DNA positivity, further studies are required to test the role of mRNA testing in the triage of women with abnormal cervical cytology or follow up of HPV DNA positive and cytology negative. These epidemiological data will be important to determine the future impact of vaccination on HPV infected women in our region.