Journals
2026 EN
Gürsoy Yaprak · Baykan Toygar Sinan
Different approaches to democracy and populism lead to varied conclusions about their relationship. Some see populism as a threat to democracy, while others argue that it can contribute to democratization by giving a voice to excluded groups. This article provides a multifaceted view and regards populism as a “frenemy” of democracy based on theoretical discussions and historical evidence from around the world. As a friend, populist parties and leaders help integrate underprivileged classes into the political system in authoritarian settings and revitalize politics in liberal democracies that have become unresponsive to ordinary citizens. However, as an enemy, populist actors in power undermine liberal institutions in already unstable contexts, especially when they remain in government for extended periods. We argue that the importance of competitive elections for populism underscores democracy’s normative resilience over the past 50 years. Given the evidence of global populist governance so far, the danger of populism is potentially exaggerated compared to totalitarian ideologies in the First Reverse Wave. Perceiving populism only as an enemy stems partly from its conflation with far-right ideology, which obscures another danger: the erosion of political freedoms by non-populist incumbents through illiberal means in the name of protecting democracy itself.
Resource
2026 EN
Gafner Stefan · Orhan Nilüfer · Kahraman Çiğdem
+1 more
Turmeric ( Curcuma longa ) is widely used as a spice and in dietary/food supplements and herbal medicines. Reports assessing the authenticity of commercial products have shown that the ingredient is subject to adulteration with, among others, artificial dyes, undeclared diluents, and synthetic curcumin. This scoping review summarizes published data on adulteration of turmeric products sold as spice and dietary or food supplements to estimate the prevalence of non-authentic turmeric on the market. This scoping review was based on a literature analysis from Google Scholar, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science databases, covering publications from 2000 to 2025. Article selection was performed according to PRISMA-ScR guidelines. After the initial search, specific countries were added to refine the search. Of the 375 publications retrieved, 347 were eliminated as duplicates or because they lacked information on turmeric adulteration, adulteration of commercial products, or did not provide the number of adulterated samples. An additional 19 papers were found searching the citations, or by using Google Search with the keywords “Curcuma longa”, “turmeric”, “government report”, and “adulteration”. One more report from the CVUA Stuttgart was found using the keywords “Kurkuma”, “Verfälschung”, and “Report”. In total, 48 papers were included in the review. A total of 48 publications representing 2235 commercial turmeric samples were included in the study. The overall adulteration rate was 20.0%, with spice samples having a slightly lower percentage of adulterated samples (20.4%) than dietary and food supplements (22.0%). Adulteration of turmeric remains a concern on markets worldwide.
Journals
2026 EN
Yozkat Gökhan · Gürkan Gülşah · Kahraman Sibel
Vaccine hesitancy refers to the reluctance or refusal to get vaccinated. This can be influenced by various factors, including concerns about vaccine safety, distrust of healthcare systems, misinformation circulating on social media, cultural beliefs, and inadequate health literacy. The aim of this study is to determine whether there is any relationship between vaccine hesitancy and health literacy of prospective science teachers. The sample of the study consists of 165 students studying at the faculty of education of a state university. It was observed that there was a low-level negative relationship between health literacy and vaccine hesitancy. The study shows that higher health literacy reduces vaccine hesitancy. Since teachers have responsibilities in improving the health literacy levels of society, the health literacy levels of teacher candidates need to be increased.
Journals
2026 EN
Dilbaz-Gürsoy Merve · Özcebe Esra
This study aims to examine if children at risk of developmental language disorder show differences in social-emotional competence and/or behavioural problems compared to their typically developing peers. It also investigates the correlation between the interactional behaviours of parents and children and how it relates to the language and social-emotional development of children. The study included 102 children (51 children at risk of developmental langauge disorder, 51 typically developing peers). All children were aged between 24–36 months. Children’s expressive and receptive language abilities, expressive vocabulary, and social-emotional development were evaluated. Parent and child’s interactional behaviours, such as parental responsiveness and child’s initiation, were assessed during free play. Children at risk of developmental language disorder demonstrated significantly higher problem behaviours and lower social-emotional competences compared to their typically developing peers. A significant relationship was found between expressive vocabulary and social-emotional competence in the at risk group. It was established that there were some significant correlations between language, social-emotional development, and parent–child interactional behaviours. This study offers evidence that children at risk of developmental language disorders are at increased risk of having additional emotional and/or behavioural problems. Certain parental interactional behaviours are linked to their children’s language and social-emotional development, particularly for typically developing children.
Journals
2026 EN
Özcan Eda Nur · Gürsoy Esim
This paper reports on a part of a larger practitioner research project focused on integrating environmental issues through critical language pedagogy into a young learner’s classroom in Turkey. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s problem-posing model grounded in critical pedagogy, the authors developed localized materials, and a pedagogic model rooted in six environmental themes derived from the students’ lived experiences. The pedagogic model was implemented in a public primary setting with a group of fourth-grade students. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the students to understand the model’s effectiveness in achieving its dual objectives: development of language and critical environmental awareness. The purpose of this paper is to present a theory-driven, practical, pedagogic model for practitioners seeking to develop their context-sensitive environmental ELT pedagogies.
Journals
2026 EN
Kahraman Ünsal Ozan · Küçük Damla · Üçağaç Ahmet
+1 more
Legal systems across jurisdictions continue to grapple with the inherent difficulty of attributing responsibility in multi-agent scenarios marked by probabilistic causation, distributed actions, and epistemic uncertainty—particularly within the domain of insurance law. Traditional legal tools such as proximate cause tests, fault trees, and intuitive heuristics often fall short in handling such complexity with analytical precision or procedural fairness. This study introduces CausalRank, a novel, hybrid mathematical model that integrates Bayesian conditional probability inference with a PageRank-based influence propagation algorithm to enable structured, recursive, and normatively calibrated allocation of legal responsibility. The model is structured in five computational stages: (i) construction of an Actor-Action-Event (AAE) causal graph, (ii) population of a Bayesian Conditional Probability Matrix (B) reflecting probabilistic dependencies, (iii) recursive scoring of actors’ causal contributions via an adapted PageRank algorithm (CRS), (iv) normative and evidentiary modulation through the Responsibility Distribution Function (RDF), and (v) final liability allocation with full traceability. Unlike existing models, CausalRank captures not only direct causation but also indirect, systemic influence, and adjusts outputs using legal–theoretic variables such as foreseeability, institutional duty, and evidentiary confidence. Through a legally realistic, multi-agent traffic collision scenario, the study demonstrates how CausalRank produces liability distributions that are computationally rigorous, normatively coherent, and empirically explainable. The model’s transparent, modular design supports its integration into legal decision support systems, insurance adjudication frameworks, and regulatory simulation tools. Key strengths include its ability to manage uncertainty, facilitate counterfactual reasoning, and reflect plural forms of responsibility (individual, institutional, and infrastructural). In sum, CausalRank offers not just a technical innovation but a conceptual framework for rethinking how legal responsibility can be allocated in complex, data-rich, and ethically demanding contexts. It advances the field of computational legal reasoning by aligning formal causal models with normative legal principles, providing a foundation for future interdisciplinary research and real-world application.
Resource
2026 EN
Serhat Kahraman · Cem Suha Yilmaz · Metin Yilmaz
+1 more
This paper presents a modular, multi-criteria trajectory validation framework for industrial robot digital twins, implemented as Functional Mock-up Units (FMUs) compliant with the FMI 2.0 Co- Simulation standard and integrated within a ROS 2 and Gazebo Ignition runtime pipeline. The framework evaluates planned trajectories generated by MoveIt 2 against three complementary criteria: dynamics feasibility via a Recursive Newton–Euler inverse dynamics solver, safety compliance through a two-tier architecture combining a physically-grounded hard gate at the critical joint margin (0.02 rad, derived from the UR10e’s 125 Hz servo control characteristics) with a weighted geometric mean soft scoring layer, and motion smoothness via a length-normalized Gaussian jerk decay function.Aratio-based test-level aggregation mechanism inspired by the IEC 61508 distinction between systematic and random failures classifies hard-failure patterns and prevents weighted score averaging from masking genuine safety deficiencies. Experimental evaluation across 450 tests—spanning two industrially-representative scenarios (chassis inspection and rapid workspace traversal), three OMPL planners (RRTConnect, RRT*, EST), three velocity scales, and five weight configurations—demonstrates the framework’s discriminant power: the same planner and velocity configurations yield 96.4% PASS for rapid traversal yet 0% PASS for chassis inspection, where all tests are classified as systematic failures due to trajectory-level joint margin violations that are invisible to goal-position verification. The score paradox—where 96% of inspection tests achieve soft scores above the PASS threshold yet all receive FAIL verdicts—validates the necessity of the two-tier architecture for safety-critical trajectory assessment in digital twin environments.
Resource
2026 EN
Mehmet Ulvi Simsek
Half of individuals with neurofibromatosis (NF) inherit the disorder from an affected parent, while the remaining cases arise from sporadic. Neurofibromatosis data is generally tabular that ML algorithms have shown successful results on tabular data. However, insufficient data is a significant factor affecting performance. There is an also another limitations as clinical interpretability—an essential requirement for trust, transparency, and ethical use in medical decision making. Therefore, the proposed frameworks bridges data augmentation, ML interpretability with natural language explanation. Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) emerges as the best-performing model, achieving approximately 0.80 accuracy and 0.80 F-score, substantially improving upon previously reported results on the same dataset. The integration of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques such as SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), and PFI (Permutation Feature Importance) becomes crucial for uncovering the underlying relationships between genetic, phenotypic, and demographic features. Furthermore, integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) enables the automatic interpretation and textual summarization of XAI outputs, translating complex importance maps and feature interactions into human-readable clinical insights. These XAI artefacts are translated into concise clinical narratives by the Phi-3-mini LLM, and the resulting explanations are quantitatively assessed with global/local faithfulness, hallucination rate, and feature- and text-level consistency metrics, demonstrating high alignment between narrative and XAI evidence after prompt optimization. Consequently, the proposed framework delivers a transparent and auditable decision-support pipeline for health dataset and offers a reusable template for integrating XAI and LLM-based explanation in rare-disease tabular modeling. This hybrid framework bridges the gap between computational reasoning and medical understanding. This framework give us to knowledge-driven decision support system for NF diagnosis and risk assessment. The proposed approach not only improves model explainability but also promotes trustworthy AI practices in rare genetic disease research.
Journals
2026 EN
Arslan Burak · Ceylan Hakan · Cura Oguzhan
+7 more
ABSTRACT Aim Our aim was to investigate the value of basophils in predicting tumor aggressiveness in clear‐cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). Methods Baseline characteristics of 183 patients were recorded. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to calculate the cut‐off value for basophil count in predicting the presence of perirenal and/or renal sinus fat involvement, as well as a high‐grade WHO/ISUP score. Regression analyses were performed to determine the independent risk factors for perirenal/renal sinus fat invasion and a high‐grade WHO/ISUP score. Results The ROC curve analysis showed that the cut‐off value of basophil count was 0.045 for the presence of a high‐grade WHO/ISUP score (AUC = 0.769) and perirenal and/or renal sinus fat involvement (AUC = 0.731). Tumor size ( p = 0.013), high WHO/ISUP grade ( p = 0.036), LVI ( p = 0.028), perirenal/renal sinus fat involvement ( p = 0.043), and advanced (3–4) TNM stage (0.012) were significantly higher in patients with basophil count ≥ 0.045. In multivariate analysis, tumor size (OR = 1.10), LVI (OR = 3.35), and preoperative basophil count ≥ 0.045 (OR = 3.65) were found to be independent predictors for the presence of a high‐grade WHO/ISUP score. Similarly, tumor size (OR = 1.21), high WHO/ISUP grade (OR = 2.44), and preoperative basophil count ≥ 0.045 (OR = 1.96) were found to be independent predictors for the presence of perirenal and/or renal sinus fat involvement in multivariate analysis. Conclusion Our results demonstrated that preoperative basophil count emerges as a valuable predictor of tumor aggressiveness in ccRCC, offering a readily accessible biomarker to aid in the management of this malignancy.
Journals
2026 EN
Gürlek Gökçebay Dilek · Gürsoy Gamze · Kanbur Mehtap
+3 more
ABSTRACT Background Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is widely used in both malignant and non‐malignant diseases in children. This study aimed to evaluate long‐term endocrine complications in pediatric HSCT survivors. Methods Children who underwent HSCT between April 2010 and October 2014 were retrospectively assessed. Data included demographics, growth and nutritional status, thyroid function, bone health, pubertal development, and gonadal function. Results Seventy‐five patients (45 males, 30 females; mean current age 18.8 ± 3.9 years) were included. The mean follow‐up duration after HSCT was 9.7 ± 1.2 years, and at least one endocrine disorder was identified in 40 patients (53.3%). At the last follow‐up, 23 patients (30.6%) were underweight, and 17 (18.6%) had short stature. Growth impairment was more frequent in patients with non‐malignant diseases. Hypothyroidism was observed in 6 patients (8%), and low bone mineral density (BMD)/osteoporosis in 17 (22.6%). Short stature, malnutrition, low BMD, and vitamin D deficiency were more prevalent among those who underwent HSCT at ≥10 years of age. Hypogonadism was detected in 12 females (40%) and 11 males (24%) and showed no association with age at HSCT, pubertal stage, primary diagnosis, or conditioning regimen. Conclusions These findings underscore the importance of long‐term endocrine surveillance in HSCT survivors, particularly in those transplanted at ≥10 years of age.