SummarySir William Willcocks (1852–1933) was a prominent British irrigation engineer who served in various British colonies. Best known as the chief designer of the Old Aswan Dam, Willcocks was born and trained in India, achieved prominence with his contribution to the development of centralized and perennial irrigation in Egypt, and was hired at the end of his career by the Ottomans to restore the ancient irrigation works of Mesopotamia (which was then on the verge of being acquired by the British). (...) In this article, I follow Willcocks' voyages across the British Empire and show how hydraulic science moved from one colonial centre to another, and how this movement contributed to the construction and maintenance of colonialism on the ground. Often sent to newly acquired territories with ambitious projects to redesign the landscapes of property and agriculture, Willcocks and other engineers who gained their expertise in the colonies relied on lessons from their day-to-day struggle with the land and other social actors' competing agendas to develop the daily techniques that helped establish colonial rule. As the reception of Willcocks' work in London illustrates, it was in the metropole that engineers' practices were translated into a colonial symbolism that had large-scale technical systems as the right tools for the job of subordinating unruly waters and Nature writ large. (shrink)

Background: Moral distress is a common problem among professionals working in the field of healthcare. Moral distress is the distress experienced by a professional when he or she cannot fulfill the correct action due to several obstacles, although he or she is aware of what it is. The level of moral distress experienced by nurses working in intensive care units varies from one country/culture/institution to another. However, in Turkey, there is neither a measurement tool used to assess moral distress suffered (...) by nurses nor a study conducted on the issue. Aim/objective: The study aims to (a) validate the Turkish version of the Moral Distress Scale–Revised to be used in intensive care units and to examine the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the scale, and (b) explore Turkish intensive care nurses’ moral distress level. Method: The sample of this methodological, descriptive, and cross-sectional design study comprises 200 nurses working in the intensive care units of internal medicine and surgical departments of four hospitals in three cities in Turkey. The data were collected with the Socio-Demographic Characteristics Form and The Turkish Version of Moral Distress Scale–Revised. Ethical considerations: The study proposal was approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Medicine, Cumhuriyet University. All participating nurses provided informed consent and were assured of data confidentiality. Results: In parallel with the original scale, Turkish version of Moral Distress Scale–Revised consists of 21 items, and shows a one-factor structure. It was determined that the moral distress total and item mean scores of the nurses participating in the study were 70.81 ± 48.23 and 3.36 ± 4.50, respectively. Conclusion: Turkish version of Moral Distress Scale–Revised can be used as a reliable and valid measurement tool for the evaluation of moral distress experienced by nurses working in intensive care units in Turkey. In line with our findings, it can be said that nurses suffered low level of moral distress. However, factors which caused the nurses in our study to experience higher levels of moral distress are inadequate communication within the team, working with professionals they considered as incompetent, and futile care. (shrink)

Aim: This study was carried out in order to determine ethical decision-making levels of oncology nurses. Ethical Consideration: Research Ethics Committee's approval was obtained prior to the data collection. Permission to use the Turkish version of the Nursing Dilemma Test was received from Birgül Cerit. Written approval was taken from school administrators to conduct the study confirming that there were no invasive procedures planned for human beings during the study period. The study was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration. (...) Verbal consent was obtained from each of the nurses who agreed to participate after they were informed about the study content. Method: The population of this study conducted in a descriptive way consisted of a total of 96 nurses working at the oncology units and outpatient chemotherapy units of four different hospitals between September 2017 and March 2018. The study sample included 60 nurses who responded to the question form. The data of the study were collected using “Nurses Information Questionnaire” and “Nursing Dilemma Test” developed by Crisham in 1981. Results: Oncology nurses’ mean scores in Principled Thinking (49.00 ± 6.46) and those in Practical Considerations (18.35 ± 4.47) were found to be above the moderate level. It was determined that the oncology nurses participated in the study were familiar with situations similar to the dilemmas included in the Nursing Dilemma Test (15.00 ± 4.20). Conclusion: It was concluded that oncology nurses try to take ethical principles into consideration but are also affected by environmental factors while making decisions concerning ethical dilemmas. The most frequently encountered ethical dilemmas by oncology nurses include the following: deciding not to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation, telling the truth to the patient, studies being carried out without the patient’s content, and patient’s refusal of treatment. In order to improve oncology nurses’ critical thinking and ethical decision-making skills, it is important to determine ethical dilemmas encountered by oncology nurses, and nurses should be encouraged to be involved in ethical decision-making process through cooperation with the other healthcare personnel. (shrink)

Wearing facial masks became a common practice worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigated (1) whether facial masks that cover adult faces affect 4- to 6-year-old children’s recognition of emotions in those faces and (2) whether the duration of children’s exposure to masks is associated with emotion recognition. We tested children from Switzerland (N = 38) and Brazil (N = 41). Brazil represented longer mask exposure due to a stricter mandate during COVID-19. Children had to choose a face displaying (...) a specific emotion (happy, angry, or sad) when the face wore either no cover, a facial mask, or sunglasses. The longer hours of mask exposure were associated with better emotion recognition. Controlling for the hours of exposure, children were less likely to recognise emotions in partially hideen faces. Moreover, Brazilian children were more accurate in recognising happy faces than Swiss children. Overall, facial masks may negatively impact children’s emotion recognition. However, prolonged exposure appears to buffer the lack of facial cues from the nose and mouth. In conclusion, restricting facial cues due to masks may impair kindergarten children’s emotion recognition in the short run. However, it may facilitate their broader reading of facial emotional cues in the long run. (shrink)

In Critique of Forms of Life, Rahel Jaeggi develops an immanent critique to evaluate and criticize forms of life. Jaeggi seeks a criterion that relies neither on external nor internal standards but rather on an imminent, non-teleological quasi-standard rooted in ongoing social dynamics. She claims that social learning processes can serve as a standard or indicator of progress within forms of life; however, she does not fully explain how these learning processes demonstrate both normative and functional progress. In this paper, (...) I argue that Jaeggi’s immanent critique requires a more robust conception of agency, one that emphasizes the role of creativity in the dialectical relationship between active and passive learning processes. Such a framework would better capture the progressive and regressive movements within forms of life. Furthermore, I expand on how creativity in narrating forms of life animates active learning processes and determines the success or failure of social transformations from both functional and normative perspectives. I suggest that the focus should be on how individuals and collective groups, as learners, actively transform their social environments through new experiences and imaginative narratives, in order to detect the immanent problems that occur in the learning processes of forms of life themselves. (shrink)

Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun (...) resolution are implemented in this paper. This implementation provides a better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments, and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the statistical results. (shrink)

Although disasters and political ecology problems continue to grow on a global scale, the states and their stakeholders still make decisions that can escalate risks and vulnerabilities. Within their populist discourse, they use political ecology imaginaries, which shape collectively held future visions and regulate desires and beliefs about values, norms and ways of life. Since imaginaries become an extension of control, it is critical to explore counter and alternative political ecology imaginaries for possible futures especially in disaster-prone countries. This study (...) aims to explore alternative political ecology imaginaries and possible, future makings of contemporary artworks. Through the lens of feminist accounts in political ecology and science and technology studies (STS), this exploratory research is based on the qualitative analysis of five purposefully sampled contemporary artworks from Turkey, a disaster-prone country where political ecology risks and vulnerabilities are high and the imaginaries of the state and its stakeholders are extremely authoritative and popularized. Research methodology of the study mainly consists of a literature review, discourse analysis, field notes and participatory observation. The findings of the study contribute to disclose the transgressions around knowledge claims in political ecology studies. Counter and alternative political imaginaries of contemporary artistic research generate possible futures for more-than-human-worlds. (shrink)

Dürr-i meknūn (The hidden pearl) is one of the best-known and most frequently cited but least studied works of fifteenth-century Ottoman literature. An anonymously written encyclopedic work in Turkish, it covers a wide range of subjects, starting with the creation and ending with the day of judgment. Although no fifteenth-century copy has survived, the Dürr displays a close ideological and intertextual relationship with other well-known fifteenth-century Ottoman works that were the building blocks of an indigenous Ottoman religious, historical, political, and (...) apocalyptic literature on which later generations relied. This article critically reviews the Dürr by situating it against the backdrop of the political context of the 1460s and early 1470s, informed by Sultan Meḥmed II’s imperial policies seeking to unite the Islamic world under one rule and by the dire crusade threat menacing the Ottoman empire posed by Venice and its allies in 1472–73. I argue that the work was composed by a member of the scholarly elite to criticize Meḥmed’s imperial ambitions and, most notably, his designs to conquer the Mamluk sultanate, which the Dürr identifies as a disastrous endeavor that would lead to the conquest of Islam by the Christians. (shrink)

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at ages 2 to 3 (Aksu-Koç & Slobin, 1985; Nakipoğlu, Uzundag, & Sarıgül, 2021). So far, however, we know very little about children's understanding of causatives with novel verbs. In the present study, we asked: (a) (...) When does the generalization of causative morphology in a novel context emerge? and (b) What role does child-directed input play in this development? To answer the first question, we conducted comprehension-judgment experiments with children aged 2;6–6;11 using pseudo-verbs (Study 1 & 2). Results showed that children preferred the Turkish causative suffix -DIr over an unrelated or no suffix to denote caused events earliest at age 4;10. To answer the second question, we analyzed child-directed speech from a longitudinal corpus of Turkish language acquisition (Study 3). Results showed that when addressing children younger than age 3, caregivers used the -DIr suffix with little variation considering the overall variability of verbs they could utter. Overall, these findings suggest that productivity with morphological causatives in a novel context emerges in a later stage of acquisition. This later development might partly be accounted for by the insufficient variation of morphological causatives in the early input. (shrink)

This article aims to make a distinction among contemporary artworks that use algorithmic technologies. Departing from Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, the focus is given to artworks that use algorithmic agencies, as assemblages of human and nonhuman entities. Making an ethno-methodological analysis of three artworks, The Pitiful Story of Deniz Yılmaz (2015–present) of Bager Akbay, Artificial Intelligence for Governance, the Kitty AI (2016) of Pınar Yoldaş and Plantoid (2015) of Primavera Di Filippi, the article examines paratactical use of algorithmic (...) agencies in contemporary artistic practice. Exploring, revealing and learning from the tactics used by platforms, corporations and institutions that control and govern, paratactical use of algorithmic agencies generates a self-reflexive perspective on such tactics of control. Paratactical works also explore absurdities and contingencies embedded in algorithmic technologies. They work within failures and errors, and perform subversive ways of thinking, acting and enacting. In conclusion, paratactical works deal with the reproduction, distribution and normalization of ignorance, extinction, degeneration, corruption and destruction. (shrink)

The paper is composed of two parts. The first part covers juvenile delinquency with all its characteristics. When analyzing the delinquency, we gave a special place to the socio-pathological phenomena which is more and more present and the rate is higher from year to year. Social pathology is a huge issue that requires special commitment, first, for its detection and then prevention. Within the delinquency, we also cover the most common crimes committed by juveniles. In the second part of this (...) paper, the authors deal in more details with a specific form of crime which can also be committed by juveniles: child sexual abuse and pedophilia. First, the difference between child sexual abuse and pedophilia will be discussed, a difference that is of particular importance in cases where minors are abusers. Furthermore, the main characteristics of cases when both perpetrators and victims of sexual abuse are minors will be addressed. Although these criminal offenses are rarer in practice unlike the criminal offenses and deviant behaviors treated in the first part, however, knowing the main characteristics and specifics of such cases is of particular importance for the legal-criminal treatment of the perpetrators of these criminal offenses. (shrink)

Rethinking Utopia is a collection that discusses utopian thinking in relation to different philosophical themes. It seeks utopianism in political theory (particularly in Kant and Derrida), populism, Turkish Islamism, international law, and it fleshes out themes of modernism and classless society in the selected utopian examples. By discussing and showing the relationship between utopia and these topics, the book shows that the range of subjects related to utopias is wider than the current literature suggests. The book attempts to bring together (...) academic fields, which are not cross-fertilized in the existing debates on utopia, by building bridges between actual politics and futuristic visions. On the one hand, it looks at utopia as a means to think about and reconfigure contemporary politics (as in the case of international law and populist politics); on the other hand, it investigates how different philosophical/literary texts, from widely-known More and Le Guin to lesser-known Turkish Islamists Kısakürek, Karakoç and Özel, imagine their distinct utopian vision where a new form of anarchist, classless or Islamist society could be possible. (shrink)

Although an inverse relationship between religion and deviance is empirically well-established in the western context, previous studies on Islam and deviance conducted in non-western countries are limited. To address this gap in deviance research, we hypothesized that individual religiosity would be inversely related to deviance with the inverse relationship being more likely for ascetic than anti-ascetic or secular deviance. To test this hypothesis, we applied ordinary least squares and logistic regression methods to analyze data collected from 2,005 survey participants of (...) a Turkish public university student population. Regression results provided partial support for the hypothesis, as we found that religiosity was inversely related to both ascetic and secular deviance. The observed inverse relationship is noteworthy in that it was found in an institutionally secular, Muslim country. Implications of our findings are discussed. (shrink)

In Critique of Forms of Life, Rahel Jaeggi develops an immanent critique to evaluate and criticize forms of life. Jaeggi seeks a criterion that relies neither on external nor internal standards but rather on an imminent, non-teleological quasi-standard rooted in ongoing social dynamics. She claims that social learning processes can serve as a standard or indicator of progress within forms of life; however, she does not fully explain how these learning processes demonstrate both normative and functional progress. In this paper, (...) I argue that Jaeggi’s immanent critique requires a more robust conception of agency, one that emphasizes the role of creativity in the dialectical relationship between active and passive learning processes. Such a framework would better capture the progressive and regressive movements within forms of life. Furthermore, I expand on how creativity in narrating forms of life animates active learning processes and determines the success or failure of social transformations from both functional and normative perspectives. I suggest that the focus should be on how individuals and collective groups, as learners, actively transform their social environments through new experiences and imaginative narratives, in order to detect the immanent problems that occur in the learning processes of forms of life themselves. (shrink)

Incorporating conceptual and discoursal perspectives, this study examines multimodal conceptual metaphors occurring in university advertisement posters. These posters offer a unique window onto the creative operation of cognitive mechanisms in the production of images and texts designed to work together to convey a message. Based on a dataset of posters promoting South Korean universities, the study explores (1) what metaphors emerge from interaction across modes; (2) how multimodal metaphoric creativity facilitates recontextualized framing; and (3) what social perspectives, values, ideologies, and (...) cultural underpinnings of the society’s education discourse are conveyed in the posters via metaphors. From the conceptual perspectives, the mapping relations manifested in both visual and verbal modes reveal several overarching frames in various metaphor scenarios, reflecting different levels of generality through recontextualization. From the discoursal perspectives, the study shows that discourse stances regarding the perception, purpose, progress, and process of education are based on social attitudes, embodied experiences, cultural values, and ideologies linked to contemporary South Korean lifestyles. The study discusses the discoursal views on education that are manifested in multimodal metaphors related to self-growth, national and global competitiveness, the national identity of Koreanness, and the idea of building human capital and facilitating employment. (shrink)

Pronouns are a ubiquitous part of discourse, but unusual in that their meaning is almost entirely determined by context. While early theorists hoped to explain pronouns based on a small number of simple principles, the last half‐century of research has revealed a cornucopia of influences at the syntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic levels. While there are currently a few popular theories, evaluating them is complicated by the complexity of the empirical situation, which is compounded by the fact that many popular (...) experimental methods are incommensurate and are uninterpretable under one theory or another. Moreover, with a few notable examples, research has focused on English, and so the generalizability of results is uncertain. Here, we take a step toward a clear empirical foundation for theory, with a tightly controlled study of comprehension of overt and null pronouns in Turkish. We show that pronoun resolution in Turkish is influenced by verb type, word order, and referential form, though not always in ways predicted by existing theories. Our findings highlight the need for further cross‐linguistic research and more careful experimental control in order to refine models of pronoun interpretation and better account for the interaction of syntactic and discourse factors. (shrink)

There are limitations of obstetric estimation of neonatal outcome in extremely premature newborns. Predicting outcomes, survival, and morbidity are often uncertain, such as in cases of extreme prematurity, certain fetal anomalies, intrauterine growth restriction, and intrauterine infection. Informed consent, truth telling, the maternal–fetal conflict, decision making, and the fetus as a patient are the most important issues of obstetric and neonatal ethics. Because the boundary between utility and futility is not clear, the best interest of the mother, the fetus, and (...) the newborn will be subject of discussion every time. Here, we report a case of obstetric patient to discuss. (shrink)

Discrimination is a negative, destructive and marginalizing attitude as old as the history of humanity. It becomes visible in many different forms such as racism, sexism, nationalism, sectarianism, religiousness, and classism. When we look at the sources of discriminatory attitudes and tendencies, we encounter a wide range of reasons. For example, factors such as wrong learning, created fears, distorted feelings of hatred, scientific, philosophical, political thoughts, religiouspolitical personalities, and flawed educational understandings can be shown as some of these. In this (...) study, while the meaning, source, problems and solutions to the problem of religious intolerance, which is one of the discriminatory attitudes, are discussed from historical and social perspectives, the views of the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum are taken into consideration. (shrink)

The ethics of autonomous vehicles has received a great amount of attention in recent years, specifically in regard to their decisional policies in accident situations in which human harm is a likely consequence. Starting from the assumption that human harm is unavoidable, many authors have developed differing accounts of what morality requires in these situations. In this article, a strategy for AV decision-making is proposed, the Ethical Valence Theory, which paints AV decision-making as a type of claim mitigation: different road (...) users hold different moral claims on the vehicle’s behavior, and the vehicle must mitigate these claims as it makes decisions about its environment. Using the context of autonomous vehicles, the harm produced by an action and the uncertainties connected to it are quantified and accounted for through deliberation, resulting in an ethical implementation coherent with reality. The goal of this approach is not to define how moral theory requires vehicles to behave, but rather to provide a computational approach that is flexible enough to accommodate a number of ‘moral positions’ concerning what morality demands and what road users may expect, offering an evaluation tool for the social acceptability of an autonomous vehicle’s ethical decision making. (shrink)

Background Medical errors represent a significant threat to patient safety, often stemming from miscommunication and negligence. Nurses play a critical role in preventing such errors; however, they frequently underreport or conceal them. Simulation-based applications provide a controlled and safe environment where nurses can experience and reflect on medical errors, thereby enhancing their awareness and contributing to improved patient safety practices. Aim The study aims to investigate nurses’ experiences with medical errors using a simulation and to provide an in-depth understanding of (...) their behaviors. Research design Descriptive phenomenological qualitative research. Participants and research context: The study was conducted with 10 nurses at a university hospital between March and April 2023. Simulation scenarios were developed in line with the INACSL standards. Data were collected using a descriptive form and semi-structured interviews and analyzed using descriptive phenomenological analysis. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the Karadeniz Technical University Health Sciences Scientific Research Ethics Committee (approval no.2022/60) on 06.05.2024. Informed consent was obtained from the participants. Results During the simulation practices, nurses exhibited two distinct behaviors concerning medical errors: concealment ( n = 4) and disclosure ( n = 6). The analysis identified two themes and 12 subthemes based on the nurses’ experiences. Conclusion The study concluded that nurses exhibited a range of behaviors and emotions in response to medical errors, with these responses influenced by various underlying factors. The findings of this study are anticipated to inform strategies for managing medical errors encountered by nurses. Future research should focus on integrating and evaluating simulation-based approaches to medical error management within nursing education. (shrink)