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Cerebrovascular diseases comprise the most common category of inpatient cases taken care of by neurologists. Dysphagia and malnutrition are not rare after stroke. It is strongly recommended for neurologists to screen and treat swallowing disturbances and malnutrition in stroke patients. However, present scientific literature lacks clear evidence with regards to nutritional treatment strategies for stroke patients. This review and recommendation paper is written with the aim to standardize nutritional screening and treatment algorithms during acute and chronic phases of cerebrovascular diseases and guide neurologists in Turkey for their daily practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential evolution (DE) is a population based evolutionary algorithm widely used for solving multidimensional global optimization problems over continuous spaces, and has been successfully used to solve several kinds of problems. In this paper, differential evolution is used for quantitative interpretation of self-potential data in geophysics. Six parameters are estimated including the electrical dipole moment, the depth of the source, the distance from the origin, the polarization angle and the regional coefficients. This study considers three kinds of data from Turkey: noise-free data, contaminated synthetic data, and Field example. The differential evolution and the corresponding model parameters are constructed as regards the number of the generations. Then, we show the vibration of the parameters at the vicinity of the low misfit area. Moreover, we show how the frequency distribution of each parameter is related to the number of the DE iteration. Experimental results show the DE can be used for solving the quantitative interpretation of self-potential data efficiently compared with previous methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SURALP is a 29 degrees-of-freedom full-body walking humanoid robot designed and constructed at Sabanci University - Turkey. The human-sized robot is actuated by DC motors, belt and pulley systems and Harmonic Drive reduction gears. The sensory equipment consists of joint encoders, force/torque sensors, inertial measurement systems and cameras. The control hardware is based on a dSpace digital signal processor. This paper reviews the design of this robot and presents experimental walking results. A posture zeroing procedure is followed after manual zeroing of the robot joints. Controllers for landing impact reduction, early landing trajectory modification, foot-ground orientation compliance, body inclination and Zero Moment Point (ZMP) regulation, and independent joint position controllers are used in zeroing and walking. A smooth walking trajectory is employed. Experimental results indicate that the reference generation and control algorithms are successful in achieving a stable and continuous walk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermodal transportation (IMT) combines two or more different modes of transportation without changing the packaging of the freight transported in order to minimize the transportation cost and to utilize the benefits of modes that are used. One of the most common intermodal freight transportation systems is the Rolling Highway (Ro-La), where a special train system is used to carry highway vehicles on railway cars. This paper reviews IMT and proposes a system in which the facility layout problems are solved simultaneously with the scheduling problems arising in Ro-La transportation. In this context, the best station layouts are obtained by applying a layout improvement algorithm to several initial layouts with respect to different scoring functions. One of the important questions to answer in the IMT problem pertains to the number of loading and unloading platforms. Using the output of the layout improvement algorithm, the train scheduling model is solved to find the minimum number of platforms in a station, the number of trains, and the departures with the carried trucks and trailers, while scheduling train operations, with the objective of minimizing operation costs. The proposed IMT system is applied to the Marmaray Undersea Railway Tunnel Project with regard to different Ro-La systems, and its effectiveness is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heuristic method is one of the methods used for the scheduling of resource-constrained projects. This method is commonly used in programming the projects with high number of activities and resources such as construction investments. This paper investigates the effectiveness of three heuristic method priority rules applied in the resource scheduling of ten Turkish housing estate projects which were scheduled according to three preselected priority rules [maximum remaining path length (MRPL), latest finish time (LFT), and minimum slack time (MNSLCK)] in resource-constrained conditions. The performance of each priority rule was evaluated in relation to the duration of the project. The results revealed that MRPL priority reduced the project duration to minimum in six projects, whereas LFT priority yielded the best duration results in three projects and MNSLCK priority in only one project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IIn this paper the capability of two different feed-forward back-propagation neural network algorithms, namely Levenberg-Marquardt and gradient-descent, in solving complex nonlinear problems is utilized for suspended sediment prediction. The monthly streamflow and suspended sediment data from two stations, Palu and Çayağzi, in the Firat Basin in Turkey are used as case studies. The first part of the study involves the prediction of sediment data for the two stations. The second part of the study focuses on the prediction of the downstream station sediment data using upstream data. The effect of the periodicity on model performance is also investigated in each application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]