Plant immune system is entirely based on the immunities of the individual cells in which systemic signals originate from the infection sites. Powdery mildew disease is one of the agents causing these infection sites, resulting in significant yield losses, if disease develops. Understanding the molecular basis of plant-pathogen interactions is the new trend for fighting against plant pathogens, since classical methods used in selection of resistant plants are becoming less and less efficient nowadays. Thus, finding out the genes which are responsible in plant&rsquo / s resistance is becoming very important. In this thesis, effect of &lsquo / General Control Nondepressible-2&rsquo / (GCN2) homolog protein in barley defense mechanism was aimed to be studied. The GCN2 of yeast was v previously identified in our laboratory as an interacting protein when the yeast cDNA library was screened with a putative yellow rust R gene (Yr10) fragment. There are reports available in the literature for the function of GCN2 protein, which makes it a good candidate for a role in disease resistance. Thus, the barley homologue of GCN2 might have a role in the R protein mediated early disease response of which may be proceeding via Programmed Cell Death (PCD). In order to observe such function of HvGCN2 in barley, silencing of its expression via Virus Induced Gene Silencing (VIGS) was investigated. Therefore, the GCN2 homologue was found to function as dampening the severity of the disease. The silencing with triple technical replicates was observed in 5 of the 6 samples, at an average of 43.2% by qRT-PCR analysis. The pathogen growth levels at different time points were analyzed under light microscope on the silenced and the control samples by measuring the primary and secondary hyphae lengths. The total of 24 seedlings and 292 individual spores were analyzed, and then the level of disease formation was quantitated with 603 primary hyphae and 106 secondary hyphae measurements. Up to 25% hyphae growth rate differences between the control and silenced groups were observed with a probability value less than 0.05 on t-test.

This dissertation examines the claim that, unlike utilitarianism and deontology, virtue ethics ascribes a positive role to emotions in moral evaluation by taking them as the constituents of moral goodness and moral value. I wish to identify the limit and scope of this claim and to show what kind of emotion theory is suitable for explaining the essential features of virtue ethics. To do so, I defend some kind of cognitivism, the cognitive-affective theory of emotion, as the most suitable theory for virtue ethics. I argue that the moral significance that virtue ethicists assign to emotions can only be explained by such a holistic and non-reductionist account of emotions. In order to demonstrate how the virtue ethicists&rsquo / positive treatment of emotions with respect to moral evaluations works in theory, I have looked at Aristotle&rsquo / s theory of emotions and ethics, paying special attention to his notion of the &lsquo / mean relative to us.&rsquo / We shall see that the &lsquo / mean relative to us,&rsquo / which entails the existence of suitable emotions being felt by the moral agent, is justified on the basis of such an idea. The other main purpose of this dissertation is to examine whether Kant&rsquo / s ethics is compatible with virtue ethics. My interpretation is that Kant&rsquo / s position on emotions oscillates between the negative and the instrumentalist view, while Aristotle&rsquo / s view is moralist. I will argue that even the most celebrated Kantian feeling of respect does not fall under the moralist position. Although Kant recognizes emotions as morally relevant in the determination of duties of virtue, the kind of roles he assigns to them are merely aesthetic, instrumental, or ornamental and regulative, all of which are secondary to pure practical reason. But, in virtue ethics, emotions and feelings play actual causative roles. They can both influence and be influenced from reason in the determination of virtuous actions / they are therefore both causally active and morally valuable in moral actions.

During the last years, with the evolution of technology enabling the control of nano-mesoscopic systems, the possibility of experimentally implementing a Maxwell’s demon has aroused much interest. Its classical version has already been implemented, in photonic and electronic systems, and currently its quantum version is being broadly studied. In this context, the purpose of this work is the development of a protocol for the implementation of the quantum version of an autonomous Maxwell’s demon in a system of superconducting qubits. The system is composed of an Asymmetrical Single-Cooper-Pair Transistor, ASCPT, which has its extremities in contact with heat baths, such that the left one has a lower temperature than the right one. And of a device of two interacting Cooper-Pair Boxes, CPB’s, named as an ECPB, for Extended Cooper-Pair Box. The ECPB is also in contact with a heat bath and possess a genuine quantum feature, entanglement, being described by its antisymmetric and symmetric states, that couple capacitively to the ASCPT with different strengths. A specific operating regime was found where the spontaneous dynamics of the tunneling of Cooper pairs through the ASCPT, will led to a heat transport from the bath in contact with the left extremity of the ASCPT to the bath at the right. And so, as in Maxwell’s original thought experiment, the demon, which is composed by the ECPB and the island of the ASCPT, mediates a heat flux from a cold to a hot bath, without the expense of work. However as expected, the violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not occur, as during the dynamics heat is also released to the bath in contact with the ECPB, compensating the decrease of entropy that occurs in the baths in contact with the ASCPT. / Nos últimos anos, com a evolução da tecnologia que permite o controle de sistemas nano-mesoscópicos, a possibilidade de se implementar um demônio de Maxwell despertou muito interesse. A sua versão clássica já foi realizada experimentalmente com sucesso em sistemas fotônicos e eletrônicos e atualmente a versão quântica tem sido amplamente estudada. Neste contexto, o objetivo deste trabalho é desenvolver um protocolo para a implementação de uma versão quântica de um demônio de Maxwell autônomo utilizando dispositivos supercondutores. O sistema é composto por um Asymmetrical Single-Cooper-Pair Transistor, ASCPT, que possui as suas extremidades em contato com banhos térmicos, sendo que o banho à esquerda possui uma temperatura inferior ao da direita. E por um dispositivo composto por dois Cooper-Pair Boxes, CPB’s, interagentes, denominado ECPB, sigla para Extended Cooper-Pair Box. O ECPB também se encontra em contato com um banho e possui uma característica genuinamente quântica, emaranhamento, sendo descrito por seus estados antissimétrico e simétrico, que se acoplam capacitivamente ao ASCPT com intensidades distintas. Encontrou-se que em um regime de operação específico a dinâmica espontânea de tunelamento de pares de Cooper ao longo do ASCPT origina o transporte de calor do banho à esquerda do ASCPT, ao banho à direita. Desta forma, assim como proposto originalmente por Maxwell, o demônio, composto pelo ECPB e pela ilha do ASCPT, media um fluxo de calor de um banho frio para um banho quente, sem a realização alguma de trabalho. Contudo como esperado, a violação da 2ª lei da termodinâmica não ocorre, já que durante a dinâmica calor é liberado ao banho em contato com o dispositivo de CPB’s, compensando a diminuição de entropia que ocorre nos banhos em contato com o ASCPT.

High-quality preschool education produces substantial long-term educational, social, and economic benefits, but large benefits occur only when teachers are professionally prepared and adequately compensated. Qualifying the teacher candidates depends on many interrelated components of a teacher education. The aim of this study is to evaluate the student selection policy, decision-making policy, recruitment policy, teacher candidates&rsquo / educational profiles, faculty development and assignment policy, curriculum and instruction, and the graduates&rsquo / competences from the perspectives of the faculty members in the preschool teacher education program. For this purpose, decision-oriented program evaluation CIPP model is taken as a framework. In order to reach in-depth and detailed information from the participants, study is designed as a qualitative phenomenological research. Participants are selected through purposeful sampling strategies that include criterion sampling and snowball sampling procedures from the population of 150 academicians in the 55 preschool teacher education program in Turkey. Data is collected through semi-structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires from 58 participants. According to the content analysis, findings indicated that there is need for the additional tests in the student selection, improvement in the faculty development policy, accreditation, faculty initiative in curriculum planning and implementing, alternative strategies in practicum, and collaboration of the local authorities and the faculties in the recruitment policy of the graduates. In this respect, it is believed that the findings will pave the way for the program developers to reform the program accordingly, will give further insights about the real experiences of the academicians and take their suggestions to improve the program and will help the researchers to raise some new questions about the preschool teacher education program to investigate.

Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) are the most common DNA sequence variations where only a single nucleotide (A, T, C, G) in the human genome differs between individuals. Besides being the main genetic reason behind individual phenotypic differences, SNP variations have the potential to exploit the molecular basis of many complex diseases. Association of SNPs subset with diseases and analysis of the genotyping data with clinical findings will provide practical and affordable methodologies for the prediction of diseases in clinical settings. So, there is a need to determine the SNP subsets and patients&rsquo / clinical data which is informative for the prediction or the diagnosis of the particular diseases. So far, there is no established approach for selecting the representative SNP subset and patients&rsquo / clinical data, and data mining methodology that is based on finding hidden and key patterns over huge databases. This approach have the highest potential for extracting the knowledge from genomic datasets and to select the number of SNPs and most effective clinical features for diseases that are informative and relevant for clinical diagnosis. In this study we have applied one of the widely used data mining classification methodology: &ldquo / decision tree&rdquo / for associating the SNP Biomarkers and clinical data with the Alzheimer&rsquo / s disease (AD), which is the most common form of &ldquo / dementia&rdquo / . Different tree construction parameters have been compared for the optimization, and the most efficient and accurate tree for predicting the AD is presented.

Parkinson&rsquo / s disease (PD) is characterized by the progressive loss of dopaminergic nigral neurons and striatal dopamine resulting in serious motor deficits but also some non-motor anomalies. Animal models of human neurodegenerative diseases are essential for better understanding their pathogenesis and developing efficient therapeutic tools. There are many different PD models, however, none of them is fully reproducing all the symptoms of the disease. In addition, different investigators use different behavioral measures which makes even more difficult to compare and evaluate the results. The aim of the present study was to compare motor and cognitive deficits in two most common models of PD: the Rotenone and 6-OHDA model, using a large battery of neurological tests and a probabilistic learning task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effects of bilaterally induced Rotenone and 6-OHDA through behavioral test batteries assessing the cardinal motor symptoms and the cognitive abnormality of Parkinson&rsquo / s Disease in the same rat population. Also, the present study is unique on the basis of providing both longitudinal observations of behaviour in the same treatment group and the cross-sectional comparisons of the behavioural responses between different groups. In the current study, the neurotoxins were applied at relatively low doses of 3-4 &mu / g, bilaterally to the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc). Experiments were conducted on 50 young-adult male Sprague&ndash / Dawley rats randomly assigned to five experimental groups: Rotenone, 6-OHDA, vehicle (DMSO/Saline), and the intact control. The neurological tests included locomotor activity,catalepsy, rearing, stepping, and rotarod/accelerod tests. They were applied prior to, and on days 4-7-10-20-40-150 while the learning task was applied 49 days after drug infusion.During the first 2 postoperational months, both neurotoxins produced progressive deterioration in motor performance but showing no effect on cognitive functions. Five months after the surgery, regression of bradykinesia but persistence of sensorimotor deficits was noted. The tests&rsquo / results suggest different susceptibility of different motor functions to the degeneration of nigro-striatal (N-S) pathway. So, different tests were demonstrated to have different power in detecting similar motor deficits.

High-quality preschool education produces substantial long-term educational,social, and economic benefits, but large benefits occur only when teachers are professionally prepared and adequately compensated. Qualifying the teacher candidates depends on many interrelated components of a teacher education. The aim of this study is to evaluate the student selection policy, decision-making policy, recruitment policy, teacher candidates&rsquo / educational profiles, faculty development and assignment policy, curriculum and instruction, and the graduates&rsquo / competences from the perspectives of the faculty members in the preschool teacher education program. For this purpose, decision-oriented program evaluation CIPP model is taken as a framework. In order to reach in-depth and detailed information from the participants, study is designed as a qualitative phenomenological research. Participants are selected through purposeful sampling strategies that include criterion sampling and snowball sampling procedures from the population of 150 academicians in the 55 preschool teacher education program in Turkey. Data is collected through semi-structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires from 58 participants. According to the content analysis, findings indicated that there is need for the additional tests in the student selection, improvement in the faculty development policy, accreditation, faculty initiative in curriculum planning and implementing, alternative strategies in practicum, and collaboration of the local authorities and the faculties in the recruitment policy of the graduates. In this respect, it is believed that the findings will pave the way for the program developers to reform the program accordingly, will give further insights about the real experiences of the academicians and take their suggestions to improve the program and will help the researchers to raise some new questions about the preschool teacher education program to investigate.

This work focuses on a cognitive science inspired solution to an event detection problem in a video domain. The thesis raises the question whether video sequences that are taken in highway tunnels can be used to create meaningful data in terms of symbolic representation, and whether these symbolic representations can be used as sequences to be parsed by attribute grammars into abnormal and normal events. The main motivation of the research was to develop a novel algorithm that parses sequences of primitive events created by the image processing algorithms. The domain of the research is video detection and the special application purpose is for highway tunnels, which are critical places for abnormality detection. The method used is attribute grammars to parse the sequences. The symbolic sequences are created from a cascade of image processing algorithms such as / background subtracting, shadow reduction and object tracking. The system parses the sequences and creates alarms if a car stops, moves backwards, changes lanes, or if a person walks into the road or is in the vicinity when a car is moving along the road. These critical situations are detected using Earley&rsquo / s parser, and the system achieves real-time performance while processing the video input. This approach substantially lowers the number of false alarms created by the lower level image processing algorithms by preserving the number of detected events at a maximum. The system also achieves a high compression rate from primitive events while keeping the lost information at minimum. The output of the algorithm is measured against SVM and observed to be performing better in terms of detection and false alarm performance.

This study aims at finding out instructors&rsquo / perceived competencies in Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Ministry of Education (MONE) competencies, and accordingly exploring strengths and weaknesses of the ELT undergraduate program as well as providing suggestions for a more effective and fruitful program. At the first phase of the research, a questionnaire is given to seventy-five participants, working in the department of Foreign Languages at various universities. For the second phase of the study, an interview prepared in the light of the questionnaire results is conducted with thirty-four of aforementioned participants. The results of this study illustrate that the participants find themselves more competent in learning, language proficiency, planning, instructing, and content than assessing, identity and context, and commitment and professionalism since the participants believe in the need of improving themselves in latter standards. Similarly, they consider the methodology, general education and language components of the ELT undergraduate program effective because they find those components practical and focused during the program while the literature and linguistics components are thought to be ineffective in preparing them for the profession as the methodology of these components, which is not integratedwith ELT enough. Lastly, in the lights of these findings, some suggestions are made for improving the program. For further research, all ELT teachers&rsquo / perceptions in Turkey can be investigated and suggestions for a better undergraduate program can be asked.

The aim of this study is to investigate teachers&rsquo / perceptions of constraints on improving student thinking skills in schools, and to find out whether there are differences in teachers&rsquo / perceptions of constraints in terms of subject area, educational background, teaching experience, gender, geographical area, and school location. A survey design was used in this study. The questionnaire used in the study was developed by making use of the related literature, and it was administered to 522 teachers working in the public high schools in four different regions of Turkey during the fall semester of 2002-2003 academic year. The data gathered are analysed through descriptive and inferential statistics (one-way ANOVA and t-test). There were four major constraints on improving student thinking, namely, teacher-related, student-related, curriculum-related, and external factors to classroom. The results indicated that the most agreed constraints were the student-related ones. The results also showed that there were no statistically significant differences in teachers&rsquo / perceptions of the constraints on improving student thinking based on the background variables, i.e., subject area, educational background, teaching experience, gender, geographical region, and school location.