Vast consumption of natural resources threats the human life. Growing scarcity of fresh water is posing a great challenge to humanity as well. Thus many governments take special measures for efficient use of freshwater. There are many products that use too much fresh water. Toilet is among these products. In search of new solutions for lack of fresh water, designers design alternative toilets. However, it is necessary to understand the evolution of toilets and current state to develop better new technologies and products. This thesis investigates the evolution of toilet design throughout the history. Factors affect toilet design, and changes in their improvement throughout the evolution of toilets are examined. The study also aims to investigate advantages and disadvantages of squat and flushed toilets and their current state.

In knowledge society theory, wealth is created by production of knowledge and information which are basic sources of innovation. Innovation has vital importance for providing firms survival and competitive power together with enabling countries sustained economic progress and competitiveness. Because of its importance, measuring innovation becomes necessary for evaluating countries&rsquo / performance and policymaking. First attempts to develop measurement framework for innovation was achieved by OECD via the Oslo Manual. Then, Latin American and Caribbean countries developed the Bogota Manual. As demonstrated by the Bogota example, industrial structures of developing countries including Turkey differ from the developed ones, which leads to failure of the methods used in developed countries for measuring innovation. In this thesis, the general innovation measurement concept and innovation systems in developing countries are discussed first in order for reflecting national capabilities of Turkey. Then, widely used innovation indicators of investment in R&amp / D, human sources, patents and utility models, scientific publications and high technology exports are evaluated in terms of measurement scale, advantages and disadvantages and inadaptability together with offering basic alternative or complementary solutions when possible and with bringing out points to pay attention if they are bound to be used

This thesis carries out a comparative analysis of Harold Pinter&#039 / s &quot / The Birthday Party&quot / , &quot / The Caretaker&quot / , and &quot / A Slight Ache&quot / and Edward Albee&#039 / s &quot / The Zoo Story&quot / and &quot / A Delicate Balance&quot / . It achieves this by exploring how the dramatic structure, characterization, and use of language in these plays display the playwrights&#039 / tendency to employ similar themes of existentialist philosophy / existential resistance to life and man&#039 / s seld-quest in the face of existential anxiety and despair. Man shows a variety of inauthentic responses in order to escape the lack of meaning in life, freedom to choose and burden of responsibility. The aim of this study is to discuss these inauthentic responses given by the characters in the above mentioned plays. They are classified as active and passive forms and analyzed while the parallelism and differences between these two playwrights&#039 / approaches are explored.

In this study, an Analytic Network Process (ANP) and Preference Ranking Organization MeTHod for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE) based approach is developed and used to compare overall performance of some commonly used classification and prediction data mining methods on quality improvement data, according to several decision criteria. Classification and prediction data mining (DM) methods are frequently used in many areas including quality improvement. Previous studies on comparison of performance of these methods are not valid for quality improvement data. Furthermore, these studies do not consider all relevant decision criteria in their comparison. All relevant criteria and interdependencies among criteria should be taken into consideration during the performance evaluation. In this study, classification DM methods namely / Decision Trees (DT), Neural Networks (NN), Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS), Logistic Regression (LR), Mahalanobis-Taguchi System (MTS), Fuzzy Classifier (FC) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) / prediction DM methods DT, NN, MARS, Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Fuzzy Regression (FR) and Robust Regression (RR) are prioritized according to a comprehensive set of criteria using ANP and PROMETHEE. According to results of this study, MARS is found superior to the other methods for both classification and prediction. Moreover, sensitivity of the results to changes in weights and thresholds of the decision criteria is analyzed. These analyses show that resulting priorities are very insensitive to these parameters.

In its most general form this study aims to understand and reveal the dynamics that shape AKP&rsquo / s Kurdish politics. In this way primarily, socio-political factors that constitute AKP and the political tradition out of which it has arose have been analyzed with in the theoretical framework of the center-periphery model. It seeks to determine the socio-political basis of AKPs emergence on a platform of change and EU centered vision. It understands this approach as an effort to legitimize itself against a Kemalist center. This study understands AKP&rsquo / s desire to align itself with the West in the course of its quest for legitimization and its desire for the candidacy for the process of ascension to the European Union as the only paths to take after the events of February the 28th has confirmed the judgment that Turkey cannot consolidate its own democracy within its own dynamics. This study contends that the most fundamental influence that has shaped AKP&rsquo / s Kurdish politics and obliged AKP to attend to the Kurdish problem, in addition to the political tradition out of which AKP arose, is full accession to EU and the target of consolidating democracy. The study also analyzes the evolutionary phases the Kurdish politics went through. The process of consolidation of democracy in Turkey in accordance with the requirements of ascension to the EU has been seen as the common fate of AKP and the Kurdish politics as well as the source of legitimization both domestically and internationally. This study understands AKP&rsquo / s Kurdish politics as one of a paradox for the ethnic and religious identities that has faced a systematic resistance since the conception of the republic: On the one hand is the union of these two identities against a sociopolitical system that excludes both, and on the other hand is their political competition on a platform that is perpetually overlapping. The study concludes that AKP&rsquo / s determination and ability to solve the Kurdish problem will give hints on whether the party would succeed or not in its mission of cerating a new political language and democratizing the country.

Recent changes in the insurance regulations and laws in Turkey lead insurance industry to gain further importance and turn the insurance industry one of the rising sectors in financial markets. However, while these favorable events for the insurance industry takes place in Turkish markets, on the global markets the economic crisis initiated with the collapse of US sub-prime mortgage markets deepened and the credit crunch arose in the aftermath. In the times of credit stress having good liquidity base is important for the firms. In recent economic crisis, liquidity related troubles resulted in bailouts or takeovers of giant financial companies. In order to prevent negative consequences of inadequate liquidity and to sustain financial stability, having appropriate level of liquidity is especially crucial for financial companies like insurers. In this thesis it is aimed to analyze the Turkish insurance sector&rsquo / s liquidity condition for the period between 2002 and 2008 with the help of liquidity ratios. Considering the nature of the business, a distinction is made between &ldquo / non-life&rdquo / and &ldquo / life&rdquo / insurance companies while assessing their liquidity ratios. Furthermore, panel data regression analysis is conducted to determine the firm specific factors affecting the liquidity decisions of non-life insurers operating in Turkey.

The starting motivation of this study is to develop an intuitively strong approach to addressing architectural design problems through computational models. Within the scope of the thesis, the complexity of an architectural design problem is modeled computationally by translating the design reasoning into parameters, constraints and the relations between these. Such a model can easily become deterministic and defy its purpose, if it is customized with pre-defined and unchangeable relations between the constraints. This study acknowledges that the relations between design constraints are bound to change in architectural design problems, as exemplified in the graduation project of the author. As such, any computational design model should enable designers to modify the relations between constraints. The model should be open for modifications by the designer. v The findings of the research and the architectural design experiments in the showcase project suggest that this is possible if mass customized sequences of abstract, modifiable and reusable relations link the design constraints with each other in the model. Within the scope of this thesis, the designer actions are mass-customized sequences of relations that may be modified to fit the small design tasks of relating specific design constraints. They relate the constraints in sequence, and are mass customized in an abstract, modifiable and reusable manner. Within this study, they are encoded in Rhino Grasshopper definitions. As these mass customized relations are modifiable, they are seen as a remedy for enabling the designers to build models that meet individual and intuitive needs of the design problems that designers define.

Maintaining proper waterflood conformance is a critical component of waterflood management. Most methods used to control waterflood conformance have proven to be only marginally effective. A unique technique has been developed for creating a durable reservoir flow restriction that diverts injected water into unswept reservoir sections. Placement of the restriction is based in the location of the thermal front between the injector and producers. A thermally activated nano-sized particle system-BRIGHTWATER - was developed that gives us this restriction. A sector model of ACG field has been developed to study applicability of BRIGHTWATER injection in ACG field. A decrease in oil production and increase in water production were seen in wells after production started. The water cuts were high for South flank wells. From the simulation it was seen that there were unswept zones. So this new technology was decided to apply in this thesis work. Several runs were conducted to study effect of BRIGHTWATER concentration, crosslinker concentration, injection rate and pressure, injection temperature, injection times and injection well locations. Results are given in tables and figures and briefly discussed. Also the best and the worst cases are chosen from the results, and analyzed in detail. Finally, economical analysis is given. It has been observed that injecting the polymer in slug form is better than continuous injection. Injecting polymer in early times may give better results. Injection of polymer with 3 slug sizes between 6 month injection periods seems more beneficial. According to the simulation results optimum polymer injection temperature was 780 F. Good results were obtained when polymer was injected at 65000, 75000 and 85000 bbl/day injection rates. Oil recoveries obtained during simulation were in the range of 1.4% to 3.8 % which gives additional recovery of 11 to 31 MMSTB of oil. BRIGHTWATER injection has been found to be applicable to ACG field.

The aim of this thesis is to design a controller for an unmanned helicopter to perform target engagement. This mission is briefly defined as / the helicopter flies to a firing point under the commands of a trajectory controller, and then it is aligned to the target with attitude control. After weapon firing, the helicopter initiates a return maneuver under again the commands of the trajectory controller. This mission where the continuous systems and discrete guidance decisions are to be executed in coherence can be studied as a hybrid control problem. One hybrid control approach which is used in this study is the representation based on two motion primitives: trim trajectories and maneuvers. To obtain the desired trim trajectories and the maneuvers, a dynamic inversion based controller is developed. The controller has two loops: the inner loop which controls the helicopter attitudes and the outer loop which controls the helicopter trajectory. A guidance algorithm is developed which enables the controller to switch from the inner loop to the outer loop or vice versa. Simulations are generated to test the controller performance.

The increasing use of the internet demands more powerful routers with higher speed, less power consumption and less physical space occupation. IP lookup operation is one of the major concerns in today&rsquo / s routers for providing such attributes. To accomplish IP lookup on routers, hardware or software based solutions can be used. In this thesis, an SRAM based pipelined architecture proposed earlier for ASIC implementation is re-designed and implemented on an FPGA in the form of a BRAM based pipelined 8x8 torus architecture using Xilinx ISE and simulated and verified using Modelsim Simulator. Some necessary modifications and improvements for FPGA implementation are carried out. The results of our experiments, which are performed for a real router lookup table and a real time traffic load with various optimizations, are also presented. Our study and design effort demonstrates the feasibility of the FPGA implementation of the proposed technique, of course with a considerable performance penalty.