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 Academic engagement used to refer to the extent to which students identify with and value schooling outcomes, and participate in academic and non-academic school activities. This study aims to investigate the academic engagement and satisfaction from the school among the university students. The data is taken from the undergraduate students in School of Transportation & Logistics in Istanbul University. We used a questionnaire that consisted of two parts. First part of the questionnaire is about to measure the students’ academic engagement that is improved by Schaufeli et al. Second part of the questionnaire is about to measure the students’ satisfaction from the school. K-means cluster analysis is used to determine two groups of students, group the students in to two clusters based on their school satisfaction scores. We named these two groups as “satisfied” and “unsatisfied” students. Secondly we investigate the relationships between the satisfaction scores and the academic engagement. By means of T Test we investigate whether the academic engagement differs between the clusters that are determined according to the students’ satisfaction scores. Finally we found that academic engagement differs according to the identified clusters.
 
 

The aim of this study to examine the performance of Support Vector Regression (SVR) which is a novel regression method based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) approach in predicting the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) National 100 Index daily returns. For bechmarking, results given by SVR were compared to those given by classical Linear Regression (LR). Dataset contains 6 technical indicators which were selected as model inputs for 2005-2011 period. Grid search and cross valiadation is used for finding optimal model parameters and evaluating the models. Comparisons were made based on Root Mean Square (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Theil Inequality Coefficient (TIC) and Mean Mixed Error (MME) metrics. Results indicate that SVR outperforms the LR for all metrics.

In order to meet increased demand for services, municipalities are compelled to use their resources in a most efficient manner. The regular collection of revenues in municipalities, while making expenditures in  most efficient ways depend on the healthy functioning of the budget and accounting and the financial control system correspondingly. In is necessary for municipalities to continuously control the balance of incomes and expenses, determining and eliminating the negativities in this balance. For this purpose, financial analyses and management ratios are needed. With the financial analyses made, a financial control system may be established in a municipality and used for management purposes. Municipalities which continuously produce information by means of financial control, will be able to take corrective measures in line with these information, take expenditure decreasing measures by determining which items cause the increases and decreases in incomes and expenditures and undertake income increasing procedures. For this purpose, financial analysis varieties were mentioned in the study and a practice made by the Beylikdüzü Municipality  for the analysis of financial statements, obtained as a result of the accrual based accounting system, in public institutions included herein.

Developments in international financial markets concern both developed countries and developing countries closely. The transactions of institutions arising from of commercial activities display a more complex and more risky state in line with international economic developments. The globalization trend in the world economy, the extreme fluctuations in currencies, interests and product prices have rendered closely following up the developments in financial tools mandatory. Taking advantage of derivative financial tools which increase the revenue of assets by taking future risks into consideration, impact a decrease in debt costs and has the purpose of transferring risks are of vital importance with respect to the successful management of companies. At the present time in which internationalcommerce, free market economy and globalization has gained in importance, one of the derivative products used in risk management and have a wide implementation area is swap transactions. Swap transactions can be expressed as a financial transaction including the exchange of interest, foreign currency or both between two or more parties. Swap transactions in particular are used for purposes such as protection against risks due to interest rates and exchange rates, ensuring low cost financing, changing the debt structure and entering different markets. In this study, the generallydefined characteristics of swap transactions, which have an important standing within financial risk management and have been rapidly developing in the world in recent years and their recognition according to the International Accounting Standard 39 concerning the recognition of swap transactions, which has in particular termed the study have been focused on. In the framework of the standard, interest swap and foreign currency swap implementation study were included with respect to the matter

Nowadays the role of local governments is bigger than ever considering the central authority in Turkey. Especially, one can observe that the municipalities’ tasks are depended on their financial structures. In this study the financial resources of Turkish municipalities are evaluated. The obtained findings illustrate that the municipalities have three different financial resources and these resources might be sufficient to make their activities.