Development of etching paste for serial number restoration on aluminum engine block

Engine numbers, which involve information regarding the engine type, production number, and year and place of manufacture, are used for identification purposes. Comprising of unique alphanumeric characters, the engine numbers are fully or partially obliterated especially in auto theft and smuggling cases to conceal the origin, identity, and owner of vehicles. The limitations of the current restoration techniques such as the difficulty of using chemical liquid etching in vertical sites, the restrictions of magnetic and optical methods, and the applicability of several techniques like electron backscatter diffraction only in the laboratory environment prompt the development of new techniques. In view of these limitations and the importance of restoring engine numbers in criminal investigations, this unique study aimed to develop an etching paste that would restore the effaced characters on a real aluminum alloy engine block. The characters which were cold-stamped on the engine block were milled at varying depths and restoration attempts were conducted using etching pastes formed with different chemicals and materials. The analyses indicate that the etching paste formed with 200 mg of perlite, 400 mg of iron powder, and 450 μL of 20 M NaOH provided restoration to a good extent. The prevention of over-etching through the controlling of the chemical reaction and the cost-effectiveness appears to be the advantages of this technique. The success of recovery on the real engine block, the facilitation of restoration on curved surfaces, and the chance of on-site usage will likely make the etching paste a widely used tool in serial number restoration.     

Public confidence in the judiciary: the interaction between political awareness and level of democracy

Apart from the studies that focus on public attitudes toward higher courts in advanced democracies, we know little about the factors that can explain public confidence in the judiciary in a comparative setting. In this regard, the goal of this study is to explain whether, and to what extent, the country's level of democracy moderates the impact of political awareness on public confidence in the judiciary. This study uses hierarchical linear models to analyse the interaction between individual and country level factors by using the World Values Survey (2005–2009) data for 49 countries and various other data sources. Our empirical results show that in advanced democracies political awareness variables like education and political participation have a positive impact on public confidence in the judiciary, whereas in countries with weak levels of democracy higher political awareness leads to increased cynicism about the judiciary. These results suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to explain confidence in the judiciary is not possible when we are dealing with a wide range of societies that vary in terms of many characteristics, both institutional and cultural.     

Introduction: claiming social citizenship

Social citizenship in the classical sense of T.H. Marshall has been declared to be eroded and to have lost its significance. The introduction to this special issue challenges this assumption and argues that recent anthropological work on social citizenship in post-colonial, post Cold War and post-socialist states have shown that social citizenship is relevant and is being claimed by citizens of these states. Historical notions of citizenship as well as claiming rights to state support in return for having worked for the state are at work here. Furthermore the contributions to this issue illustrate how notions and practices of social citizenship compete and sometimes replace other practices of claiming citizenship on the basis of ethnicity, nationality or cultural ties.     

An Investigation into Whether or Not the Class and Individual Characteristics of Five Turkish Manufactured Pistols Change During Extensive Firing

Abstract:  In order to assess whether or not the class and individual characteristics of a firearm change over time, five different makes of Turkish self-loading pistol were tested and were each fired a large number of times. The class and individual characteristics were identified for each pistol and the first fired cartridge case was compared with the subsequent consecutive 250th fired cases for each pistol. It was found that there were slight changes in some of the individual and class characteristics; however, this was not statistically significant and did not affect the ability of the firearms examiner to match the first fired case to the last fired case for each firearm tested.     

Coproduction of participation policies in Turkey: The making of city councils

This paper uses the case of the city councils to study the introduction of new possibilities for citizen participation in Turkish policy-making. In Turkish political science literature, city councils are simply described either as a result of the coercive influence of international organizations, or a ‘civil society’ initiative included in the agenda by the political power. The paper demonstrates that these participatory mechanisms have been coproduced by a complex network of domestic state and non-state actors, yet are not fully controlled by any of the actors engaged in their making.     

Some aspects of science-based technological promotion

Scientific research car for scientific purposes. As such, scientific research will necessarily be evaluate scientific terms. However, scientific research can also be supported for such nonscientific purposes as economic development, industrialization, education, etc. In that case, evaluation of scientific research will be based on economic, educational, etc., yardsticks. This paper attempts to seek evaluation criteria for the public support of science for the purposes of technological promotion. Such a public investment is shown to be a risky process. The “riskiness” of the process is discussed within the framework of a model of science-based technology and expressed in stochastic terms. A decision-making framework is then developed on the basis of expected utility hypotheses.     

Homemade Heavy Caliber Rifles—Two Unusual Firearms

Historically, in crimes involving heavy caliber rifles, only conventional factory‐made versions have been used. However, in recent years the number of homemade long‐barreled rifles is increasing. The characteristics of two such firearms that have been submitted to the Turkish Criminal Laboratory are discussed here. When the main parts of the guns were examined in detail, it was noted that nearly all of the parts had been made carelessly, with several structural defects visible. It was determined that the homemade heavy caliber rifles were unfit for efficient use and it was possible that they could have seriously harmed the shooter had they been fired. The development of these kinds of gun and the possibility of their use spreading throughout the country in terrorist attacks could cause a serious threat to national security.     

Exploratory spatial analysis of crimes against property in Turkey

Turkey, a rapidly developing country, is a junction point between Asia and Europe in terms of its social and economic structure. Turkey is both the most advanced economy in the Turkish-speaking world and the largest economy in the Muslim world. In the last few years, with the development of Turkey’s economic and social structure, the level of criminality in the country has attracted attention. Consequently, we aimed to explore potential spatial associations of crimes against property rates across the 81 provinces of Turkey (NUTS3) from 1997 to 2009. Geographical information systems and explorative methods of spatial data analysis were employed in the analyses of crime rates. Since crime is a phenomenon that arises from the interaction between social, economic, psychological circumstances and, especially, geographical factors, this study attempts to rectify the possible deficiencies of traditional statistical analyses of geography. Because of the very different population sizes in each province, comparing the volume of crimes makes a major impact on the stability of the crime rates; therefore in this study an empirical Bayes smoothing method was used to interpret the crime rates correctly. Global spatial autocorrelation indices were used to test the spatial dependence of the distribution of the crime rates. Besides the excess risk rates, local spatial autocorrelation methods were used to detect and interpret the clustering of crime rates. In order to model the crime rates, a set of socioeconomic parameters (migration rates by province, gross national product according to purchasing power parity by province, registered number of touristic facilities and number of rooms by province, electricity consumption statistics, provincial unemployment rates and urbanisation index values were handled with geographically weighted regression. According to the results, criminal activities were non-random in terms of time and space. Property crime, except for smuggling, is densely clustered in the west and south-west of Turkey. The present study demonstrates the utility of spatial analysis and geographically weighted regression to detect some important geographical dimensions and crucial geographical aspects of property crimes in Turkey.     

Importance of electromyography and the electrophysiological severity scale in forensic reports

Forensic reports on traumatic peripheral nerve injuries include dysfunction degrees of extremities, which are arranged according to the Turkish Penalty Code. The aim of this study is to discuss the role and importance of electromyography while preparing forensic reports in the cases of traumatic peripheral nerve injuries and the usefulness of scoring systems. A modified global scale, recommended by Mondelli et al., was used to assess the electrophysiological impairment of each peripheral nerve. Forensic reports of 106 patients, reported between 2002 and 2004, were evaluated. Thirty-four percent of the cases were reported as "total loss of function," 41.5% were reported as "functional disability," and there were no dysfunctions in the other cases in forensic reports that were prepared based on Council of Social Insurance Regulations of Health Processes and Guide prepared by the Council of Forensic Medicine and profession associations of forensic medicine. When we rearranged these forensic reports based on the electrophysiological severity scale (ESS), it was clearly found that all of the score 2 cases and 86.7% of the score 3 cases corresponded to "functional disability" and 91.4% of the score 4 cases correspond to "total loss of function." We found a significant correlation between the ESS and functional evaluation in peripheral nerve injury cases. Evaluation of functional disabilities in peripheral nerve injuries with the ESS represents a standardized and objective method used for forensic reports.