Scrutinizing impacts of conspiracy theories on readers' political views: a rational choice perspective on anti‐semitic rhetoric in Turkey

Although conspiracy theories have been politically significant throughout history, only a few empirical studies have been about their influence on readers' views. Combining a rational choice approach with a content analysis of an anti‐Semitic best‐selling conspiracy theory book series in Turkey – the Efendi series – and semi‐structured interviews with its readers, this paper reveals the effects of the conspiracy theories on readers' political perspectives. The findings suggest that whereas the rightists are reactive to the Jewish origins of the Dönmes, the leftists oppose the Dönmes as dominant bourgeois figures. This paper concludes that left‐ and right‐wing adherents use the conspiratorial accounts in line with their political views and ontological insecurities. It expands the existing academic literature, which conceptualizes conspiracy theories either as paranoid delusions or as neutral, rational narratives, by showing that they can be both.     

Fuzzy quality-team formation for value added auditing: A case study

Value-added (quality) auditing is emerging as one of the most powerful tools for continuous quality improvement, with the introduction of the ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 19011 standards that focus team-based audits, proper auditor skills, process auditing, and effectiveness, etc. Formation of an effective quality audit team (QAT) based on the required auditor skills is therefore the initial stage of the value added auditing. QATs audit organizations at different locations with varying auditing requirements in order to evaluate an organization's own quality system (first party part audits according to IEC9001 Clause 8.2.2). The QAT consists of a lead auditor and one or more auditors that have the required skills in varying levels for the execution of an audit. For a successful audit, the formation of a QAT is vital since each audit team must at least fulfill the minimum requirements and skills needed for a specific audit. In this case study, a fuzzy mathematical-programming model and a solution algorithm based on “simulated annealing” is proposed for the formation of QATs. This is one of the first attempts in the literature to form this kind of teams analytically. Example problems are also solved in the paper to present the application of the proposed approach.     

An ant colony algorithm for solving budget constrained and unconstrained dynamic facility layout problems

The main characteristic of today's manufacturing environments is volatility. Under a volatile environment, demand is not stable. It changes from one production period to another. To operate efficiently under such environments, the facilities must be adaptive to changing production requirements. From a layout point of view, this situation requires the solution of the dynamic layout problem (DLP). DLP is a computationally complex combinatorial optimization problem for which optimal solutions can only be found for small size problems. It is known that classical optimization procedures are not adequate for this problem. Therefore, several heuristics including taboo search, simulated annealing and genetic algorithm are applied to this problem to find a good solution. This work makes use of the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to solve the DLP by considering the budget constraints. The paper makes the first attempt to show how the ACO can be applied to DLP with the budget constraints. In the paper, example applications are presented and computational experiments are performed to present suitability of the ACO to solve the DLP problems. Promising results are obtained from the solution of several test problems.