Fast Moving Consumer Goods: Competitive Conditions and Policies

Fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) constitute a large part of consumers' budget in all countries. The retail sector for FMCGs in Turkey is in the process of a drastic transformation. New, "modern" retail formats, like chain stores and hyper/supermarkets, have rapidly diffused in almost all major urban areas, and increased their market share at the expense of traditional formats (grocery shops, green groceries, etc.) in the last couple of decades. This rapid transformation has raised concerns about competitive conditions in the sector. This study is aimed at to shed light on competitive conditions prevailing in the FMCGs retail trade sector in Turkey. We analyze how the structure of the market is being transformed in recent years by new retail formats. The study is focused on the analysis of competitive dynamics (inter-firm rivalry, pricing and non-price policies, barriers to entry, regulatory conditions, etc.) within the sector, and draws lessons for competition policy.FMCG, competition policy, Turkey

A new adaptive focus measure for shape from focus

This paper proposes a new focus measure operator for Shape From Focus to recover a dense depth map of a scene. The method can handle depth discontinuities effectively by using adaptively shaped and weighted support windows. The support window shapes and weights are determined from the image characteristics of the all-focused image of the scene. Similar and closer pixels in the support window get higher weights, which inhibits the problems caused by the depth discontinuities. The size of the support window can be increased conveniently for a more robust depth estimation without introducing any window size related Shape From Focus problems. The large support window sizes also addresses the edge bleeding problem. The experiments on the real and synthetically refocused images show that the introduced ideas work effectively and efficiently in real world applications.

Sex differences in adult craniofacial parameters

To compare normal male and female craniofacial parameters in adults and evaluate associations of sex and intercochlear distance with other craniofacial parameters. In 60 normal adults (30 men and 30 women) who had no otitis media, craniofacial parameters were measured retrospectively on two-dimensional reformatted computed tomography scans. Compared with women, men had significantly greater mean osseous auditory tube length, cartilaginous auditory tube length, mastoid length, intercochlear distance, sella to posterior nasal spine distance, sella to basion distance, and nasopharynx sagittal area. The intercochlear distance was significantly correlated with mastoid depth, midpoint of the pharyngeal opening distance, sella to nasion distance, and nasopharynx sagittal area and inversely with angle of the auditory tube. Most men and women had Korner septum present, and mean thickness of Korner septum was significantly greater in men than women. Some craniofacial parameters, especially vertical parameters, differ with sex. These differences begin in childhood and continue in adulthood. Sex must be considered when planning a craniofacial morphologic study, and results of a craniofacial morphologic study should be evaluated with caution when there is no sex matching of the patient and control groups

Diurnal vertical distribution of zooplankton in a newly formed reservoir (Tahtali Reservoir, Kocaeli): the role of abiotic factors and chlorophyll a

Although water level fluctuations and related environmental variations occurring within reservoirs have a considerable effect on the zooplankton community, studies on zooplankton dynamics of reservoirs are very limited. In the present study, we aimed to elucidate the diurnal vertical migration of zooplankton in relation to the concentration of physicochemical factors and chlorophyll a content in a recently formed water reservoir (Tahtali Reservoir, Kocaeli, northwestern Turkey). During the sampling period 20 zooplankton taxa were identified, which were mostly indicative of eutrophic waters, as confirmed by the physicochemical factors of the water in the reservoir. Rotifera was the most abundant group, followed by Copepoda and Cladocera. Statistical analyses indicated that all the zooplankton species showed a similar distribution pattern throughout the study. They declined in abundance in the water column from the surface to a depth of 6 m, and then increased relatively again towards the deepest part of the water (9 m). Abiotic factors, chlorophyll a, time of the day, and depth significantly impacted the abundance of zooplankton, whereas they jointly had no effect. The results suggested that abiotic factors and chlorophyll a were controlling factors on the vertical distribution pattern of the zooplankton in the Tahtali Reservoir

HiMODE: A Hybrid Monocular Omnidirectional Depth Estimation Model

Monocular omnidirectional depth estimation is receiving considerable research attention due to its broad applications for sensing 360° surroundings. Existing approaches in this field suffer from limitations in recovering small object details and data lost during the ground-truth depth map acquisition. In this paper, a novel monocular omnidirectional depth estimation model, namely HiMODE is proposed based on a hybrid CNN+Transformer (encoder-decoder) architecture whose modules are efficiently designed to mitigate distortion and computational cost, without performance degradation. Firstly, we design a feature pyramid network based on the HNet block to extract high-resolution features near the edges. The performance is further improved, benefiting from a self and cross attention layer and spatial/temporal patches in the Transformer encoder and decoder, respectively. Besides, a spatial residual block is employed to reduce the number of parameters. By jointly passing the deep features extracted from an input image at each backbone block, along with the raw depth maps predicted by the transformer encoder-decoder, through a context adjustment layer, our model can produce resulting depth maps with better visual quality than the ground-truth. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the significance of each individual module. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets; Stanford3D, Matterport3D, and SunCG, demonstrate that HiMODE can achieve state-of-the-art performance for 360° monocular depth estimation. Complete project code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/himode5008/HiMODE

Invasion of freshwater bodies in the Marmara region (northwestern Turkey) by nonnative gibel carp, Carassius gibelio (Bloch, 1782)

The aim of this study was to learn the invasion speed and sex ratio, which would be indicative of invasive character, of a nonnative fish species, gibel carp, by reporting its new localities in the Marmara region of northwestern Turkey. Whether the occurrence of gibel carp in freshwater bodies of the Marmara region was random (i.e. chance element) was tested. The question of population increase since first introduction was also examined. Among 14 new locations for gibel carp found during this study, the majority were in mostly lentic ecosystems. The invasion rate of gibel carp in the Marmara region, since its first introduction in the early 1980s, is approximately 1 new water body per year (1.17; number of sites invaded by gibel carp = 35). Females significantly outnumbered males in 10 out of the 12 populations studied, with the sex ratio deviating from unity (1:1) in all populations except 2. The regional extent of gibel carp occurrence increased with the number of years since first introduction (y = 1.34x - 2651.1, F = 47.41, P < 0.001, = 0.95). The implications for conservation of native fishes are discussed

Stocking of Common Carp (Cyprinus carpio) into Some Newly-Established Reservoirs of North-West Anatolia May Enhance the Spread of Non-Native Fish

Stocking of water bodies with non-native fish species for fisheries enhancement is a common practice worldwide. However, overall limited benefits in terms of revenues for local communities have so far been reported in some countries, whilst accidental introductions of several non-native fish species have occurred. To evaluate the benefits vs. costs associated with common carp Cyprinus carpio stocking practices, a three-year sampling study (2009-2011) was carried out across twelve adjacent artificial reservoirs of the Kocaeli Peninsula (north-west Anatolia, Turkey). Apart from common carp, 18 fish species in total were recorded, of which 12 native and six non-native, the latter comprising more than half of the total catch and dominated by gibel carp Carassius gibelio. Even though the abundance of common carp, natives and non-natives increased over the study period, common carp was always comparatively less abundant relative to most of the other species. Overall, the present findings indicate that stocking of common carp into the studied reservoirs has not fully met with the proposed objectives, likely a result of less-than-optimal age-0 fish release strategies and limited availability of spawning grounds. On the other hand, invasion especially by gibel carp is thought to be under way and this may ultimately impact on the abundance of the native fish fauna