AN ANALYSIS OF TURKEY REGARDING THE DECENTRALIZATION AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT REFORM

In the post-80s, within the context of liberalization and globalization a reform on the local governments was called for all around the world. In line with this trend, reforms were put into practice in Turkey. However, these reforms were not systematically implemented up to 2000s. After the Justice and Development Party came to power, local governments were financially and administratively strengthened. Local governments have begun to come to the fore within the administrative structure in terms of authority, duties and responsibilities. In the last decade they have been the driving force of the economic production being in harmony with the market. Apart from this general picture of transformation, the government has carried out two important policies. The first one is the closure of minor local government units (municipalities and villages). The second policy is the enlargement of the borders of metropolitan and provincial municipalities. In many settlements, the process of enlargement has been implemented to include the first policy. At the end of the year 2012, a law which epitomized these decade-long reforms on local governments was passed and with this law the outline of this reform process was drawn and concretized. This paper aims at briefly explaining the mentioned reform process and evaluating it from different perspectives

The examination of gathering points' capacity regarding mobility and accessibility: Case of Bayrakli district

The concept of accessibility that bases on continuing the flow of people, goods and services uninterruptedly is discussed as "maximum contact by minimum facility". This concept which is related with the distance has been evaluated various criteria such as physical, economic, perceptual, temporal, etc. Several assignations (optimum location, minimum distance, best distribution method, etc.) have revealed the importance of gathering points in terms of proceeding the disaster management properly. The origin point of linking "accessibility" and "transportation network" is the mobility which reveals as accessing people to adequate gathering points and services in the shortest time. These gathering points which are determined due to the specific criteria and also referred to the social infrastructure areas have a vital importance when any disaster or emergencies occur; so the site selection, availability and accessibility of these areas become extremely significant. The aim of this study is to examine the accessibility of gathering points in Bayrakli district located in Izmir city by taking minimum standards and also some recommendations into consideration. The spatial analyses based on current and potential gathering points are carried out via ArcMap software. The current and potential gathering points in Bayrakli district are examined in terms of accessibility their capacity for each neighbourhood due to their spatial distribution. According to the results, each gathering points in neighbourhoods cannot be accessible in the shortest duration by walking and also the current urban pattern affects the capacity parameter regarding the accessibility and mobility significantly. © Authors 2018. CC BY 4.0 License

Estimating the size of underground economy in Turkey

Bu çalışmada amaç, Türkiye’de kayıtdışı ekonominin boyutunu tahmin etmektir. 2005:4-2013:4 dönemini kapsayan İstihdam Yaklaşımına göre, kayıtdışı istihdamın kurumsal olmayan nüfusa oranı, ortalama %5 olarak tahmin edilmiştir. 2005:4-2015:2 dönemi kullanılarak Basit Parasal Oran Yaklaşımı ile hesaplanan kayıtdışı ekonominin GSYİH'ya oranı ortalama %8 olarak bulunmuştur. Ayrıca elde edilen bulgular, kayıtdışı ekonomi faaliyetlerinin, ekonomik kriz döneminde artış eğilimine sahip olduğunu göstermektedir.The purpose of this study is to estimate the size of the underground economy for Turkey. According to the Employment Approach for the period of 2005:4-2013:4, the ratio of underground employment to the non-institutional population is estimated average 5%. The ratio of underground economy to the GDP is estimated average 8% by the Simple Currency Ratio Approach for the period of 2005:4-2015:2. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the growing of underground economy has a tendency to increase during the crisis period

A new model for heating of Solar North Polar Coronal Hole

This paper presents a new model of North Polar Coronal Hole (NPCH) to study dissipation/propagation of MHD waves. We investigate the effects of the isotropic viscosity and heat conduction on the propagation characteristics of the MHD waves in NPCH. We first model NPCH by considering the differences in radial as well as in the direction perpendicular to the line of sight (\textit{los}) in temperature, particle number density and non-thermal velocities between plumes and interplume lanes for the specific case of \ion{O}{VI} ions. This model includes parallel and perpendicular (to the magnetic field) heat conduction and viscous dissipation. Next, we derive the dispersion relations for the MHD waves in the case of absence and presence of parallel heat conduction. In the case of absence of parallel heat conduction, we find that MHD wave dissipation strongly depends on the viscosity for modified acoustic and Alfven waves. The energy flux density of acoustic waves varies between $10^{4.7}$ and $10^7 \,erg\,cm^{-2}\,s^{-1}$ while the energy flux density of Alfven waves turned out to be between $10^6-10^{8.6} \,erg\,cm^{-2}\,s^{-1}$. But, solutions of the magnetoacustic waves show that the parallel heat conduction introduce anomalous dispersion to the NPCH plasma wherein the group velocity of waves exceeds the speed of light in vacuum. Our results suggests all these waves may provide significant source for the observed preferential accelerating and heating of \ion{O}{VI} ions, in turn coronal plasma heating and an extra accelerating agent for fast solar wind in NPCH.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, Submitted to MNRA

Novel food grade dispersants : review of recent progress

Many foreseen advances in the design of food structures, suitable for ever demanding nutrient delivery systems, tailored controlled release, microencapsulation and protection of active ingredients, require a generation of superior dispersants than those currently provided by proteins. While the most efficient structure for such dispersants is relatively easy to specify, in foods they cannot simply be synthetically manufactured. The review highlights several possible strategies for realising more efficient food colloid stabilisers and summarises the key recent progress for each approach, both experimentally and theoretically. The emphasis is on those methods that lead to macromolecularly adsorbed layers. Practical aspects apart, we also discuss a number of interesting fundamental questions that each approach raises

URBAN AREAS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Sustainable development is a term that was first used before the public in adocument "Our Common Future" prepared by a commission of The United NationsEnvironmental Programme. It envisages the aims and methods of development and industrialization being in harmony with the physical facilities of the Earth. Thus,preventing excessive extravagancy, it aims at a steady developmental process forthe people of the world, and securing resources that will allow development in the world of the future generations. There are different definitions for "sustainable development". In terms of economic means, it can be defined as "the best management of scarce resources". It can also be interpreted as "maximizing the netbenefits of our economic development". Another definition might be "using our resources without reducing the income of the future generations". Rapid increase inpopulation and urbanization in this century has led to some imbalances in the ecosystem, which is composed of a system based on the interconnection between the human and nature. Rapid growth of urbanization and thus the negative developments taking place in the structure of urban population is one of the major causes of air pollution.The city has the nature of influencing the environment directly and negatively as a result of the increasing urban population. Especially,the urban population settlement on agricultural lands and the destruction of urban and fertile areas in terms of natural resources and so forth have led to the negative environmental developments

Realizing strong light-matter interactions between single nanoparticle plasmons and molecular excitons at ambient conditions

Realizing strong light-matter interactions between individual 2-level systems and resonating cavities in atomic and solid state systems opens up possibilities to study optical nonlinearities on a single photon level, which can be useful for future quantum information processing networks. However, these efforts have been hampered by the unfavorable experimental conditions, such as cryogenic temperatures and ultrahigh vacuum, required to study such systems and phenomena. Although several attempts to realize strong light-matter interactions at room-temperature using so-called plasmon resonances have been made, successful realizations on the single nanoparticle level are still lacking. Here, we demonstrate strong coupling between plasmons confined within a single silver nanoprism and excitons in molecular J-aggregates at ambient conditions. Our findings show that the deep subwavelength mode volumes, $V$, together with high quality factors, $Q$, associated with plasmons in the nanoprisms result in strong coupling figure-of-merit -- $Q/\sqrt{V}$ as high as $\sim6\times10^{3}$~$\mu$m$^{-3/2}$ -- a value comparable to state-of-art photonic crystal and microring resonator cavities, thereby suggesting that plasmonic nanocavities and specifically silver nanoprisms can be used for room-temperature quantum optics

Detecting Singleton Review Spammers Using Semantic Similarity

Online reviews have increasingly become a very important resource for consumers when making purchases. Though it is becoming more and more difficult for people to make well-informed buying decisions without being deceived by fake reviews. Prior works on the opinion spam problem mostly considered classifying fake reviews using behavioral user patterns. They focused on prolific users who write more than a couple of reviews, discarding one-time reviewers. The number of singleton reviewers however is expected to be high for many review websites. While behavioral patterns are effective when dealing with elite users, for one-time reviewers, the review text needs to be exploited. In this paper we tackle the problem of detecting fake reviews written by the same person using multiple names, posting each review under a different name. We propose two methods to detect similar reviews and show the results generally outperform the vectorial similarity measures used in prior works. The first method extends the semantic similarity between words to the reviews level. The second method is based on topic modeling and exploits the similarity of the reviews topic distributions using two models: bag-of-words and bag-of-opinion-phrases. The experiments were conducted on reviews from three different datasets: Yelp (57K reviews), Trustpilot (9K reviews) and Ott dataset (800 reviews).Comment: 6 pages, WWW 201

Neural network modelling of rainfall interception in four different forest stands

The objective of this study is to reveal whether it is possible to predict rainfall, through fall and stem flow in forest ecosystems with less effort, using several measurements of rainfall interception (hereafter ‘interception’) and an artificial neural network based linear regression model (ANN model). To this end, the Kerpe Research Forest in the province of Kocaeli, which houses stands of mixed deciduous-broadleaf forest (Castanea sativa Mill., Fagusorientalis Lipsky, Quercus spp.), black pine (Pinus nigra Arnold), maritime pine (Pinus pinaster Aiton) and Monterey pine (Pinus radiata D. Don), was selected study site. Four different forest stands were observed for a period of two years, during which rainfall, throughfall and stemflow measurements were conducted. These measurements were separately calculated for each individual stand, based on interception values and the use of stemflow data in strict accordance with the rainfall data, and the measured throughfall interceptionvalues were compared with values estimated by the ANN model.In this comparison, 70% of the total data was used for testing, and 30% was used for estimation and performance evaluation. No significant differences were found between values predicted with the help of the model and the measured values. In other words, interception values predicted by the ANN models were parallel with the measured values. In this study, the most success was achieved with the models of the Monterey pine stand (r2 = 0.9968; Mean Squared Error MSE = 0.16) and the mixed deciduous forest stand (r2 = 0.9964; MSE = 0.08), followed by models of the maritime pine stand (r2 = 0.9405; MSE = 1.27) and the black pine stand (r2 = 0.843, MSE = 17.36)