United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is part of the geographic region known as the Middle East. With a land mass of 82,000 square kilometres, predominantly desert and mountains it is bordered by Oman, Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Gulf. The UAE is strategically located due to its proximity to other oil rich Middle Eastern countries such as Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The UAE was formed from a federation of seven emirates (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Ajman, Fujuriah, and Um Al Quain) in December 1971 (Ras Al Khaimah did not join the federation until 1972) (Heard-bey, 2004, 370). Abu Dhabi is the political capital, and the richest emirate; while Dubai is the commercial centre. The majority of the population of the various Emirates live along the coast line as sources of fresh water often heavily influenced the site of different settlements. Unlike some near neighbours (Iran and Iraq) the UAE has not undergone any significant political instability since it was formed in 1971. Due to this early British influences the UAE has had very strong political and economic ties with first Britain, and, more recently, the United States of America (Rugh, 2007). Until the economic production of oil in the early 1960’s the different Emirates had survived on a mixture of primary industry (dates), farming (goats and camels), pearling and subsidies from Britain (Davidson 2005, 3; Hvit, 2007, 565) Along with near neighbours Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the UAE is part of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a trading bloc. (Hellyer, 2001, 166-168).

AITPM Email Newsletter Volume 0904, April 2009: Presidents Message

President’s Report Hello fellow AITPM members, A few weeks ago we saw another example of all levels of Government pulling together in real time to try to deal with a major transport incident, this time it was container loads of ammonium nitrate falling off the Pacific Adventurer during Cyclone Hamish and the associated major oil spill due to piercing of its hull off Moreton Bay in southern Queensland. The oil spill was extensive, affecting beaches and estuaries from Moreton Island north to the Sunshine Coast; a coastal stretch of at least 60km. We saw the Queensland Government, Brisbane, Moreton Bay and Sunshine Coast Regional Council crews deployed quickly once the gravity of the situation was realised to clean up toxic oil on beaches and prevent extensive upstream contamination. Environmental agencies public and private were quick to respond to help affected wildlife. The Navy’s HMAS Yarra and another minesweeper were deployed to search for the containers in the coastal area in an effort to have them salvaged before all ammonium nitrate could leach into and harm marine habitat, which would have a substantial impact not only on that environment but also the fishing industry. all of this during the final fortnight before a State election.) While this could be branded as a maritime problem, the road transport and logistics system was crucial to the cleanup. The private vehicular ferries were enlisted to transport plant and equipment from Brisbane to Moreton Island. The plant themselves, such as graders, were drawn from road building and maintenance inventory. Hundreds of Councils’ staff were released from other activities to undertake the cleanup. While it will take some time for us to know the long term impacts of this incident, it seems difficult to fault “grassroots” government crews and their private counterparts, such as Island tourism staff, in the initial cleanup effort. From a traffic planning and management perspective, we should also remember that this sort of incident has happened on road and rail corridors in the past, albeit on lesser scales. It underlines that we do need to continue to protect communities, commercial interests, and the environment through rigorous heavy vehicle management, planning and management of dangerous goods routesincluding rail corridors through urban areas), and carefully considered incident and disaster recovery plans and protocols. I’d like to close in reminding everyone again that AITPM’s flagship event, the 2009 AITPM National Conference, Traffic Beyond Tomorrow, is being held in Adelaide from 5 to 7 August. SA Branch President Paul Morris informs me that we have had over 50 paper submissions to date, from which a very balanced and informative programme of sessions has been prepared. www.aitpm.com has all of the details about how to register, sponsor a booth, session, etc. Best regards all, Jon Bunker

Predicting query reformulation during web searching

This paper reports results from a study in which we automatically classified the query reformulation patterns for 964,780 Web searching sessions (composed of 1,523,072 queries) in order to predict what the next query reformulation would be. We employed an n-gram modeling approach to describe the probability of searchers transitioning from one query reformulation state to another and predict their next state. We developed first, second, third, and fourth order models and evaluated each model for accuracy of prediction. Findings show that Reformulation and Assistance account for approximately 45 percent of all query reformulations. Searchers seem to seek system searching assistant early in the session or after a content change. The results of our evaluations show that the first and second order models provided the best predictability, between 28 and 40 percent overall, and higher than 70 percent for some patterns. Implications are that the n-gram approach can be used for improving searching systems and searching assistance in real time.

Entrepreneurship and family firms : growth and survival

Family businesses dominate in a majority of economies (Astrachan and Shanker, 2003; Chrisman, Chua, and Sharma, 2005; Morck and Yeung, 2004). As entrepreneurial activities have been shown to be central to economic growth it is essential that family businesses, irrespective of ownership patterns, not only survive but also grow thus growing the economy overall. While a great deal is known about entrepreneurial activities and a body of knowledge is being developed in relation to entrepreneurial processes in family firms, more needs to be understood in relation to the dynamics of entrepreneurial activities at the individual family firm level. One area of particular interest is the dynamics within the business and the family and how these dynamics impact upon entrepreneurial activities. Specifically how relationships between and among family members engaged in the business can interact with professional non-family member senior executives. The senior executives can actively use their positions in such ways that initiatives suggested by family members are less successful than they might be. This paper addresses how ‘family’ aspects of a business can assist or impede the entrepreneurial activities of individuals. It takes into account some of the unique features of family businesses – such as the importance of ‘familiness’ as a competitive advantage; the direct links between ownership and control of a business and the recognition (often implicit) that individuals in families do make a difference to how the business functions (Habbershon and Williams, 1999, Sharma, 2004; and Tokarczyk, Hansen Green, and Down, 2007). This emphasis on individuals in families fits well with the idea of entrepreneur as individual, as expressed by Schumpeter (1934), Baumol et al (2007). The theoretical approach that adopted to explore the dynamics of processes occurring within family firms is structuration theory combined with a theory of embeddeness (Dacin, Ventresca and Beal, 1999; Giddens, 1979, 1984, Jack and Anderson, 2002; and Sarason, Dean and Dillard, 2006).

Action learning of online marketing via a global contest

Introduction: The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a global competition in which student teams run advertising campaigns for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) using AdWords, Google’s text-based advertisements. In 2008, its inaugural year, over 8,000 students and 300 instructors from 47 countries representing over 200 schools participated. The Challenge ran in undergraduate and graduate classes in disciplines such as marketing, tourism, advertising, communication and information systems. Combining advertising and education, the Challenge gives student hands-on experience in the increasingly important field of online marketing, engages them with local businesses and motivates them through the thrill of a global competition. Student teams receive US$200 in AdWords credits, Google’s premier advertising product that offers cost-per-click advertisements. The teams then recruit and work with a local business to devise an effective online marketing campaign. Students first outline a strategy, run a series of campaigns, and provide their business with recommendations to improve their online marketing. Teams submit two written reports for judging by 14 academics in eight countries. In addition, Google AdWords experts judge teams on their campaign statistics such as success metrics and account management. Rather than a marketing simulation against a computer or hypothetical marketing plans for hypothetical businesses, the Challenges has student teams develop and manage real online advertising campaigns for their clients and compete against peers globally.

CTCombine : rotating and combining CT data with an accurate detector model, to simulate radiotherapy portal imaging at non-zero beam angles

Established Monte Carlo user codes BEAMnrc and DOSXYZnrc permit the accurate and straightforward simulation of radiotherapy experiments and treatments delivered from multiple beam angles. However, when an electronic portal imaging detector (EPID) is included in these simulations, treatment delivery from non-zero beam angles becomes problematic. This study introduces CTCombine, a purpose-built code for rotating selected CT data volumes, converting CT numbers to mass densities, combining the results with model EPIDs and writing output in a form which can easily be read and used by the dose calculation code DOSXYZnrc. The geometric and dosimetric accuracy of CTCombine’s output has been assessed by simulating simple and complex treatments applied to a rotated planar phantom and a rotated humanoid phantom and comparing the resulting virtual EPID images with the images acquired using experimental measurements and independent simulations of equivalent phantoms. It is expected that CTCombine will be useful for Monte Carlo studies of EPID dosimetry as well as other EPID imaging applications.