Approximate Sum-Capacity of K-user Cognitive Interference Channels with Cumulative Message Sharing

This paper considers the K user cognitive interference channel with one primary and K-1 secondary/cognitive transmitters with a cumulative message sharing structure, i.e cognitive transmitter $i\in [2:K]$ knows non-causally all messages of the users with index less than i. We propose a computable outer bound valid for any memoryless channel. We first evaluate the sum-rate outer bound for the high- SNR linear deterministic approximation of the Gaussian noise channel. This is shown to be capacity for the 3-user channel with arbitrary channel gains and the sum-capacity for the symmetric K-user channel. Interestingly. for the K user channel having only the K th cognitive know all the other messages is sufficient to achieve capacity i.e cognition at transmitter 2 to K-1 is not needed. Next the sum capacity of the symmetric Gaussian noise channel is characterized to within a constant additive and multiplicative gap. The proposed achievable scheme for the additive gap is based on Dirty paper coding and can be thought of as a MIMO-broadcast scheme where only one encoding order is possible due to the message sharing structure. As opposed to other multiuser interference channel models, a single scheme suffices for both the weak and strong interference regimes. With this scheme the generalized degrees of freedom (gDOF) is shown to be a function of K, in contrast to the non cognitive case and the broadcast channel case. Interestingly, it is show that as the number of users grows to infinity the gDoF of the K-user cognitive interference channel with cumulative message sharing tends to the gDoF of a broadcast channel with a K-antenna transmitter and K single-antenna receivers. The analytical additive additive and multiplicative gaps are a function of the number of users. Numerical evaluations of inner and outer bounds show that the actual gap is less than the analytical one.Comment: Journa

Incorporating Citizenship Education Framework in Social Studies Teachers’ Education Programme in Sultanate of Oman

Educational system in Oman is attempting to educate Omani students to be "good" citizens in an increasingly globalized society. However, a few studies that have been conducted until now in Oman revealed a gap between the intentions of the educational policy of teaching citizenship education in the schools and the actual practices of teacher education preparation programs. Therefore, any endeavor to develop citizenship in Oman schools will not achieve its goals without taking teacher education into account both pre-service and in-service. Accordingly, the present study aims to propose a framework for developing citizenship education in the initial teacher education in Oman. This descriptive study highlighted the gap between the policy and practice in social studies teacher education. The international literature reveals that student teachers feel insufficiently prepared to develop citizenship and Omani student teachers are not exceptional. Thus, the present study proposed a framework to incorporate citizenship education in the current teachers' preparation programs. Furthermore, the study reveals the inadequate presence of the topic of citizenship in teacher education. Therefore, teachers' understanding of citizenship becomes shallow, which undoubtedly leads to superficial learning on the part of the students. Therefore, a framework was proposed to develop citizenship in teacher education. This framework consists of the rationale behind the change, the Layout of the ground for change in teacher education, the mechanisms of the change, and the areas of the change

Community of assessment practice or interests: The case of EAP writing assessment

Setting, disseminating and applying assessment standards are part of university academic programmes of study. Nowadays, assessment is increasingly viewed from a social practice perspective, and so doing entails exploring how the quality of assessment is shaped by interaction and co-participation with different communities of practice. Therefore, based on this perspective, the study reported here aimed to examine the assessment policies and practices of laboratory report writing of first year students in credit-bearing, English for Special Purposes programmes at a university in the Sultanate of Oman. Interviews of programme administrators and the instructors plus institutional and programme documents were examined to investigate these assessment policies and practices. The programme administrators were asked about how they planned the written assessment in their programmes, and the instructors were asked about their experiences of these assessments. The data were then analysed thematically using community of practice framework, namely in relation to (1) a shared repertoire of communal resources, (2) mutual engagement, and (3) a sense of joint enterprise. It was found that instead of community of practice, there were (sub)communities of practices wherein interaction, negotiation and communication amongst members and non-members were punctuated by control, power and autonomy, all working with the aim of narrowing the range between the personal goals of the academic and the communal goals of the institution. The overarching conclusion is that in their assessment practices, the two instructional programmes exhibited varying degrees of community of practice based on the above three attributes

Measuring Competition in Banking Sector in Oman

Purpose of the study: The purpose of the study was to investigate and measure the competitive environment in the banking sector in Oman. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study considered an effort towards measuring the nature of competition of 12 out of 16 Omani banks from 2009 to 2019 over applying Panzar and Rosse (PR-model). It measured the competition index, called H-statistic, as it gives a quantitative assessment of the competitive nature of the studied market. The non-structural model was adopted to measure the competitive behavior of the banking sector. The data was taken from Muscat Securities Market (MSM) over obtaining financial statements of banks and data was tested using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Findings: The result showed that it was not able to reject the monopolistic competition that H value considered between values of zero and on,e for the banking market in Oman. Thus, Omani banks operate under monopolistic competition. Practical Implications: The study has interesting policy implications. It is recommended to encourage foreign banks' presence to enhance the competitive condition of the banking sector thus making sure the exit and entrance of banks in the industry to raise the competition. Social Implications: The flexibility in the competitive condition of the banking sector will lead to increase competition so this will produce a variety of services and products to improve the banks’ performance and customer satisfaction. Originality/value: This is the first study of its kind in studying and testing the competitive environment for the banking sector in Oman using the PR-model.  &nbsp

Potential impacts of hard infrastructure development on agricultural trade

2017 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.The development of hard infrastructure has the potential to enhance agricultural production and international agricultural trade. Good quality physical networks could reduce the transport costs for producers and suppliers, thereby increasing the volume of agricultural bilateral trade. For most countries, tariff rates, transport costs, geographic drawbacks, and other nontariff barriers are considered to be the most significant potential impediments to trade. This study estimates the role of hard infrastructure on agricultural bilateral trade among North and Latin American countries, as one determinant of transport costs. By using panel data for agricultural imports from 2006 to 2014, we measure the potential impact of the quality of overall hard infrastructure as well as specific modes of transport networks such as roads, railroads, ports and airports infrastructure on the prevalence and patterns of agricultural trade. A modified gravity model of trade has been used to measure the impact of different trade barriers on the trade of food, animal, vegetable and aggregated agricultural products. Results show that the distance between countries and hard infrastructure are statistically significant and play an important role in determining transport costs as well as the variation in agricultural bilateral trade. For both aggregated and disaggregated agricultural trade, the estimated coefficients show that exporters' infrastructure has a larger impact on trade than importers' infrastructure. Results show that a 10 percent improvement in the quality of an exporters' hard infrastructure may increase total agricultural import volume by 8.6 percent, while a 10 percent improvement in importers' hard infrastructure may increase aggregated agricultural imports by 6.0 percent

Education for Developing a Global Omani Citizen: Current Practices and Challenges

Oman is a developing country which reformed its educational system in 1998 in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century, especially economic challenges. Strength of national identity and developing a sense of global citizenship were among the priorities of the new educational reform. This paper is based on a review of current practices regarding global citizenship education in educational system. The purpose of this theoretical study was to explore the current provision of the aspects of global citizenship education in Omani schools. Specifically, the study attempts to identify the current practices that are implemented by Omani schools to help Omani students to develop a sense of effective global citizenship. The study indicates that Omani education is not nationally centered as it aims to develop students who have global awareness. The study shows employing different approaches to develop a sense of global citizenship, namely, a separate school subject; integrated theme in social studies education, participation in some international initiatives in global citizenship education, and celebrating the international days and decades

Inversion symmetry on Frobenius manifolds

We give an interpretation of the inversion symmetry of WDVV equations using theory of flat pencil of metrics associated to Frobenius manifolds

Multiple stakeholders’ perception of the long-term success of project: a critical study of Oman tourism resort projects.

Projects and project management (PM) principles are expanding, both in terms of adoption by different industries as well as within the field itself. PM literature shows that PM schools of thought have grown to around nine distinct research areas and are still growing (Bredillet 2008a, 2008d, 2008b; Turner 2018). It is estimated that circa thirty per cent of the global economy is project-based (Turner 2010), where organisations adopt principles of PM to accomplish the change they inspire. With this expansion, there is an increasing criticism in the literature that project evaluation using the ‘iron triangle' or the triple constraints of cost, time and scope is not reflecting the actual project status (de Oliveira and Rabechini Jr 2019). Some projects have not met the criteria, although they are still considered a success, and the opposite is those projects that are meeting the criteria but are regarded as a failure. Literature reveals that project success needs to widen the scope of its evaluation to include the relevant stakeholders. Besides, success varies across different dimensions, such as industries, countries, sectors, stakeholders and across timescales of the project lifecycle, which necessitates developing context-specific evaluations criteria and factors. The purpose of this study is to explore the stakeholder's roles and their importance and investigate their perceptions of success criteria and the associated factors for the context of tourism resorts in Oman. This research focused on the context of tourism projects in the case of a developing country. Tourism has grown globally, passing the mark of one billion tourists, and is becoming the largest service industry in the world (Duncan et al. 2013). With this growth come projects that countries are undertaking to cultivate the benefits of tourism, as much as possible, in order to meet their economic challenges and improve their economy. One form of tourism developments that has been favoured by countries is the resort's development, where it is believed that the benefits outweigh the negative impacts. Oman is an oil-dependent, developing country, where oil and gas are making 79% of government revenue and 42% of the GDP (BTI 2018, p.26). The government has established a tourism policy that aims to increase the tourism share within the country's gross domestic product (GDP) from current level of less than 3% to around 10% by the year 2040. The policy demonstrates, among others, the initiatives of developing resorts across different parts of the country to showcase their diverse nature and charms to attract specific segments of tourists. The success criteria and the associated factors for these projects involve a different set of stakeholders that value the long term impacts of such developments. With the research nature being exploratory and seeking stakeholder’s thoughts and opinions, an interpretivist paradigm is pursued. This was conducted using a qualitative methodology with semi-structured interviews to understand the perceptions of multiple stakeholders for the resort project's success. The local stakeholders were purposively selected to be interviewed, as they live out the positive or negative impacts of these developments. Thirty-six participants were interviewed representing the main stakeholder groups of government, investors, operators, NGOs and residents from different resort areas, i.e. sea and mountain resorts. The interviews were transcribed and manually coded using a three-phase coding process in line with Saldaña (2013). NVIVO software was used to facilitate the data analysis process. The analysis resulted in a better understanding of the roles of stakeholders and developed context-specific themes that constituted success criteria and factors for the resort projects in Oman. The findings of the research were presented in a seminar to academics at Sultan Qaboos University, in Oman, as well as presented to individuals from government, and private sectors to confirm credibility and minimise any research bias. The findings of this research serve both the fields of project success and tourism resort literature at individual levels as well as collectively. The results demonstrate that there is an ambiguity in the dimensions of project success: factors and criteria which has contributed to the confusion of the project success definition that was highlighted in the literature by Davis (2016). The research identified possible explanations for this confusion that would help to clarify the concept of project success. Besides, the research reveals that in the long-term, the success of projects goes beyond the ‘iron triangle' measurement; instead, success is a process of stakeholder’s satisfaction that involves successive inter-exchanges. The stakeholders are context-specific where the context of the project designates their interest, roles and power. The exchanges between the stakeholders are governed by trust between them, where each stakeholder’s power plays a role. The research has utilised Social Exchange Theory (SET) as a framework to explain how success criteria and factors are exchanged between stakeholders to reach a satisfactory state. The use of SET can support the research in describing how different stakeholders perceive the success of projects throughout the project lifecycle. Elements of stakeholder’s power and trust between them were integrated into the model of resort project success from Oman. In the development of the model for this thesis, it was proposed that satisfactory exchanges between stakeholders must take place where there is a need to balance the power of all stakeholders. Stakeholder's power is a function of resource's ownership and the right of people to elect their government, both of which do not exist in the case of Oman; research found that people have a ‘conditional power' where certain factors influence its level. The conditional power can vary considerably and impacts the overall success of the project. Unlike what the literature suggests that trust increases with power, this research found that this is only applicable between government and the private sector. However, with the public, the power increases when there is a lack of trust with both the government and the private sector