Competitiveness of Arabian gulf ports from shipping lines’ perspectives: Case of Sohar port in Oman

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to investigate the factors that encourage shipping lines to use port of Sohar, in Oman. Some selected factors were used to assess to what extent it affects the port choice from shipping lines companies’ perspective. These factors include infrastructure, hinterland, connectivity and port’s dues. Design/methodology/approach: for this study both quantitative and qualitative methodologies were used. Self-administered questionnaire used for collecting quantitative data while interviews were used to collect qualitative data. Secondary data was collected by reviewing academic literature and recent relevant articles and reports. Findings: Port of Sohar has a better opportunity to be the gateway of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) States and all Cargo could have dropped in the port and transferred to other GCC States by road, rail and other transportation modes. This opportunity is gained by the strategic location of Sohar Port outside of the Strait of Hormuz. It can be concluded that port competitiveness can be improved through strategic location, improved hinterland conditions, port facilities, services cost, volume of cargo, connectivity to other ports and dwell time factor. Research limitations: The research was limited mainly by conducting it only at the port of Sohar because surrounding ports are too far away and it should involve more ports to gain comparative results. Limited number of stakeholders as Port Authority, Oman International Container Terminal (OICT) and shipping lines companies and agents is another limitation. Practical implications: The port can improve its competitive advantages and focus on the investigated factors. The government can also continue in working in the three big infrastructural projects; the new express roads, Sohar Airport and rail network connections with other GCC networks. Originality/value: the study used specific factors that expected to contribute to the shipping lines companies’ selection of ports in the gulf region. This could help the port to identify their competitive advantage and how they can use these competencies to improve their competitiveness in relation to other ports in the region.Peer Reviewe

Face Detection Technique Based on Skin Color and Facial Features

Face detection is an essential first step in face recognition systems with the purpose of localizing and extracting the face region from the background. Apart from increasing the efficiency of face recognition systems, face detection technique also opens up the door of opportunity for application areas such as content based image retrieval, video encoding, video conferencing, crowd surveillance and intelligent human computer interfaces. This thesis presents the design of face detection approach which is capable of detecting human faces from complex background. A skin color modeling process is adopted for the face segmentation process. Image enhancement is then used to improve the face candidate before feeding to the face object classifier based on Modified Hausdroff distance. The results indicate that the system is able to detect human faces with reasonable accurac

The Impact of Social Value Orientation and Risk Attitudes on Trust and Reciprocity

Prior experimental studies provide evidence that the levels of trust and reciprocity are highly susceptible to individuals’ preferences towards payoffs, prior experience, capacity to learn more about personal characteristics of each other and social distance. The objective of this study is to examine whether social value orientation as developed by Griesinger and Livingstone (1973) and Liebrand (1984) and risk preferences can help to account for the variability of trust and trustworthiness. We use the Berg et al. (1995) investment game to generate indices of trust and reciprocity. Prior to their participation in the investment game, all subjects participated in two other games. One is used to measure their social value orientation (a measure of other regarding behavior) and the second to measure risk attitudes. These variables are introduced as treatments in the analysis of the trust and reciprocity data. In addition to these preference related variables, gender is introduced to capture any differences between men and women which may not be encompassed by value orientation and risk attitudes. The statistical analysis indicates that the social value orientation measure significantly accounts for variation in trust and reciprocity. As well, the level of trust exhibited by an investor significantly affects the reciprocity of the responders and this measure of trust interacts with social value orientation. Individuals who are highly pro-social reciprocate more as the sender’s trust increases, while those who are highly pro-self reciprocate less as the sender’s trust increases. For this sample of participants, the gender variable does not capture any differences in the behavior of men and women that is not already reflected by the differences captured by their value orientations. Risk attitudes do not significantly account for variation in trusting behavior, except for the case where individuals have neither strongly pro-social nor pro-self social value orientations. In this case, more riskseeking individuals are more trusting.Trust, Reciprocity, Social Value Orientation, Risk Attitudes, Gender

The Impact of Empowering Investors on Trust and Trustworthiness

This paper uses laboratory mechanism design in an investment environment to examine the impact of empowering investors with the right to veto the investee’s profit distribution decision on the level of trust and trustworthiness. One of the key findings is that the empowerment of investors through both costless and costly vetoes significantly increases trust by over 30% in both cases. Interestingly, we observe a comparable pattern when the power to veto is removed. Analyses of veto decisions indicate that empowering investors increases both trust and trustworthiness without an undue abuse of the power to veto and that the veto decisions are largely driven by unfair responses, consistent with the theory on inequity aversion.Empowerment; Veto; Investment; Trust; Trustworthiness; Reciprocity

Development of a Multi-Standard Protocol Using Software Defined Radio for a Mobile Station Transceiver

In this thesis, the Software Defined Radio Digital Control System (SDR DCS) has been developed to perform a multi-standard protocol of the handset using the GSM and CDMA systems. The SDR DCS was designed for the SDR based band digital transceiver of the handset as a control and protocol software to control and handle the operation of the handset when roaming between different protocols; it could easily and quickly let the handset reconfigure with the future protocol; it configured the handset with either of the GSM or CDMA protocol software, and scheduled for reconfiguration of the handset with the second protocol in sequence. The SDR DCS controls the download of the specific air interface environment. In order to implement the whole design in software, the design had to go through three stages. The first stage was to do all the design steps in the software using generic computing resources such as Hardware Description Language (HDL), with the top-level design for each protocol. The second stage was to define a logic circuit to perform the signal processing for each protocol; this step was applied after the simulation and synthesis, and eventually programming that circuit into the FPGA board. The third stage was to use the FPGA to implement the functions required for each protocol which constitutes the multi-standard protocol. The VHDL files were created for each element of the GSM and CDMA protocols. The GSM related system was developed with encoders and decoders linked to the channel model. The CDMA related system was designed with a transmitter to encode the user’s data into wide bandwidth using a reverse link channel and a synchronized receiver to receive the signal from the forward link channel and decode the wide bandwidth to recover the base band user’s data. The Synopsys™ software package was used for the design, synthesis and simulation of the SDR base band platform. The simulation tools used include the Model Sim and System Studio. Meanwhile, the Xilinx ISE 9.2i was used as the synthesis tool. The results of the simulated and synthesized top-level design files were downloaded into the Xilinx XSA-3S1000 FPGA board. The waveforms for the GSM and CDMA outputs approximately matched the ones seen in the oscilloscope for the FPGA output pin. This proved that the SDR DCS had successfully implemented its task, according to the objectives of the design