Dubai outbound tourism: An exploratory study of Emiratis and expatriates

This research investigates the perceptions of residents of Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) towards the state of Victoria, Australia as a destination and assesses their knowledge of Victoria’s tourism attributes. Focus groups were undertaken with UAE nationals (referred to as Emiratis), expatriate residents and travel agents. In the case of the former group it was found that the previous travel experiences of most respondents involved travelling in family groups with the wife and mother making the key travel-related decisions. The responses appeared to be broadly representative of attitudes prevalent more widely within their relevant families. Of the expatriate respondents, all were experienced travellers who had previously visited Australia. Their tourism interests, in such things as outdoor activities and music, differed from those of the Emiratis. All but one of the respondents in the focus group of travel agents had previously visited Australia. The study fills a gap in researching immature markets. The use of the focus group method illustrates how investigating the perceptions of emerging target markets can provide a useful input to shape future industry development

The influence of mutation on population dynamics in multiobjective genetic programming

Using multiobjective genetic programming with a complexity objective to overcome tree bloat is usually very successful but can sometimes lead to undesirable collapse of the population to all single-node trees. In this paper we report a detailed examination of why and when collapse occurs. We have used different types of crossover and mutation operators (depth-fair and sub-tree), different evolutionary approaches (generational and steady-state), and different datasets (6-parity Boolean and a range of benchmark machine learning problems) to strengthen our conclusion. We conclude that mutation has a vital role in preventing population collapse by counterbalancing parsimony pressure and preserving population diversity. Also, mutation controls the size of the generated individuals which tends to dominate the time needed for fitness evaluation and therefore the whole evolutionary process. Further, the average size of the individuals in a GP population depends on the evolutionary approach employed. We also demonstrate that mutation has a wider role than merely culling single-node individuals from the population; even within a diversity-preserving algorithm such as SPEA2 mutation has a role in preserving diversity

Strategic Communication and Public Engagement: The UAE E-Brainstorming Session

In the context of the conference’s topic of ‘Strategic Communication and Public Engagement’ comes this case study, which illustrates the creative use of social media in crowdsourcing ideas from the public with the goal of formulating government policy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Unlike the usual model of top-down policy formulation in many developing countries, the UAE government adopted an experiment entitled ‘The UAE Brainstorming Session’, which is the country’s first technology-based citizen engagement event that leveraged the highly popular social media platforms to elicit ideas and suggestions about public services. Specifically, two under-performing national sectors were targeted; public health and education. Citizens and residents were invited to identify the main issues in these two sectors and offer their suggestions to address them. The UAE Prime Minister personally tweeted inviting everyone to participate. The public response to this initiative was substantial, with 82,000 new ideas delivered by several social media channels. A ministerial committee then shortlisted the best ideas, suggestions, and these were subsequently discussed in a strategic cabinet retreat. The next step was government approval of several initiatives, which were subsequently implemented. Lessons learned from this case study can be beneficial to many countries that are considering similar technology-based initiatives that utilize popular and accessible social media as public policy tools and instruments of citizen engagement. Keywords: Strategic Communication; Citizen Engagement; Social Media; United Arab Emirates Government

Dubai outbound tourism: An exploratory study of Emiratis and expatriates

This research investigates the perceptions of residents of Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) towards the state of Victoria, Australia as a destination and assesses their knowledge of Victoria\u27s tourism attributes. Focus groups were undertaken with UAE nationals (referred to as Emiratis), expatriate residents and travel agents. In the case of the former group it was found that the previous travel experiences of most respondents involved travelling in family groups with the wife and mother making the key travel-related decisions. The responses appeared to be broadly representative of attitudes prevalent more widely within their relevant families. Of the expatriate respondents, all were experienced travellers who had previously visited Australia. Their tourism interests, in such things as outdoor activities and music, differed from those of the Emiratis. All but one of the respondents in the focus group of travel agents had previously visited Australia. The study fills a gap in researching immature markets. The use of the focus group method illustrates how investigating the perceptions of emerging target markets can provide a useful input to shape future industry development. © The Author(s) 2011

From Movements to Media: Exploring White Racial Identity Development in U.S. Society

This thesis explores what it means to live consciously as a White individual in our racialized United States society and was written with the well-founded belief that this nation’s existing racial hierarchy systematically benefits White people and oppresses People of Color. Whiteness and White Privilege are key terms that underscore this project as it employs Dr. Janet Helms’ White Racial Identity Development Model as a framework to examine how these concepts are contextualized in contemporary culture. The WRID model is applied to news-related media case studies that portray White people’s responses to the Black Lives Matter movement in order to concretize the racial identity development that can occur when White individuals are confronted with an organizational, social manifestation of racial stress. These examples are then examined through theoretical communication lenses to analyze mass media’s ability to shape public opinion through the various hegemonic paradigms that it promotes. On an individual level, media literacy is one solution to combating the racist messages that our information-saturated world constantly produces, and on an institutional level, changing the nature of media construction and consumption is a greater response to the systemic issue of racial injustice. This project implores its readers to commit to greater societal consciousness, one that begins with individual racial consciousness, is amplified by understanding movements and racial justice work led by People of Color such as Black Lives Matter, and is maintained by consistently and creatively challenging messages from media and dominant power structures that promote the racial inequity that plagues this country today

Risk analysis and contract management for Public Private Partnership projects in Egypt

In the light of the current political and economic conditions in Egypt, Public Private Partnership projects appear as an effective solution in order to help the government in enhancing its infrastructure, utilities and services using the technical skills and capabilities of the private partner. Although Public Private Partnerships are used all over the world, they can be of particular importance in developing countries which seek a quick and effective in improving its projects. Accordingly, Public Private Partnerships started to be used in Egypt and there are several projects under study for future implementation. The two key success factors for PPP projects are a proper risk allocation and a suitable contract so that the risks are adequately covered and are properly assigned to the party who is the best at managing them. In this research, the top 59 risk factors that affect PPP projects are identified from the Literature Review and are grouped into several critical risk groups and included in a questionnaire which is distributed among a number of experts (25 experts) who worked internationally and in the Egyptian Market. The results of the survey showed that the top 26 risks are from the following groups: Financial and Macroeconomic risk group, Commercial risk group, Legal risk group, Political risk group, Regulatory risk group, Government maturity risk group, Technical risk group, Production risk group, and Unforeseen risk group. An attempt for mapping the identified risks and the risk allocation identified in the survey is done to contract clauses of two PPP projects contracts where the risk allocation is defined clearly in the clause (public private or both). In some cases, the risk allocation according to the survey results was perfectly conforming to the risk allocation according to the real case contracts such as in the case of the Performance Security risk, the Permits risk, the Unforeseen Geotechnical conditions risk and the Latent Defect risk. In other cases, the risk allocation according to the survey results was not conforming to the risk allocation according to the real case contracts such as in the case of Nationalization/expropriation risk and the Government Corruption risk. In addition, a prototype for Risk Decision Support System for the top ranked risks in the survey was developed using Crystal Ball software in order to determine the overall severity and the overall contingency percentage of the project. Finally the top risks are compared to the critical risks obtained from the previous studies in China, India and Singapore and the top risks identified were conforming to a great extent