Norma Foster and 'Wildlife in Crisis'

Norma Foster (born Vorster) produced and presented a 26-part series, “Wildlife in Crisis”, which covered many of the most significant wildlife areas and problems in Southern Africa. The series, though produced for Viacom for American television, was the first wildlife documentary series shown on South African television when the service started in 1976 and it arguably influenced many important later practitioners. The article covers Foster’s background as a beauty queen and actress, and it examines the role of the Department of Information in facilitating the series. It also examines ways in which the National Parks Board sought to highlight their role as pioneering and cutting-edge wildlife scientists by allowing Foster access to game capture, veterinary treatments and discussions with scientists. It argues, finally, that the privileged role the National Parks Board gave Foster may have limited their coverage by more important and influential American wildlife programmes such as “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”

Research ratings, research coherence and justifying the butterfly

A few years ago, a leading academic figure in my field shared, generously, insights into the ways in which the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) regarded research. We should not, she noted severely, behave like butterflies, flitting from one topic to another. The NRF wanted research coherence, proficiency in a field, persistence in establishing authority as specialists. Current NRF guidance on research ratings continues to note that ‘unfocussed / opportunistic research’ is not desirable and will lead to poor ratings or no ratings. As a card-carrying contrarian, I argue that the obsession with coherence has led, and continues to lead, to bad effects: narrowness of focus, failure of interdisciplinary research, a failure to use the archive constructively, and a failure to respond to new challenges timeously. I want to justify the butterfly

Conservation propaganda in South Africa? The case of Laurens van der Post, the Department of Information and the National Parks Board.

This article examines correspondence in the archives of the South African National Parks relating to a television film, “All Africa within us”, that Sir Laurens van der Post made for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in various South African nature reserves in 1974. The correspondence reveals that The South African Department of Information, supported by Dr Piet Koornhof, who was friendly with Van der Post, helped arrange the visit, expecting that Van der Post would provide favourable coverage of South African conservation efforts and thus, indirectly, of the National Party. The article reveals the complex interplay of motives between the Parks Board, Van der Post, the Department of Information and the BBC. It shows that the Kruger Park authorities were suspicious of filmmakers and wished to control the products by, for example, asking for scripts in advance. Van der Post’s letters and later commentary by his producer suggest that he changed his emphasis and focus considerably from the outset to the final production. The most fruitful approach to such productions may be in Actor-Network theory which tries to show the importance of different agents in controlling, or failing to control, a cultural product. Attempts to see conservation films as simple propaganda or political statement, the article argues, are misplaced and simplify the complexities

Master of Science

thesisThis work presents the general characteristics of cumulus convection and the large-scale environment in a simulation of tropical precipitating convection known as the Giga-LES. A moist static energy (MSE)-based analysis is used because MSE mixes linearly and is conserved for moist adiabatic motions. The MSE-based analysis is rst used to examine the properties of convection over height and amount of dilution through mixing, and a minimum dilution greater than zero is quantied. Additionally, an interesting pattern of average buoyancy over MSE and height in the simulation is revealed, possibly linked to cloudy downdrafts and mixing at the edge of clouds. Investigating further, an MSE-based analysis is performed on selected subregions of the simulation domain, particularly the near cloud environment (NCE) of cloudy updrafts in the simulation. It is found that the NCE around all sizes of updrafts, from shallow to deep convection, contains points with properties of a subsiding shell. The dynamical importance of the evaporative-cooling driven subsiding shell has already been demonstrated in previous work studying shallow cumulus clouds. This work presents the rst evidence of subsiding shells in the NCE of deep convection, and quanties the mass ux associated with subsiding shells for dierent sized clouds. With a new understanding of the NCE of active cloudy updrafts, the updrafts themselves are studied further. The work of Lin and Arakawa is discussed which claries how the entraining plumes of the Arakawa and Schubert parameterization should be interpreted. The physical interpretation is that they are composed of subcloud elements with similar detrainment levels that come from dierent cloudy updrafts. How are the subcloud elements that make up these ideal plumes distributed throughout the cloud eld? The answer to this question has implications for the viability of dierent techniques of cumulus parameterization. I present a new method for characterizing the dilution of a cloud with a constant fractional entrainment rate that is sensitive to the cloud's population of least diluted subcloud elements. This allows for variability in both CTH and composition of least diluted subcloud elements to be simultaneously examined over thousands of active cloudy updrafts in the simulation

Market Structure and Cyclical Fluctuations in U.S. Manufacturing

The relevance of imperfect competition for models of aggregate economic fluctuations has received increased attention from researchers in both macroeconomics and industrial organization. Measuring properly the size of industry markups of price over marginal cost is important both for assessing the role of market structure and for determining the extent to which excess capacity is a significant feature accompanying imperfect competition in American industry. Using a panel data set on four-digit Census manufacturing industries, this paper expands recent work by Robert Hall on the importance of market structure for understanding cyclical fluctuations. We outline a methodology for estimating industry markups of price over cost and the influence of market structure on cyclical movements in total factor productivity. While we find evidence to support the proposition that price exceeds marginal cost in U.S. manufacturing, our results offer only limited support for the notion that markups are importantly related to differences in industry concentration, though the effect of unionization is important. Concentration effects are important only in industries producing durable goods or differentiated consumer goods. In addition, much of the estimated markup of price over marginal cost is accounted for by fixed costs related to overhead labor, advertising, and central office expenses; we do not find compelling evidence of substantial evidence of excess capacity in most industries.

Business Cycles and Oligopoly Supergames: Some Empirical Evidence on Prices and Margins

There has been a significant interest on a theoretical level in the application of supergames to oligopoly behavior. Implications for pricing behavior in trigger-strategy models in response to aggregate demand are of particular importance for public policy considerations. We contrast the predictions for the movements of industry prices over the business cycle of two such models -- put forth by Edward Green and Robert Porter and by Julio Rotemberg and Garth Saloner -- and test the predictions using a panel data set of U.S. manufacturing industries. Our principal findings are four. First, the levels of price-cost margins of concentrated, homogeneous-goods industries, while higher than those of unconcentrated counterparts, appear to be closer to those predicted by a single-period Cournot-Nash equilibrium than monopoly. Second, there is little evidence to support the idea that price-cost margins of these industries have different cyclical patterns from other industries apart from effects by level of industry concentration. Maximum price declines for concentrated industries give little support for the occurrence of price wars during either recessions or booms. Finally, consistent with the predictions of the Rotemberg-Saloner model, the industries with high price-cost margins have more countercyclical price movements than those exhibited by other industries. That gradual price adjustment is quantitatively important for those industries, suggests, however, that other factors may lie behind the apparent rigidity of prices.

Optimizing superplastic response in lithium containing aluminum-magnesium alloys.

http://archive.org/details/optimizingsuperp00munrNAN

Presentation of Cultural Information in a Series of English Textbooks

Although several studies have been conducted on the analysis of the cultural information in the English textbooks in Thailand, none of them focused on the presentation of the types of culture and their presentation in the four skills of language learning. With the use of the framework based on Lee’s (2009) and Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001), the cultural information in the textbooks was analyzed in terms of Big “C’ and Small ”c” Culture. The findings revealed that Big “C” Culture were slightly more prominent than Small “c” Culture and both were presented in the receptive skills of listening and reading more frequently than in the productive skills of speaking and writing. This study sheds some light on the types of cultural information addressed in English textbooks to facilitate the learning of culture as a component of intercultural communicative competence and to prepare EFL students for international communication settings

Cryptic Rhetoric: The ANC and Anti-Americanization

South Africans live in a country that is rich in political contradictions, paradoxes and ambivalences. We have a communist party in government; yet a bitter public service sector strike lasted for almost the whole month of June 2007. Avowed socialists and social democrats, in government with the Communists, have embraced neoliberal economic orthodoxy and the disciplines of the market. A former ANC Communist Party leader and candidate for the ANC chair, Tokyo Sexwale, is a billionaire and took the Donald Trump role in a local version of the television show ‘‘The Apprentice.’’ When a leading media house decided to aim a new publication at Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) shop stewards, it found not only that most of the shop stewards were regular church-goers, but that a sizable number of them were office-bearers in their churches. We have a state broadcasting service that draws almost all of its income from advertizing. And so on