Something between us

Something Between Us is a comi-tragedy, a novel that deals with the relationships between a group of adolescent friends. Set in a small South African mining town in the 1980s, against a general backdrop of political upheaval and border conflict, it aims to explore the nature and consequences of these relationships within the context of a central incident, in which the novel's narration reveals some of the wider fracture lines in the South Africa that was, and the South Africa that is today. Something Between Us is also a satire, in the manner in which it treats the behaviours, attitudes and idiomatic turns of speech that would characterize a certain sector of white youth from this particular era. The intention of the novel is to reveal, albeit with a comic-serio touch, the ways in which South Africa's past, as refracted through young lives, continues to reach into the present

Modeling and simulating Chinese cross-border e-commerce: an agent-based simulation approach

©2023. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This document is the Accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Journal of Simulation (JOS). To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1080/17477778.2022.2043791Chinese cross-border e-commerce has become the largest in the world, overtaking US e-commerce and representing about 40% of total global e-commerce spending in 2018. This market is highly complex, uncertain, and poorly understood. Surveys and statistics have been used to characterise it, but new approaches are required to better understand its complexity. To address this gap, we present an agent-based model of Chinese cross-border e-commerce. For a realistic representation of the buyers’ decision-making mechanism and some elements of their communication, including word of mouth (WOM), we use endorsements theory, and a survey is used to specify the model. The aim of the study is twofold: (1) to present an agent-based simulation (ABS) model of the Chinese cross-border e-commerce market; and (2) to illustrate the potential of the model to explore future possible configurations of the market and to guide stakeholders’ decision making

The Effect of Message Repetition on Information Diffusion on Twitter: An Agent-Based Approach

©2023. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This document is the, Accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2023.3260449Background: Twitter offers tools that facilitate the diffusion of information by which companies can engage consumers to share their messages. Literature review: Communication professionals are using platforms such as Twitter to disseminate information; however, the strategies that they should use to achieve high information diffusion are not clear. This article proposes message repetition as a strategy. Research questions: 1. What is the wear-out point of Twitter? 2. How many times should a company repeat a tweet written on its brand page to maximize the diffusion for seeds? 3. How many times should a company repeat a tweet written on its brand page to maximize the diffusion while minimizing the number of consumers reaching their wear-out point for seeds? 4. How many times should a company repeat a tweet written on its brand page to maximize the diffusion for nonseeds? 5. How many times should a company repeat a tweet written on its brand page to maximize the diffusion while minimizing the number of consumers reaching their wear-out point for both seeds and nonseeds? Research methodology: An agent-based simulation model for information diffusion is proposed as an approach to measure the diffusion of a tweet that has been repeated. The model considers that consumers can reach their wear-out point when they read a tweet several times. Results: The results of the model indicate the number of times a company should send the same tweet to achieve high information diffusion before this action has negative effects on consumers. Brand followers are key to achieving high information diffusion; however, consumers begin to feel bothered by the tweet by the sixth repetition. Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine tweet repetition as a strategy to achieve higher information diffusion on Twitter. In addition, it extends the information diffusion literature by controlling the wear-out effect. It contributes to both communication and computational science literature by analyzing a communication problem using an agent-based approach. Finally, this article contributes to the field of technical and professional communication by testing a strategy to reach great information diffusion, and by creating a tool that any company can use to anticipate the results of a communication campaign created in Twitter before launching it

Post-traumatic stress disorder in children exposed to violence

The International Society for Burns Injuries (ISBI) has published guidelines for the management of multiple or mass burns casualties, and recommends that 'each country has or should have a disaster planning system that addresses its own particular needs.' The need for a national burns disaster plan integrated with national and provincial disaster planning was discussed at the South African Burns Society Congress in 2009, but there was no real involvement in the disaster planning prior to the 2010 World Cup; the country would have been poorly prepared had there been a burns disaster during the event. This article identifies some of the lessons learnt and strategies derived from major burns disasters and burns disaster planning from other regions. Members of the South African Burns Society are undertaking an audit of burns care in South Africa to investigate the feasibility of a national burns disaster plan. This audit (which is still under way) also aims to identify weaknesses of burns care in South Africa and implement improvements where necessary

Post-traumatic stress disorder in children exposed to violence

Objectives. To investigate to what extent local children exposed to community violence develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), whether the symptom profile is typical or atypical, and how detection can be improved.Design. A cross-sectional study of two samples of children with a high risk of past exposure to violence.Setting and subjects. Sixty Xhosa-speaking children aged 10 - 16 years; 30 from the Children's Home which serves Khayelitsha, and 30 from a school in a violent area of KhayelitshaOutcome measures. A shortened version of the Survey of Exposure to Community Violence (SECV) was administered to determine exposure to violence. Structured questionnaires and a clinical assessment were used to elicit symptoms and make psychiatric diagnoses.Results. All 60 children reported exposure to indirect violence, 57 (95%) had witnessed violence, and 34 (56%) had experienced violence themselves. Twenty-four (40%) met the criteria for one or more DSM-III-R diagnoses and 13 (21.7%) met the criteria lor PTSD.Conclusions. Community violence places children at a high risk of developing serious psychiatric disorders and many children develop PTSD. None of the children in the school sample had received intervention prior to the study, pointing towards an urgent need for increased community and professional awareness of children at risk

Planetary Cliff Descent Using Cooperative Robots

Future robotic planetary exploration will need to traverse geographically diverse and challenging terrain. Cliffs, ravines, and fissures are of great scientific interest because they may contain important data regarding past water flow and past life. Highly sloped terrain is difficult and often impossible to safely navigate using a single robot. This paper describes a control system for a team of three robots that access cliff walls at inclines up to 70°. Two robot assistants, or anchors, lower a third robot, called the rappeller, down the cliff using tethers. The anchors use actively controlled winches to first assist the rappeller in navigation about the cliff face and then retreat to safe ground. This paper describes the coordination of these three robots so they function as a team to explore the cliff face. Stability requirements for safe operation are identified and a behavior-based control scheme is presented. Behaviors are defined for the system and command fusion methods are described. Controller stability and sensitivity are examined. System performance is evaluated with simulation, a laboratory system, and testing in field environments

Differential associations between actual and expected GP practice prescribing rates for statins, ACE inhibitors, and beta-blockers: a cross-sectional study in England

AIM: To explore the relationship between actual and expected general medical practitioner (GP) practice prescribing rates for statins, angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, and beta-blockers. BACKGROUND: There is a growing body of literature highlighting inequities in GP practice prescribing rates for many drug therapies. The equity of prescribing is of central importance in the area of therapeutics since it explores the interface between those patients who should and those who actually do receive a drug therapy. SETTING: Four primary care trusts (PCTs 1–4) in the North West of England, including 132 GP practices. METHODS: Actual and expected prescribing rates for statins, beta-blockers, and ACE inhibitors were specifically developed for each GP practice. RESULTS: There were no statistically significant correlations between actual and expected prescribing rates in PCT2 and PCT3, although in PCT1 there were statistically significant correlations for statins (0.286, p < 0.05) and ACE inhibitors (0.381, p < 0.01). In PCT4, correlations were moderate to high for beta-blockers (0.693, p < 0.01), and moderate for statins (0.541, p < 0.05) and ACE inhibitors (0.585, p < 0.01). Scatterplots highlighted large variations between individual GP practices (both within and between PCTs) in terms of the relationship between actual and expected prescribing rates. CONCLUSION: This paper highlights variability between PCTs and GP practices in terms of the relationship between actual and expected prescribing rates. The findings from this paper may further advance the suggestion of inequities in prescribing rates for coronary heart disease (CHD) drugs, and studies such as this may be repeated in different therapeutic areas, healthcare settings, and countries

The Stackage Repository: An Exploratory Study of its Evolution

Context. Package repositories for a programming language are increasingly common. A repository can keep a register of the evolution of its packages. In the programming language Haskell, with its defining characteristic monads, we can find the Stackage repository, which is a curated repository for stable Haskell packages in the Hackage repository. Despite the widespread use of Stackage in its industrial target, we are not aware of much empirical research about how this repository has evolved, including the use of monads. Objective. This paper conducts empirical research about the evolution of Stackage considering monad packages through 22 Long-Term Support releases during the period 2014-2023. Focusing on five research questions, this evolution is analyzed in terms of packages with their dependencies and imports; including the most used monad packages. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale analysis of the evolution of the Stackage repository regarding packages used and monads. Method. We define six research questions regarding the repository's evolution, and analyze them on 51,716 packages (17.05 GB) spread over 22 releases. For each package, we parse its cabal file and source code to extract the data, which is analyzed in terms of dependencies and imports using Pandas scripts. Results. From the methodology we get different findings. For example, there are packages that depend on other packages whose versions are not available in a particular release of Stackage; opening a potential stability issue. The mtl and transformers are on the top 10 packages most used/imported across releases of the Stackage evolution. We discussed these findings with Stackage maintainers, which allowed us to refine the research questions.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figure