Illusions of Unity: The Paradox Between Mega-Sporting Events and Nation Building

This article presents an investigation into the use of nation building rhetoric as a motive to host mega- sporting events. Previous literature regarding mega-events presents the potential for such events to be used for uniting a nation. Moreover, nation building has been conceived in public relations research as consisting of two main components; national identity and national unity, both of which can be tied to image crafting. However, examining the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the planning for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil demonstrates a paradox that exists between the concept of nation building and the actual hosting of mega-events. The theoretical underpinnings of nation building run contrary to the reality of mega-events where minority groups are often left marginalized and disenfranchised from the rest of the country. If anything, these events may serve to divide, rather than unite

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead