Changing conversation and dialogue through LeadSA: an example of public relations activism in South Africa

Abstract:The words of Lund and Nabavi “we learn more about something if we talk about it” (2008, p. 27) highlight the importance of conversation and dialogue in bringing about change – be it in an organization or in society. In South Africa, given the country’s history, dialogue across ethnic, social and political divides does not come naturally. The need for changed and new conversations exists in South Africa. Despite celebrating 20 years of democracy South Africans still face many economic, social and moral challenges. These challenges manifest themselves through protest actions against the slow pace of improvement in the townships, frustration with lack of personal progress among young South Africans, a lack of tolerance and understanding of the “others” (Seekings, 2007). Unfortunately change takes time and concerted effort (Eyre & Littleton, 2013), trust must be built and is earned through participation in open dialogue and mutual negotiation (Bardhan, 2011, p. 97). Public relations activism as a manifestation of the postmodernist worldview and PR activists as change agents are at the heart of this exploratory study of the role of public relations in the South African society. The research aim of this article is to investigate the principles and methods used by Primedia Broadcasting South Africa’s LeadSA initiative to start and facilitate social dialogue and to contribute to social change. Data was collected by means of interviews with key decision-makers at LeadSA. In addition, a variety of documents, such as electronic newsletters, internal documents and research reports, were analysed. A case study approach was used to contextualise the theory and illustrate the principles and practices implemented by LeadSA

The longitudinal phase-space integral with leading particles

De Groot’s method of calculating the longitudinal phase-space integrals is generalized to include leading particles. The generalization simplifies practical calculations of all quantities predicted by the uncorrelated jet model with leading particles

Ancient pigs reveal a near-complete genomic turnover following their introduction to Europe

Archaeological evidence indicates that pig domestication had begun by ∼10,500 y before the present (BP) in the Near East, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) suggests that pigs arrived in Europe alongside farmers ∼8,500 y BP. A few thousand years after the introduction of Near Eastern pigs into Europe, however, their characteristic mtDNA signature disappeared and was replaced by haplotypes associated with European wild boars. This turnover could be accounted for by substantial gene flow from local European wild boars, although it is also possible that European wild boars were domesticated independently without any genetic contribution from the Near East. To test these hypotheses, we obtained mtDNA sequences from 2,099 modern and ancient pig samples and 63 nuclear ancient genomes from Near Eastern and European pigs. Our analyses revealed that European domestic pigs dating from 7,100 to 6,000 y BP possessed both Near Eastern and European nuclear ancestry, while later pigs possessed no more than 4% Near Eastern ancestry, indicating that gene flow from European wild boars resulted in a near-complete disappearance of Near East ancestry. In addition, we demonstrate that a variant at a locus encoding black coat color likely originated in the Near East and persisted in European pigs. Altogether, our results indicate that while pigs were not independently domesticated in Europe, the vast majority of human-mediated selection over the past 5,000 y focused on the genomic fraction derived from the European wild boars, and not on the fraction that was selected by early Neolithic farmers over the first 2,500 y of the domestication process

Tracing the first steps of American sturgeon pioneers in Europe

Background: A Baltic population of Atlantic sturgeon was founded ~1,200 years ago by migrants from North America, but after centuries of persistence, the population was extirpated in the 1960s, mainly as a result of over-harvest and habitat alterations. As there are four genetically distinct groups of Atlantic sturgeon inhabiting North American rivers today, we investigated the genetic provenance of the historic Baltic population by ancient DNA analyses using mitochondrial and nuclear markers. Results: The phylogeographic signal obtained from multilocus microsatellite DNA genotypes and mitochondrial DNA control region haplotypes, when compared to existing baseline datasets from extant populations, allowed for the identification of the region-of-origin of the North American Atlantic sturgeon founders. Moreover, statistical and simulation analyses of the multilocus genotypes allowed for the calculation of the effective number of individuals that originally founded the European population of Atlantic sturgeon. Our findings suggest that the Baltic population of A. oxyrinchus descended from a relatively small number of founders originating from the northern extent of the species' range in North America. Conclusion: These results demonstrate that the most northerly distributed North American A. oxyrinchus colonized the Baltic Sea ~1,200 years ago, suggesting that Canadian specimens should be the primary source of broodstock used for restoration in Baltic rivers. This study illustrates the great potential of patterns obtained from ancient DNA to identify population-of-origin to investigate historic genotype structure of extinct populations

Limiting fragmentation from scale-invariant merging of fast partons

Exploiting the idea that the fast partons of an energetic projectile can be treated as sources of color radiation interpreted as wee partons, it is shown that the recently observed property of extended limiting fragmentation implies a scaling law for the rapidity distribution of fast partons. This leads to a picture of a self-similar process where, for fixed total rapidity Y, the sources merge with probability varying as 1/y.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure (2 eps files). Final version, also updated w.r.t. the published version in Phys. Lett. B665/1 (2008) pp. 35-3

Multibin long-range correlations

A new method to study the long-range correlations in multiparticle production is developped. It is proposed to study the joint factorial moments or cumulants of multiplicity distributions in several (more than two) bins. It is shown that this step dramatically increases the discriminative power of data.Comment: Latex, 14 pages, no figure

Superposition effect and clan structure in forward-backward multiplicity correlations

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the link between forward-backward multiplicity correlations properties and the shape of the corresponding final charged particle multiplicity distribution in various classes of events in different collisions. It is shown that the same mechanism which explains the shoulder effect and the H_n vs. n oscillations in charged particle multiplicity distributions, i.e., the weighted superposition of different classes of events with negative binomial properties, reproduces within experimental errors also the forward-backward multiplicity correlation strength in e+e- annihilation at LEP energy and allows interesting predictions for pp collisions in the TeV energy region, to be tested at LHC, for instance with the ALICE detector. We limit ourselves at present to study substructures properties in hadron-hadron collisions and e+e- annihilation; they are examined as ancillary examples in the conviction that their understanding might be relevant also in other more complex cases.Comment: 16 page

Bulk Dynamics in Heavy Ion Collisions

The features of heavy ion collisions that suggest the relevance of collective dynamics, as opposed to mere superpositions of nucleon-nucleon or even parton-parton collisions, are reviewed. The surprise of these studies is that bulk observables are far simpler than typical dynamical models of nucleus-nucleus collisions would imply. These features are shown to have a natural interpretation in terms of statistical-hydrodynamical models. The relevance of hydrodynamics to heavy ion collisions, coupled with the various similarities of the heavy ion data with that of more elementary collisions, raises very basic questions about its relevance to smaller systems.Comment: 10 Pages, 13 Figures, invited parallel talk at the International Nuclear Physics Conference (INPC 2004), Goteborg, Sweden, June 27 - July 2, 200

Probability landscapes for integrative genomics

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The comprehension of the gene regulatory code in eukaryotes is one of the major challenges of systems biology, and is a requirement for the development of novel therapeutic strategies for multifactorial diseases. Its bi-fold degeneration precludes brute force and statistical approaches based on the genomic sequence alone. Rather, recursive integration of systematic, whole-genome experimental data with advanced statistical regulatory sequence predictions needs to be developed. Such experimental approaches as well as the prediction tools are only starting to become available and increasing numbers of genome sequences and empirical sequence annotations are under continual discovery-driven change. Furthermore, given the complexity of the question, a decade(s) long multi-laboratory effort needs to be envisioned. These constraints need to be considered in the creation of a framework that can pave a road to successful comprehension of the gene regulatory code.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We introduce here a concept for such a framework, based entirely on systematic annotation in terms of probability profiles of genomic sequence using any type of relevant experimental and theoretical information and subsequent cross-correlation analysis in hypothesis-driven model building and testing.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Probability landscapes, which include as reference set the probabilistic representation of the genomic sequence, can be used efficiently to discover and analyze correlations amongst initially heterogeneous and un-relatable descriptions and genome-wide measurements. Furthermore, this structure is usable as a support for automatically generating and testing hypotheses for alternative gene regulatory grammars and the evaluation of those through statistical analysis of the high-dimensional correlations between genomic sequence, sequence annotations, and experimental data. Finally, this structure provides a concrete and tangible basis for attempting to formulate a mathematical description of gene regulation in eukaryotes on a genome-wide scale.</p