Public

In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science, psychology, marketing, and advertising. In public relations and communication science, it is one of the more ambiguous concepts in the field. Although it has definitions in the theory of the field that have been formulated from the early 20th century onwards, it has suffered in more recent years from being blurred, as a result of conflation of the idea of a public with the notions of audience, market segment, community, constituency, and stakeholder.

The name "public" originates with the Latin publicus (also poplicus), from populus, and in general denotes some mass population ("the people") in association with some matter of common interest. So in political science and history, a public is a population of individuals in association with civic affairs, or affairs of office or state. In social psychology, marketing, and public relations, a public has a more situational definition.John Dewey defined (Dewey 1927) a public as a group of people who, in facing a similar problem, recognize it and organize themselves to address it. Dewey's definition of a public is thus situational: people organized about a situation. Built upon this situational definition of a public is the situational theory of publics by James E. Grunig (Grunig 1983), which talks of nonpublics (who have no problem), latent publics (who have a problem), aware publics (who recognize that they have a problem), and active publics (who do something about their problem).

Capital

Capital may refer to:

Architecture

Colleges, seminaries, and universities

Capital ẞ

Capital sharp s (ẞ) is the majuscule of eszett. Sharp s is unique among the letters of the Latin alphabet in that it has no traditional upper case form. This is because it never occurs word-initially in German text, and traditional German printing (which used blackletter) never used all-caps. When using all-caps, traditional spelling rules required the replacement of ß with SS. However, in 2010, the use of the capital ẞ became mandatory in official documentation in Germany when writing geographical names in all-caps.

History

There have been repeated attempts to introduce a majuscule ß. Such letterforms can be found in some old German books dating back to the late 19th century and some later signage and product design. One of the best known examples is the East German 1957 Duden.

Inclusion in Universal Character Set

A proposal by Andreas Stötzner to the Unicode Consortium for the inclusion of capital double s in the Universal Character Set was rejected in 2004, on the basis that capital ß is a typographical issue, and therefore not suitable for character encoding. A reworked version of Stötzner's proposal was submitted on 25 April 2007 by DIN. The proposal suggested the Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S. The proposal has been adopted and the character was added as Unicode character "ẞ" U+1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S when Unicode 5.1 was released, on 4 April 2008.

Capital (economics)

Capital is a type of good that can be consumed now, but if consumption is deferred, an increased supply of consumable goods is likely to be available later. Adam Smith defines capital as "That part of a man's stock which he expects to afford him revenue is called his capital." Capital is derived from the Latin word "caput" meaning head, as in "head of cattle". The term "stock" is derived from the Old English word for stump or tree trunk, i.e. something that grows over time. It has been used to refer to all the moveable property of a farm since at least 1510. In Middle Ages France contracted leases and loans bearing interest specified payment in heads of cattle.

In economics, capital goods, real capital, or capital assets are already-produced durable goods or any non-financial asset that is used in production of goods or services.

How a capital good is maintained or returned to its pre-production state varies with the type of capital involved. In most cases capital is replaced after a depreciation period as newer forms of capital make continued use of current capital non profitable. It is also possible that advances make an obsolete form of capital practical again.