Public Relations Clients

Unlike in the United Kingdom, where members of the PR Consultants Association are required to have an updated, published list of all clients, the U.S. Council of PR decided against a proposal for the disclosure of client lists. Therefore the worlds biggest PR agencies, which are mostly U.S. based, are still in the position to make a secret of their clients.

Although public relations activity is mostly associated with marketing and issues management for corporate firms, also PR for nations, politicians and NGOs is common. Among the first to pursue PR for nations was Edward L. Bernays, one of the founders of modern public relations. Besides his activity in the Creel-Committee, which was responsible for the American propaganda during World War I, he also worked as a PR consultant for Lithuania and India. With his engagement for United Fruit he was moreover actively involved in the Cold War - especially in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Guzman.

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Industrial design

Industrial design refers to the ornamental aspect of a useful article which may constitute of two or three-dimensional elements. To be qualified for intellectual property protection the design must be novel or original. Protection can be obtained through registration in a government office and usually is given for 10 to 15 years.

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Expert system

Expert systems are advanced computer programs that mimic the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of an expert in a particular discipline. Their creators strive to clone the expertise of one or several human specialists to develop a tool that can be used by the layman to solve difficult or ambiguous problems. Expert systems differ from conventional computer programs as they combine facts with rules that state relations between the facts to achieve a crude form of reasoning analogous to artificial intelligence. The three main elements of expert systems are: (1) an interface which allows interaction between the system and the user, (2) a database (also called the knowledge base) which consists of axioms and rules, and (3) the inference engine, a computer program that executes the inference-making process. The disadvantage of rule-based expert systems is that they cannot handle unanticipated events, as every condition that may be encountered must be described by a rule. They also remain limited to narrow problem domains such as troubleshooting malfunctioning equipment or medical image interpretation, but still have the advantage of being much lower in costs compared with paying an expert or a team of specialists.

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