This paper investigates a novel statistical approach to music classification that utilizes recent technology developed in the domain of natural language processing. Specifically, we investigate the use of factored language models (FLMs) for the task of producing conditional probability distributions to model origin-specific folk songs. In our model, pitch cluster and quantized duration are empl...

Moral judgments about an agent’s behavior are enmeshed with inferences about the agent’s mind. Folk psychology—the system that enables such inferences— therefore lies at the heart of moral judgment. We examine three related folk-psychological concepts that together shape people’s judgments of blame: intentionality, choice, and free will. We discuss people’s understanding and use of these concep...

The paper discusses some aspects of a work in progress aimed at the development of technologies for digitization of Bulgarian folk music and building a digital library with Bulgarian folk songs presented with their music, texts and notes. This library provides digital preservation of the sound recordings, lyrics and notations of more than 1000 Bulgarian folk songs and tools for various types of...

The present paper is an attempt to assess the credibility of various folk claims on medicinal uses of Bombax ceiba L. in view of scientific studies done so far. Almost all parts of the plant are widely used by tribal communities for gastrointestinal and skin diseases, gynecological and urino-genital disorders, general debility, diabetes and impotence. There are direct evidences of scientific va...

There is a huge chasm between the sort of lawful determination that figures in fundamental physics, and the sort of causal determination that figures in the ‘folk physics’ of everyday objects. For example, consider a rock sitting on a desk. In everyday life, we think of the rock as having a fixed stock of dispositions--the disposition to slide on the desk when pushed, to shatter when struck by ...

This paper develops a simple “instant-response” model of strategic behavior where players can react instantly to changing circumstances, but at the same time face some inertia after changing action. The framework is used to reconsider the folk theorem and, in particular, the role of the key condition of dimensionality. In contrast to the discounted case in discrete time, here low dimensionality...

This commentary stresses the importance of Atran’s work for the development of a new cognitive anthropology, but questions both his particular use of Dawkins’s “meme” model and the general usefulness of the meme model for understanding folk-taxonomies as cultural phenom-

It is a common medical folk-practice for parents to encourage their children to contract certain infectious diseases while they are young. This folk-practice is controversial, in part, because it contradicts the long-term public health goal of minimizing disease incidence. We study an epidemiological model of infectious disease in an age-structured population where virulence is age-dependent an...