Issues of digital preservation of shapes and internal structures of historical cultural objects are discussed. An overview of existing approaches to digital preservation related to shape modeling is presented and corresponding problems are considered. We propose a new digital preservation paradigm based on both constructive modeling reflecting the logical structure of the objects and open stand...

n Abstract Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that only human cultural traditions accumulate modifications over historical time (the ratchet effect). The key adaptation is one that enables individuals to understand other individuals as intentional agents like the self. This species-unique form of social co...

Multiple literatures suggest that the following factors may figure prominently in explanations of women's increasing empowerment: (1) socioeconomic development; (2) rising gender-egalitarian attitudes that transform economic development into a cultural process of human development; (3) historical legacies stemming from a society's cultural and political traditions; and (4) institutional design ...

The concept of historical trauma (HT) was developed to explain clinical distress among descendants of Jewish Holocaust survivors and has since been ascribed new meanings to account for suffering in diverse contexts. In American Indian (AI) communities, the concept of AI HT has been tailored and promoted as an expanded notion of trauma that combines psychological injury with historical oppressio...

At first glance ancestral knowledge and computer science appear incompatible. Critical ancestral computing—socio-cultural and historical ecosystem approaches to solve complex problems—as an epistemological center for computer science education opens a pathway of critical consciousness, academic success and cultural relevance (Ladson-Billings, 2009). Weaving both disciplines to build a tapestry ...

CLIO , developped by ICS-FORTH, is a system for cultural documentation purposes of museums. It serves as a scientific catalogue of museum artifacts, as opposed to the basic documentation and administrative purposes served by usual collections management systems. It supports artifact descriptions as temporal, geographical, cultural, historical contexts; style, technique, usage, and physical data...

Explanations for the emergence of monogamous marriage have focused on the cross-cultural distribution of marriage strategies, thus failing to account for their history. In this paper I reconstruct the pattern of change in marriage strategies in the history of societies speaking Indo-European languages, using cross-cultural data in the systematic and explicitly historical framework afforded by t...

Launched in 2010, the Google Books Ngram Viewer offers a novel means of tracing cultural change over time. This digital tool offers exciting possibilities for cultural psychology by rendering questions about variation across historical time more quantitative. Psychologists have begun to use the viewer to bolster theories about a historical shift in the United States from a more collectivist to ...

In this article, I shall review contemporary Chinese studies of Mencius in Taiwan. In order for this review to be more focused, I shall not attempt to include all the books and articles published on Mencius. Instead, I shall focus on material that follows these two approaches: (1) philosophical and (2) intellectual-historical. Contemporary scholars who take the first approach see the Mencius as...

Using Western theories and perspectives as models, this chapter discusses the cultural interpretation of dying and death in a non-Western society. Also discussed, based on the historical, political, and cultural history of Nigeria, are the implications of dying and death for death preparation, the problem of deathcausation diseases without external symptoms, and the special plight of widows. Su...