BACKGROUND Research was carried out into agricultural and domestic-handicraft uses in folk traditions in the Tyrrhenian sector of the Basilicata region (southern Italy), as it is typically representative of ethnobotanical applications in the Mediterranean area. From the point of view of furnishing a botanical support for the study of local "material culture" data was collected through field int...

In this study, we attempt to explore cross-media retrieval between music and image data based on the emotional correlation. Emotion feature analytic could be the bridge of cross-media retrieval, since emotion represents the user's perspective and effectively meets the user's retrieval need. Currently, there is little research about the emotion correlation of different multimedia data (e.g. imag...

In the absence of a medical cure for AIDS, HIV-infected individuals may seek alternative treatments that are consistent with cultural and social beliefs. This paper examines beliefs about, and use of, folk healing practices by HIV-infected Hispanics receiving care at an HIV/AIDS clinic in inner-city New Jersey. Anonymous individual interviews were conducted with 58 male and 18 female HIV-infect...

Over the last twenty years a considerable amount of valuable research has uncovered the activities of a variety of unorthodox medical practitioners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Quack doctors, spiritual healers, medical botanists, and bone-setters have all been subjected to detailed analysis.1 In contrast, the practitioners of folk-magical healing have been largely overlooked.2 Th...

For the last several decades, Chinese society has experienced transformative changes. How are these changes understood among Chinese people? To examine this question, Part 1 in this research solicited folk beliefs of cultural change from a group of Chinese participants in an open-ended format, and the generated folk beliefs were rated by another group of participants in Part 2 to gage each beli...

This paper studies the role of memory and communication in overlapping generations (OLG) games between ongoing organizations. In each organization, each individual, upon entry into the game, replaces his predecessor who has the same preferences and faces the same strategic possibilities. An individual has no prior memory — that is, he does not directly witness the events that occur before his t...