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-

We present constructs for computing aggregate functions over sets of tuples and along paths in a database graph. We show how Datalog can be extended to compute a large class of queries with aggregates without incurring the large expense of a language with general set manipulation capabilities. In particular, we aim for queries that can be executed eeciently in parallel, using the class nc and i...

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...

This paper demonstrates how association rule mining can be applied to discover relations between two ontologies of folk music: a genre and a region ontology. Genre– region associations have been widely studied in folk music research but have been neglected in music information retrieval. We present a method of association rule mining with constraints consisting of rule templates and rule evalua...