Sorghum ergot in India is caused by Claviceps africana and C. sorghi. The distributions of these two species in India is not known. Eighty-nine sorghum ergot isolates were cultured from young sphacelia obtained from male sterile sorghum plants artificially inoculated using inoculum collected in the field. Based on cultural characteristics, the isolates were separated into two groups which diffe...

Our previous work on real-valued function optimization problems had shown that cultural learning emerged as the result of meta-level interaction or swarming of knowledge sources, “knowledge swarms” in the belief space. These meta-level swarms induced the swarming of individuals in the population space, “Cultural Swarms”. The interaction of these knowledge sources produced emergent phases of pro...

The rise of cultural industries is in part facilitated by the rise of leisure and entertainment in the advanced industrialized economies. This article explores one such example, taking ‘ethnic’ art, Xamenco, and examining the role of consumption in shaping Xamenco, both as an art form and as an industry. The global reach of the Xamenco industry is assessed by focusing on two major markets, Japa...

Gene-culture coevolutionary theory is a branch of theoretical population genetics that models the transmission of genes and cultural traits from one generation to the next, exploring how they interact. These models have been employed to examine the adaptive advantages of learning and culture, to investigate the forces of cultural change, to partition the variance in complex human behavioral and...

This cross-sectional study was designed to develop normative functional fitness standards for the Portuguese older adults, to analyze age and gender patterns of decline, to compare the fitness level of Portuguese older adults with that of older adults in other countries, and to evaluate the fitness level of Portuguese older adults relative to recently published criterion fitness standards assoc...

Cultural change in organisations is both difficult to implement and hard to achieve. In this paper, theory from strategic human resource management, organisational cultural change, systemic thinking and practice, and punctuated equilibrium, is integrated in order to build a model for organisational culture change. Evidence is provided showing the capacity of the model to enable researchers and ...

Cultural products such as song lyrics, television shows, and books reveal cultural differences, including cultural change over time. Two studies examine changes in the use of individualistic words (Study 1) and phrases (Study 2) in the Google Books Ngram corpus of millions of books in American English. Current samples from the general population generated and rated lists of individualistic word...

Cultural variation in a population is affected by the rate of occurrence of cultural innovations, whether such innovations are preferred or eschewed, how they are transmitted between individuals in the population, and the size of the population. An innovation, such as a modification in an attribute of a handaxe, may be lost or may become a property of all handaxes, which we call "fixation of th...

The Patient Safety Culture Improvement Tool (PSCIT) was developed to assist healthcare organizations in identifying practical actions to improve their culture. This article describes the development process of the PSCIT and provides a guide to using the PSCIT. The tool is based on a safety culture maturity model, which describes five stages of cultural evolution, from pathological to generative...

Since over a decade and ever more often we observe a clash between specific “new” living entities and the governance and regulation of (bio-)medical practices. These are the entities we call “bio-objects.” As will become clearer in the following, these bio-objects are indicators of a fundamental change between different systems of thought and practice: this is in the case of medicine the change...