Crisis memes are the ghoulish and satirical posts that spread through social media concurrently with serious journalistic reportage. They are folk productions that respond to challenging events based on thematic and structural templates of popular online image macros. This article explores how templatability is relevant to the underpinnings, development, structure and value of crisis memes. The...

This paper describes ideas and initial experiments in embodied imitation using e-puck robots, developed as part of a project whose aim is to demonstrate the emergence of artificial culture in collective robot systems. Imitated behaviours (memes) will undergo variation because of the noise and heterogeneities of the robots and their sensors. Robots can select which memes to enact, and – because ...

Nowadays the research topics of science and technology are diversified and segmented into more and more categories. The number of interdisciplinary research topics has also increased. With increasingly sophisticated research on science and technology, there is a growing need for interdisciplinary and international availability, distribution and exchange of the latest research results, in re-edi...

The meme is an evolutionary replicator, defined as information copied from person to person by imitation. I suggest that taking memes into account may provide a better understanding of human evolution in the following way. Memes appeared in human evolution when our ancestors became capable of imitation. From this time on two replicators, memes and genes, coevolved. Successful memes changed the ...

Imitation is a powerful means of spreading culture teaching people to speak languages, children to play, and surgeons to operate. The basic unit of imitation is a replicator called meme which, like genes, carries and spreads information. The concepts of memes and the science of memetics were introduced by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976. Since then, memes have been found everywhere, used to e...

Push technologies are rapidly moving toward autonomous and evolutionary intelligent agents for seeking, organizing, and creating information via the Web and other pervasive and innovative information technologies. We describe and define autonomous and evolutionary agents designed for push technologies. Memes, which are messages one agent broadcasts to another, causing the agent to evolve are in...

This paper reports on the automatic generation of image macro based Internet memes – potentially funny combinations of an image and text, intended to be spread in social networks. Memes are produced for news headlines for which, based on linguistic features, a suitable macro is selected and the text is adapted. The generation method is described together with its current implementation, which i...

Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme was first formulated in his book The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976). In The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture (Ashgate, 2007), the first substantial text applying the concept of memetics to music, Steven Jan proposes a theory of music and an associated analytical method centred on the meme. For Jan, memes are a multitude o...

The celebration of Allan Kaufman’s 80th birthday was an occasion to reflect on a career that has stimulated the mutual exchange of ideas (or memes in the terminology of Richard Dawkins) between many researchers. This paper will revisit a meme Allan encountered in his early career in magnetohydrodynamics, the continuation of a magnetohydrodynamic mode through a singularity, and will also mention...