For the last 25 years discussions and debates about commonsense psychology (or “folk psychology,” as it is often called) have been center stage in the philosophy of mind. There have been heated disagreements both about what folk psychology is and about how it is related to the scientific understanding of the mind/brain that is emerging in psychology and the neurosciences. In this chapter we wil...

Sensor-enabled wearable devices and smartphones collect data about users’ movements, location, and private spaces and activities. As with many ubiquitous computing technologies, this data collection happens in the background and appears “seamless” or invisible to the user. Despite this, users are still expected to make informed choices regarding consent to data collection. Folk theories are set...

Both of these books deal with folk medicine but whereas American folk medicine is a collection of 1973 conference papers edited by Professor Hand, Magical medicine is a collection of his own selected essays covering essentially the last decade. The basic tenet of both is that the idea of "medicine" is differentially interpreted and defined according to social, historical, religious, and cultura...

There remains a broad consensus that current folk racial categories— those categories usually used on surveys, recognized by tbe U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and used on census forms and by U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA)—do not correspond to meaningful biological categories. Pace some recent attempts to defend the use of folk racial categories as a proxy for ancestry and ...

Music classification has been widely investigated in the past few years using a variety of machine learning approaches. In this study, a corpus of 3367 folk songs, divided into six geographic regions, has been created and is used to evaluate two popular yet contrasting methods for symbolic melody classification. For the task of folk song classification, a global feature approach, which summariz...

There are a number of expressions in Swedish and other languages, which describe the songs of different birds, e.g. the rose finch imitated as saying "Pleased to see you". These folk rhymes seem to both imitate the birds' songs and to describe some content connected to the bird. Swedish folk rhymes for the songs of different birds were analyzed in terms of sound structure and content. Imitation...

This essay serves as an introduction to the folk practices and beliefs of East Punjab. It argues that although there are clear religious identities established by the major organized religions, this does not preclude participation in other practices which cut across these boundaries. These “folk” practices and beliefs cluster around the anxieties and ambiguities of death, common understandings ...