Caste as a system of social stratification remains an important aspect in the lives of many peoples throughout the world. Dimensions of caste are found in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and even North America. Yet, it is India that stands out among nations as the most notable in terms of caste stratification today. Although elements of the caste system, such as untouchability, were outlawed over 50 ...

In this paper, we present three case studies on visualizing spatiotemporal data on interactive tabletops and surfaces for casual use. While there is a growing interest among citizens to make sense of their social community and urban environment, most existing geovisualization tools have been designed for experts such as planners and analysts. We introduce situationspecific visualization systems...

In online consumer reviews on Web sites such as Epinions, laypeople write and post their evaluations of technical products. But how do they get readers to take their opinions seriously? One way that online reviewers establish credibility is to assert expertise. This article describes 10 types of assertions that online reviewers used (along with the three broader categories of these types), expl...

We distinguish between two categories of belief — thin belief and thick belief — and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifcally, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of othe...

‘Explanation’ appears to be ambiguous between a representational-artifact, an objective, and a doxastic sense. That the distinctions between the three are still poorly understood we regard as an impediment to progress in the philosophy of science and as a source of the field’s resistance to greater integration with experimental psychology. We begin to elucidate the overlapping contours of the t...

Our most fundamental concepts of musical motion and space, used by laypeople an d music theorists alike, are defined by conceptual metaphors that are based on our experience of physical motion. We analyze the 3 most important metaphors of musical motion : the "MOVING MUSIC." metaphor, the "MUSICAL LANDSCAPE" metaphor, and the "MOVING FORCE" metaphor. We show how each metaphor is grounded in a p...

This paper presents an interactive apparatus to didactically explore Alberti's treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria, as generative design systems, namely shape grammars. This apparatus allows users to interactively explore such architectonical knowledge in both appealing and informal ways, by enabling them to visualize and manipulate in real-time different design solutions. The authors...