We are interested in developing intelligent systems for music composition. In this paper we focus on our research into generative rhythms. We have adopted an Artificial Life (A-Life) approach to intelligent systems design in order to develop generative algorithms inspired by the notion of music as social phenomena that emerge from the overall behaviour of interacting autonomous software agents....

This paper examines the emergence of differing student behaviour in the use of ICT in Melbourne and Singapore. It seeks to explain the stark contrasts in intra-group communication and the use of online course materials in terms of cultural differences, drawing largely on Hofstede’s framework for cultural analysis. Hofstede found Australians to be highly individualistic and to have both low powe...

Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progres...

The links between parenting and child behaviour in cultural context have received increasing research attention. We investigated the effect of parenting on child adjustment using a multimethod design, comparing English and Turkish families. The socioeconomically diverse samples included 118 English and 100 Turkish families, each with two children aged 4-8 years. Mothers completed questionnaires...

together with a consideration of the important similarities and common ground it shares with medical sociology, its sister discipline. They argue cogently for the data and models of the latter to be taken into account by anthropologists interested in the social and cultural dimensions of health and disease. Their basic anthropological tenets are first the "adaptive" nature of health-related beh...

Although culture is usually thought of as the collection of knowledge and traditions that are transmitted outside of biology, evidence continues to accumulate showing how biology and culture are inseparably intertwined. Cultural conflict will occur only when the beliefs and traditions of one cultural group represent a challenge to individuals of another. Such a challenge will elicit brain proce...

This paper discusses mechanisms for personalizing access to cultural heritage collections and suggests that paths or trails are a flexible and powerful model for this and could link with existing models of cognitive information behaviour. We also describe a European project called PATHS (Personalized Access To cultural Heritage Spaces) that aims to support information exploration and discovery ...