BACKGROUND Few studies have addressed the challenges associated with international students as they adapt to studying medicine in a new host country. Higher level institutions have increasing numbers of international students commencing programmes. This paper explores the experiences of a cohort of students in the early years of medical school in Ireland, where a considerable cohort are from an...

Archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence suggests a link between a population's size and structure, and the diversity or sophistication of its toolkits or technologies. Addressing these patterns, several evolutionary models predict that both the size and social interconnectedness of populations can contribute to the complexity of its cultural repertoire. Some models also predict that a sudde...

The aim of this speculative paper, rooted in a variety of concepts derived from social anthropology, theology, and the history of religion, is to develop the broad notion of spirituality in terms of what might be called cultural wisdom. This I do alongside a discussion of the human proclivity for meaning-making understood as a process expressed in numerous religious traditions as 'salvation'. T...

Every individual has behaviours, beliefs, and values which are different from the behaviours, beliefs, and values of other individuals. However, if individuals interact with each other there will be a tendency for their behaviours, beliefs, and values to become more similar because of imitation, teaching, and social learning. A group of individuals interacting with each other will tend to have ...

Significant new information shows that the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) eruption from the Phlegrean Fields, southern Italy, was much larger than hitherto supposed and in fact one of the largest late Quaternary explosive events. The eruption can be dated to 40,000 calendar years ago, within the interval of the so-called Middle to Upper Paleolithic 'transition'. Its position can be precisely correla...

BACKGROUND This paper considers the role of teaching primary care trusts (tPCTs) at the turn of the century. A retrospective evaluation of a complex intervention is used. The evaluation has three perspectives. These are (1) a commentary on tPCTs in health policy in England, (2) the authors' reflections as senior members of a tPCT in Northern England and (3) a look-back exercise with tPCT member...

Archaeologists argue that the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans was driven by interspecific competition due to a difference in culture level. To assess the cogency of this argument, we construct and analyze an interspecific cultural competition model based on the Lotka-Volterra model, which is widely used in ecology, but which incorporates the culture level of a species as a variable...

OBJECTIVE To test the cultural invariance of the Impact-on-Family Scale in order to make cross-cultural comparisons. METHODS The Italian version of the scale was administered to mothers of children with chronic illnesses. Factorial invariance was examined to investigate whether the four factors found with the original United States (U.S.) scale could be replicated. RESULTS The results clear...

This meta-analysis offers an updated set of national cultural scores along the dimensions of Hofstede's cultural framework. The meta-analytic national cultural indices have two advantages. First, they are based on a larger and more representative sample than that used in Hofstede's or any other cross-cultural comparison study. The data come from 451 empirical studies representing over 2000 samp...

Culture pervades human lives and has allowed our species to create niches all around the world and its oceans, in ways quite unlike any other primate. Indeed, our cultural nature appears so distinctive that it is often thought to separate humanity from the rest of nature and the Darwinian forces that shape it. A contrary view arises through the recent discoveries of a diverse range of disciplin...