Previous work on mathematical models of cultural evolution has mainly focused on the diffusion of simple cultural elements. However, a characteristic feature of human cultural evolution is the seemingly limitless appearance of new and increasingly complex cultural elements. Here, we develop a general modelling framework to study such cumulative processes, in which we assume that the appearance ...

Transcendental near-death experiences show some cross-cultural variation that suggests they may be influenced by societal beliefs. The prevailing Western model of near-death experiences was defined by Moody's description of the phenomenon in 1975. To explore the influence of this cultural model, we compared near-death experience accounts collected before and after 1975. We compared the frequenc...

Based on a short overview over the different paradigms for human computer interaction we introduce and discuss the most recent paradigm of cultural computing. Cultural computing addresses underlying and almost unconscious cultural determinants that have since ancient times a strong influence on our way of thinking, feeling and worldview in general. Different cultures worldwide will have differe...

Electronic circuit optimization design is important research field in engineering applications. Circuit scale and the time of evaluate the circuit are the challenge problems for circuit optimization design algorithm and the traditional optimization algorithms cannot solve the two problems very well. Cultural Algorithms are a class of computational models derived from observing the cultural evol...

Optimization problems arise in many real-world applications. Cultural Algorithms are a class of computational models derived from observing the cultural evolution process in nature, compared with genetic algorithm the cultural algorithms have high convergence speed. Aiming at the disadvantages of basic cultural algorithms like being trapped easily into a local optimum, this paper improves the b...