In recent years, far from arguing that evolutionary approaches to our own species permit us to describe the fundamental character of human nature, a prominent group of cultural evolutionary theorists has instead argued that the very idea of 'human nature' is one we should reject. It makes no sense, they argue, to speak of human nature in opposition to human culture. The very same sceptical argu...

Reverse Engineering Complex Cultural Concepts: Identifying Building Blocks of “Religion” Ann Taves ABSTRACT: Researchers have not yet done an adequate job of reverse engineering the complex cultural concepts of religion and spirituality in a way that allows scientists to operationalize component parts and historians of religion to consider how the component parts have been synthesized into larg...

design process is one of the main processes practiced in engineering. in this paper, after demonstrating the place of engineering among the topics discussed about technology, design process is studied from the perspective of three different models. the first model, vincenti’s model, provides an abstract explanation of the design process; the second model, bucciarelli’s model, has a sociological...

Bridges of high cultural value and aesthetic quality deserve respectful treatment and construction interventions must balance these assets with the severe requirements of utilisation. This is particularly relevant to structural engineers and bridge owners involved in rehabilitation or modification interventions. This paper presents, by means of eight bridges in Switzerland, examples of how inte...

This paper presents a new method to solve complex engineering optimization problems. This method is based on intermingling Cultural Algorithms with Tabu search meta-heuristic. The proposed approach uses a specified set of knowledge sources to update agent’s information, as well as employs the diffusion factor to propagate the best solutions in the social network. This approach avoids premature ...

A’ view of nature within the framework of garden and in relation with human needs and drives that satisfy theneed to be rooted has caused the representation of nature in garden to be regarded as cultural heritage. Garden and garden designing are suitable cases for us to study cultural characteristics and traits. Thus, human beings have searched their eternal interest in an ideal and unattainabl...

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...

In today’s world cultural competency becomes more and more important in order to act successfully in the modern economy. Nevertheless it is often difficult to engage students in immersive international experiences that develop inter-cultural awareness. Especially undergraduate engineering students have to deal with packed curricula with little or no room for languages and an often unforgiving s...

This paper will describe a process of ‘pragmatic annotation’ (c.f. Simpson-Vlach and Leicher 2006) which systematically identifies pragmatic meaning in spoken text. The annotation of stretches of text that perform particular pragmatic functions allows conclusions to be drawn across data sets at a different level than that of the individual lexical item, or structural content. The annotation of ...