Kurt Squire is a PhD candidate in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, and is currently working as a research manager at MIT on the Microsoft-MIT funded Games-to-Teach Project. His research interests include the design of games and simulations, the use of games and simulations in formal learning environments, video game industry & culture, socio-cultural learning theory, perf...

The paper first analyzes the different meanings of and interests in “societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology” by science fiction authors, scientists and engineers, policy makers and science managers, business people, transhumanists, the media, and cultural and social scientists. Based on the mutual semantic impact among these groups, a dynamical model of the debate on “societal and ...

We present a biologically inspired mathematical model for describing the personalized interactions of users with cultural heritage objects. The main idea is to measure the interest of an artwork spectator by means of a model able to capture the context and the visitor behaviors. In the proposed approach, the user is assimilated to a computational neuron, and its interests are deduced by countin...

The present study focused on voice quality and the perception of the basic emotions from speech samples in cross-cultural conditions. It was examined whether voice quality, cultural, or language background, age, or gender were related to the identification of the emotions. Professional actors (n2) and actresses (n2) produced non-sense sentences (n32) and protracted vowels (n8) expressing the si...

Cultural transmission of reproductive success states that successful men have more children and pass this raised fecundity to their offspring. Balaresque and colleagues found high frequency haplotypes in a Central Asian Y chromosome dataset, which they attribute to cultural transmission of reproductive success by prominent historical men, including Genghis Khan. Using coalescent simulation, we ...

In Europe, interest in wild forest products is increasing. Such products may be interpreted in a biological sense as deriving from autonomously growing forest species or in a biocultural sense as reflecting dynamics in human living with biodiversity through re-wilding of earlier domesticated species. In this article I elaborate the idea that the new interests reflect biocultural dynamics. First...

Recent prescriptions for rescuing civilization from collapse involve extending our human capacity for empathy to a global scale. This is a worthy goal, but several indications leave grounds for cautious optimism at best. Evolutionary biology interprets non-kin helping behaviors as products of natural selection that rewarded only the transmission success of resident genes within ancestors, not t...

Visiting a real or virtual museum or an archaeological site could be a hard task, especially for large sites provided with many works of art or ancient ruins. For this reason most historical sites propose guided tours, helping visitors to improve their satisfaction and stimulate interests. In this work we explore the use of an e-learning environment, called Lecomps5, in order to provide museums...