Background. Globalization within higher education leads to an increase in cultural and linguistic diversity in student populations. The purpose of this study was to explore culturally diverse health care students' experiences in clinical environment in Finland, and to compare them with those of native Finnish students' participating in the same program. Method. A cross-sectional survey was perf...

Cultural theory elucidates conflicting opinions driving the climate change debate. Patterns of shared values and beliefs are described as cultural biases. These partial perspectives about society and environment legitimize four ways of life worldviews. This research tests whether cultural biases about the environment have the same structure as those about society to clarify their role in climat...

Recent studies of humanoid robotics (Brooks 1998) have claimed that natural communication with human beings requires that the artificial agent possesses two essential features: embodiment, sharing a structurally and functionally similar body with the interlocutor, and situatedness, being embedded in the same socio-cultural environment (Zlatev 1999). However, almost no specific methods have been...

1. Current Views of Global Carrying Capacity 2. The Global Social, Economic, and Cultural Situation 2.1. Economic Differences 2.2. Cultural Differences 2.3. A Comparison of Production and Consumption between Developed and Developing Countries 3. Carrying Capacity of Natural Resources 4. The Environment, Environmental Problems, and Environmental Protection 5. Population, Resources, and Environme...

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...

Models of cultural evolution study how the distribution of cultural traits changes over time. The dynamics of cultural evolution strongly depends on the way these traits are transmitted between individuals by social learning. Two prominent forms of social learning are payoff-based learning (imitating others that have higher payoffs) and conformist learning (imitating locally common behaviours)....

1. Organism and Environment 1.1 Man-environment interactions 1.2 Ecology and human evolution 2. Ecological Constraints of Human Cultural Evolution 2.1 The meaning of natural resources 2.2 Ecology and life style 2.3 The cultural value of plants and animals 2.4 Ethnoecology 3. The Human Impact 3.1 Changing the “ecological order” 3.2 Ecological knowledge and survival 4. Applied Ecology, Culture, a...

This article presents research towards the development of a virtual learning environment (VLE) inhabited by intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and modelling a scenario of inter-cultural interactions. The ultimate aim of this VLE is to allow users to reflect upon and learn about intercultural communication and collaboration. Rather than predefining the interactions among the virtual agents and sc...

Geographic environment is a combination of natural and cultural environments under which humans survive. Virtual Geographic Environment (VGE) is a new multi-disciplinary initiative that links geosciences, geographic information sciences and information technologies. A VGE is a virtual representation of the natural world that enables a person to explore and interact with vast amounts of natural ...