Suchergebnisse

What do Mesoamerica, Greece, Byzantium, Island, Chad, Ethiopia, India, Tibet, China and Japan have in common? Like many other cultures of the world, they share a particular form of cultural heritage: ancient handwritten documents. This volume offers in 16 articles on philological, cultural, and material aspects of manuscripts a common ground across disciplines and cultures.

AbstractThe human aptitude for imitation and social learning underpins our advanced cultural practices. While social learning is a valuable evolutionary survival strategy, blind copying does not necessarily facilitate survival. Copying from the majority allows individuals to make rapid judgments on the value of a trait, based on its frequency. This is known as the majority bias: an individual's tendency to copy the behavior elicited by the largest number of individuals in a population. An alternative approach is to follow those who are the most proficient. While there is evidence that children do show both processes, no study has directly pitted them against each other. To do this, in the current experiment 36 children aged between 4 and 5 years watched live actors demonstrate, as a group or individually, how to open novel puzzle boxes. Children exhibited a bias to the majority when group and individual methods were successful, but favored the individual if the group method was unsuccessful. Affiliating children with the unsuccessful majority group did not impact on this pattern.

This book presents Lars Johanson's Code-Copying Model, an integrated framework for the description of contact-induced processes. The model covers all the main contact linguistic issues in their synchronic and diachronic interrelationship. The terminology is kept intuitive and simple to apply.

Abstract
Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) are subject to forces influencing other graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for complexity. The historical record of cattle brands in some US states is complete owing to legal registration, providing a unique opportunity to assess how sampling processes leading to time- and space-averaging influence our ability to make inferences from limited datasets in fields like archaeology. In this preregistered study, we used a dataset of ~81,000 Kansas cattle brands (1990–2016) to explore two aspects: (1) the relative influence of copying, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for complexity on the creation and diffusion of brand components; and (2) the effects of time- and space-averaging on statistical signals. By conducting generative inference with an agent-based model, we found that the patterns in our data are consistent with copying and pressure for intermediate complexity. In addition, by comparing mixed and structured datasets, we found that these statistical signals of copying are robust to, and possibly boosted by, time- and space-averaging.

Abstract
In the late Ming, illustrated materia medica works became increasingly salient among educated elites in the Jiangnan area. This article analyzes two hand-illustrated treatises, Jinshi kunchong caomu zhuang and Bencao tupu, and the cultural contexts of their production. The interplays between copying and editing and image-text relationships in the two works provide insight into how materia medica was exploited as a pictorial subject for ideas about the human-nature dynamic. I demonstrate that materia medica images represented symbolic possession of the natural world and thus served as a maker of social distinction. I also shed light on the perpetuated tradition of making images of materia medica as an intellectual practice. My examinations of materia medica images by women artists also challenge the correlations between gender and representations of flora and fauna in the historiography of Chinese paintings.

Courts and scholars today understand and discuss the institution of copyright in wholly instrumental terms. Indeed, given the forms of analysis that they routinely employ, one might be forgiven for thinking that copyright is nothing more than a comprehensive government-administered scheme for encouraging the production of creative expression and is therefore quite legitimately the subject matter of public law. While this instrumental focus may have the beneficial effect of limiting copyright's unending expansion, it also serves as a source of distraction. It directs attention away from the reality that copyright is fundamentally a creation of the law and is thus endowed with a uniquely legal normativity that instrumental accounts find difficult to capture. In so doing, it also glosses over the rather crucial fact that copyright law's basic structure is and indeed always has been that of private law. In this Article, I argue that taking copyright's legal architecture seriously reveals a matrix of core private law concepts and ideas that are in turn a rich and underappreciated source of normativity for the institution. In the process, I make three interrelated claims. First, copyright theories and analyses ought to pay greater attention to the analytical structure of copyright's entitlement framework and the ways in which this structure seeks to operate in the real world. Discussions of copyright law would do well to appreciate that the institution's exclusive rights framework functions almost entirely through its creation of an obligation not to copy original expression. Second, copyright can usefully be reconceptualized as revolving around the "wrong of copying," which originates in the right-duty structure that copyright creates. Reorienting discussions along these lines allows for a more direct focus on why copyright treats copying as a wrong, what actions constitute the wrong, and which plural values can fruitfully coexist within its private law structure. Third, focusing on copyright's internal logic need not come at the cost of its instrumentalism. To the contrary, such an approach entails mediating the institution's instrumentalism through its private law structure on a nuanced, pragmatic basis.

This paper presents a detailed study of a form of academic dishonesty that involves the use of multiple accounts for harvesting solutions in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). It is termed CAMEO Copying Answers using Multiple Existence Online. A person using CAMEO sets up one or more harvesting accounts for collecting correct answers; these are then submitted in the user's master account for credit. The study has three main goals: Determining the prevalence of CAMEO, studying its detailed characteristics, and inferring the motivation(s) for using it. For the physics course that we studied, about 10% of the certificate earners used this method to obtain more than 1% of their correct answers, and more than 3% of the certificate earners used it to obtain the majority (> 50%) of their correct answers. We discuss two of the likely consequences of CAMEO: jeopardizing the value of MOOC certificates as academic credentials, and generating misleading conclusions in educational research. Based on our study, we suggest methods for reducing CAMEO. Although this study was conducted on a MOOC, CAMEO can be used in any learning environment that enables students to have multiple accounts. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ; The first two authors contributed equally to this work. The second and fourth authors want to thank the projects "eMadrid" (Regional Government of Madrid) under grant S2013/ICE-2715 and "RESET" (Ministry of Economy and Competiveness) under grant RESET TIN2014-53199-C3-1-R for partially supporting this work.