Related papers: What? Who? Why? Stellify
In traditional astronomies across the world, groups of stars in the night sky were linked into constellations -- symbolic representations rich in meaning and with practical roles. In some sky cultures, constellations are represented as line…
Cultural astronomy reveals ways in which perception and culture have shaped the interpretation of the night sky.
We answer the question whether, when forming constellations in the night sky, people in astronomical cultures around the world and through time consistently imagined and assigned the same symbolism to the same (type of) star group. Evidence…
The Audible Universe project aims at making dialogue between two scientific domains investigating two distinct research objects, briefly said, Stars and Sound. It has been instantiated within a collaborative workshop that started to…
Reputations provide a powerful mechanism to sustain cooperation, as individuals cooperate with those of good social standing. But how should moral reputations be updated as we observe social behavior, and when will a population converge on…
Learning structured representations of visual scenes is currently a major bottleneck to bridging perception with reasoning. While there has been exciting progress with slot-based models, which learn to segment scenes into sets of objects,…
Cultures around the world organise stars into constellations, or asterisms, and these groupings are often considered to be arbitrary and culture-specific. Yet there are striking similarities in asterisms across cultures, and groupings such…
A rational framework is proposed to explain how we accommodate unbounded sensory input within bounded memory. According to this framework, memory is stored as a statistic-like representation that is repeatedly summarized and compressed to…
In D(L)akota star knowledge, the Sun is known as Wi and the Moon is Han-Wi. They have an important relationship, husband and wife. The pattern of their ever-changing relationship is mirrored in the motions of Sun and Moon as seen from our…
Scientists often think of the world (or some part of it) as a dynamical system, a stochastic process, or a generalization of such a system. Prominent examples of systems are (i) the system of planets orbiting the sun or any other classical…
Light pollution is actively destroying our ability to see the stars. Many Indigenous traditions and knowledge systems around the world are based on the stars, and the peoples' ability to observe and interpret stellar positions and…
The modern usage of the words astronomy and astrology is traced back to distinctions, largely ignored in recent scholarship. Three interpretations of celestial phenomena (in a geometric, a substantialist and a prognostic versions) coexisted…
Global citizenship plays an important role in today's schools. Many subjects taught in schools have already incorporated such ideas. Science and physics have also followed suit. However, when dealing with astronomy - a topic so seemingly…
The indigenous astronomy in Africa and of Africans exhibits many of the same patterns as indigenous astronomy found in other parts of the world such as with agricultural calendars established by observing celestial bodies as well as other…
For more than 50,000 years, Indigenous Australians have incorporated celestial events into their oral traditions and used the motions of celestial bodies for navigation, time-keeping, food economics, and social structure. In this paper, we…
Using the frequency of keywords is a classic approach in the formal analysis of text, but has the drawback of glossing over the relationality of word meanings. Word embedding models overcome this problem by constructing a standardized and…
Galaxies represent the main form of organization of matter in our universe. Therefore, they are of obvious interest for the new multidisciplinary field of astrobiology. In particular, to study habitability of galaxies represents one of the…
Quantifying a society's value system is important because it suggests what people deeply care about -- it reflects who they actually are and, more importantly, who they will like to be. This cultural quantification has been typically done…
Simulations of dense stellar systems currently face two major hurdles, one astrophysical and one computational. The astrophysical problem lies in the fact that several major stages in binary evolution, such as common envelope evolution, are…
During the voyages that led him to discover the new continent bearing his name, Amerigo Vespucci made interesting astronomical observations of the southern sky. In the past, his data have been interpreted with criteria that do not follow…