Selection Of Memes Research Articles

Memes Adoption in Basic Medical Science Education as a Successful Learning Model: A Mixed Method Quasi-Experimental Study.

Basic medical sciences are of a solid abstract nature.Pharmacologyis a challenging discipline delivered in all healthcare-related curricula with different aims and goals. Memes are one of aiding instructional designs proved to surge students' performance and satisfaction with the educational process. Apart from assessing medical students' and faculty's perception of meme use in pharmacology learning, the current study aimed to explore the criteria of preferences and factors associated with successful memes' adoption in this discipline as one of the most challenging basic medical sciences. A biphasic study was conducted among second-year undergraduate medical students and faculty members. The study involved assessing the perceptions of staff and students, and thematic content analysis was performed on the narrative responses of the participants to explore factors contributing to the success of learning memes. Additionally, students' performance was also analyzed. The use of memes in pharmacology was well perceived by medical students, with a mean satisfaction rating of 4.5/5 for high-achieving students and 4.33 for low-achieving students. Memes were associated with a performance surge (p = 0.022). Six themes emerged as criteria for a successful learning experience of meme use: previous scientific background on the meme topic, scenario context of the meme, learning concepts tackled by memes, the simplicity of meme's message, the relevance of meme's message to practice, and the modality of meme's use in the topic of education. Regarding the perception of meme use in pharmacology learning, four themes emerged:the mode and engagement oflearning experience mode,thefeasibility of meme use in pharmacology learning, students'attitudestowards further meme inclusion in their study, andtheperceived impact ofmemeson students' cognitive skills. The use of memes in pharmacology yields positive learning outcomes. A careful selection of memes is required to ensure a successful learning experience.

Memeplex-based memetic algorithm for the multi-objective optimal design of composite structures

Hybrid construction is proposed to decrease costs in lightweight structures using fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) composite materials. Minimum weight, minimum strain energy (stiffness), and minimum energy variability of the structural system response are the objectives of the robust design optimization approach applied to composite shell structures with stiffeners. The trade-off depends on given stress, displacement, and buckling constraints imposed on composite structures considering non-linear geometric behavior. The design variables are ply angles and ply thicknesses of shell laminates, the cross-section dimensions of stiffeners, and the variables related to the selection of materials and their distribution at the laminate level and subsequently of the laminates along the structure. A Multi-Objective Memetic Algorithm (MOMA) applies multiple learning procedures exploring the synergy of different cultural transmission rules. An enlarged virtual population with a dual age-dominance nature captures and updates the Pareto curve. The concept of memeplex controls the meme selection and their propagation along the hybrid genetic and cultural evolution path. The success of memetic learning procedures is analyzed by measuring each meme's relative and absolute success events according to different approaches, depending on the reference time used in evolutionary history. Results show that MOMA is promising in multi-objective optimization of composite hybrid structures.

COVID-19 and viral anti-Asian racism: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of memes and the racialization of the COVID-19 pandemic

This article examines how internet memes both enacted and reproduced racialization of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were motivated to undertake this work by a surge in hatred towards and violence against people with East Asian heritage following the outbreak of COVID-19. We focus on memes because of their ubiquity in contemporary culture and their capacity to both reflect and shape discourses. We conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis of two prominent memes – juxtaposing a ‘top-down’ process of meme selection and distribution (the sharing of ‘The Kung-Flu Kid’ meme on Instagram by Donald Trump Jr) with a ‘bottom-up’ process (the ‘Corona-chan’ meme that originated on the website 4chan). We situate our study in a growing literature on politicized memes, challenging an emerging consensus that lauds ‘bottom-up’ memes as a democratizing force enabling resistance to hegemony, inequality and injustice. While we do not reject this characterization outright, we add nuance, showing that racialized memetic discourses around COVID-19 were propagated both from the top-down and from the bottom-up. We conclude that memes are particularly powerful communicative tools in racialized discourse because their use of polysemy, humour and cultural reference allows them to subvert the mechanisms that sanction openly racist statements.

Software tools for analysis and synthesis of stochastic systems with high availability (XIV)

Paper presents the new multi-memetic modification of the Mind Evolutionary Computation (MEC) algorithm with the incorporated landscape analysis (LA) for solving global optimization in problems complex highly available systems (HAS). The proposed landscape analysis is based on the concept of Lebesgue integral and allows one to divide objective functions into three categories. Each category suggests a usage of specific hyper-heuristics for adaptive meme selection. The new algorithm and its software tools were utilized to solve an optimal control problem for the epidemic’s propagation model, based on the SIER model with pulse vaccination. Results of the numerical experiments demonstrate a significant influence of vaccination’s start time, frequency and intensity on the maximum number of infected individuals. Results of the numerical experiments demonstrate a significant influence of vaccination’s start time, frequency and intensity on the maximum number of infected individuals. The proposed algorithm helped to find and the optimal vaccination schedule in order to minimize the number of infect-ed individuals while also maintaining the volume of the utilized vaccine at the low level.

Translating Local Issues in Global Formats: The Case of Memes

The present article aims to study the phenomenon of memes, in the attempt to identify the level of globalization vis à vis localization these communicative, social and cultural products voice. This article therefore presents a small selection of memes from both the United Kingdom and Italy, and briefly analyses them from a linguistic and visual perspective. For reasons of space, the quantitative analysis of the corpus will not be discussed at length here. However, the qualitative analysis of the memes selected for this study will prove that the majority of the existing material, while adapting to global formats and visuals, often exploits regional and local varieties of language. Thus, since language is the expression of specific cultures, the analysis demonstrates how, despite globalization, local (and localized) features of the communities that create memes survive in their uniqueness. Hence, since memes are privileged forms of communication among younger members of society, the results point to a generation of youth that, despite the tendency to follow global models, is well aware of the traditional and local cultures they stem from and strive to keep them alive. On the basis of this analysis, the article finally argues that memes – like many other products of popular culture – represent a privileged arena which, if studied systematically through the tools of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, can reveal important aspects of the societies that produce them and their evolution.

Memes as games: The evolution of a digital discourse online

This study proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how and why certain memes prevail as a form of political discourse online. Since memes are constantly changing as they spread, drawing inferences from a population of memes as concrete digital artifacts is a pressing challenge for researchers. This article argues that meme selection and mutation are driven by a cooperative combination of three types of communication logic: wasteful play online, social media political expression, and cultural evolution. To illustrate this concept, we map Shepard Fairey’s Obama Hope Poster as it spreads online. Employing structural rhetorical analysis, the study categorizes Internet memes on branching diagrams as they evolve. We argue that mapping these variations is a useful tool for organizing memes as an expression of the values and preferences embedded in online communities. The study adds to the growing literature around the subversive nature of memetic diffusion in popular and political culture.

Structured Memetic Automation for Online Human-Like Social Behavior Learning

Meme automaton is an adaptive entity that autonomously acquires an increasing level of capability and intelligence through embedded memes evolving independently or via social interactions. This paper begins a study on memetic multiagent system (MeMAS) toward human-like social agents with memetic automaton. We introduce a potentially rich meme-inspired design and operational model, with Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Dawkins’ notion of a meme as the principal driving forces behind interactions among agents, whereby memes form the fundamental building blocks of the agents’ mind universe. To improve the efficiency and scalability of MeMAS, we propose memetic agents with structured memes in this paper. Particularly, we focus on meme selection design where the commonly used elitist strategy is further improved by assimilating the notion of like-attracts-like in the human learning. We conduct experimental study on multiple problem domains and show the performance of the proposed MeMAS on human-like social behavior.

Circulación de memes en WhatsApp: ambivalencias del humor desde la perspectiva de género

WhatsApp has become a social phenomenon. Everyone talks on WhatsApp! Users sending multimedia messages and sometimes memes: a visual-verbal joke emerged in digital culture to induce humorous responses in its receivers. This article analyzes a selection of memes captured for six months in a group of employed women aged between 50 and 55 years. The analysis begins with a characterization of prototypical meme. Then examines the topics and interprets the meaning of content distributed humorous. The results suggest that humor is more than laughter and humor is mediated by the social structure. Memes reflects the androcentric culture but now women and men are mocked equally.

Realization of an Adaptive Memetic Algorithm Using Differential Evolution and Q-Learning: A Case Study in Multirobot Path Planning

Memetic algorithms (MAs) are population-based meta-heuristic search algorithms that combine the composite benefits of natural and cultural evolutions. An adaptive MA (AMA) incorporates an adaptive selection of memes (units of cultural transmission) from a meme pool to improve the cultural characteristics of the individual member of a population-based search algorithm. This paper presents a novel approach to design an AMA by utilizing the composite benefits of differential evolution (DE) for global search and Q-learning for local refinement. Four variants of DE, including the currently best self-adaptive DE algorithm, have been used here to study the relative performance of the proposed AMA with respect to runtime, cost function evaluation, and accuracy (offset in cost function from the theoretical optimum after termination of the algorithm). Computer simulations performed on a well-known set of 25 benchmark functions reveal that incorporation of Q-learning in one popular and one outstanding variants of DE makes the corresponding algorithm more efficient in both runtime and accuracy. The performance of the proposed AMA has been studied on a real-time multirobot path-planning problem. Experimental results obtained for both simulation and real frameworks indicate that the proposed algorithm-based path-planning scheme outperforms the real-coded genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and DE, particularly its currently best version with respect two standard metrics defined in the literature.

Directional cultural change by modification and replacement of memes.

Evolutionary approaches to culture remain contentious. A source of contention is that cultural mutation may be substantial and, if it drives cultural change, then current evolutionary models are not adequate. But we lack studies quantifying the contribution of mutations to directional cultural change. We estimated the contribution of one type of cultural mutations--modification of memes--to directional cultural change using an amenable study system: learned birdsongs in a species that recently entered an urban habitat. Many songbirds have higher minimum song frequency in cities, to alleviate masking by low-frequency noise. We estimated that the input of meme modifications in an urban songbird population explains about half the extent of the population divergence in song frequency. This contribution of cultural mutations is large, but insufficient to explain the entire population divergence. The remaining divergence is due to selection of memes or creation of new memes. We conclude that the input of cultural mutations can be quantitatively important, unlike in genetic evolution, and that it operates together with other mechanisms of cultural evolution. For this and other traits, in which the input of cultural mutations might be important, quantitative studies of cultural mutation are necessary to calibrate realistic models of cultural evolution.

A multi-objective approach for robust airline scheduling

We present a memetic approach for multi-objective improvement of robustness influencing features (called robustness objectives) in airline schedules. Improvement of the objectives is obtained by simultaneous flight retiming and aircraft rerouting, subject to a fixed fleet assignment. Approximations of the Pareto optimal front are obtained by applying a multi-meme memetic algorithm. We investigate biased meme selection to encourage exploration of the boundaries of the search space and compare it with random meme selection. An external population of high quality solutions is maintained using the adaptive grid archiving algorithm. The presented approach is applied to investigate simultaneous improvement of reliability and flexibility in real world schedules from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Experimental results show that the approach enables us to obtain schedules with significant improvements for the considered objectives. A large scale simulation study was undertaken to quantify the influence of the robustness objectives on the operational performance of the schedules. Rigorous sensitivity analysis of the results shows that the influence of the schedule reliability is dominant and that increased schedule flexibility could improve the operational performance.

Dennett, Foucault, and the Selection of Memes

The idea of cultural evolution, coined by Daniel Dennett, suggests we might be able to formulate a Darwinian type of explanation for the adaptive 'tricks' we learn as human beings. The proposed explanation makes use of the idea of memes. That idea is examined and related to semantic units linked to the terms in a natural language. It is agreed with Dennett that these are of pivotal significance in understanding the structure of human cognition. The alternative is then explored to the chaos of worddemons that Dennett appeals to in explaining why and how we think and enter into discursive relations. Beginning with certain thoughts about language games the essay moves on to consider the relations of power and knowledge that shape discursive reality and explain our subjectivities and actions. This leads to a sketch of Foucaultian theory as an advance in the philosophy of mind required to move beyond fairly gestural accounts of psychological explanation to be found in the standard biologically motivated approaches.