This paper considers the alleged incompatibility of humour and religion, identifies the need for a multifaceted approach to the study of humour and religion, and spotlights important scholarship on ...humour and religion. It also outlines how this special issue emerged from an online symposium organized by the editors (Nicole Graham and Paul S Martin) in 2020 titled: The Sacred and The Profanity: Humour, Religion and Ritual, hosted by the University of Bristol and the University of Kent and introduces the various papers which are spread across both the globe and historical periods and which engage various media.
By means of functional magnetic resonance imaging the present paper analyzes the neural correlates of processing and appreciating incongruity-resolution and nonsense cartoons. Furthermore, the ...relation between experience seeking and these neural substrates was investigated as this personality characteristic is known to influence humor appreciation. In the processing of incongruity-resolution stimuli the incongruity of the joke is largely resolvable, whereas in nonsense stimuli it is only partially resolvable and more incongruity remains. The anterior medial prefrontal cortex, bilateral superior frontal gyri and temporo-parietal junctions (TPJ) show more activation during processing of incongruity-resolution than of nonsense cartoons. These differences indicate that processing of incongruity-resolution cartoons requires more integration of multi-sensory information and coherence building, as well as more mental manipulation and organization of information. In addition, less self-reference might be established in nonsense cartoons as it is more absurd and more often deals with impossible situations. Higher experience-seeking scores correlate with increased activation in prefrontal, posterior temporal regions and the hippocampus. This might be due to a more intense exploration of the humorous stimuli as experience seekers tend to search novel mental stimulation. Furthermore, experience seeking was positively associated with brain reactivity towards processing nonsense in contrast to incongruity-resolution stimuli, which is in line with behavioral studies that showed a preference for nonsense humor by experience seekers.
•Development of an entropy-based evaluation method to evaluate ontology strength.•Evaluation an ontological semantic ontology using the evaluation method.•Evaluation of the backbone of the UMLS with ...this method.
In this paper we introduce a method to develop knowledge bases for medical decision support systems, with a focus on evaluating such knowledge bases. Departing from earlier efforts with concept maps, we developed an ontological-semantic knowledge base and evaluated its information content using the metrics we have developed, and then compared the results to the UMLS backbone knowledge base. The evaluation method developed uses information entropy of concepts, but in contrast to previous approaches normalizes it against the number of relations to evaluate the information density of knowledge bases of varying sizes. A detailed description of the knowledge base development and evaluation is discussed using the underlying algorithms, and the results of experimentation of the methods are explained. The main evaluation results show that the normalized metric provides a balanced method for assessment and that our knowledge base is strong, despite having fewer relationships, is more information-dense, and hence more useful. The key contributions in the area of developing expert systems detailed in this paper include: (a) introduction of a normalized entropy-based evaluation technique to evaluate knowledge bases using graph theory, (b) results of the experimentation of the use of this technique on existing knowledge bases.
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