interminable

to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance

then you put in your oar

no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before

tenor of the argument

around the age of 11, become capable of reflecting on their thinking and working with more abstract ideas. But more recent research has identified metacognitive abilities in much younger children, from around the age of three. 

try to explain a concept to yourself or a friend

Too often, metacognition remains in the background, engaged in only half-consciously and half-heartedly. The result is too much time spent employing unproductive learning strategies and spinning our wheels. More explicit metacognition can help teachers, parents, and students work smarter and learn more efficiently.

Literally, “metacognition” refers to a process coming “after” or “beyond” (meta-”) the act of acquiring knowledge (cognition). It is “thinking about thinking,” or the space beyond thinking where we can plan, monitor, and assess our efforts to think, know, or learn about something.

By this point, I felt I’d proven that the Uncanny Valley was functioning as a meme in what I consider its classic, Dawkins form, as a concept floating around with people like Lawrence Weschler who understand it deeply, with people who didn’t seem to care much at all about it, as in the monkey/Cage painting. But I had promised the audience that I’d investigate whether or not the Uncanny Valley was a meme as it is now defined by and on the internet. I pointed to a page on the concept in knowyourmeme.com, which lists it, but not without dissenters (we are talking about the internet after all). The Uncanny Valley ‘is not a meme. It is not a sub-culture. It is not a person. It is not related to the internet in any way. It does not belong on KYM’, read one comment from 2009. More pointed was this from 2012: ‘And what memetic materials have people made to purposefully exploit the Uncanny Valley?’In that same year, Masahiro Mori was interviewed on the occasion of a new translation of his by now famous essay. In his typically self-effacing manner, he discussed his work in light of a well-known Japanese children’s fable: ‘I think of myself as the dog in the story “Hanasaka Jiisan”… I bark “Dig here!” and then other people will dig and find treasure.’In 2013, I went digging, and in rooting around the meme-trove icanhazcheeseburger.com, found one (under its evolved definition): a picture of a ventriloquist’s dummy head, ‘THE UNCANNY VALLEY’ in caps and underlined below, and the following printed at the bottom, ‘And to think this was made to look charming and cute’ (Figure 2). Here, I was rewarded precisely with the extrinsic rather than the intrinsic, a viral text–image matrix rather than a pseudo-genetic concept transfer. Having long-since abandoned my rant, I was now ready to appreciate a fully networked visual aphorism or seen another way a wittily captioned image. Here was this new thing-in-the-world, multi-, or better yet unimediated, ever mutating matrices of meaning and, yes, fun. So with thanks to the originary intent of Richard Dawkins, the challenge from the Berkeley grad student, the brilliant barks of Masahiro Mori, and the anonymous craft of the icanhazcheeseburger poster, my rant that wasn’t comes to its end. window.figureViewer={doi:'10.1177/1470412914544517',path:'/na101/home/literatum/publisher/sage/journals/content/vcua/2014/vcua_13_3/1470412914544517/20200124',figures:[{i:'fig1-1470412914544517',type:'fig',g:[{m:'10.1177_1470412914544517-fig1.gif',l:'10.1177_1470412914544517-fig1.jpeg',size:'160 KB'}]} ,{i:'fig2-1470412914544517',type:'fig',g:[{m:'10.1177_1470412914544517-fig2.gif',l:'10.1177_1470412914544517-fig2.jpeg',size:'207 KB'}]} ]}

an alternate theory of memes as extrinsic entities, external to the mind and slithering through the culture itself

ts hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme which shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; memes also need transmission. Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means). Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time. Memes reproduce by copying from a nervous system to another one, either by communication or imitation. Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behavior of another individual. Communication may be direct or indirect, where mem

r existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.'[21] "Kilroy was here" was a graffito that became popular in the 1940s, and existed under various names in different countries, illustrating how a meme can be modified through replication. This is seen as one of the first widespread memes in the world[22] Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create