Gender bias in video game dialogue.

Gender biases in fictional dialogue are well documented in many media. In film, television and books, female characters tend to talk less than male characters, talk to each other less than male characters talk to each other, and have a more limited range of things to say. Identifying these biases is an important step towards addressing them. However, there is a lack of solid data for video games, now one of the major mass media which has the ability to shape conceptions of gender and gender roles. We present the Video Game Dialogue Corpus, the first large-scale, consistently coded corpus of video game dialogue, which makes it possible for the first time to measure and monitor gender representation in video game dialogue. It demonstrates that there is half as much dialogue from female characters as from male characters. Some of this is due to a lack of female characters, but there are also biases in who female characters speak to, and what they say. We make suggestions for how game developers can avoid these biases to make more inclusive games.

Trope analysis and folk intuitions.

This paper outlines a new method for identifying folk intuitions to complement armchair intuiting and experimental philosophy (X-Phi), and thereby enrich the philosopher's toolkit. This new approach-trope analysis-depends not on what people report their intuitions to be but rather on what they have made and engaged with; I propose that tropes in fiction ('you can't change the past', 'a foreknown future isn't free' and so forth) reveal which theories, concepts and ideas we find intuitive, repeatedly and en masse. Imagination plays a dual role in both existing methods and this new approach: it enables us to create the scenarios that elicit our intuitions, and also to mentally represent them. The method I propose allows us to leverage the imagination of the many rather than the few on both counts-scenarios are both created and consumed by the folk themselves.

The effects of skeletal preparation techniques on DNA from human and non-human bone.

The forensic pathologist increasingly relies on the forensic anthropologist to be the consulting expert in human identification. Likewise, if identification is not possible from visual inspection of skeletal remains, the forensic biologist may be called upon to conduct DNA analysis. The possibility of downstream DNA testing needs to be considered when skeletal preparation techniques are employed to deflesh human remains, as they have the potential to strongly impact genetic analyses and subsequent identification. In this study, three cleaning techniques, boiling bone in water, in bleach, and in powdered detergent/sodium carbonate, were tested for their effect on nuclear and mtDNA recovery from a variety of human and non-human bones. A statistically significant reduction in DNA yields occurred in non-human bones cleaned with bleach, and DNA degradation was apparent electrophoretically. The human bones also showed much lower yields from bleach cleaning, while the detergent/carbonate method allowed the largest segments of DNA to be amplified, indicating it may have a less degradative effect on bone DNA than either of the other cleaning processes.