The word culture, from the Latin colo, -ere, with its root meaning "to cultivate", generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. Different definitions of "culture" reflect different theoretical bases for understanding, or criteria for evaluating, human activity. Anthropologists most commonly use the term "culture" to refer to the universal human capacity to classify, codify and communicate their experiences symbolically. This capacity is long been taken as a defining feature of the genus Homo. However, primatologists such as Jane Goodall have identified aspects of culture among our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.Goodall, J. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior.

Defining "culture"

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BBC News | UK | World Edition

Consumer inflation falls to 4.5%
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:12:18 -0000
Official figures show that UK inflation fell from 5.2% to 4.5% in October, as oil prices and transport costs fell.
Miliband warns of piracy danger
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:08:47 -0000
Foreign Secretary David Miliband says that piracy around Somalia "is a grave danger to stability in the region".
Council leader sorry over Baby P
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:45:05 -0000
The leader of Haringey Council in north London formally apologises for the death of Baby P in the borough.
300,000 UK visas 'wrongly issued'
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:30:16 -0000
Around 300,000 visas giving people the right to come to Britain may be wrongly approved every year, MPs are told.
Parents drowned in sea rescue bid
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:34:39 -0000
Three parents drowned trying to rescue their children from the sea while on holiday in Portugal, an inquest hears.
UK to auction carbon permits
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:26:41 -0000
The UK Government is to auction carbon emissions permits to power firms over the next 5 years.

The Economist: Britain

Scottish politics: The union forever?
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:06:15 -0000
Recession is cutting into the nationalists’ popularityONE of Alex Salmond’s proudest boasts from his first year as nationalist first minister of the devolved Scottish government was persuading local councils to freeze their tax levels. He achieved it by giving them a generous 5% spending increase for the fiscal year to March 2009 and much more freedom in how they spent it. But now inflation and recession are biting chunky holes in council budgets, cuts are having to be made and a lot of the election pledges of the Scottish National Party (SNP) are being binned. Mr Salmond’s seemingly unassailable post-election popularity has suddenly plunged as a result.The blows to the councils’ finances are big. Edinburgh thinks it will make only GBP23m from selling surplus land and property this year, rather than the GBP43m it expected. Extra fuel and energy costs will add GBP10m to its bills. Glasgow council says that the tanking property market will reduce its revenue from planning applications by about GBP1m a month. Fewer new homes also mean that council-tax receipts will be down by about GBP1.4m on the year. Councillors across Scotland are in a similar plight, and so are having to cut spending. ...
Renewable energy: The green pound
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:06:15 -0000
Greenery may create jobs—but not the ones its boosters thinkIT HAS been a confusing time for Britain’s environmentalists. Dismay greeted reports on November 6th that BP, an oil firm, was ditching plans to build a wind farm at the Isle of Grain, a blowy expanse of industrialised desolation in Kent. In fact, said BP, it was pulling out of wind energy in Britain altogether in favour of an American market brimming with $15 billion (GBP10 billion) a year in green-power subsidies. Four days later moods lifted when Vattenfall, a Swedish company, said it was joining forces with Scottish Power to build a 300MW, GBP780m wind farm off Kent. Britain is keen on windmills for two reasons. First, it has promised big reductions in carbon emissions (an 80% drop by 2050 compared with 1990) and a barely credible boost in the amount of energy it gets from renewable sources (15% by 2020). And second, ministers see green power as a growth industry. Gordon Brown said in June, for example, that renewable energy could provide 160,000 new jobs. The prime minister compared its potential with the explosive growth in the 1970s and 1980s of the offshore oil industry. ...
Cash and local councils: Icelandic saga
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:06:15 -0000
Were they reckless, badly advised or just unlucky?BACK in 1991 scores of local authorities used newfangled financial swaps to bet and lose millions on interest rates. They were let off the hook by the House of Lords: the peers ruled the deals null and void because council officers had been acting beyond their legal powers.No such defence can be used this time. Local governments—123 of them—stuffed GBP919.6m into accounts with Icelandic banks that paid over-the-odds interest rates until they collapsed and were nationalised in October, with deposits frozen. On November 13th council representatives were in Iceland to treat with Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm handling the bank work-out there. They have little chance of being repaid in full. ...
Interest-rates outlook: Plumbing new depths
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:06:15 -0000
The Bank of England signals more cuts to comeTHAT show-stopping cut in interest rates looked like a hard act to follow. But on November 12th Britain’s central bank rose to the occasion as it unveiled the dire forecasts that had prompted its decision a week earlier to cut the base rate from 4.5% to 3%. Even after its hefty monetary easing, the Bank of England now expects a nasty recession. Its central projection, set out in the quarterly Inflation Report, shows GDP falling by almost 2% in the year to the second quarter of 2009 (see chart). This outcome is far worse than the bank envisaged in August, even though its forecast then seemed fairly gloomy. ...
Child-killing: Most foul
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:06:15 -0000
The wrong lessons learnt, and another horrifying deathON NOVEMBER 11th two men were found guilty at the Old Bailey of killing a 17-month-old boy known to the public only as Baby P. The toddler had a broken back, eight fractured ribs, a missing fingernail and toenail, multiple bruises and an ear almost torn off. What finally killed him on August 3rd 2007 was a blow to the head so severe that the postmortem found a tooth in his stomach. The two men, one the mother’s boyfriend, the other a lodger, were found not guilty of murder. They will be sentenced on December 15th for “causing or allowing the death of a child”, an offence that was placed on the statute books in 2005 to stop those jointly culpable for a child’s death from avoiding punishment by blaming each other. Earlier, the baby’s mother had pleaded guilty to the same charge. The maximum sentence is 14 years. ...
Politics and the recession: Bigger, wider, deeper
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:06:15 -0000
Tax cuts make a cross-party comeback, thanks to economic woesHOUSES, financial services, iPods—all sold well during the decade and a half of economic growth that preceded Britain’s incipient recession. One thing there wasn’t a market for was tax cuts. Labour increased the tax burden to splurge on public services. Far from feeling put-upon, voters spurned offers of lower taxes from the Conservatives at consecutive elections. And the Liberal Democrats saw their vote go steadily up between 1997 and 2005 as they made the case for higher taxes.Yet such are the political changes being wrought by the downturn—the most profound of which remains the revival of Gordon Brown’s premiership—that soon all three parties could be standing on tax-cutting platforms. The pragmatic need to stimulate a flagging economy has achieved what years of principled arguments for lower taxes failed to do. ...

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