This paper presents an approach for automatically identifying high-level narrative structure information, particularly character roles, from unannotated folk tales. We introduce a new representation called action matrices to encode Propp’s narrative theory on character role and their “sphere of action.” We tested our approach in a fully automated system (Voz) using a corpus of 10 folk tales. Ou...

True-crime stories of outlaws have been a part of popular culture in England since the Middle Ages. Tales of criminality gained increasing circulation in print through the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (1674–1913) and the “dying confessions” published in broadside form by the Ordinary of Newgate in the eighteenth century.1 The confessional broadsides were designed as warnings for their audience; t...

This article will present what we know of the life and times of an important alchemist, Ibn Umayl. It is entitled ‘Towards a Context’ because I have not yet consulted a number of his treatises, which are mostly only available as manuscripts. Ibn Umayl’s position in alchemy accords with Hermetic doctrines, and may have developed as a traditionalist reaction to developments in alchemy around the ...

Anthropologists, borrowing techniques from evolutionary biology, have demonstrated that some common fairy tales can be traced back 5,000 years, or more, long before the development of written traditions.

Tales from the crypt ow many stem cells reside in a human colonic crypt and how do they divide and regenerate? According to the deterministic theory, a small number of " immortal " stem cells haunt a crypt, and when they divide, each generates a single replacement stem cell. The stochastic model, in contrast, contends that a crypt niche harbors many stem cells, and each cell division randomly g...

To cite: Quilliam S. J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2014;40:142–144. BACKGROUND To bridge the gap – that’s what my brief for the Journal has always been. To create understanding between reproductive health professionals and health service consumers – to help the former appreciate the needs of the latter. This is why I often base my columns directly on the experiences of end-users: women patient...

In this Science-Fiction Prototyping article, I present an imaginative forward look at how artificial intelligence and virtual environments might change the nature of future education. The discussion is intended to be a somewhat speculative and thought provoking journey into what may be possible. At its root, it imagines a future time when the technological singularity has been reached, and mach...

We study the new problem of Huffman-like codes subject to individual restrictions on the code-word lengths of a subset of the source words. These are prefix codes with minimal expected code-word length for a random source where additionally the code-word lengths of a subset of the source words is prescribed, possibly differently for every such source word. Based on a structural analysis of prop...

This past spring, estuarine ecologist Denise Breitburg and her postdoctoral fellow, Richard Fulford (both of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC)) brought together 20 ecologists and fisheries biologists from academic institutions, government agencies and the Smithsonian for a three-day workshop to attempt to “disentangle” the effects of eutrophication (excessive nutrient input) ...

Mathematical modeling is being increasingly recognized within the biomedical sciences as an important tool that can aid the understanding of biological systems. The heavily regulated cell renewal cycle in the colonic crypt provides a good example of how modeling can be used to find out key features of the system kinetics, and help to explain both the breakdown of homeostasis and the initiation ...