To enter Agnon's fictive universe, one must acknowledge the very central place occupied by Torah as the fabric of the world that both contains Creation and binds God to Israel. Torah, as pre-existing text, authorizes subsequent interpretations in the assumption that they are already contained within it. Using the texts of rabbinic tradition, Agnon maps out this territory in Seper, soper vesippu...

Males usually have little involvement in the dramas of social insect societies, but a newly identified Cardiocondyla ant species has been found to produce long-lived, murderous males, even before the first workers, in a new form of queen-queen competition.

Entertainment-education dramas can persuade because they show characters who change their behavior to improve their lives. Stories have unique power and nuance to describe people’s behavior and interactions, and their consequences. When audience members see that they could be in the same situation as the characters, stories can move them to change, too. E-E is particularly able to influence beh...

A content analysis was conducted to examine sexual consequences on teen programming. The sample consisted of prime-time television dramas that featured characters between the ages of 12 and 22 years. Two major goals guided the study. First, the types of sexual consequences in teen programming were investigated. Results showed that emotional and social consequences far outnumbered physical conse...

Drama, at least according to the Aristotelian view, is effective inasmuch as it successfully mirrors real aspects of human behavior. This leads to the hypothesis that successful dramas will portray fictional social networks that have the same properties as those typical of human beings across ages and cultures. We outline a methodology for investigating this hypothesis and use it to examine ten...

We approach creating an interactive drama from the viewpoint that having a human author involved in the creation of the drama is a valuable component. Given that there is this author, we suddenly find opposing forces inherent to the system: the amount of interaction we desire to give the User of the system vs. the amount of dramatic control we wish to give the Writer. In this paper, we propose ...

Creating an interactive drama requires authors to produce large quantities of story content. A programmer or knowledge expert typically creates this content because they have experience with the story environment. By using an authoring tool someone with less experience with the story environment can organize and create story content. The Scribe Authoring Tool is an authoring tool that will be u...