The eBetharké Syriac Digital Library Portal is a collaborative effort between the libraries at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; and the Beth Mardutho Syriac Institute, a traditional library of texts; to create a specialized digital library collection online. This digital library features content in and relating to Syriac, an Aramaic dialect spoken in the 1 century A.D. and for which...

This paper outlines the prevalence of developmental delay in children and discusses the recent literature regarding the benefits of early identification and evidence based strategies for developmental surveillance and screening. We describe a systematic approach to the child with developmental delay and the optimal methodology for arriving at the etiologic basis for the delay. A review of the m...

To a modern reader pornography and the representation of reproduction are mutually exclusive, despite their common subject matter: sex. But seventeenth-century pornographic texts do not conform to modern ideas about the nature of pornography. Sexual intercourse is defined as for the purpose of procreation with cataclysmic consequences resulting from its avoidance. In this period the pleasures o...

Inference about whether a word in one text has similar meaning to another word in the other text is an essential task in order to understand whether two texts have similar meaning. However, this inference becomes difficult especially when two words do not share a lexical root, do not have the same argument structure, or do not have the same part-of-speech. This paper presents an unsupervised ap...

Specialized applied fields in natural sciences – medicine, biology, chemistry etc. require building and exploring of information systems based on related text forms (words, phrases). These forms represent expert information and knowledge. The paper discusses the integration of two basic approaches – relational for structuring complex related texts and object oriented for data analysis. This con...

We describe an interactive narrative system that embodies Object Oriented Prompted Play (O2P2). This means that behaviours, attributes, and crucially stories are attached to objects in the story world. The approach is inspired by children’s social play where narrative emerges from collaborative, improvised negotiation. The object oriented architecture is appropriate for improvisation, imposing ...

This essay gives an overview of the metaphors that patients in comparison to caregivers employ to conceptualize their experience with the chronic degenerative, cognitive, and incurable aspects of Alzheimer's disease. It explores how the images (such as the journey, darkness, the death sentence, and torture) relate to the narration of cognitive decline and memory loss, and how these personal acc...

Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 2...

The paper presents a methodology for development of tools for semantics oriented search in repositories of digitized manuscripts. This methodology is based on the application of some Semantic Web technologies to existing manuscript collections that may include: electronic catalogue containing marked-up manuscript descriptions, full texts of manuscripts, digital images of manuscript pages. It is...

We argue that the current, predominantly task-oriented, approaz~hes to modularizing text • generation, while plausible and useful conceptually, set up spurious conceptual and operational constraints. We propose a data-driven approach to modularization and illustrate how it eliminates • •the previously ubiquitous constraints on combination of evidence across modules and on • control. We also bri...