People are constrained by their culture and social life when telling stories. A second language learner then cannot be expected to tell stories in the target language without cross-cultural effects that influence the way of narration. The present study examined the role of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) in the organization of narratives by focusing on Persian speakers’ and EFL...

User stories are a widespread instrument for representing requirements. They describe small user-oriented parts of the system and guide the daily work of developers. Often however, user stories are too coarse, so that misunderstandings or dependencies remain unforeseeable. Granularity of user stories needs to be investigated more, but at the same time is a hard-to-grasp concept. This paper inve...

We introduce Claude Lévi Strauss’ canonical formula (CF), an attempt to rigorously formalise the general narrative structure of myth. This formula utilises the Klein group as its basis, but a recent work draws attention to its natural quaternion form, which opens up the possibility that it may require a quantum inspired interpretation. We present the CF in a form that can be understood by a non...

When in search of an explanation for the nature of philosophy, a good starting point is to inquire as to its origins. As is commonly known, Occidental philosophy originated in Ancient Greece as a substitute for mythological and religious explanations. Instead of accepting explanations of the foundations and origins of reality based on the anthropomorphic projections of mythology, the early Gree...

Life and death, generation and corruption are obviously universal experiences of mankind. Man had to deal with these phenomena and search for psychological accommodation to the objective facts. Man, however, has tremendous capacity for imagination and wonder -so it is easy to let our imagination err in the gray zone, especially when it seeks to satisfy our deepest desires. Thus the notions of t...

One way people learn new words is through reading books and stories. Little kids love hearing their favorite stories over and over and are also very good at learning new words. We wondered if reading the same stories could be helping preschool kids learn new words. Our research tested if it was better to read the same stories over and over or to read a few different stories. Here, we tell you a...

Hundreds of years ago, sailors were terrified by the Kraken, a dreadful sea monster capable of sinking ships and with a taste for human flesh. Today we know the legends of this monster were based on sightings of giant squids. This animal belongs to the genus Architeuthis and was the subject of many scientific studies. Despite its enormous size (up to 18m), the giant squid is astoundingly elusiv...

This essay argues that the semi-biographical film 8 Mile represents Eminem as being both racially distinctive and as possessing universal commercial appeal. 8 Mile accomplishes this paradoxical construction by portraying ‘‘Rabbit’’ as ‘‘white trash,’’ a discursively ‘‘dark’’ (white) object, and as an American mythological white subject. The film makes whiteness hyper-visible by subjecting it to...

This study takes teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL) into a gaming environment. Students fundamentally engaged in a mythological context in a 3D online virtual space called Quest Atlantis. Such an environment was in sharp contrast with how English is taught in a typical Chinese classroom in Mainland China. Preliminary findings reveal that co-questing is promising for impro...