A story summarizer benefits greatly from a reader model because a reader model enables the story summarizer to focus on delivering useful knowledge in minimal time with minimal effort. Such a summarizer can, in particular, eliminate disconnected story elements, deliver only story elements connected to conceptual content, focus on particular concepts of interest, such as revenge, and make use of...

on a Sumerian clay tablet dating from about 2500 B.C. It describes the cleansing of wounds with water and milk followed by a dressing with honey and resin. The Egyptians discovered that a closed wound will heal faster than a wound which is left open. They devised an adhesive dressing by applying gum to linen strips which were applied to draw the edges of an open wound together. The Ebers papyru...

I report on special features of a course on statistics and probabilities at my university, where future teachers of mathematics in primary school are instructed on en-active representations of statistical situations and on their analogue modelling. I also report on empirical work with future mathematics teachers of primary school in Baden Württemberg who have been instructed to introduce simple...

The article deals with a Mediaeval hagiographic text dating from 1309, Joinville's work Histoire de Saint Louis. The text is a hagiography or sacred biography, a legal testimony that served in the canonisation process of Louis IX, but, at the same time, also the chronicle of a crusader expedition, that is, the story of a journey which was both an expedition and a pilgrimage. Finally, the text i...

Disease is a universal feature of life for multicellular organisms, and the study of disease has contributed to the establishment of key concepts in the biological sciences. This implies strong connections between plant pathology and basic biology, something that could perhaps be made more apparent to undergraduate students interested in the life sciences. To that end, we present an instruction...