Dying Prepared in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe offers an analysis of the various ways in which people made preparations for death in medieval and early modern Northern Europe.

The concept of process is ubiquitous in science, engineering and everyday life. Category theory, and monoidal categories in particular, provide an abstract framework for modelling processes of many kinds. In this paper, we concentrate on sequential and parallel decomposability of processes in the framework of monoidal categories: We will give a precise definition, what it means for processes to be decomposable. Moreover, through examples, we argue that viewing parallel processes as coupled in this framework can be seen as a category (...) mistake or a misinterpretation. We highlight the suitability of category theory for a structuralistic interpretation of mathematical modelling and argue that for appliers of mathematics, such as engineers, there is a pragmatic advantage from this. (shrink)

The Nordic countries have often been regarded as ideal states with respect to their organization of society, including, among other things, their democracy, public education systems, gender equality, and strong concern for nature. From the late twentieth century onward, an increasing interest in Nordic literature, film, and design—genres where social and environmental themes have been strongly highlighted—can be noted internationally.This discourse of the Nordic societies can be considered to contain both utopian and dystopian aspects. As Kjerstin Aukrust and Cecilie Weiss-Andersen (...) show in their article on French democracy, the Nordic, understood as a utopian motif, has been a long-standing topic in modern French... (shrink)

Up until the end of the twentieth century, the dystopia was a practically nonexistent genre in Finnish literature. However, since the turn of the century, there has been a marked dystopian turn. In addition to the anxieties associated with the passing of the millennium, emerging global issues such as digital development, environmental problems, and terrorism have contributed to the ongoing popularity of dystopian fiction.1 At the same time, Finnish literature has been strongly influenced by the trends of international book markets. (...) For example, the unprecedented popularity of dystopian young adult literature has inspired Finnish authors. In the past ten years, a number of writers have published... (shrink)