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Many students choose not to pursue higher education due to its financial burden and the looming threat of debt that follows. However, 10 million dollars of scholarship money in Canada goes unclaimed each year due to a lack of applicants (Griffiths, 2022). Students who require financial assistance for higher education can only capitalize on the available scholarship money if they have the necessary skills to create successful applications (Hoff, 2013). Furthermore, the low-income students who will benefit the most from access to these resources often have to work part-time jobs after school, so they are unable to devote the necessary time to this process (Singh,1998). To address this barrier, we have developed an equitable, accessible module-based program that strives to connect the surplus of untapped scholarship money each year with students who desire to fund their pursuit of higher education. These modules will facilitate equitable access to higher education by fostering students' skills related to budgeting, financial planning, scholarship searching, and application writing and will be implemented directly in the high school curriculum. To facilitate their implementation and avoid any potential pitfalls, the modules would decrease the burden on educators, be accessible to students with disabilities, and include content-related to cybersecurity. By helping foster students' self-efficacy and confidence in their knowledge and skills so they can apply for funding, we aim to increase the number of people applying for scholarships so that financial resources are no longer a significant barrier to higher education. References Griffiths, A. (2022, January 8). Canadian scholarships by province. GrantMe.https://grantme.ca/canadian-scholarships-by-province/ Hoff, E. (2013). Interpreting the early language trajectories of children from low-SES and language minority homes: Implications for closing achievement gaps. Developmental Psychology, 49(1), 4–14. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027238 Singh, K. (1998). Part-Time Employment in High School and Its Effect on Academic Achievement. The Journal of Educational Research, 91(3), 131–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220679809597533

The Old Norse language, dialects of which were spoken across Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, has no equivalent of the Modern English umbrella term ‘humour’. (Of course, neither do many languages, dead or living: Old Norse acts as a case study here for a methodology that could be applied to multiple other instances.) One way, then, to approach a culture’s sense of what for Modern English speakers falls under ‘humour’, is to examine its own vocabulary of terms relating to phenomena like amusement, entertainment, jokes, and so on, and the contexts in which they appear. This allows for a culturally specific mapping of what forms of ‘humour’ were prevalent, appropriate, prized, or otherwise. The chapter offers contextual discussion of Old Norse terms like gaman (amusement), skemmtun (entertainment), leikr (game, play), hlaegi (ridicule), glens (jesting), hað (mockery), and others. In doing so it aims to highlight the problems and complexities of translation and interpretation from a linguistic and cultural context in which there are often no easy one-on-one correspondences with Modern English vocabulary and terminology, as well as to show where continuities with Modern English can be found.

Background To evaluate and establish a digital workflow for the custom designing and 3D printing of mouth opening tongue-depressing (MOTD) stents for patients receiving radiotherapy for head and neck cancer. Methods We retrospectively identified 3 patients who received radiation therapy (RT) for primary head and neck cancers with MOTD stents. We compared two methods for obtaining the digital impressions of patients’ teeth. The first method involved segmentation from computed tomography (CT) scans, as previously established by our group, and the second method used 3D scanning of the patients’ articulated stone models that were made during the conventional stent fabrication process. Three independent observers repeated the process to obtain digital impressions which provided data to design customized MOTD stents. For each method, we evaluated the time efficiency, dice similarity coefficient (DSC) for reproducibility, and the 3D printed stents’ accuracy. For the 3D scanning method, we evaluated the registration process using manual and automatic approaches. Results For all patients, the 3D scanning method demonstrated a significant advantage over the CT scanning method in terms of time efficiency with over 60% reduction in time consumed (p

This chapter examines the Old Norse myth of the mead of poetry in light of the distributed cognition hypothesis. It explains how Norse skaldic poetry scaffolds various cognitive processes, and then argues that the myth of the poetic mead, which sees poetry as an alcoholic substance, is exploited by Old Norse poets to understand and describe poetry’s effect on the mind. Examples are given that suggest poets saw poetry as ‘mind altering’ in ways that resonate with certain aspects of the distributed cognition hypothesis: in particular, that poetry is cognition-enabling through feedback-loop processes; that the mind can be extended into the world and over time in poetry; that cognition can be shared and/or furthered by engaging with other minds; that the body plays a non-trivial role; and that poetry performs mental and affective work in the world.

Background and purpose Customized mouth-opening-tongue-depressing-stents (MOTDs) may reduce toxicity in patients with head and neck cancers (HNC) receiving radiotherapy (RT). However, making MOTDs requires substantial resources, which limits their utilization. Previously, we described a workflow for fabricating customized 3D-printed MOTDs. This study reports the results of a prospective trial testing the non-inferiority of 3D-printed to standard and commercially-available (TruGuard) MOTDs as measured by patient reported outcomes (PROs). Materials and methods PROs were collected at 3 time points: (t1) simulation, (t2) prior to RT, (t3) between fractions 15–25 of RT. Study participants received a 3D-printed MOTDs (t1, t2, t3), a wax-pattern (t1), an acrylic-MOTDs (t2, t3) and an optional TruGuard (t1, t2, t3). Patients inserted the stents for 5–10 min and completed a PRO-questionnaire covering ease-of-insertion and removal, gagging, jaw-pain, roughness and stability. Inter-incisal opening and tongue-displacement were recorded. With 39 patients, we estimated 90% power to detect a non-inferiority margin of 2 at a significance level of 0.025. Matched pairs and t-test were used for statistics. Results 41 patients were evaluable. The 3D-printed MOTDs achieved a significantly better overall PRO score compared to the wax-stent (p = 0.0007) and standard-stent (p = 0.0002), but was not significantly different from the TruGuard (p = 0.41). There was no difference between 3D-printed and standard MOTDs in terms of inter-incisal opening (p = 0.4) and position reproducibility (p = 0.98). The average 3D-printed MOTDs turn-around time was 8 vs 48 h for the standard-stent. Conclusions 3D-printed stents demonstrated non-inferior PROs compared to TruGuard and standard-stents. Our 3D-printing process may expand utilization of MOTDs.

I am grateful to Dr Judy Quinn for discussion of the ideas in this paper at an early stage. I have also benefitted greatly from the feedback from various audiences who have heard earlier versions, in particular that of the Scandinavian Studies seminar, University College London.

The Islendingasogur [Sagas of Icelanders] are often said to be obsessed with law. But while the importance of legal themes to saga narrative cannot be doubted, the extent to which the sagas cite technical details of law and legal process varies greatly across the corpus. The use of law in this manner has various literary and stylistic effects which should be viewed as integral to the narrative design, and explored as such within individual sagas.

Review(s) of: Living through conquest: The politics of early English, 1020-1220, by Treharne, Elaine, (Oxford Textual Perspectives), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, paperback, pp. xvi, 218, 7 b/w illustrations, R.R.P. 16.99 pounds, ISBN 9780199585267.

Review(s) of: The academy of Odin: Selected papers on old norse Literature, by Lonnroth, Lars, (The Viking Collection, 19), Odense, University Press of Southern Denmark, 2011, cloth, pp. 426, 5 b/w, 2 colour illustrations, R.R.P. DKK300.00, ISBN 9788776745899.

Review(s) of: Behaving like fools: Voice, gesture, and laughter in texts, manuscripts, and early books, by Perry, Lucy and Alexander Schwarz, eds, (International Medieval Research, 17), Turnhout, Brepols, 2011, hardback, pp. xii, 301, 28 b/w illustrations, R.R.P. 80.00, ISBN 9782503531571.