Telling stories is an important aspect virtual agents designed to interact with people socially over time. We describe an experiment designed to investigate the impact of the identity, presentation form, and perspective of a virtual storyteller on a human user who engages in a story-swapping activity with two virtual characters. For each interaction, the user was given 10 “ice-breaker” question...

Background Experts have recommended the adoption of health literacy universal precautions, whereby health care providers make all health information easier to understand, confirm everyone's comprehension, and reduce the difficulty of health-related tasks. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services selected three health literate practices to track progress in the adoption of health literac...

Literate programming is a method to integrate programs with their documentation. Compilable modules are no separate entities, but they are extracted from the documentation. Most literate programming tools use explicit commands in the formatter input files to guide the extraction process. The CLiP approach presented in this paper relies on coding style instead. This makes the code extraction com...

At the beginning of the 21st century we are in ensconced in an information and technology explosion. There is more data available than ever before and people throughout the world are being overwhelmed by data and information. People need training to use the available data and information meaningfully and productively. Not only do individuals have to be literate, e.g. know how to read with under...

It is confirmed through information users’ daily activities that they apply many shortcuts, ignore some information and use heuristics – particularly in electronic social networking environments. The critical analysis of the literature and research findings are used as a base to identify and create a short (preliminary) inventory of information heuristics that people use at various stages of se...

Icons, or pictorial and graphical objects, are commonly used in human-computer interaction (HCI) fields as the mediator in order to communicate information to users. However, there have been little studies focusing on the majority of the world’s population – semi-literate communities – in terms of icon design. In this study, a new icon taxonomy of four quadrants, namely abstract-general, abstra...

Learning to read and write generates new rules within the language processing systems. These new rules significantly change the manner in which some operations are performed. This finding was studied, by comparing the performance of literate and illiterate persons in several tasks. It was found that illiterate individuals (1) had difficulties in repeating pseudowords, (2) were worse at memorizi...

The size of the intrahousehold externality created when a literate household member provides literacy services to illiterate members is estimated in this paper, using a model of children’s heightfor-age in Papua New Guinea. This externality appears to be large. These results support the use of a new measure of literacy, developed by Basu and Foster (1998) to take account of the gains when illit...

Creativity is not a planned emergence. As it happens, when person who convicted crime in the eyes of society, or by chance, and its consequences isolate him prison, his feelings guilt make to do some kind artistic work. People like Mr.Puthuraja, Mr. Pozhilan, Dr. Prakash, Chidambaram Puzhilan, were Chennai Puzhal Central Jail have written novels, short stories (collections), empirical essays co...