This study presents the results of an initial phase of a project seeking to convert texts into a more accessible form for people with autism spectrum disorders by means of text simplification technologies. Random samples of Simple Wikipedia articles are compared with texts from News, Health, and Fiction genres using four standard readability indices (Kincaid, Flesch, Fog and SMOG) and sixteen l...

This ethnographic study explores the implications of romance reading for young Indian women’s gender, class, and national identities in one urban setting in South India. The project demonstrates that the practice of reading Western romance fiction is deeply embedded within patriarchal discourses of feminine respectability that exert control over women’s sexuality. Young women’s fascination for ...

Previous studies have suggested that fiction book reading has a stronger positive effect on vocabulary development than nonfiction. In this study, we examined this phenomenon in terms of word appearance information in fiction (story texts), nonfiction (explanation texts), and web text using latent semantic analysis (LSA). In a human experiment with Japanese undergraduates, we replicated fiction...

Throughout Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield’s long career in the first half of the twentieth century, he produced both fiction and non-fiction writings on a wide variety of subjects, but there was one topic that consistently reappeared in novels, short stories, essays, and non-fiction works: the blending of people and nature in the farm landscape. This paper will examine the landsc...

This paper uses a narrative literary study to discuss how the science fiction prototyping method has been applied so far in different disciplines, including technology and engineering research (specifically Intelligent Environment research), foresight, futuresand business studies. Then the paper presents very similar practices in human-computer interaction, entitled as e.g. critical design, spe...

The paper presents a bilingual English-Spanish parallel corpus aligned at the paragraph level. The corpus consists of twelve large novels found in Internet and converted into text format with manual correction of formatting problems and errors. We used a dictionary-based algorithm for automatic alignment of the corpus. Evaluation of the results of alignment is given. There are very few availabl...

Reading is a multi-sensory activity, entailing perceptual, cognitive and motor interactions with whatever is being read. With digital technology, reading manifests itself as being extensively multi-sensory – both in more explicit and more complex ways than ever before. In different ways from traditional reading technologies such as the codex, digital technology illustrates how the act of readin...

In perfect competition, there is a sense in which no supplier makes any purposeful, meaningful decision regarding the price that it sets. Rather, because of perfect substitutability between all products (recall the assumption of homogenous goods in a perfectly-competitive market), firms are all price-takers. A view of firms as price-takers is incompatible with the notion that we would now like ...

In Hodgkin's disease, cytogenetically aberrant clones have been demonstrated in a minority of cases studied. In the remaining cases, only normal metaphases have been found, but it is questionable whether normal karyotypes actually correspond to the pathognomonic Hodgkin and Reed-Sternberg (HRS) cells. Numerical aberrations could be studied by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). However, ...