Male infertility has been under-researched, and in part this seems due to a strong reticence by men to talk to researchers about infertility. Rather than suggest possible features of male infertility that might lead to this reticence, this paper explores how researchers have themselves accounted for the high nonresponse rates. The analysis details the way in which social scientific reasoning ab...

We present a system that uses evolutionary optimization to suggest new story-world events that, if added to an existing interactive story, would most improve the average interactive experience, according to author-supplied criteria. In doing so, we aim to apply some of the ideas from drama-managed storytelling, such as authorial aesthetic control, in an unguided setting more akin to emergent st...

This paper reports an experiment in authorship attribution that reveals considerable authorial structure in texts written by authors with very similar background and training, with genre and topic being strictly controlled for. We interpret our results as supporting the hypothesis that authors have ’textual fingerprints’, at least for texts produced by authors who are not consciously changing t...

The purpose of this article is to propose a tool for measuring distances between different styles of one or more authors. The main study is focused on measuring and visualizing distances in a space induced by ranked lexical features. We investigate the case of Vladimir Nabokov, a bilingual Russian English language author.

Role-playing games, and other types of contemporary video games, usually contain a main storyline consisting of several causally related quests. As players have different motivations, tastes and preferences, it can be beneficial to customize game plotlines. In this paper, we present an offline algorithm for adapting human-authored game plotlines for computer roleplaying games to suit the unique...

This study aimed to develop a pain attitudes questionnaire (PAQ) and examine its reliability and validity for use in assessing the constructs of stoicism and cautiousness relevant to pain perception. The questionnaire was administered to 373 healthy community-dwelling individuals who were subsequently divided into four age groups to test for differences in stoicism and cautiousness, two attitud...