Participants generated lists of exemplars from the categories of animals, tools, and fruit, and their lists were used to determine the relative accessibility of individual exemplars. Measures of accessibility included output dominance (the number of participants who listed an exemplar), rank (how early instances were listed), and two scores that reflect their combination-output precedence and d...

This paper describes the design and development of an interactive narrative for the ‘Experimenta Vanishing Point’ media arts exhibition in 2005. The Cocktail Party Effect tells the story of the imminent extinction of Great Apes in the wild using touch and sound in the absence of visual elements. The narrative is driven by haptic-audio exploration of a virtual cocktail glass which functions as a...

‘Words, words, words.’ This was Hamlet’s reply to Polonius’ question, ‘What do you read, my lord?’ (Shakespeare, 1603) [1]. By repeating the word three times, Hamlet suggests that what he is reading is meaningless. Before launching the journal Archives of Public Health, we have asked ourselves: ‘Do we not already produce too many words too many journals?’ or in other words ‘What is the added va...

The aim of this paper is to call to attention a very large and important area of human factors engineering that is almost entirely neglected. This area consists of the language and the words that are attached to the tools, machines, systems, and operations with which human factors engineers are concerned. Examples, illustrations, and data are cited to show that changes in the words used in man-...

Zeidari Nasavi’s Nafsat al-Masdoor is one of the few works which are written in technical prose and mainly aim at conveying meaning rather than affection. Considering the emotional strain of his literary text, Zeidari believes music has the highest effect on conveying the feeling, and in various ways, including the use of elements of prosody, literary figures, and the selection and arrang...