The study of atmospheric ice-nucleating particles via microfluidically generated droplets

Ice-nucleating particles (INPs) play a significant role in the climate and hydrological cycle by triggering ice formation in supercooled clouds, thereby causing precipitation and affecting cloud lifetimes and their radiative properties. However, despite their importance, INP often comprise only 1 in 10³–10⁶ ambient particles, making it difficult to ascertain and predict their type, source, and concentration. The typical techniques for quantifying INP concentrations tend to be highly labour-intensive, suffer from poor time resolution, or are limited in sensitivity to low concentrations. Here, we present the application of microfluidic devices to the study of atmospheric INPs via the simple and rapid production of monodisperse droplets and their subsequent freezing on a cold stage. This device offers the potential for the testing of INP concentrations in aqueous samples with high sensitivity and high counting statistics. Various INPs were tested for validation of the platform, including mineral dust and biological species, with results compared to literature values. We also describe a methodology for sampling atmospheric aerosol in a manner that minimises sampling biases and which is compatible with the microfluidic device. We present results for INP concentrations in air sampled during two field campaigns: (1) from a rural location in the UK and (2) during the UK’s annual Bonfire Night festival. These initial results will provide a route for deployment of the microfluidic platform for the study and quantification of INPs in upcoming field campaigns around the globe, while providing a benchmark for future lab-on-a-chip-based INP studies

“One of the baddies all along” : Moments that challenge a player’s perspective

Reflection has become a core interest for game designers. However, empirical research into the kinds and causes for reflection within games is scarce. We therefore conducted an online questionnaire where participants (n=101) openly reported perspective-challenging moments within games, their causes, experience, and impact. Where past work has emphasised transformative reflection that changes player’s views and behaviour outside the game, we found that players report predominantly moments of ‘endo’-transformative reflection, which is focused on players’ game-related behaviour and concepts. We further identify some causes of perspective-challenging moments relating to narrative, game systems, game-external sources, and player expectations. Narrative reveals emerge as a key cause of perspective challenge

A comparison of hedonic and utilitarian digital products based on consumer evaluation and technology frustration

This study explores how hedonic mobile applications (apps) compare to utilitarian apps in consumer evaluation. We posit that achieving a set of passionate consumers is a pre-cursor to product success in markets, whereas technology frustration is a negative hindrance to the product success. Also, we argue that technology frustration may act as a negative complementing factor to consumer passion, and this effect is higher for hedonic products than utilitarian products. We contextualize our study to the android apps, and used a dataset that tracked 19,121 apps in the android market for three months and coded our variables from this dataset. We conducted empirical analysis and found support for our hypotheses. This study contributes to the information systems and marketing literature in providing a new dimension associated with consumer evaluation of digital products, and draws evaluative comparisons between hedonic and utilitarian digital products