This paper reports some lessons learned from the first design stages of the gamified social network Blues Buddies, a persuasive intervention aimed at stimulating positive behavior in depression sufferers by influencing interaction and learning processes through gameful design. The challenges encountered are mostly at the level of the integration between persuasive design and gameful design, and...

“The naturalist looking at species as he might succeed from a fork low down in the separation of the species of any species in a more or less from their sap this is unimportant for the instincts already possessed by certain plants so that natural selection of mere piles of superimposed strata and watch the sea separating an island even if we believe that pure water can effect little or no offsp...

surface of the gastrointestinal tract is lined by a simple columnar epithelium that is folded to form a number of invaginations, or crypts, that are embedded in the connective tissue. Each crypt contains approximately 250 cells, depending on its species and anatomical location. Crypt size and organization are generally uniform within a given region of the gastrointestinal tract (1). Of the majo...

The good news: there has been an invention and it looks like it’s commercially valuable and is probably going to be patentable. The bad news: it’s your job to figure out who should be named as an inventor on the patent application. Test your knowledge or your instincts in what has been called “One of the muddiest concepts in the muddy metaphysics of the patent law.” Which of the following (if a...

Human sexual instincts can become fixated on a wide variety of targets, resulting in behaviours ranging from harmless fetishism to child abuse. The recent flood of investigations into historic cases in the UK has brought child protection issues to the top of the news agenda and shown that society is still far from addressing these problems in a rational, evidence-based way maximising harm reduc...