Sesame Credit: Social Compliance Gamification in China

Sesame Creditis the gamified Chinese social credit. It aims at monitoring and controlling the behavior of more than a billion citizens until 2020. Basing itself on the distribution of rewards and punishments to individuals, upon scoring based on the compliance of the aforementioned citizens towards laws and government interests. The present study probes Sesame Credit from data collected from academic papers, Chinese government official documents, as well as media articles.An interpretative analysis is conducted based on the Octalysismethod of gamification and the motivational method known as the Self-Determination Theory. Residing as main conclusions: a) the efficiency of the Sesame Credit depends on extensive and continual monitoring of the population by the Chinese government; b) despite the coercive aspects, such gamification is observed to be as popular in China, due to a millenary tradition of people’s compliance to the social and those of authority obedience

The Era of Distrust

By the mid-1980s, the state-sponsored positive framing of the peaceful atom served a range of government interests. It enabled the United States and European states to use nuclear power as leverage against developing countries in a time when petroleum seemed to swing the pendulum of global resource dominance toward several so-called backward countries. It was useful to countries trying to prop up the legitimacy of their nuclear weapons programs, while secretly working on bombs, and it provided environmental arguments to those whose priority was actually energy security. The peaceful atom’s promise of plenty helped to maintain a veneer of credibility for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, at a time when the IAEA seemed to have become the treaty’s policing instrument. The more the United States relied on the IAEA, the more it recommitted to making promises of peaceful nuclear technology, especially to the developing world.

Compromising on Hybrid Justice

This chapter focuses on the Khmer Rouge tribunal, and the danger of building a mixed court on a fragile political foundation. It shows how distrust and feuds between the United Nations and its Cambodian partners have contributed to a problematic and unwieldy design for the tribunal. The court has been able to deliver credible justice for cases in which UN and Cambodia government interests have aligned. However, its performance and perceived legitimacy have suffered from the divergent preferences of the partners, and the tribunal has had limited impact on Cambodia’s formidable rule-of-law challenges.

The Maestro’s Place in a Changing World

When Bernstein arrived in Japan in 1979, the global landscape of classical music was undergoing major transformations. Japan and South Korea were important producers and consumers of classical music, as reflected in the Philharmonic’s itinerary. Japan’s seemingly unrivaled technological and industrial power was symbolized by Sony’s release of the Walkman, which made the company’s name a household word around the globe. CBS/Sony played a central role in Bernstein’s tour, marking a clear contrast with Bernstein’s earlier Japan tours, which were led by government interests. To navigate the changing classical music market, Amberson further corporatized its operations, shaping and guarding the maestro’s image while propelling his reach far beyond the United States.

A Survey of the Autonomy, Accountability, Effectiveness and Governance of Slovak State-Owned Enterprises

Fourteen Slovak state-owned enterprises were studied, using published data and structured interviews with management. A novel methodology is used to assess SOE autonomy, effectiveness, accountability and governance. Variations in operating conditions reflect different government objectives and different ownership models. Mixed state-private firms performed more like competitive firms than did wholly state-owned SOEs. This information was fed into an assessment of Slovak SOEs’ compliance with the 2015 OECD Guidelines on SOE Corporate Governance. There are many differences between Slovak practice and the Guidelines. This may reflect a choice to favour government interests, rather than the OECD’s inclusion of a wider group of stakeholders. One cost is foregone efficiency gains. Another is the perception that the present highly opaque governance system hides corruption.

Public-private cybersecurity ties will intensify

Subject Public-private cybersecurity partnerships. Significance As cybersecurity has become an increasing threat to society, no single institution can confront the challenge alone. Partnerships between governments and the private sector are an essential component of the solution. Impacts Encryption will be a key source of misalignment between private and government interests. Private cybersecurity firms will need to improve their geopolitical risk assessment capabilities. The cybersecurity skills shortage will keep governments dependent on the private sector in the short-to-medium term.

Public sector employees and the freedom of political communication

This article considers the Australian Public Service guidelines on public comment on social media in terms of the constitutionally protected freedom of political communication. It argues the guidelines are excessively broad, and go beyond legitimate government interests, significantly affecting the speech of government employees. Such employees have a significant contribution to make to the kind of political debates that are necessary in a functional democracy. It argues there is a real question regarding the compatibility of the guidelines with the constitutionally implied freedom of political communication.

How to Limit Accommodations

In recent years, the United States has seen a resurgence of debates over the propriety of various religious accommodations afforded religious individuals and institutions from otherwise valid laws. The crumbling consensus over religious accommodations appears largely due to growing skepticism over whether religious accommodations, once granted, can be limited to the “right” kind of cases without bleeding into the “wrong” kind of cases. Some courts and scholars have responded to these growing worries by proposing limits on the scope of legally recognized accommodationist claims; for example, some have argued that commercial entities should, per se, be denied claims for religious accommodation and others have argued that claims for accommodation should not be granted where the theological burden is deemed by a court to be de minimis or non-existent. By limiting the types of recognized accommodationist claims, such arguments hope to prevent religious objections from trumping other important rights and values; if the claims never get off the ground, so the logic goes, there is no need to worry about their potential consequences. This tactic, however, stands on dangerous footing. At bottom, such arguments put government in the position of giving unequal weight and credence to claims for accommodation based upon religious and theological criteria, thereby creating inequalities among religious claims. As an alternative strategy, courts should avoid threshold doctrinal tests for accommodation claims; instead courts should explicitly balance religious claims against important government interests in order to determine whether or not to grant an accommodation. Such an alternative approach pulls courts out of the business of distinguishing between different types of religious claims, encouraging them instead to impose limits on religious accommodation by directly considering governmental interests, precisely the type of inquiry courts are well-equipped to address.