Mutual Transparency Research Articles

ПРОШЛОЕ, НАСТОЯЩЕЕ И БУДУЩЕЕ ЦИФРОВОГО ПРАВИТЕЛЬСТВА: АНАЛИЗ КИТАЙСКОЙ ПРАКТИКИ

In the digital age, the progression of digital government models presents a nuanced problem that this study meticulously investigates. Contextually, the inception of digital government in China has transpired through three distinct phases, each marked by a characteristic emphasis: technology-oriented, mutual transparency-oriented, and people-oriented. The analysis underscores a critical shift in emphasis across these stages, from an initial concentration on technological deployment to a present focus on mutual transparency and citizen engagement. Despite the evident progress, an issue emerges around capturing and articulating these stages with precision and objectivity. In response to this problem, this study undertakes an in-depth examination of case studies pertinent to each phase, which unravels insights into their defining characteristics. The findings indicate a potential trajectory towards a digital government model that further accentuates public participation. The aim of this study is to deepen the comprehension of the evolution of digital government in China and to shed light on its potential future trajectory, thereby contributing significantly to the dialogue around policy formulation and the future development of digital governance.

Aspecte ale activității Brigăzii 9 Mecanizată „Mărășești”, reflectată în mass-media românească

The 9th Mechanised Brigade “Mărășești” is a mechanised infantry brigade belonging to the Romanian Land Forces. Its primary mission is to maintain stability and balance in the Black Sea region. The brigade operates in the Dobrogea province, which has an important geostrategic location in the area, serving as the NATO and EU border with the East. The brigade is the successor of the combat traditions of the Active Dobrogea Division, established on 1 November 1878. From 1902, it was known as the 9th Infantry Division, with its garrison located in Constanța. As part of the Romanian Army’s transformation strategy, the 9th Mechanised Brigade “Mărășești” took control of all units in Dobrogea from the former 34th Mechanised Brigade. On 13 September 2023, in recognition of the professionalism and the role of the Dobrogean brigade, 58 representatives of the member states of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe visited the 9th Mechanised Brigade “Mărășești”. This visit aimed to promote mutual transparency and was organised according to the provisions of the 2011 Vienna Document, which aims to increase confidence and security in Europe. This article highlights significant aspects of the Brigade’s activity, in the context of the 145 years of its existence.

Aspects of the Activity of the 9th Mechanised Brigade “Mărășești”, Reflected in the Romanian Mass Media

The 9th Mechanised Brigade “Mărășești” is a mechanised infantry brigade belonging to the Romanian Land Forces. Its primary mission is to maintain stability and balance in the Black Sea region. The brigade operates in the Dobrogea province, which has an important geostrategic location in the area, serving as the NATO and EU border with the East. The brigade is the successor of the combat traditions of the Active Dobrogea Division, established on 1 November 1878. From 1902, it was known as the 9th Infantry Division, with its garrison located in Constanța. As part of the Romanian Army’s transformation strategy, the 9th Mechanised Brigade “Mărășești” took control of all units in Dobrogea from the former 34th Mechanised Brigade. On 13 September 2023, in recognition of the professionalism and the role of the Dobrogean brigade, 58 representatives of the member states of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe visited the 9th Mechanised Brigade “Mărășești”. This visit aimed to promote mutual transparency and was organised according to the provisions of the 2011 Vienna Document, which aims to increase confidence and security in Europe. This article highlights significant aspects of the Brigade’s activity, in the context of the 145 years of its existence.

Commitment Games with Conditional Information Disclosure

The conditional commitment abilities of mutually transparent computer agents have been studied in previous work on commitment games and program equilibrium. This literature has shown how these abilities can help resolve Prisoner’s Dilemmas and other failures of cooperation in complete information settings. But inefficiencies due to private information have been neglected thus far in this literature, despite the fact that these problems are pervasive and might also be addressed by greater mutual transparency. In this work, we introduce a framework for commitment games with a new kind of conditional commitment device, which agents can use to conditionally disclose private information. We prove a folk theorem for this setting that provides sufficient conditions for ex post efficiency, and thus represents a model of ideal cooperation between agents without a third-party mediator. Further, extending previous work on program equilibrium, we develop an implementation of conditional information disclosure. We show that this implementation forms program ε-Bayesian Nash equilibria corresponding to the Bayesian Nash equilibria of these commitment games.

Экклесиологическая концепция Э. Мерша и ее восприятие богословами русской диаспоры

In 1933 the Catholic scholar Emile Mersch published his work “The Mystical Body of Christ” (Le Corps mystique du Christ), in which the concept of the “mystical body” was traced from early Christian times to the beginning of the 20th century. Having paid tribute to Eastern fathers, Mersch believed that this concept reaches its final synthesis in the works of the “French school” authors in the 17th century, where the concept of personal mystical unity with Christ, dating back to the Rhine mystics, is combined with the idea of St. Cyril of Alexandria and St. Hilary of Pictavia of the “natural” unity of the Church in the Eucharist. Mersch considered this synthesis to be a complete expression of St. Augustine’s teachings of the Church as the “total Christ” (the whole Christ) - totus Christus. Some authors of the diaspora paid their attention to the Mersch’s monography. M. Lot-Borodina wrote a review to this work. Fr. Sergey Bulgakov used this work as a source of the references to blessed Augustine. But it was Fr. Georges Florovsky who treated this work most thoughtfully. In the description of his response to the Mersch’s work, we need to remember that initially Fr. Georges based on the position, which was formed in Russian theology by representatives of “new theology” at the beginning of the 20th century, first of all – the position of metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky). This position was characterized by the constitution of the unity of the Church on the moral rather than Eucharistic level. The moral level was regarded, because of the personalistic concept of the mutual transparency of persons, as a natural unity. The article traces the gradual evolution of Fr. Georges’s views from the above concept, through an attempt to combine the teaching of totus Christus with the teaching of metropolitan Anthony, to the unambiguously expressed Christological emphasis in ecclesiology. As a result, Florovsky's late ecclesiology reveals a certain closeness to the ecclesiology of the French school, and hence to Mersch’s general conceptual conclusions.

Observation of mutual extinction and transparency in light scattering

Interference of scattered waves is fundamental for modern light-scattering techniques, such as optical wavefront shaping. Recently, a new type of wavefront shaping was introduced where the extinction is manipulated instead of the scattered intensity. The underlying idea is that upon changing the phases or the amplitudes of incident beams, the total extinction will change due to interference described by the cross terms between different incident beams. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the mutual extinction and transparency effects in scattering media, in particular, a human hair and a silicon bar. To this end, we send two light beams with a variable mutual angle on the sample. Depending on the relative phase of the incident beams, we observe either nearly zero extinction, mutual transparency, or almost twice the single-beam extinction, mutual extinction, in agreement with theory. We use an analytical approximation for the scattering amplitude, starting from a completely opaque object, and we discuss the limitations of our approximation. We discuss the applications of the mutual extinction and transparency effects in various fields such as non-line-of-sight communications, microscopy, and biomedical imaging.

Interpersonal Boundary Spanning for Supplier Integration in Complex NPD

Managers often express a desire for better new-product development (NPD) through supplier integration but are just as often unsure how to bring this about and so underutilize a buy strategy or even forgo it altogether. This article argues that integrating suppliers’ design teams in complex NPD requires addressing the fundamental need in these relations for mutual transparency amongst the actors such that they may adaptively substitute knowledge exchanges for their inability to specify otherwise the finished product and subsystem designs. Reporting on a case study of a jet-aircraft development project, lower level boundary spanners are shown to enable this adaptive coordination by selectively deploying from amongst three different boundary-spanning modes to coordinate for the kind of knowledge flow necessary to the situation at hand. Formalization, colocation, and buyer cross-functionality are found to be contingencies important to one or other of these modes. This article offers implications for how better to coordinate a buy strategy for complex NPD, taking also into account the scope of supplier involvement and the level of innovation in the project.

Mutual extinction and transparency of multiple incident light waves

When a wave is incident on a complex scattering medium, the transmitted intensity differs from the incident one due to extinction. In the absence of absorption, the extinguished power is equal to the total scattered power, a well-known conservation law termed the optical theorem. Here, we extend the case of a single incident wave to the situation of scattering and extinction by multiple incoming waves. The emerging generalized optical theorem has the exciting consequence that multiple incident waves show mutual extinction and mutual transparency, phenomena that do not exist in common forward scattering or self-extinction. Based on both exact calculations of realistic three-dimensional (3D) samples containing many (up to 104) scatterers and on approximate Fraunhofer diffraction theory we make the striking observation that the total extinction of two incident waves is greatly enhanced, called mutual extinction, or greatly reduced, mutual transparency, by up to 100% of the usual single-beam extinction. In view of the surprisingly strong mutual extinction and transparency, we propose new experiments to observe mutual extinction and transparency, namely in two-beam experiments with either elastic and absorbing scatterers, in optical wavefront shaping, in dynamic light scattering, and we discuss possible applications.

In Case You Haven't Heard…

In the interests of mutual transparency… Andrew Kolodny, M.D., published a retrospective declaration of conflict of interest in the Sept. 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31483441), referring to two articles written in 2017 and 2018 with former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Thomas Frieden (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29049522 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29677298). In this month's clarification, he added the information about being “expert witness in malpractice cases involving opioid prescribing.” At first glance, this made it appear that, for the first time, Kolodny was disclosing his medical expert testimony against opioid pharmaceutical companies in massive lawsuits. He had already done so. We asked Ivan Oransky, M.D., co‐founder of Retraction Watch and executive director of The Center For Scientific Integrity, for a comment. “The rules around conflict of interest are still in formation,” Oransky said. But instead of “death by 1,000 cuts,” with accusations flying, authors and journal editors should just make all possible conflicts clear at the start via the ICMJE form. Kolodny, who has been paid to tackle opioid pharma and at the same time has advocated against opioid pharma is a perfect example of this quandary. For more, read https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/14/jose‐baselga‐doctors‐industry‐conflict/.

СЕТЕВИЗАЦИЯ КУЛЬТУРЫ: НА ПУТИ К ОБЩЕСТВУ ВЗАИМНОЙ ПРОЗРАЧНОСТИ

The article shows that culture development according to the network principle caused the transformation of the notion “privacy” itself and the formation of the society of mutual transparency where people keep an eye on each other. The process of culture internetization stimulated the powerful movement of both supporters and opponents of transparency, who try to escape from total control and to preserve the right to privacy. The paper traces the evolution of transparency caused by internetization of modern culture. Initially transparency comes out as the state supervision over the society and later on it took the form of citizens’ mutual control over each other. The author identifies such consequences of culture internetization as the minimization of mediatory structures and the transformation of institution of trust conditioned by the development of blockchain technology.

Implementing Substance Abuse Intervention Services in New York City Sexually Transmitted Disease Clinics: Factors Promoting Interagency Collaboration.

This report presents results of Project LINK, a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)-funded, 5-year collaboration (2007-2012) between New York City (NYC) health and NY State substance abuse disorder (SUD) agencies, an LGBT organization contractor, and multiple SUD, social service, and mental health referral agencies. LINK allowed the first ever SUD screening, brief intervention, and referrals to treatment (SBIRT) intervention services onsite in NYC Bureau of Sexually Transmitted Disease Control (BSTDC) clinics. Factors favoring collaboration were (a) joint recognition of substance abuse as an STD risk factor; (b) prior collaborations; (c) agreement on priority of BSTDC's mission and policies; (d) extensive SBIRT training, cross training on STDs; (e) a memorandum of agreement; and (f) mutual transparency of collaborative efforts, among others. LINK screened over 151,000 STD clinic patients and delivered brief interventions to 60% of positively screened patients and met a mandated follow-up target. Factors found to facilitate collaboration here may help screen prospective new health collaborations.

Boost-glide Weapons and US-China Strategic Stability

ABSTRACTThe United States and China are testing boost-glide weapons, long-range strike systems capable of flying at Mach 5 or faster through the upper atmosphere. For the United States, these systems would provide a conventional prompt global strike capability, which, together with US ballistic missile defense programs, Chinese experts regard as a threat to China's ability to conduct nuclear retaliation. This perception is encouraging the Chinese military to modify its nuclear posture in ways that tend to create greater risks for both sides. If China's own boost-glide systems are meant to carry nuclear payloads only, their deployment would not fundamentally alter the current situation between the two states. However, if they were conventionally armed or dual-purpose, or if the United States could not determine the payloads they carried, the deployment of Chinese boost-glide systems could compound problems of strategic stability created by the introduction of ballistic missile defense, antisatellite, and antiship ballistic missile capabilities. If the technical hurdles can be overcome, it may be difficult for the two sides to refrain from these deployments in the absence of strong mutual trust or an established arms-control relationship. New confidence-building measures and expanded mutual transparency are warranted to avoid creating new dangers.

Architecture for Multi-Technology Real-Time Location Systems

The rising popularity of location-based services has prompted considerable research in the field of indoor location systems. Since there is no single technology to support these systems, it is necessary to consider the fusion of the information coming from heterogeneous sensors. This paper presents a software architecture designed for a hybrid location system where we can merge information from multiple sensor technologies. The architecture was designed to be used by different kinds of actors independently and with mutual transparency: hardware administrators, algorithm developers and user applications. The paper presents the architecture design, work-flow, case study examples and some results to show how different technologies can be exploited to obtain a good estimation of a target position.

The business of conversations: Market social media surveillance and visibility

Businesses increasingly rely on social media for personal information, which renders their market more visible. This paper draws on a surveillance studies perspective to consider the growth of market surveillance on social media. Drawing on a series of 13 semi–structured interviews with professionals who use Facebook as a business tool, this paper considers three emerging strategies. Radical transparency imports self–presentation tactics in a corporate realm, furthering corporate visibility. Listening refers to the surveillance of personal information. Finally, a conversational approach combines the visibility of both the market and the corporate actor. While popular literature celebrates this as a kind of mutual transparency, corporate actors are strategic in terms of what they present on social media.

Mutual Transparency or Mundane Transgressions? Institutional Creeping on Facebook

This article explores the post–secondary sector’s adoption of social media. Social media plays an increasing role in the visibility of personal information. The term refers to a set of web–based services that facilitate the authorship and distribution of media between users. The most popular social media site is Facebook with over 750 million users worldwide. Facebook was originally launched as a service for university students to author and distribute information about their personal identity, interpersonal connections, and social activities. While Facebook has since expanded its scope beyond universities, student life remains a heavily ‘Facebooked’ phenomenon. University administrators are keenly aware of their students’ presence on this site, and are adopting new practices to harness Facebook as an extension of their professional duties. This paper draws upon findings from a series of fourteen semi–structured face–to–face interviews with various administrators and employees at a medium–sized university in Eastern Ontario. As Facebook first emerged in an academic context, these findings provide a rich example of how institutions can scrutinize populations using social media. These findings suggest that institutional surveillance on Facebook stems from ground–up practices prior to implementing top–down mandates, suggesting that these practices have developed from institutional users’ personal experiences with the site. As well, the visibility of the university and its reputation is offered by respondents as motive for scrutiny, suggesting a discourse of mutual transparency of both the university as an institution as well as its student population.

On the Civic Role of Firms in Emerging Ecologies of Value

Knowledge is the main competitive assets in today economy. This resource, differently from the others firms have traditionally managed, increases its value through sharing and diffusing. Adoption, in fact, does not only contribute to increase its trustworthiness, but also to broadening its scope and application. The development of global digital infrastructures such as Internet has even enhanced the potential advantages that may derive from sharing knowledge. In this paper the development of ecologies of value, context of knowledge sharing where parties participate to the production of a collective value, is presented as alternative strategy to protecting the value of knowledge through intellectual property right. Being able to leverage on the potential disclosed by collective interaction in ecology of values requires participants not exploiting open accessibility to their own advantage. This calls for the emergence of a new ethic. An ethic of the abundance, where people develop a complete consciousness of the potential deriving from sharing knowledge for their own success and happiness. The role of firms in emerging ecologies of value is to promote the development of such an ethic by setting up context of interaction that are open, based on tolerance and mutual transparency.

Social Democracy �ber Alles

Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. By David Held. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 216 pp., $57.95 cloth (ISBN: 0-7456-3352-8), $19.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7456-3353-6). Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus is David Held's most comprehensive manifesto yet for “global cosmopolitan social democracy.” In it, Held outlines a system that embeds universal human security guarantees and the globalized market system—both characterized with commendable nuance—into a liberal global social compact. Global Covenant is breathtaking in its visionary sweep and relentless in its commitment to a refined Atlanticist multilateralism that would create an overlapping “multicentrism” of democratic institutions—even of citizenship and sovereignty. (Ideally, sovereignty becomes “liberal international sovereignty.”) Kant's conception of humanity as being united in “overlapping communities of fate” pervades the book and energizes Held's vision for “multilayered, multilevel governance.” Obviously, Global Covenant will not persuade skeptics who believe that social democracy could only flower in the Western-dominated twentieth century (Desai 2005) or that it “merely polishes capitalism's roughest edges” (Bond 2005:89). Nor will the book engage realists who renounce the power and practical value of ideals in international relations. Nor will its ambitious scope satisfy admirers of pure and narrow disciplinary scholarship. As a manifesto, Global Covenant is unconcerned with alternatives. Comparative assessments of Held's vision vis-a-vis Asian regionalism, for example, or to less formal global governance based on public–private cooperation and mutual transparency (Reinicke 1998; Florini 2003) will not be found here. Yet, even though it clearly is a manifesto, Global Covenant is carefully documented. It does, however, rely heavily on the usual scholarly suspects: economists Dani Rodrik and Joseph Stiglitz, philosopher Jurgen Habermas, and political scientists …

Mutual transparency of coherent laser beams through a terahertz-field-driven quantum well

Quantum-well excitons dressed by a terahertz field have multiple optical resonances. An optical beam tuned to any of the resonant frequencies excites the dressed-exciton state; therefore the optical beam experiences attenuation upon its transmission. For two coherent optical beams tuned to two different resonant frequencies, however, one can judiciously choose the amplitudes and phases in such a way that the beams do not produce any excitation, and thus they experience no attenuation, even though each of beams would be strongly attenuated in the absence of the other. This two-color scheme also suggests coherent control of dressed excitons by a pair of phase-locked pulses with different carrier frequencies and nonoverlapping spectra.

Adaptive geovisualization: an approach towards the design of intelligent geovisualization systems

Adaptive geovisualization has been marked as a research front that addresses design issues of a user-centered geovisualization system. By constantly keeping trace of user actions, a highly adaptive geovisualization system is able to predict the behavior of its end user and accordingly provide him with the visualization that suits best his personal taste and need. An adaptive geovisualization system does not either hide its own behaviors from its end users. Such a mutual transparency is made possible by the mechanism of self-description and self-evaluation coupled with the capability of self-organization and self-navigation based on user models. This paper clarifies some major concepts and techniques of adaptive geovisualization, pinpoints the existing bottlenecks, analyses the main components of an adaptive geovisualization system, and put forward some research directions. Among others, the authors have discussed topics such as adaptive GUI design, dynamic structuring and re-structuring of databases, adaptive design of geo-query functions (intelligent geo-database navigation), adaptive symbolilzation etc.

The Fight Against Organised Crime in Europe: A Comparative Perspective

This article provides an overview of the measures and actions taken by the Member States of the European Union in their fight against organised crime and transborder crime. The Action Plan to Combat Organized Crime adopted by the Ministers for Justice and Home Affairs during the Dutch EU Presidency, submitted some 30 recommendations with respect to greater harmonisation regarding the fight against organised crime in the EU Member States. The author gives a concise summary of the most relevant changes and the structural characteristics per Member State, paying attention to developments in the specific countries and the organisations involved. One of the conclusions reached is that few or no reforms within national investigative and prosecution authorities may be directly traced back to the regulatory impulses of the EU. Although the EU Action Plan has not yet realised a convergence of the systems, the European process of integration has increased the mutual transparency and knowledge of one another's systems.