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Decentralized finance (DeFi), enabled by blockchain, could bring about a new financial system, where peers will interact directly, with little or no place for traditional intermediation. However, some crucial tasks cannot be left solely to an algorithm and, consequently, most DeFi applications still require human decisions. The aim of this research is to assess the role of intermediation in the light of DeFi, analysing how humans and algorithms will interact.

The authors based their work on a twofold qualitative methodology, first analysing publicly available secondary data, particularly from white papers and DeFi Pulse (a website providing data on DeFi solutions) and then running two focus group discussions.

DeFi does not eliminate financial intermediation, but enables it to be performed in new ways, where decentralization means that no single entity can hold too much power or monopoly. DeFi has, however, inherited risks from the underlying technologies that unintentionally facilitate illegal behaviour and can hamper the authorities’ supervision. The complex duality algorithm- vs human-based actions will not be solved indisputably in favour of the former, as DeFi solutions can range from requiring algorithms to play a dominant role, to enabling greater human interaction by actively involving more people.

This research contributes to the emerging debate between algorithm- and human-based intermediation, especially in relation to the standing literature on financial intermediation, where considerations made in the light of the newest theories on blockchain and DeFi are still scarce.

Patrick Blessinger is the founder and Executive Director of the International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association and a Research Fellow at the School of Education at St. John's University in Queens, New York, USA. He has taught over 150 college and university courses and he has served as a program chair at colleges and universities in the US and EU. He consults with HE institutions in the areas of technology innovation and internationalization and he serves as an academic and accreditation advisor for HE institutions. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Institute for Meaning-Centered Education. He is the founder and editor of the International HETL Review and co-editor of the Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education. He is co-editor of several volumes within the Cutting-edge Technologies in Higher Education book series (Emerald) and co-editor of the book, Meaning-Centered Education: International Perspectives and Explorations in Higher Education (Routledge: 2013). He attended Auburn University, Georgia Tech, and the University of Georgia. He is a peer-recognized expert and thought leader in the field of teaching and learning and he has received several academic awards including a Fulbright Scholarship from the US Department of State and a Governor's Teaching Fellowship from the State of Georgia, USA.

Final research papers are still the preferred method for end-of-term assessment in higher education. However, there is a recent push for a greater increase in digital literacy skills in today’s students. Determining the best way to utilize technology, while keeping an eye dedicated toward the pedagogical purpose, is the ultimate focus of this chapter. The authors of this chapter have endeavored to exhibit how tools such as wikis, blogs, and podcasting were best used in higher education situations to promote learning and expand student digital literacy by providing an alternative to the classic final paper option while fully engaging learners with a multimodal approach to learning. The research discussed has demonstrated that learner-generated knowledge requires a higher order of understanding, and as such, leads to higher levels of learning and longer retention of material. Cooperation and collaboration are now key components of the higher education experience; many of these technical alternatives are designed with built-in collaborative elements.

Corporations are confronted with growing demands to take a stand on socio-political issues, i.e. corporate social advocacy (CSA), which affects their reputation in the public. Companies use different CSA message strategies, including calling the public to support and act on the issue they advocate. Using reactance theory, the authors investigate the impact of CSA messages with a call to action on corporate reputation in the case of a company's gender equality initiative.

A one-factorial (CSA message with or without a call to action) between-subjects experiment was conducted by surveying 172 individuals living in Switzerland. The CSA messages were created in the context of gender equality.

The authors' study indicates that CSA messages with a call to action compared to those without overall harmed corporate reputation due to individuals' reactance, which is higher for CSA messages with a call to action, negatively affecting corporate reputation. The impact of the CSA message strategy with a call to action on corporate reputation remains significant after controlling for issue alignment and political leaning.

Communicating about socio-political issues, especially taking a stand, is a significant challenge for corporations in an increasingly polarized society and has often led to backlash, boycotts and damage to corporate reputation. This study shows that the possible adverse effects of advocating for socio-political issues can be related to reactance. It emphasizes that companies advocating for contested issues must be more cautious about the message strategy than the issue itself.

This book centers on several key areas of social engagement and social learning in higher education today, including social networking platforms and e-portfolios. In addition to these Web 2.0 technologies, rapid improvements in related communication technologies (e.g., broadband services, wireless, mobile phones, and tablets) have also provided the necessary infrastructure components by which educators implement innovative teaching and learning practices on a larger scale, in a more reliable manner, and in a more targeted fashion. These technologies are also transforming our views of what it means to learn in an increasingly globalized, interconnected, and pluralistic world. The authors have presented several perspectives on how to use social networking tools to better engage learners in more meaningful and authentic learning activities. Social networking sites like Facebook are not a panacea for effective learning, but they do provide instructors and students with a convenient platform for enhancing the teaching and learning process. Instructors also play an important part in modeling proper online behavior through their presence on the platform and their interaction with their students. However, these tools are only one piece of the learning puzzle. The ultimate goal is to enable students to become lifelong learners and to instill in them a high value for learning that matures over their lifetime. As such, these tools can be used to better engage students more deeply in authentic and personally meaningful learning experiences.

Contextualizing grammar in second language (L2) classrooms implies making grammar constructs relevant to the learners’ world; affording learners the opportunities to better comprehend and apply these concepts in their own milieus. This instructional design (ID) has been devised to contextualize grammar and to explore learner engagement of pre-service English teachers through Computer-Aided Learning (CAL) and Task-based Learning (TBL) in a technology-driven learning environment. CAL encompasses technology-aided discussions, multi-media presentations, online tests and exercises, and social media deployment. TBL, on the other hand, contextualizes grammar using technology and social network in planning, executing, and presenting four assigned tasks: picture essay, brochure design, dialogue composition, and comic strips illustration. Facebook is the e-portfolio of the class, archiving all group and individual output. The CAL-TBL tandem is propelled by group initiatives and class collaboration evident in group discussions and planning, microteaching, task presentations, peer reviews, and self-evaluations. These initiatives engage learners; empowering students to collaboratively take active part and responsibility for their own learning. The three-hour-class meets every week in a computer laboratory. The post-semester feedback and online poll course design review as well as the University Course Evaluation comments have shown that the ID, from the learners’ perspective, is effective in contextualizing grammar and in engaging learners.

This chapter is about the politics of surveillance and more specifically about the politics of siting public closed circuit television (CCTV) systems within urban neighborhoods. Through an exploration of political contests waged around attempts by local police to install public surveillance systems in the City of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Granville Mall districts, we argue that the success of public surveillance proposals is hardly inevitable. Instead, a combination of local factors play vital roles in variously supporting or constraining such attempts. Although this present chapter can be read as providing a useful counterpoint to the dominance of accounts about such developments in Great Britain, where public CCTV is a routine fact of daily urban life, we conclude on a cautionary note: with the current proliferation of public and private forms of surveillance throughout urban spaces, surveillance analysts risk missing the forest for the trees if we only concentrate on the fate of one surveillance tool or tactic.

This chapter investigates the need to focus on the gap between the pure quantification of the body, expressed by robotic implants, and recent research aiming to recover qualitative aspects of touch, such as sensation. The solution proposed is to analyse new implant technologies with a stereoscopic vision that is able to consider sensation both as intensity of neural signals and as something that we feel. The central question is: what is the value of introducing qualitative analysis into typically quantified robotics research, governed by data?

Americans are still chasing the heritage of the American Dream passed on to them by their parents. But there are differences between the expectations of the dream and the reality of Americans' perceptions of their lives today. This makes marketing to this generation a highly complex operation. Carol Farmer looks at the American social pattern and the radical changes in retailing which it has sparked off. This is a summarised version of a paper delivered to the International Retail Conference of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, recently held in Zurich.