technology is a tool that helps the party accomplish fusing its political control with China’s economic prosperity and “social development.

digital infrastructure is a key to solving problems in governance and improving its political control.

fiber-optic cables, data centers, and IoT devices enable connectivity in smart cities.

he Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), or other data-dependent environments such as smart cities and smart manufacturing. This infrastructure, better described as “digital infrastructure,”

“new infrastructure,” artificial intelligence, 5G, and data centers.

George Bowden, “MI6 Boss Warns of China ‘Debt Traps and Data Traps,’” BBC, November 30, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59474365.

“If you allow another country to gain access to really critical data about your society, over time that will erode your sovereignty, you no longer have control over that data.

go beyond both surveillance and espionage

in promoting and subsidizing their expansion abroad,

Peter Hartcher, “Huawei? No Way! Why Australia Banned the World’s Biggest Telecoms Firm,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 21, 2021, https://www.smh.com.au/national/huawei-no-way-why-australia-banned-the-world-s-biggest-telecoms-firm-20210503-p57oc9.html; “Huawei 5G Kit Must Be Removed from UK by 2027,” BBC, July 14, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53403793; Gautam Chikermane, “No Huawei in 5G Is a Start, No China in Critical Infrastructure Should Be Next,” Observer Research Foundation, Digital Frontiers, May 5, 2021, https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/no-huawei-in-5g-is-a-start-no-china-in-critical-infrastructure-should-be-next; and “Huawei Ban Timeline: Detained CFO Makes Deal with U.S. Justice Department,” CNET, September 30, 2021, https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/huawei-ban-timeline-detained-cfo-makes-deal-with-us-justice-department

to effectively ban Huawei from providing 5G equipment in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and numerous other countries, as well as the debate around those decisions.

o violate or exploit globally accepted data privacy norms

he largest issue is that China has a political system that is fundamentally different from liberal democracies and that is embedded in the digital technologies and infrastructure researched and developed in China and exported globally.

embed standards that go against liberal democratic values

he government’s strategic interests

for Chinese digital companies to gain greater market access

access to, and control over, data internationally

export of digital infrastructure

onceived of as agents of geopolitical influence or means to control critical, strategic resources

nor delegates to standard-setting bodies have traditionally been

with the ultimate goal of shaping the international architecture rather than simply seeking advantage within it

an edge in setting international standards.

unmatched industrial capacity that allows it to build the physical infrastructure of the digital world.

its centralization allows it to more effectively leverage that scale than any other leading global player.

unmatched size grants it unmatched ability to produce and access data:

but innovation may no longer be the determinative asset it once was

The last industrial revolution, which was catalyzed by the emergence of technology as a factor of production, rewarded innovative capacity as a critical source of national strength.

These conversations ignore the more foundational, strategic contest for the global architecture.

Beijing works to shape the rules of the digital environment from the top down by setting international technical standards and exporting a China-centered system of digital governance.

China’s overarching digital ambition is to seize the opportunity of the digital revolution, control data as a factor of production, become the network great power, and leapfrog to leadership of the world order. This is how Beijing frames the competition for and of the fourth industrial revolution.

mazon’s real power lies in its ability to shape the information ecosystem in which users shop.

it has the dominant information platform.

the player that controls digitized logistics hubs can shape international shipments of cobalt without having to deploy troops to capture mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo;

power is therefore a function of both capturing data and controlling the architecture of digital exchange: information infrastructure like 5G and smart logistics hubs, platforms like social media and digital trade hubs, and the technical standards and governance systems that define their operations and evolution.

Strategic, revolutionary power in the digital revolution lies a step beyond accessing data—it lies in the ability to shape data and its movement.

owever, data is not like land or labor. Its strategic value does not only come from access or ownership.

China has a first-mover advantage in the digital economy and is expected to achieve a revival in the fourth industrial revolution.4

Technological changes in different periods not only bring about industrial changes, but also affect changes in the world structure.

“With the advent of the digital economy, data elements have become the new engine for economic development. Data is a new production factor, a basic resource, and a strategic resource.

Today’s industrial revolution, the digital revolution, is a function of data having emerged—alongside land, labor, capital, and technology—as a factor of production.

Beijing benefits from a set of asymmetric, structural advantages—scale, centralization, and industrial capacity

They reveal that China is turning traditionally commercial and cooperative global domains into battlefields of nation-state competition.

China’s digital ambitions threaten the ability of companies to compete fairly in the international marketplace, of information to circulate freely, and of governments to defend themselves.

China intends to define this digital architecture by building its physical infrastructure and corresponding virtual networks and platforms, setting the technical standards that govern them, and shaping the emerging global digital governance regime.

Beijing’s global digital strategy rests on seizing this opportunity by competing to control international data, its movement, and, by extension, the production, distribution, and consumption of resources and ideas internationally.

A New Type of Geopolitical Power: China’s Competitive Strategy for the Digital Revolution

When we later tune our model to identify the difference between these positive and negative passages, we are teaching it to determine what are often very nuanced differences.

Adding these ‘negative’ training examples (Q, P-) is a common approach used in many bi-encoder fine-tuning methods, including multiple negatives ranking and margin MSE loss (the latter of which we will be using). Using hard negatives in-particular can significantly improve the performance of our models [3].

Excluding the positive passage (if returned), we assume all other returned passages are negatives. We then select one of these negative passages at random to become the negative pair for our query.

Yes, those returned results are the most similar passages to our query, but they are not the correct passage for our query. We are, in essence, increasing the similarity gap between the correct passage and all other passages, no matter how similar they may be.

It may seem counterintuitive at first. Why would we return the most similar passages and train a model to view these as dissimilar?

Excluding the positive passage (if returned), we assume all other returned passages are negatives. We then select one of these negative passages at random to become the negative pair for our query.

The negative mining process is a retrieval step where, given a query, we return the top_k most similar results.

To fix this, we perform a negative mining step to find highly similar passages to existing P+ passages. As these new passages will be highly similar but not matches to our query Q, our model will need to learn how to distinguish them from genuine matches P+. We refer to these non-matches as negative passages and are written as P-.

The (query, passage) pairs we have now are assumed to be positively similar, written as (Q, P+) where the query is Q, and the positive passage is P+.

Query generation is not perfect. It can generate noisy, sometimes nonsensical queries. And this is where GPL improved upon GenQ. GenQ relies heavily on these synthetic queries being high-quality with little noise. With GPL, this is not the case as the final cross-encoder step labels the similarity of pairs. Meaning dissimilar pairs are likely to be labeled as such. GenQ does not have any such labeling step.

GPL is perfect for scenarios where we have no labeled data. However, it does require a large amount of unstructured text. That could be text data scraped from web pages, PDF documents, etc. The only requirement is that this text data is in-domain, meaning it is relevant to our particular use case.

Each of these steps requires the use of a pre-existing model fine-tuned for each task. The team that introduced GPL also provided models that handle each task. We will discuss these models as we introduce each step and note alternative models where relevant.

Pseudo labeling, using a cross-encoder model to assign similarity scores to pairs.

Negative mining, retrieving similar passages that do not match (negatives).

Query generation, creating queries from passages.

At a high level, GPL consists of three data preparation steps and one fine-tuning step.

As you may have guessed, the same applies to the first scenario of fine-tuning a pretrained model. It can be hard to find relevant, labeled data. With GPL we don’t need to. Unstructured text is all you need.

GPL hopes to solve this problem by allowing us to take existing models and adapt them to new domains using nothing more than unlabeled data. By using unlabeled data we greatly enhance the ease of finding relevant data, all we need is unstructured text.

rights

program themselves

set clear goals for public diplomacy

Clearly defined goals with subordinate country or region-specific objectives where necessaryDesired outcomeDefinition of the problems, risks, and threatsClearly identified target groupsPlan of activities including coordination between relevant national authoritiesDescription of resources and investments requiredStandardised evaluation methodology

can be scaled down based on the needs and resources of each project and ministry.

The first step is to adopt a strategic approach.

temptation for diplomats to measure their performance on public diplomacy by describing activities rather than assessing outcomes

e. To be measurable, the mission needs to be broken down into achievable and time-limited objectives.

many public diplomacy goals are necessarily intermediate or long-term.

much public diplomacy work is wrapped up within a specific policy goal

whether the organisation itself, the foreign ministry in this case, is structured as it should be,

based on continuous monitoring against specific performance indicators

strategy remains on track. Are the objectives realistic, have the right target groups been identified, has the right balance of activities been drawn up?

little understanding of how diplomats contribute to the well-being of their own countries

particularly important for foreign ministries, much of whose work is not understood by their own domestic public

any activity that involves spending tax-payers’ money should be assessed for cost-effectiveness,

justify program expenditures

erformance measurement and evaluation ensure accountability and transparency so that stakeholders,

iplomats will say that it is not possible to quantify results of activities

valuation is often the most neglected area of activity in foreign ministries.

For print, there are special considerations when re-using an ISBN. We recommend you reach out and ask our expert support team if you have ISBN Print questions.

Draft2Digital will automatically assign an ISBN to any book published through our system free of charge.

For your ebook, give us a JPEG at 1600x2400.

If you currently sell a print book with Amazon KDP Print Expanded Distribution or Ingram Spark, we do not recommend you list with D2D Print. If you currently list your books with KDP Print without Expanded Distribution (Expanded Distribution disabled), D2D Print will be a good fit to help expand your reach.

epub of your own

You can create, convert, and download a pixel-perfect paperback PDF or ebook EPUB file without having to publish through D2D.

Frequently Asked Questions

defends the human person in her dignity and the most profound choices.

three dimensions of the relationship with himself, relationship with God, and relationship with others,” he said.

they carry within them a new anthropological vision that differs significantly, if not substantially, from the idea of the Christian proposal, especially in the sense of a conception of rights in an exclusively individualistic form.”

“Given the misunderstandings that exist around free speech on platforms I sometimes think it is hard to grasp until you’re on the frontline having to make these decisions to get the gravity & difficulty of the work,” tweeted Esther Crawford, a Twitter executive whose own social network, Squad, was acquired by Twitter. “I’m very pro free speech but there must be limits for the health of a platform and to ensure the safety of people.”

The company has gotten much better at detecting fake accounts and disinformation, for example, and also was the first social network to penalize Trump for violating its policies. (Trump is now banned from Twitter.)

In 2019, Twitter also developed labels that would cover up tweets by powerful people and politicians who broke the service’s rules but whose tweets were considered newsworthy. And in 2020, it developed new policies to tackle misinformation during the 2020 election and the pandemic.

Twitter’s shift from being a largely unmoderated platform into one with more robust content moderation took place a year after the 2016 presidential election, when it was revealed that Russian operatives spread disinformation on social media to try to tilt the election outcome toward Trump.

“To [many of the older tech leaders], the Internet represented freedom, a new frontier, a flowering of the human spirit, and a great optimism that technology could birth a new golden age of mankind,” Wong, a Silicon Valley pioneer, said in a widely-viewed thread. “It’s not that the principle is no longer valid (it is), it’s that the practical issues around upholding that principle are different, because the world has changed. ”

long subscribed to the ideal that more speech is the best antidote to harmful or bad speech.

“My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” he said.

to make available to the public the company’s algorithm, helping people understand how content surfaces on the platform.

“Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have the, both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

“What Musk seemingly fails to recognize is that to truly have free speech today, you need moderation,”

have spent billions of dollars and employed armies of people to create and enforce policies to reduce hate speech, misinformation and other toxic communication that degrades public discourse.

his ambition for what the platform should be — a largely unpoliced space rid of censorship — is naive, would hurt the company’s growth prospects and would render the platform unsafe.

The promotion of multilingualism is not only a cultural issue; it is directly related to the need for the further development of the internet, especially local content

access to online education

Do you believe that internet companies are/should be the main actors responsible for dealing with such content?

He also insisted that the algorithm Twitter uses to rank its content, deciding what hundreds of millions of users see on the service every day, should be public for users to audit.

Mr. Musk argued that taking Twitter private would allow more free speech to flow on the platform. “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” he said in an interview at the TED conference on Thursday.

they are responsible for the driving task, thereby automating the movement of people and goods to reduce accidents and congestion

Advancing automated driving systems (ADS) technology

The privilege of issuing money is synonymous with economic power.

It makes it possible to trade products and services across great geographic distances, between people who may not know each other and have no particular reason to trust each other.

Money is one of humankind’s most remarkable innovations.

when it comes to offset printing we always recommend doing your own research into local printers, since quotes will vary from project to project, as will the customer experience. 

If you’re after a few beautiful copies to hand out to friends, or you need them for a book signing or book fair, or you simply feel your publishing journey won’t be complete until you hold your book in the flesh, Blurb’s standout quality once again makes it a great option. 

With Blurb, ordering a batch is much cheaper than printing your books one at a time, and no matter how image-heavy your book is you can be pretty certain of a high-quality print that’ll help sell your book to retailers and their customers.

you’re better off printing with IngramSpark.

To maximize the benefits of both of these printers, you can distribute to Amazon via KDP Print but opt out of their expanded distribution. Then use IngramSpark to distribute everywhere but Amazon!

If you want to distribute to non-Amazon stores, use IngramSpark.

Blurb

When someone makes an order, an on-demand printer will print a copy of your book and make sure it reaches the customer without any effort from you.

Offset printing usually involves storing and shipping the books yourself — and often the hassle isn’t worth it for self-publishing authors.

Offset printing usually involves storing and shipping the books yourself — and often the hassle isn’t worth it for self-publishing authors.

fear that comes from the idea that AI will ultimately ‘overthrow’ humanity as superior beings.

The combination of AI and religion has been applauded by one member of the Vatican as “an opportunity for evangelization.”

chatbots and algorithms are the real faces of AI in religion.

the Vatican went a step further to create an exorcist robot.

Just as it is almost impossible to take religion out of humanity, it is just about the same with artificial intelligence.

how an advanced enough AI could achieve consciousness and potentially be one of God’s messengers to make our lives easier.

While some denominations have welcomed artificial intelligence, such as the Vatican, in creating an exorcist robot, others remain wary of fears that it could lead to the end times.

Balance Independence and Collaboration

10. Reedsy

Draft2Digital

Use an aggregator, such as Draft2Digital and Smashwords, to distribute to a bunch of book retailers all at once. This will probably save you time and energy, though you’ll need to pay an extra fee for their services.

to adopt an inclusive narrative and language, and to move towards more inclusive platforms, products and services.

It is our duty to navigate these differences with empathy and to strive for meaningful inclusion of all cultures, genders, sexualities, races, abilities and disabilities into proper global society.

inclusivity is a mode of operation

Differences in age, culture, geography, daily habits, societal structures (among other things) can lead to significantly different expectations about what constitutes a satisfying user experience.

cherish any occasions for happiness and enjoyment.

With bold, animated, and interactive typography as the centerpiece, many websites also do without the use of any background images — for a clean and sophisticated look.

With a careful selection of fonts, websites are making bolder statements than ever, to catch their audience’s attention and to communicate their messages effectively.

Stylish hero sections with big bold typography and little to no imagery will be everything in the following year.

he did not offer any alternative solutions for those concerned that Apple's control over the App Store allows it to charge app developers exorbitant fees or subject developers to capricious or unfair rules.

could become so commonplace that important apps will only be installable by that method, rather than through the App Store

That means data-hungry companies would be able to avoid our privacy rules, and once again track our users against their will.

The current iteration of the Digital Markets Act no longer includes a sideloading requirement, but it is still not finalized.

the European Union's Digital Markets Act and the United States' Open App Markets Act, which incorporate language about forcing platform holders like Apple to allow sideloading.

Apple are "deeply concerned about regulations that would undermine privacy and security in service of some other aim," like protecting competition.

a new platform should utilise design thinking, prioritising the experience of its users: time-poor decision-makers in need of accessible, concise, and tailored analysis and advice.

the “cable”, a platform that, as its name suggests, was designed around 20th century technology

Staff should be encouraged to take career breaks to study and work elsewhere by making leave without pay a right rather than a rare privilege.

“risks losing the ‘war for talent,’

it would elevate diplomacy as the government’s primary foreign policy tool.

as a “central agency” rather than a “line agency”, to adopt Canberra bureaucrat-speak, joining the departments of Prime Minister & Cabinet (PMC), Treasury, and Finance

to lead a whole-of-government national security strategy.

alignment of means with ends

more aspiration than strateg

Russia accounts for just 2.3 percent of German trade. While that isn’t much in the grander scheme of things, the modest trade volumes also help explain the continued allure of Russia to German business.

After the Berlin Wall fell, “Go East” quickly became German industry’s rallying cry as the boardroom engineers behind Europe’s economic motor searched for new markets and cheap skilled labor to keep the pistons firing.

How much of what we are seeing is true? Or is this new front providing a false perception of control and understanding of the narrative? How can different camera angles skew reality?

the Krasukha electronic warfare system

“There are countries that would like to invent a system that freed them of reliance on the dollar, but I think it will be a long time, if ever, before the dollar is replaced as a key reserve currency in the global economy.”

“friend-shoring”

deeper economic integration with Europe and other partners embracing similar “core values and principles”.

"Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

the flow of arms into Ukraine will risk a direct military confrontation between Russia and Nato. Whereas Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria had no nuclear weapons, Russia has nearly 6,000, with an estimated 1,600 active and deployed.

China and others will not be keen to enforce a sanctions regime that could well be used against them next. Russia thus will not be as isolated as the US and Europe seem to think.

they will create countless arbitrage opportunities for Russia to sell its valuable commodities to entities beyond the reach of US sanctions.

The US tried similar measures to topple Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, but succeeded only in crushing the economy. Nor have US sanctions overturned the regimes in Iran and North Korea.

the crisis was defused by diplomacy and compromise, not by a one-sided victory.

To be sure, a diplomatic compromise does not fit with the current mood. European and US leaders' instinct is to crush Russia economically, to prove decisively that barbarism does not pay. From this perspective, compromise seems like appeasement, yet the compromise would be to save Ukraine, not to cede it. Economic warfare is also fraught with profound risks.

“The role of the gaming and digital entertainment industry in boosting consumption and economic recovery, and the development of the entire market, should be taken into account,” said Zhang.

“Over 5,000 game companies have now connected to the national anti-addiction system, and non-compliant companies have been investigated and fined by the relevant regulators,”

the collapse of at least 14,000 gaming companies

Meanwhile, the number of gamers in China rose by just 0.22 per cent to 66.6 million gamers in 2021, compared with growth of 3.7 per cent in 2020, according to the same report.

The industry’s gross sales revenue grew at a meagre rate of 6.4 per cent in 2021, down from growth of 20.7 per cent in 2020.

reflects positive social values and to avoid excessive violence.

under 18 players in the country were restricted to playing only between 8pm and 9pm on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays – turning China into an unfriendly place for young gamers.

“Anti-addiction” functions