A qualitative examination of cybercriminal governance in China

Profit-driven cybercrime has evolved into a sophisticated industry, inflicting millions of dollars in losses on the world economy. However, limited research has been conducted on the extra-legal governance of this industry, particularly in China, one of the world's most prominent cybercrime hotspots. This study, based on comprehensive fieldwork in China from 2020 to 2022 and an analysis of both primary and secondary data, seeks to address this gap. It endeavours to answer the question: How is the cybercrime industry governed in China? In line with previous research on extra-legal governance, this study finds that Chinese cybercriminals have developed a series of private governance systems, encompassing both self-governance and third-party governance, to facilitate their business interactions. In addition, this study offered three main new findings that can be added to our understanding of extra-legal governance. Firstly, self-governance is notably effective in online marketplaces due to the swift transmission of information, thus diminishing the necessity for third-party governance in the cybercrime market and the use of violence. Secondly, cybercriminal firms tend to be less predatory than traditional criminal firms, likely attributed to the reduced need for territorial resources. Lastly, cybercriminals can relocate to countries where protectors are present and continue their illicit activities remotely, with protection being more likely offered when the inflicted harm does not impact the protector's own country’s residents, and the political and economic gains outweigh the costs. This availability of protection could potentially elucidate the ongoing global dispersion of cybercriminals

CGIAR Research Program 4: Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health

This research program aims to accelerate progress in improving the nutrition and health of poor people by exploiting and enhancing the synergies between agriculture, nutrition, and health through four key research components: value chains, biofortification, control of agriculture-associated diseases, and integrated agriculture, nutrition, and health development programs and policies. With IFPRI and ILRI as co-Lead Centers, this program will also involve 10 other CGIAR Centers. It has an initial 3-year budget of US$191.4 million. The program was approved in December 2011

Human mobility and social ties in context: from places to personality

Recent years saw an increasing proliferation of the use of digitally generated traces of data for understanding human behaviour. The quantitative understanding of social networks as well as patterns of human mobility benefited tremendously from these new sources of data. The main dynamics of both social networks and human mobility such as a propensity of humans for heterogeneous behaviour, how humans choose to explore new places, or the fact that both spheres are intrinsically linked are now fairly well understood. However, how various other factors mediate the observed dynamics is still relatively unknown, not least due to the difficulty in obtaining adequate data. Thus, for my thesis I focus on how a variety of factors---places, longer-term dynamics, the personality of individuals, or neighbourhoods---might be a driver of various aspects of social and mobility behaviour. I used data from the Copenhagen network study that tracked 847 students with smartphones and measured their social encounters as well as the locations they visited for a whole academic year. I further utilised a variety of methods for analysing the data ranging from applied machine learning over inferential statistics to social network analysis. Using this dataset, I found that the qualities of places were very informative for understanding future encounters between students, that the longer-term dynamics shaped both social and mobility behaviour, and that while personality had a significant effect on the observed regularity of behaviour, its effect was rather small