More than Just a Game: Ethical Issues in Gamification

Gamification is the use of elements and techniques from video game design in non-game contexts. Amid the rapid growth of this practice, normative questions have been under-explored. The primary goal of this article is to develop a normatively sophisticated and descriptively rich account for appropriately addressing major ethical considerations associated with gamification. The framework suggests that practitioners and designers should be precautious about, primarily, but not limited to, whether or not their use of gamification practices: (1) takes unfair advantage of workers (e.g., exploitation); (2) infringes any involved workers’ or customers’ autonomy (e.g., manipulation); (3) intentionally or unintentionally harms workers and other involved parties; or (4) has a negative effect on the moral character of involved parties

Workplace Civility: A Confucian Approach

We argue that Confucianism makes a fundamental contribution to understanding why civility is necessary for a morally decent workplace. We begin by reviewing some limits that traditional moral theories face in analyzing issues of civility. We then seek to establish a Confucian alternative. We develop the Confucian idea that even in business, humans may be sacred when they observe rituals culturally determined to express particular ceremonial significance. We conclude that managers and workers should understand that there is a broad range of morally important rituals in organizational life and that managers should preserve and develop the intelligibility and integrity of many of these rituals

Bases of T-meshes and the refinement of hierarchical B-splines

In this paper we consider spaces of bivariate splines of bi-degree (m, n) with maximal order of smoothness over domains associated to a two-dimensional grid. We define admissible classes of domains for which suitable combinatorial technique allows us to obtain the dimension of such spline spaces and the number of tensor-product B-splines acting effectively on these domains. Following the strategy introduced recently by Giannelli and Juettler, these results enable us to prove that under certain assumptions about the configuration of a hierarchical T-mesh the hierarchical B-splines form a basis of bivariate splines of bi-degree (m, n) with maximal order of smoothness over this hierarchical T-mesh. In addition, we derive a sufficient condition about the configuration of a hierarchical T-mesh that ensures a weighted partition of unity property for hierarchical B-splines with only positive weights