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Online social networks are increasingly important venues for businesses to promote their products and image. However, information propagation in online social networks is significantly more complicated compared to traditional transmission media such as newspaper, radio, and television. In this chapter, we will discuss research on modeling and forecasting diffusion of virally marketed content in social networks. Important aspects include the content and its presentation, the network topology, and transmission dynamics. Theoretical models, algorithms, and case studies of viral marketing will be explored.

Sociology of sport in China has evolved from being an “exotic” subject to a localized subject over the past 35 years. It is closely associated with social changes, sports policy and athletic achievement of China. As a discipline of humanitarian and social sciences of sport, it is taught in virtually all universities with sports majors. There are about 500 scholars specializing in sport sociology in the country. Textbooks written by Chinese and foreign scholars are published. Academic papers on sport sociology are often published in the 15 accredited core sports journals. The most productive authors are from universities and the developed provinces and municipalities. The established research areas of sport sociology are extensive. These include national identity, athlete mobility, Olympic legacy, sport for all, sports industry issues, feminist studies, community sport, sport for the aged and disabled, etc. However, there are few studies with critical analysis and only a few in the areas of sport and religion, sport and race, and deviance in sport in China. Various kinds of financial support at different levels are available in the country. Empirical research is common with literature review, questionnaire, case study, and interview being the most frequently used methods. However, sport sociology is not considered as a major topic but as a research direction and it is not accepted widely by mainstream sociology. The future of sport sociology is promising, but not without challenges.

Technology has changed the future of money. The need to foster innovation in banking has been instigated by a shift from traditional finance provided by incumbents to fintech companies, such as challenger banks and decentralized platforms, offering new forms of money and payments services. The Bank of England has responded to this shift with the exploration of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which in its retail form, would give the public the opportunity for the first time to directly hold state central bank money. This CBDC proposal emerges in a landscape where private money such as cryptocurrencies are increasing in capacity of coins and in trading volume; in a crypto economy with an expanding market capital. This competition opens the possibilities to reform banking to adapt to new payments platforms such as blockchains with advanced features such as smart contracts. The proposed design of a CBDC can either compete or complement such innovations which is evaluated in this review chapter. The author argues that the plethora of public and private currencies on the market, once reached legal maturity in terms of governance, can provide the element of choice to consumers in an open, innovative, and competitive free market. The author put forward that the Bank of England must act to introduce a CBDC that is interoperable with innovative payment platforms including blockchains, accompanied by a user centric design, to participate in the ever adapting fintech economy.

Tokenization is a relatively new activity in digital finance. Tokenization, a process that creates a blockchain representation of the underlying instrument, can enhance the standard features and characteristics of assets and securities. Asset and security tokenization produces many benefits. These benefits include reducing issuance and trading costs, lessening dependency on intermediaries, facilitating more liquidity in markets, and providing greater transparency around an asset’s lifecycle for all parties involved. This chapter synthesizes the key characteristics, benefits, processes, tools, and techniques of tokenizing real-world assets. It also provides several examples of current asset-backed token applications to help understand the rapidly growing industry and analyzes future expectations of this new technology.

As its market and society open up, China has transformed itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an urban state and an economic force. This has released accumulated tourism demand, led to the development of a diversified industry, and the spread of university and vocational courses in this field. However, the industry faces challenges to recruit and retain staff, with tourism education in higher education blamed for the shortfall in numbers and quality of candidates with suitable purpose, knowledge, and passion to serve. This chapter provides a background to the development of and problems facing tourism education in China, and suggests how to support student engagement and hence the future workforce.

Cryptoassets have recently attracted the attention of national and international financial regulators. Since the mid-2010s blockchains have increasingly been adapted to automate and replace many aspects of financial intermediation, and by 2015 Ethereum had created the smart contract language that underpins the digitization of real assets as asset-backed tokens (ABTs). Those were initially issued by FinTech companies, but more recently banks active on international capital and financial markets, and even central banks, for example, the Bank of Thailand, have developed their own digital platforms and blockchains. A wide variety of real and financial assets underpins ABTs, viz., real-estate, art, corporate and sovereign bonds, and equity. Consequently, owing to the significant market capitalization of cryptocurrencies, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) published two consultative papers delineating its approach on cryptoasset regulation. In this study, the authors analyze the mechanics of ABTs and their potential risks, relying on case studies of recent issuance of tokens in equity, real-estate, and debt markets, to highlight their main characteristics. The authors also investigate the consequences of the increasingly oligopolistic structure of blockchain mining pools and Bitcoin exchanges for the integrity and security of unregulated distributed ledgers. Finally, the authors analyze the BCBS’ regulatory proposals, and discuss the reaction of international financial institutions and cryptocurrency interest groups. The main findings are, firstly, that most ABTs are akin to asset-backed securities. Secondly, nearly all ABTs are “off-chain/on-chain,” that is, the underlying is a traditional asset that exists off-chain and is subsequently digitized. The main exception is the World Bank’s bond-i that is genuinely native to the blockchain created by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and has no existence outside it. Thirdly, all ABTs are issued on permissioned blockchains, where anti-money laundering/anti-terrorist funding and know-your-customer regulations are enforced. From a prudential regulatory perspective, ABTs do not appear to pose serious systemic risks to international financial markets. This may account for the often negative reactions of banks, banking associations, and cryptocurrency interest groups to the BCBS’ 2021 proposals for risk-weighted capital provisions for cryptoassets, which are viewed as excessive. Finally, we found that issuance of ABTS and other smart contracts on permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum could potentially generate financial instability. A precedent involving Ethereum and The DAO in 2016 shows that (i) there is a significant accountability gap in permissionless blockchains, and (ii) the core developers of blockchains and smart contract technology, and Bitcoin mining pools, exercise an unexpectedly high- and completely unregulated-amount of power in what is supposedly a decentralized network.