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For students who are blind or visually impaired, technology enables greater access to the educational curriculum, immediate and independent access to information, and full participation in community and citizenship. This chapter reviews research on technology use by students with visual impairments, and highlights effective practices, promising developments, and ongoing challenges. The authors discuss the implications of these advancements on policy, instruction, professional development, and future research.

We develop a model that characterizes all possible allocations of children's time between work and school, analyzing the relationship between market work, household chores, and Brazilian children's school enrollment. If pure market work is analyzed, we find that girls are less likely to work and more likely to exclusively attend relative to boys with similar characteristics. If the definition of work includes household chores, girls are less likely to be exclusively in school and more likely to work compared to boys. The results reveal that girls disproportionately carry out domestic responsibilities, which could hinder their school achievements. Furthermore, family structures with fewer preschool-aged siblings and with more adults present alleviate the pressure to displace girls’ time away from school and toward domestic activities.

We examine the challenges of commercialization of university-developed technology and the synergistic relationship of the university's technology transfer office with business-school-based entrepreneurship education programs. We postulate that business schools can effectively augment the university technology transfer office in developing and growing successful startups, through catalyzing the process of startup creation and by actively assisting in the formation of multi-disciplinary leadership teams for spinout companies. The assistance of the business school's alumni and entrepreneur networks can also be leveraged for both mentoring and investment. The challenges of an effective program include securing early marketing input, building effective leadership teams, negotiating the terms of technology licenses, and developing the enthusiasm and cooperation of faculty researchers. At Carnegie Mellon, we have developed an integrated entrepreneurship education program focused on opportunity recognition and strategy development, team building and leadership development, and resource acquisition and allocation. Our program actively assists in launching and supporting the resulting spinout companies by connecting entrepreneurs with value-added investors, support networks, and partners. In addition, we monitor and mentor the spinout companies through their startup and growth stages. Our program includes an aggressive cross-campus initiative in which we teach entrepreneurship courses in the science, engineering, and computer science schools (in addition to the business school) and conduct seminar series to reach faculty and graduate students within those areas of the university. We are aided in the program by the enlightened technology transfer policies that Carnegie Mellon adopted in 2001. The rationale and objectives of those policies are explained in a lengthy appendix. We illustrate the effectiveness of the model through discussion of three recent spinout companies. We conclude that university entrepreneurship education programs can significantly enhance the effectiveness of university technology transfer programs. To optimize that result, the entrepreneurship education program should extend beyond the walls of the business school and should actively assist in the creation of well thought-out business plans and the formation of well-balanced leadership teams actively monitored and mentored by the business school and its alumni and entrepreneur networks. Additionally, it is necessary to tailor the program to the specific character and needs of the region.

The research community currently employs four very different versions of the social network concept: A social network is seen as a set of socially constructed role relations (e.g., friends, business partners), a set of interpersonal sentiments (e.g., liking, trust), a pattern of behavioral social interaction (e.g., conversations, citations), or an opportunity structure for exchange. Researchers conventionally assume these conceptualizations are interchangeable as social ties, and some employ composite measures that aim to capture more than one dimension. Even so, important discrepancies often appear for non-ties (as dyads where a specific role relation or sentiment is not reported, a specific form of interaction is not observed, or exchange is not possible).

Investigating the interplay across the four definitions is a step toward developing scope conditions for generalization and application of theory across these domains.

This step is timely because emerging tools of computational social science – wearable sensors, logs of telecommunication, online exchange, or other interaction – now allow us to observe the fine-grained dynamics of interaction over time. Combined with cutting-edge methods for analysis, these lenses allow us to move beyond reified notions of social ties (and non-ties) and instead directly observe and analyze the dynamic and structural interdependencies of social interaction behavior.

This unprecedented opportunity invites us to refashion dynamic structural theories of exchange that advance “beyond networks” to unify previously disjoint research streams on relationships, interaction, and opportunity structures.

The twenty-first century will be dominated by technological change as the United States competes in an increasingly interdependent world. If the United States is to maintain its technological leadership, an inclusive engineering education is required. Engineering impacts many important aspects of day-to-day life from the environment to national security and half of our graduate degrees in engineering are granted to foreign nationals. While this influx of creative talent enriches the academic community, the underutilization of domestic talent threatens the engineering enterprise with professional shortages in university classrooms, research facilities, and corporate boardrooms. We are simultaneously challenged with addressing the shrinking pool of African-American males in higher education. The challenge is daunting but not insurmountable. Many African-American students have aspirations for engineering without the preparation and the community college is well suited to provide the bridge between aspiration and accomplishment. Community colleges serve 46% of all African-American students in higher education and there are exemplary programs that have tapped the underdeveloped resources in the African-American community. One example is the Emerson Minority Engineering Scholarship Program. By utilizing best practices, this program has helped to increase the pool of African-American engineers by providing opportunities to students who may have made other academic choices. This paper reviews persistence literature and discusses the challenges and strategies in developing a community college-based minority engineering program.

This study takes the position that the concept of fraud is socially constructed. Moreover, it asks why and how different understandings of fraud have emerged. Insights from the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 2003; Lakoff, 2002, 2004, 2009) are used to analyze language revealing dominant worldviews and metaphors regarding fraud. The research method is a case study (Yin, 2014), and the analytical approach used parallels the one described in O’Dwyer (2004). The research setting is a report issued by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which provides a context to study different understandings of fraud due to the report’s divided nature. The analysis reveals three alternative worldviews, representing different assumptions about reality, that are at the root of the different understandings of fraud. These worldviews also lead to the usage of different conceptual metaphors which allow the commissioners to interpret facts in a manner that supports each worldview’s assumptions. The paper also concludes by providing a nuanced and critical examination of the results of the commission concerning its understanding of fraud.