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Recent reports suggest the shape and size of the digital divide may be changing. This exploratory study aims to examine the relationships between demographic and situational variables and small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) owners' intentions to adopt and use free public wifi technology.

A survey study of 158 SME owners in the urban renewal community (RC) of a large Southwestern metroplex investigated the influence of known digital divisors – gender, ethnicity, age, education, and experience – on the adoption and use of wi‐fi technologies. Partial least squares was used to test the hypotheses.

Contrary to previous research, gender, age, education, and experience were not related to the intention to adopt wifi technology. Ethnicity was significantly related to intent to adopt, but the relationship was small. Ethnicity and age were found to be somewhat related to wifi usage. In marked contrast from earlier research, education, gender, and experience were not significant predictors of usage.

The findings suggest that access to high‐speed wifi has the potential to reduce and/or eliminate the digital divide. The projected changes in the digital divide can be expected to make a significant impact on SME productivity and performance.

This study is one of the first to examine the influence of the adoption and use of public wi‐fi technologies by SME owners on the digital divide.

The complex value chain that facilitates local food production and consumption includes purveyors positioned across a range of marketspaces who through the various ways they present and sell their products help create and convey the meaning of “local food.” Limited governance within local food systems (LFSs) and a lack of consensus on the definition of “local food” provide purveyors with notable latitude in how they frame the meaning of “local” in the food products they produce, market, and sell. Consequently, the expansion of food products that are framed as being “local” within conventional marketspaces threatens to convolute the meaning and representation of local food within specific LFSs and across the broader local food movement (LFM). Here, I use a structured photo analysis design to explore the elements that influence the visual representation of “local food” by purveyors within five farmers’ markets and five grocery stores located across the Southern Arizona LFS (SALFS). I consider the farmers’ markets to be alternative marketspaces and the grocery stores to be conventional marketspaces. The data consist of 683 original photos taken of local food framing practices within the farmers’ markets and grocery stores and extensive field notes captured throughout multiple direct observations at each market space. My exploration is guided by a theoretical framework composed of constructs specific to institutional logic, product framing, and taste regimes. The findings illustrate how local food framing practices across alternative and mainstream marketspaces foster a local food taste regime that fails to convey the fundamental principles and values of the LFM. Recommendations for both practice and research are developed from the findings.

Futures research and long‐range planning in an urban school district involve the use of a methodology having no direct answers or precise rules in terms of experimental and design alternatives. While some design options can be found in operations research and management science, futures research projects in education are more likely to follow the directions for policy analysis initially suggested by Yehezkel Dror and re‐examined in Aaron Wildavsky. They note in policy analysis, 1. Much attention would be paid to the political aspects of public decision‐making and public policy‐making (instead of ignoring or condescendingly regarding political aspects) … 2. A broad conception of decision‐making and policy‐making would be involved (instead of viewing all decision‐making as mainly a resources allocation) … 3. A main emphasis would be on creativity and search for new policy alternatives, with explicit attention to encouragement of innovative thinking … 4. There would be extensive reliance on … qualitative methods … 5. There would be much more emphasis on futuristic thinking … 6. The approach would be looser and less rigid, but nevertheless systematic, one which would recognise the complexity of means‐ends interdependence, the multiplicity of relevant criteria of decision, and the partial and tentative nature of every analysis … (Wildavsky, Aaron, “Rescuing Policy Analysis from PPBS” Public Administration Review 29. 1969. pp. 189–202. Wildavsky's reference is to Dror's “Policy Analysts : A New Professional Role in Government Service” Public Administration Review. 27. 1967. pp.200–201). The intent is to describe a single futures research project conducted in a large urban school district staff development program. It is reported here as a means to outline a general approach to policy planning that might be used or adapted by other administrators who share an interest in futures research.

The University of North Texas (UNT) has a long-standing partnership with the University of Magallanes (UMAG), Chile. This partnership is unique due to the wide expanse of its activities and connections to the local, regional, national, and international contexts. Moreover, this mutually beneficial partnership and its accompanying and tangential activities and initiatives span student mobility, transnational research, academic partnerships, community engagement, and several UN Sustainable Development Goals. This case study will discuss the various aspects of the partnership, how it developed and flourished over the past 20 years, and the impact of COVID on initiatives to expand global collaboration. It is a fascinating study of how the research interests of two faculty members led the way for UNT to develop an interdisciplinary partnership with regional, national, and international recognition. In particular, the authors will analyze the key ingredients for success of the partnership along with lessons learned. The chapter also will examine how the pandemic created a new dynamic, discuss steps taken to mitigate its impact, and offer some predictions for future directions.

Should the higher education pipeline be viewed as a kind of geospatial production function? In this chapter, factors influencing the higher education pipeline for African-American males will be briefly examined. A specific focus will be on potential geospatial factors associated with educational attainment and life course outcomes.

For centuries, the Hispanic population has been proving itself as an emerging majority in the United States. The United States census shows that the Hispanic population more than doubled from 1970 to 1980 and from 1980 to 1990. However, despite these data, libraries have not adapted their library services to meet the needs of this population, despite their knowledge that Hispanics do not feel welcome in libraries. Authors from 1970 to 2001 have highlighted the long-standing problem of Hispanic under-utilization of libraries and have provided recommendations for the library community regarding adapting their services in a culturally sensitive manner. Despite these publications, there is still literature in 2001 reporting that Hispanics do not feel welcome in libraries. The purpose of this study is to examine the current status of three facets of librarianship: (1) outreach efforts to Hispanics; (2) specialized training for Hispanics in bibliographic and information literacy; and (3) current attitudes of Hispanics toward public libraries.

Micro hospitals are a new form of for-profit health-care facility with rapid expansion in some parts of the country. They continue to grow in Texas without in-depth public understanding or explicit policy guidance on their role in the health-care system. Our project aims to define socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of areas served by micro and regular hospitals, and by doing so help assess micro hospitals' impact in expanding health-care access for disadvantaged populations in Texas.

We (1) estimated hospital service areas (catchment areas) with a spatial model based on advanced Geographic Information System (GIS) methods using a proprietary ESRI traffic network; (2) assigned population socioeconomic measures to the catchment areas from the 2014–2018 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, weighted with an empirically tested Gaussian distribution; (3) used two-tailed t-tests to compare means of population characteristics between micro and regular hospital catchment areas; and (4) conducted logistic regressions to examine relationships between selected population variables and the associated odds of micro hospital presence.

We found micro hospitals in Texas tend to serve a population less stressed in health-care access compared to those who are more in need as measured by various dimensions of disadvantages.

Our analysis takes a cross sectional look at the population characteristics of micro hospital service areas. Even though the initial geographic choices of micro hospitals may not reflect the long-term population changes in specific neighborhoods, our analysis can provide policy makers a tool to examine health-care access for disadvantaged populations at given point in time. As the population socioeconomic characteristics have long been associated with health-care inequality, we hope our analysis will help foster structural policy considerations that balance growing health-care delivery innovations and their social accountability.

We used GIS based spatial modeling to dynamically capture the potential patient basis by travel time calculated with a street network dataset, rather than using the traditional static census tract to define hospital service areas. By integrating both spatial and nonspatial dimensions of healthcare access, we demonstrated that the policy considerations on the implications of equal opportunity for health-care access need to take into account the social realities and lived experiences of those experiencing the most vulnerability in our society, rather than a conceptual “equality” existing in the spatial and market abstraction.