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Purpose – Intersections are hazardous locations and to improve their safety we need to understand the factors contributing to crashes at these locations and provide evidence-based recommendations to reduce them. This chapter provides a summary of the findings on infrastructure-related factors contributing to crashes at urban and rural intersections and some discussions on the implications and potential countermeasures.

Approach – A review of the literature on intersection crashes was performed to identify the infrastructure-related crash-contributing factors. Some discussions on the implications and potential countermeasures are then provided.

Findings – The factors contributing to road crashes are diverse and complex. While the safety effects of a few factors (e.g., exposure and speed) are relatively consistent, many factors have different impacts on crash frequency and severity (e.g., types of intersection) and different impacts on urban and rural intersections (e.g., bus stops).

Research Implications – More studies are needed on developing a stronger theoretical or conceptual foundation on the effects of roadway designs and traffic controls on different dimensions of safety (e.g., exposure, frequency, severity, etc.), types of crashes (e.g., head-on, rear-end, etc.) or road users involved (e.g., drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, etc.).

Practical Implications – Transport engineers need to be aware that some treatments may have different effects on different crash types and road users involved. Even though the overall safety may be improved by the treatments designed, they need to consider and mitigate any unintended consequences to satisfy the Pareto improvement principle and the social equity criterion.

This chapter discusses the application of community informatics (CI) principles in the rural Southern and Central Appalachian (SCA) region to further the teaching of information and communication technologies (ICT) literacy concepts in courses that formed part of two externally funded grants, “Information Technology Rural Librarian Master’s Scholarship Program Part I” (ITRL) and “Part II” (ITRL2), awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program to the School of Information Sciences (SIS) at the University of Tennessee (UT).

The chapter documents ICT use in ITRL and ITRL2 to extend librarian technology literacy training, allowing these public information providers to become change agents in the twenty-first century. It discusses aspects of CI that influenced these two projects and shaped the training of future rural library leaders embedded in traditionally underrepresented areas to further social justice and progressive changes in the region’s rural communities.

The chapter demonstrates the role that CI principles played in the context of ITRL and ITRL2 from project inception to the graduation of the rural librarians with examples of tangible IT services/products that the students developed in their courses that were directly applicable and tailored to their SCA contexts.

ITRL and ITRL2 provided a unique opportunity to apply a CI approach to train information librarians as agents of change in the SCA regions to further economic and cultural development via technology and management competencies. These change agents will continue to play a significant role in community building and community development efforts in the future.

The pandemic has brought to light the importance of quickly adopting new technologies and building resilient organisations. Also, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be addressed in large part through technological innovations. The development of smart systems which are linked with the Internet of Things (IoT) can create different opportunities to strategically face the barriers linked with the SDGs and make sure that there is an environmentally sustainable, equitable and healthy society. This study has utilised secondary and qualitative data and has adopted the interpretative and deductive approaches. It has given significance to several aspects of the SDGs and has linked them with digital technology such as accessibility to safe and clean portable water, production of sustainable food along with the generation of green energy and its utilisation. This study has evaluated the advantages of digitalisation so that it can catalyse the transition towards SDGs and improve the health of the citizens by giving digital accessibility specifically to the underserved community. The research has selected the most essential themes which are linked to the context of SDGs and has deeply evaluated a lot of information obtained from authentic secondary resources. At last, it provides a conclusion and recommendations where it has suggested several initiatives which could be made for enhancing the overall scenario and has also disguised the limitations that were identified while completing the study.

This paper argues that the nation's immigration laws are being misused to craft a system of preventive administrative detention of immigrant men, predominantly of Middle Eastern background. These detentions give rise to imprisonment without charge for weeks and months, denial of access to lawyers, physical and psychological abuse and ultimately deportations without a fair initial hearing or the exhaustion of available appellate recourse. I argue that this expanded use of civil immigration detention is designed to weaken constitutional due process protections, bringing into the U.S. detention tactics adopted abroad under the rubric of the war on terror. This paper also highlights similarities between the evolving administrative detention system in the United States and longer-standing practices in Israel.