College professors and students are increasingly relying on social networking sites to make connections. With this new technology, questions about the lines of what is private and what is public have become blurry and misunderstood. Faculty find themselves involved in situations that are less than desirable and pose First Amendment concerns. A review of literature was conducted using a basic framework for analyzing free speech rights of college professors. A sampling of recent administrative decisions where college professors were reprimanded for online postings considered inappropriate by university authorities was also discussed. A content analysis of information posted to 85 faculty members ' Facebook walls was conducted. Results indicate that faculty members' posts were a combination of private and public concern. Implications of privacy rights for college professors on social networking sites and whether they fit within the purview of the freedom of speech First Amendment constitutional rights are considered.

In partnership with Bristol Tennessee Essential Services (BTES) whose economic development initiatives provided fiber optic internet to local schools, an engagement agreement was drafted in which an ETSU graduate student team was contracted to develop an improved delivery methodology. This article presents a longitudinal case study and underscores the implications for engineering management education.

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With the recent developments of several bridge managements systems and their wide-spread use, bridge engineers are realizing the importance of systematic and well planned investments and appropriate management. However the results are far from satisfactory. Bridge management systems need more effective policy analysis tools that can take advantage of the vast amounts of available information to be more efficient. The objective of this research is to develop a policy analysis tool, which is generic in nature and can be applied to any bridge management system provided all the appropriate data is available. In particular, this policy analysis tool is geared to suit policy making, planning and budgeting for the interstate bridges in the state of Virginia. The policy analysis tool developed in this research is a discrete event simulation model capable of extracting information from text files in the Pontis Data Interchange format and simulate user defined element level policies. The model testing was performed using the interstate bridges of the Salem district in Virginia. All the relevant information was extracted from their PONTIS databases. Several scenarios with varying network policies were simulated. The results indicate the validity and the accuracy of the model. The policy analysis tool is a useful addition to the existing policy analysis tools and is capable of handling probabilistic distributions of data instead of single value averages. This will enable the tool to capture more information thereby making the simulation model more realistic. The general framework that was developed here can be applied to any infrastructure problem, and eventually it should be possible to achieve a discrete event simulation based integrated infrastructure management system. / Master of Science

Among doctoral programs, attrition rates and student feelings of isolation are high. In an attempt to determine the current levels and sources of support and encouragement from students enrolled in a Doctor of Education program, a survey was sent to students. There were 94 respondents to the online survey. Fifty-two (65%) of the respondents were female, and 28 (35%) were male. Fourteen respondents did not self-identify. Using an independent samples t-test, it was determined that female and male doctoral students report very similar experiences in support and encouragement. The majority of doctoral students reported the highest level of support (Total Support) for almost all of the areas of survey. When asked to rank a list of sources of support and encouragement, over 71% ranked Spouse, Partner, or Significant Other as being most important. Other sources that were ranked as important were Immediate Supervisor, Children, and Workplace Peers. Most financial support for doctoral students came from a combination of Self (72%), Employer (66%), and Financial Aid/Scholarships (59%).

In a recent article Ulrich Brand has discussed how best to perform policy analysis. I reflect upon the paper as an interdisciplinary researcher experienced in public policy problems and their analysis with a particular interest in the relationship between social, economic and environmental problems. At the centre of the paper is the contrast between two existing methodologies prevalent in political science and related disciplines. One is the rationalist approach, which takes on the character of a natural science, that believes in a fully knowable objective reality which can be observed by an independent investigator. The other is a strong social constructivist position called interpretative policy analysis (IPA), where knowledge and meaning become so intertwined as to make independence of the observer from the observed impossible and all knowledge highly subjective. Brand then offers his model as a way forward, but one that he closely associates with the latter. My contention is that policy analysis, and any way forward, needs to provide more of a transformative combination of elements from both approaches. Indeed I believe this is actually what Brand is doing.

This paper deals with the key issues of early school leaving and youth unemployment in Europe and takes a look at the causes and consequences of these problems. A summary of relevant early school leaving statistics and research studies which describe the situation in Austria is presented. Measures and initiatives to reduce early school leaving that have been implemented in Austria since the Lisbon 2000 Strategy are discussed along with the questions of whether, and if so which, EU policy documents have influenced Austrian measures to tackle early school leaving. The conclusion critically sums up the following relevant results: although many of the policies recommended by the EU have been implemented in Austria, many preventive measures are also still outstanding. These include, for example, the continued lack of (tertiary level) training for kindergarten teachers and the failure to introduce comprehensive schools. The call for the latter was not met by Austrias' introduction of so-called new middle schools, a workaround which has not led to a reduction in social inequalities in educational pathways. The supra-company apprenticeship training concept is a positive development, since it reaches some of the countrys' early school leavers. (authors' abstract)

This research examines European Union (EU) policy instruments affecting the urban domain throughout the lenses of the Europeanization approach. Instead of looking at EU instruments that are formally/legally consecrated to cities, we use theoretical public policy analysis to explore the arenas and the causal mechanisms that structure the encounter between the EU and urban systems of governance. We develop the argument that there are four different modes of Europeanization. In consequence, to grasp the essence of a single instrument or a given EU initiative, one has to establish which mode is prevailing in the policy logic of that instrument or initiative. The core variables that explain change concern the status of actors’ preferences (a) and the payoffs from Europeanization (b). The combination of (a) and (b) thus originates a four dimensional space. We can therefore develop a typology for the modes of Europeanization, which chimes with current theorisations on the EU modes of governance. The eventual Europeanization of urban systems depends on the nature of strategic interaction, not on the legal ‘tools’ explicitly designated for cities. Thus, policy instruments are initially associated with the four modes. We then used process-tracing to verify whether instruments actually perform according to the ‘mode’ to which they have been initially paired, or if they trigger contingencies that have not been theoretically/deductively foreseen. This is particularly convenient within a realm – urban policies – where the EU does not have a specific formal competence and where interactions between ‘cities’ and the EU are likely to take place within multiple policy areas and during different stages of the policy process. Mechanisms are explored by considering the city of Turin. The four ‘policy instruments’ selected as proxies for the assessment of modes of Europeanization are the Covenant of Mayors programme for energy saving, directive 1994/62 (then waste framework directive) for waste management, directive 1993/30 for air quality control and the URBAN II Community Initiative for urban regeneration and development. The analysis of the four instruments reveals less variation between modes than initially expected. In this connection, theoretical similarity between modes, as emerged from the typological exercise carried out at the outset of the research, was partially echoed by the empirical analysis of policy instruments. Within cities and urban areas, the Europeanization effect is likely to assume a more blurred fashion and the action of, and reaction to, Europe is greatly interwoven with other dynamics, which in turn shape the perception and the actual impact of European modes and instruments for regulation. In the conclusions we highlight the differences between this approach and the traditional analysis of EU urban policy, and suggest avenues for future empirical research based on typologies of policy instruments.