Corporate social responsibility and socially responsible investment : new paradigm, latest fad, or ingenious plot?.

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The Contribution of Local Education Authorities to the Development of Education for Children Said to Have Mild and Moderate Difficulties With Learning and the Limitations Imposed Upon Them During This Development: With Reference, Where Appropriate, to Events in Northamptonshire

The thesis traces the development of education for children with mild and moderate learning difficulties through the actions of education authorities, either independently or in response to legislation or directives and reports from central government. Using primary sources linked to significant periods, descriptions of the current system have been constructed in order to illustrate how the development has proceeded, the relationships between central government and the education authorities, how national policy has been put into practice, how pupils in these categories have been defined and identified, the significance of integration and the development of support services and their reorganisation as a result of the educational reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. The thesis deals with events surrounding the Departmental Committee on Defective and Epileptic Children ,(1898), The Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded (1908), The Report of the Mental Deficiency Committee (1929) and the legislation of 1944, The Warnpck Report (1978), the development of support services during the 1980s, and finally the impact of educational reform and the introduction of the Code of Practice in the 1990s. Where appropriate specific examples of responses and initiatives undertaken by LEAs had been described in order to illustrate the development that has taken place. In each chapter an account of events in Northamptonshire has been given. This becomes more detailed in the last three chapters which incorporate a case study of development in the county following the Warnock Report up to the present day. The development of special needs policy in Northamptonshire is presented as a positive response to the directives of central government and as a sound basis for future development, providing possible solutions to some of the concerns reflected in current debates

Educating English Learners: Reconciling Bilingualism and Accountability

(Excerpt) In late July 2011, an estimated 5,000 individuals converged on Washington, D.C., to protest the direction of state and federal education policy. Fueled by social media, the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action was a grassroots effort organized largely by teachers, with principals, school board members, and activists lending support. Featured speakers included prominent education figures, like historian Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol, a former teacher known for his writings on school inequalities. Specific points of contention focused on high stakes testing and test-based accountability, key elements in the Obama Administration’s Blueprint for Reform and Race to the Top initiative. Attacking student poverty was a repeated rallying cry. Among the groups joining the protest were advocates for the 5.3 million “English learners” (ELs) who comprise 10.7% of the K–12 school population. These students, mostly from immigrant families, need additional English skills to achieve on par with their English-proficient peers. Though they represent more than 150 languages, seventy-three percent come from homes where Spanish is the dominant language. Their education raises red flags at times related more to conflicts over American identity and failed immigration policies than to sound pedagogy

Engineering Out Systematic Oppression: Disenfranchisement, Discrimination, and Solutions for Election Systems

This comparative analysis reviews literature from the perspective of legal, sociological, political and engineering disciplines. The interdisciplinary approach allows for a holistic examination of what problems persist in commissioning of elections. In many cases, practical engineering considerations are forced to defer to legal precedent. I blend both historical and contemporary issues regarding elections and democracy in the United States, and I trace the failures of the election system to achieve full enfranchisement. I discuss these legal battles in the context of maintaining secure elections. I review technological aspects of elections and various election systems. A newly developed tool, the Perspective On Issues Map, analyzes and illustrates the compendium of these aspects of the voting system in one graphic. Finally, I ask questions for future research.No embargoAcademic Major: Industrial and Systems Engineerin

Falling Away Into Disease: Disability-Deviance Narratives in American Crime Control

(Excerpt) Who in society is predisposed to crime? Many of us are familiar with cultural narratives that trace criminal behavior to some cognitive defect in the perpetrator. For instance, we might recall the persistent media allusions to Adam Lanza’s Asperger Syndrome after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, despite evidence that individuals on the autism spectrum are, on average, not more likely, and are quite possibly less likely, to commit serious crime in their lifetime. Similarly, popular narratives about the relationship between “mental illness” and violence are pervasive, despite the broad meaning of the terminology and a deeply-misunderstood relationship between psychiatric disability and crime. From Batman to Bundy, narratives in popular culture that explain crime through allusions to developmental, intellectual, psychiatric, or psychosocial impairments are ubiquitous. In one popular idiom, the disabled offender is “imbecilic” or “mad” to the point of lacking moral volition or free will. In another, the disabled offender is “psychopathic,” antisocial and personality-disordered, but also competent, volitional, and accountable— sometimes terrifyingly so—to the point of evil genius or predation. Tellingly, within these stories and the idioms they render, childlike incompetence and psychopathic aptitude can be difficult to parse, leading to the befuddlement of law enforcement or the courts. Stories are inherently intrigued with cause-and-effect, and so is law. Existing scholarship has highlighted the important role that criminal law, and the carceral state more broadly, have played in constructing the modern understanding of cognitive disability in the West. In particular, tenuously-biomedical constructs of insanity as “disease of the mind,” incompetence, and dangerous mental abnormality in civil confinement under state police power have themselves become cultural memes, helping to form societal understandings—and myths—about the interactions between neurodivergence, criminal predilection, and moral culpability. Law is a social institution that relies heavily on language to develop idiosyncratic models and constructs of reality, defined by consensus from within various legal communities about how a “closed linguistic system should best reflect the outside world.” The title of this essay is attributable to Fiona Campbell’s observation that disability fictions in law—in collusion with biomedical discourses—often construct difference in liminal space where no literal referent exists, “deploy[ing] . . . a ‘compulsion towards terror’ . . . of ‘falling away’ and ‘crossing over’ into an uncertain void of dis-ease.

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India