Virtual Worlds are being increasingly used in business and education. With each day more people are venturing into computer generated online persistent worlds such as Second Life for increasingly diverse reasons such as commerce, education, research, and entertainment. This book explores the emerging ethical issues associated with these novel environments for human interaction and cutting-edge approaches to these new ethical problems. This volume’s goal is to put forward a number of these virtual world ethical issues of which research is only commencing. The developing literature specifically regarding virtual world ethics is a recent phenomenon. Research based on the phenomenon of virtual world life has only been developing in the past four years. This volume introduces pathbreaking work in a field which is only just beginning to take shape. It is ideal as both as a library reference and a supplementary text in upper-division courses focused on the issues of applied ethics and new media. It is unique in being one of the first volumes specifically addressed to ethical problems of the “metaverse”. This volume includes articles from authors from around the world exploring topics such as: employing rationalist and casuistic approaches to the controversial topic of “virtual rape” yield an increased understanding of how virtual worlds ought to be designed, the relationship between the ethical and legal dimensions of virtual world users’ participation in “paratexts”, utilitarian consideration of harm and freedom in the case of virtual pedophilia, norms of research ethics in virtual worlds, the ethical implications of employing virtual worlds as tools for medical education and experimenting with healthcare services, the ethics of the collective action of virtual world communities, consideration of the virtue and potential of cosmopolitanism in virtual worlds, Deleuzian ethical approaches to the experience of the disabled in virtual worlds, the ethics of virtual world design, and the ethical implications of the “illusion of reality” presented by virtual worlds.

Fictional character is an ontologically ambivalent category — at once a formal construct and a quasi-person — which lies at the heart of the life of textual fictions of all kinds. Character and Person explores that ambivalence by investigating not only the kinds of thing that character is but how it works to engage readers and the range of typologies through which it has been constructed in very different periods, media, and genres. John Frow seeks to explore the ways in which character is person-like, and through that the question of what it means to be a social person. His focus is thus on the interaction between its two major categories, and its method involves a constant play back and forth between them: from philosophical theories of face to an account of the mask in the New Comedy; from an exploration of medieval beliefs about the body's existence in the afterlife to a reading of Dante's Purgatorio; from the history of humoral medicine to the figure of the melancholic in Jacobean drama; and from Proust and Pessoa to cognitive science. What develops from this methodological commitment to fusing the categories of character and person is an extended analysis of the schemata that underpin each of them in their distinct but mutually constitutive spheres of operation.

As the areas of community education and professional development continue to expand, the technologies that are utilized in these programs are also progressively advancing. However, it can sometimes be difficult to pin-point the best system in such a vast, ever-changing world of technology. Technology Use and Research Approaches for Community Education and Professional Development investigates how the role of information technology is impacting the academic and workplace environments. This publication will explore areas such as unique learning styles, various methods of disseminating information, and technology’s role and impact within these settings. Researchers, practitioners, and instructors in the areas of adult, continued, and higher education will benefit from this text’s innovative way of addressing efficient methods of utilizing technology.

As more individuals own and operate Internet-enabled devices and more critical government and industrial systems rely on advanced technologies, the issue of cybercrime has become a crucial concern for both the general public and professionals alike. The Psychology of Cyber Crime: Concepts and Principles aims to be the leading reference examining the psychology of cybercrime. This book considers many aspects of cybercrime, including research on offenders, legal issues, the impact of cybercrime on victims, punishment, and preventative measures. It is designed as a source for researchers and practitioners in the disciplines of criminology, cyberpsychology, and forensic psychology, though it is also likely to be of significant interest to many students of information technology and other related disciplines.

In a technology-driven world, it is essential that enterprises develop reliable and rapid flows of knowledge to distribute evenly across organizations, time and place, and individuals in order to sustain a competitive advantage. However, most leaders and managers are unacquainted with effective knowledge flow practices. Harnessing Dynamic Knowledge Principles in the Technology-Driven World provides actionable principles of Knowledge Flow Theory to identify and solve problems for implementing these principles into practice. With emerging developments and widespread applicability, this book is a practical guide for scholars, business managers, and enterprise leaders and managers interested in understanding the dynamics of knowledge flows for competitive advantage in a technology-driven world.

Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to "cute" in the sense of "attractive, pretty, charming" to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context of consumer culture. But if cuteness can get under the skin, what kinds of surfaces does it best infiltrate, particularly in the framework of historical forms, events, and objects that traditionally have been read as emergences around "big" aesthetics of formal symmetries, high affects, and resemblances? The Retrofuturism of Cuteness seeks to undo the temporal strictures surrounding aesthetic and affective categories, to displace a strict focus on commodification and cuteness, and to interrogate how cuteness as a minor aesthetics can refocus our perceptions and readings of both premodern and modern media, literature, and culture. Taking seriously the retro and the futuristic temporalities of cuteness, this volume puts in conversation projects that have unearthed remnants of a "cult of cute"-positioned historically and critically in between transitions into secularization, capitalist frameworks of commodification, and the enchantment of objects-and those that have investigated the uncanny haunting of earlier aesthetics in future-oriented modes of cuteness. The Latin acutus, the etymological root of cute, embraces the sharpened, the pointed, the nimble, the discriminating, and the piercing. But as Michael O'Rourke notes, cuteness evokes a proximity that is at once potentially invasive and contaminating and yet softening and transfiguring. Deploying cuteness as a mode of inquiry across time, this volume opens up unexpected lines of inquiry and unusual critical and creative aporias, from Christian asceticism, medieval cycle drama, and Shakespeare to manga, Bollywood, and Second Life. The projects collected here point to a spectrum of aesthetic-affective assemblages related to racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and class dimensions that exceed or trouble our contemporary perceptions of such registers within object-subject and subject-object entanglements. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Wan-Chuan Kao and Jen Boyle, "Introduction: The Time of the Child"Andrea Denny-Brown, "Torturer-Cute"Elizabeth Howie, "Indulgence and Refusal: Cuteness, Asceticism, and the Aestheticization of Desire"Claire Maria Chambers, "From Awe to Awww: Cuteness and the Idea of the Holy in Christian Commodity Culture"Justin Mullis, "All The Pretty Little Ponies: Bronies, Desire, and Cuteness"Marlis Schweitzer, "Consuming Celebrity: Commodities and Cuteness in the Circulation of Master William Henry West Betty"Mariah Junglan Min, "Embracing the Gremlin: Judas Iscariot and the (Anti-)Cuteness of Despair"Alicia Corts, "Cute, Charming, Dangerous: Child Avatars in Second Life"James M. Cochran, "What's Cute Got to Do with It?: Early Modern Proto-Cuteness in King Lear"Kara Watts, "Hamlet, Hesperides, and the Discursivity of Cuteness"Tripthi Pillai, "Cute Lacerations in Doctor Faustus and Omkara"Kelly Lloyd, "Katie Sokoler, Your Construction Paper Tears Can't Hide Your Yayoi Kusama-Neurotic Underbelly"

While the general agreement in education remains that the more senses involved in learning, the better we learn; the question still remains as to the distinction between the education of children and the education of adults. Handbook of Research on Teaching and Learning in K-20 Education provides well-rounded research in providing teaching and learning theories that can be applied to both adults and children while acknowledging the difference between both. This book serves as a comprehensive collection of expertise, research, skill, and experiences which will be useful to educators, scholars, and practitioners in the K-12 education, higher education, and adult education field.

Qualitative researchers have grappled with how online inquiry shifts research procedures such as gaining access to spaces, communicating with participants, and obtaining informed consent. Drawing on a multimethod approach, Conducting Qualitative Research of Learning in Online Spaces explores how to design and conduct diverse studies in online environments. Authors Hannah R. Gerber, Sandra Schamroth Abrams, Jen Scott Curwood, and Alecia Marie Magnifico focus on formal and informal learning practices that occur in evolving online spaces. The text shows researchers how they can draw upon a variety of theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and data sources. Examples of qualitative research in online spaces, along with guiding questions, support readers at every phase of the research process.

This volume presents papers that cover a wide gamut including immigrant consumption experiences, gift-giving, sharing, transgressive gender roles, attachments to special possessions in online games and real life, the homeless consumer experience, disposition of possessions, privacy, metaphor analysis, sustainable consumption, alcohol consumption, c

The current discussion about corruption in organizational studies is one of the most growing, most fertile and perhaps most fascinating ones. Corruption is also a construct that is multilevel and can be understood as being created and supported by social and cultural interaction. As a result, an ongoing dialogue on corruption permeates the levels of analysis and numerous research domains in organizational studies. Thus I see a major opportunity and necessity to look on corruption from a multilevel and multicultural perspective. Second, in the global society of the world today where organizational boundaries are becoming increasingly transparent and during the Global Crisis, which has been rooted in unethical and corrupt behavior of large corporations, a deeper understanding of corruption, its forms, typologies, ways to increase organizational immunity and the best practices how to fight against corruption that are particularly significant and can also uncover it means that individuals, groups, organizations and whole societies can be used to sustain a sense of purpose, direction, meaning and the right way for creating a moral frame for the ethical behavior in the world of flux. Third, there is a growing pressure in the field of organizational studies and management to formulate theories that stimulate thinking of corruption, to change understanding of the phenomenon and, what is the most important, to carry out actions that produce valued outcomes. This exciting book provides an authoritative and comprehensive overview of organizational corruption. It is an essential reference tool to carry out further research on corruption in organization. This book uncovers new theoretical insights that, I hope, will inspire new questions about corruption in organization; it also changes our understanding of the phenomenon and encourages further exploration and research.