New Orleans Museum of Art: A Master’s Report on my Internship Experiences and Observations

This report outlines my experiences and observations the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). It will focus on a brief history of expansion through size and collections, attempts to garner a younger audience through new tactics, and will analyze the Museum’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. I will address the ways that staff members are adapting to help secure NOMA’s relevancy as a modern and forward thinking non-profit who is actively trying to grow its youth membership. I will primarily focus on the efforts of the External Affairs department to refine its long and short-term goals that include creating better alliances with other museums and cultural organizations within the community and revamping their fundraising events to appeal to a wider audience. In the conclusion of this report, I will present my recommendations to address some of the shortcomings I observed while working at the Museum

CDL Data Quality Assessment

Quality issues related to commercial driver license (CDL) data present ongoing challenges to state and federal transportation agencies. This study highlights several problems with CDL data, including a lack of standardization for state-specific traffic infractions; process and workflow difficulties that degrade the accuracy, validity, and timeliness of data; adjudication procedures that can potentially mask serious violations from CDL driver history records; inadequate recordkeeping in state law enforcement citation and court case management software applications; outdated mainframe systems in urgent need of upgrades; IT personnel who are not paid enough; and insufficient reporting requirements for federal agencies that issue traffic citations. Best practices states can adopt to resolve these issues include undertaking renewed efforts to standardize state traffic infraction codes and equivalency tables; increasing automation of data entry and reducing repetitive data entry processes; amplifying outreach efforts to law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges that are focused on the federal guidelines which govern the adjudication of CDL-related infractions and their application to driver history records; including a CDL indicator in citation and adjudication software so that researchers and analysts can better track how CDL-related traffic are handled; increasing investments in new IT systems as well as personnel recruitment and retention; and improving coordination between federal agencies and the Central Violations Bureau so that traffic citations are reported to state agencies quicker

Structurally Unsound: The Changing State of Local Television

The centralized structure of ownership of the local television industry in the United States today has resulted from a combination of regulatory and market pressures. This dissertation analyzes the ways in which centralizing tendencies in ownership structure have been accompanied by the centralization of operations. As station groups add more stations and seek to operate the stations they already own in an ever more profitable manner, changed industrial practices are vitally important because they have direct effects upon the product of those stations, especially local television news.In analyzing such centralizing tendencies, the project focuses not only on centralization of ownership and operation, but on two further factors as well: changing interpretations of the "public interest" and the development of technologies for local television stations. Changing interpretations of the "public interest" provision of regulatory law permitted and encouraged station groups to grow larger, redefining the structure of the local television industry, even in the times of heaviest restriction. In terms of technological development, after a brief period of equipment designed simply to get product on the air, television equipment developers followed a consistent guiding principle of staff reduction and job simplification which aided this momentum towards centralization. The combination of changing ownership structures, shifts in understandings of "public interest," and new technologies has resulted in new business models built around invoking economies of scale, including centralcasting and multi-channel operation. These new business models have dramatically altered the program product of local television stations, especially local news. News programming, which initially entered broadcasting in response to the regulatory mandate that broadcasters serve the public in return for free access to the public airwaves, has been transformed into a primary source of local station revenue. This commodified version of news programming is the logical result of practices begun in newspapers and continued in radio broadcasting. The news product of local stations is an area of vital concern in the present day media environment, as the quantity of news on the air increases without a corresponding increase in newsroom resources, jeopardizing the quality and veracity of those news programs