Quotas: California’s Attempt to Crack Down on the Glass Ceiling

California\u27s law requiring a minimum number of women as board directors for the state\u27s publicly held companies went into effect Jan. 1, 2019. The law aims for corporate equality, but it may face several legal battles before the end of the year. Jessica Gottsacker explains some of the law\u27s shortcomings.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1018/thumbnail.jp

Entertainment Values in American Satire and Regular News Broadcasts

Social and Behavioral Sciences: 3rd Place (The Ohio State University Denman Undergraduate Research Forum)As the mass media have proliferated on American television, news programs have evolved from the traditional evening network news format and now even take the form of satirical programs. News organizations today seek to maximize audience viewership through the incorporation of entertainment values, including dramatic framing, audio-visual elements, and audience interaction. This study analyzed the extent to which these factors were used in various satire, network, and cable news broadcasts through content analysis, focusing on three levels of depth: newscast, news item, and actor. The analysis included two satire newscasts, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; two network newscasts, NBC Nightly News and ABC World News; and three cable news newscasts, The Rachel Maddow Show, Special Report with Bret Baier, and Anderson Cooper 360. Content from these shows was analyzed across two constructed weeks in 2014. Intercoder reliability was high for both content coding (Krippendorf's a= .735) and itemization of content (Guetzkow’s U = .011). Each style of newscast had its own unique presentation elements and trends, but across network, cable and satire news, stories about accidents, disasters, and crime were the most common, representing 14.2% of all news stories. Dramatization of conflict was more common than agreement in the news broadcasts, especially in cable news shows where 66.9% of news stories featured conflict. The executive branch, including the president, was the most common actor in network and cable news, presented in 30% of all news items. In network news, however, ordinary citizens were the most common actors, and were portrayed as victims 38.8% of the time. As our media continue to incorporate entertainment values into news programs, concerns are raised about the quality of the media that viewers consume, the information they learn from news broadcasts, and the role that news media play in democracy.Academic Major: Communicatio

Owners See More To Forests Than Trees

Surprisingly, many of Iowa\u27s forest owners do not view cash income as the primary value of their woodlands. Often, owners rank grazing, recreation, erosion control or wood for home use as more important

PROMOTING CSET OUTREACH ACTIVITIES THROUGH SAFETY DATA MANAGEMENT AND ANALYSIS IN RITI COMMUNITIES

Traffic crashes are one of the leading causes of death among all people in the United States, but the rates among American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) populations are significantly higher than other groups. In fact, rural areas in general are disadvantaged from a traffic safety perspective due to the lack of funding and challenges in safety improvement decisions. This may contribute to the much higher fatality rate on rural roadways than on urban roadways. Additionally, there is a known issue of underreporting of fatal crashes of tribal members. Thus, an increased focus on rural, isolated, tribal, and indigenous (RITI) community traffic safety is necessary in order to progress towards zero fatalities. The need for quality data is recognized, and even included in many tribal transportation plans, but implementation and collection of the data varies. Quality data enables better safety analysis and enables greater support for traffic safety improvements. An easy-to-use and multisource database would enable tribes throughout the state and other rural communities to more readily manage data and apply for improvement funding. In order to reach this point, it is necessary to have agreements with tribes on crash data collection and usage, and understand local customs, needs, and current practices. This research aimed to form trusting and lasting relationships with tribal leaders in Washington State in order to facilitate crash database management and traffic safety analysis in their communities. The outreach activities included meetings with local tribal leaders, interviews, and attendance and presentations at tribal conferences. Ultimately a formal research agreement was signed with one tribe in Washington State granting access to the fatal and serious injury crash data they had collected

Develop a Regional Multi-Source Database System for Safety Data Management and Analysis in RITI Communities in Washington State

Rural, Isolated, Tribal, and Indigenous (RITI) communities across the United States are disadvantaged from a transportation safety perspective. Particular concern is focusing on rural road safety. Since RITI communities often do not have the capability and resources to sufficiently solve roadway safety problems, several challenges are encountered for addressing transportation safety issues in RITI communities, including: (1) Crashes are often distributed along roads in RITI areas without known patterns; (2) Strategies to address safety issues are diverse for different RITI communities and draw from several safety areas. As a result, there is a critical need to realize equitably-augmented safety solutions that address the needs of these underserved and underinvested RITI communities. To address this gap, this project aims to develop a regional multi-source database system for traffic safety data management and analysis of RITI communities in Washington State. The existing crash data sources in RITI communities in Washington was identified and documented. The crash data on rural routes was extracted from the raw data from Washington State Department of Transportation and integrated into the multi-source database system, including traffic flow characteristics, crash attributes and contribution factors, crash-related trauma data and medical records, weather conditions, etc. The Colville tribe also provided the crash data in their tribal communities under a confidentiality agreement. A multi-source database fusion and integration system architecture was designed. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 was used to implement the database and manage the data. A six-step data quality control method was employed to clean the data by wiping out the outliers from spatial and temporal aspects. The tribal crash data was made accessible to authorized users so they can download the datasets by using password, while the WSDOT crash data was set to be public for all the users. A safety analysis module was developed for visualizing the data in the regional multi-source database system in RITI communities. The data visualization platform is developed based on the Vaadin Framework. The users can interact with the interface for data analysis. A safety performance index and a potential safety improvement index were also developed. By combining the two indexes, one can easily identify crash hotspots and the key influencing factors to consider in an improvement package.USDO

Developing a Data-Driven Safety Assessment Framework for RITI Communities in Washington State

In the history of this country, rural, isolated, indigenous, and tribal (RITI) communities were commonly overlooked with regards to social infrastructure and support. This issue is evident in the development of the transportation networks of these areas and the distinct lack of road safety in these types of communities. RITI communities carry a significantly disproportionate amount of traffic collisions and fatalities compared to urban areas. In order to improve the traffic safety conditions of the RITI communities in Washington State, it is necessary to build a traffic safety management system. A baseline data platform was developed by integrating the collected safety related data for the RITI communities in Washington State in the Year 1 Center for Safety Equity in Transportation (CSET) project. Besides the baseline data, the traffic safety management also requires the safety assessment framework, which is the corner stone of the traffic safety management system. Therefore, this project aims to develop a data-driven safety assessment framework to enable an effective roadway safety management system and improve the traffic safety conditions for RITI communities. The framework is based on an effective and efficient database management system for traffic and crash-related data of the RITI communities. In addition, in order to assist transportation agencies in practices such as the identification of high-risk roadway segments, the developed database management system has powerful visualization functions. Besides the database management and visualization platform, this project also develops roadway safety performance indices and traffic safety assessment methods in the safety assessment framework. This project also provides guidance on how to utilize these safety performance indices and results of safety assessment methods for visualization and analysis

Quotas: California’s Attempt to Crack Down on the Glass Ceiling

California\u27s law requiring a minimum number of women as board directors for the state\u27s publicly held companies went into effect Jan. 1, 2019. The law aims for corporate equality, but it may face several legal battles before the end of the year. Jessica Gottsacker explains some of the law\u27s shortcomings.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1018/thumbnail.jp

Owners See More To Forests Than Trees

Surprisingly, many of Iowa's forest owners do not view cash income as the primary value of their woodlands. Often, owners rank grazing, recreation, erosion control or wood for home use as more important.</p