The importance of being relevent : understanding the complex connections between museum and community

This document has had referenced material removed in respect for the owner's copyright. A complete version of this document, which includes said referenced material, resides in the University of Maryland, College Park's library collection. Masters final project submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Historic Preservation. HISP 710/711 Spring 2010.Like many of America’s house museums, Mount Clare, the 18th-century Baltimore plantation home of Charles Carroll, struggles to maintain relevance, sustain its mission and remain financially sound. More recently formed museums, such as the Tenement Museum of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, have begun to recognize their capacity as platforms for dialogue and social justice and the necessity of engaging their local communities, providing a useful model for Mount Clare Museum House. Engaging with its southwest Baltimore community would enable Mount Clare to fully support an educational mission that resonates with the local population, while preserving the role of the historic site. The purpose of this paper is to explore Mount Clare Museum House in terms of its relevance to various levels of community. This will be accomplished by examining Mount Clare’s governing boards and mission statement, by considering its interpretation and outreach programming, by researching community opinion, and by comparing it to aspects of the Tenement Museum. The intention is to create a better understanding of why past attempts to broaden Mount Clare’s interpretive scope have failed, to help the museum move forward in reaching out to the community, and to reflect on the public it seeks to educate

Bringing More Competition to Real Estate Brokerage

This paper provides an economic analysis of the residential real estate brokerage industry. We find that the traditional model for residential real estate brokerage services may be dated, and could be improved substantially with some public policy interventions that spur innovation. We believe that there are numerous barriers to entry that are slowing the emergence of new models for serving consumers. Some of these barriers are likely to be anti-competitive. Examples include discrimination against new brokerage models and online brokers who wish to join multiple listing services; state legislation that would require minimum service requirements, effectively preventing "a la carte" offerings; and prohibitions by real estate commissions on providing rebates to customers. In our opinion, none of these practices should be allowed. We offer three broad policy recommendations: First, federal and state antitrust authorities should carefully scrutinize efforts to limit competition in the residential real estate brokerage market. Second, state governments should refrain from adopting laws or rules that inhibit competition in real estate brokerage. Third, Congress should allow the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department to permit banks, which have long been natural potential entrants into this business, to offer residential real estate brokerage services through separately capitalized affiliates. We do not know which business models are likely to succeed in the marketplace for residential real estate services in the future. We do believe, however, that judicious public policy interventions could have a marked impact on improving services and lowering costs for home buyers and sellers. Click Here for a shorter version of this paper, published in The Milken InstituteReview .

Intelligibility of speech addressed to children

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The Value of Certified Pre-Owned Vehicles for Lexus of Edmonton

Our objective was to discover productive improvements to Lexus of Edmonton’s (LoE) current Certified Pre-Owned (CPO) Vehicle practices by determining if CPO vehicles added value, and if so, what value was added. By utilizing multiple methods, we discovered areas in the used vehicle sector that Lexus of Edmonton could improve on. In order to conduct our research, five in-depth interviews, scholarly article evaluations, meet with the representatives of Lexus of Edmonton, and surveys were conducted using paper, email and social media tools such as Google surveys, Twitter and Facebook. The methods allowed our group to utilize statistical analysis to outline the importance of relationships between variables with the statistical software, SPSS. With the information received from statistical analysis, we believe that Lexus of Edmonton can succeed with the sale of CPO vehicles by following our recommendations, including: certification education, appropriate pricing of used vehicles, building trust, value-added certification benefits based on willingness to spend and targeted demographics, as well as further research