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Technology Competencies in Northern Coastal California Accounting Practices: A Survey of Software Use and Graduate Readiness
No full textThis study investigates technology use and skill expectations among accounting practitioners and employers in Northern Coastal California, focusing on perceptions of recent graduates' technical readiness. Based on survey responses from Cal Poly Humboldt alumni and local CPA firms, the analysis identifies preferred software, expected Excel proficiency, and attitudes toward programming. Results show that Excel remains the primary analytical tool, particularly for pivot tables, data management, and basic automation, while domain-specific applications are increasingly used to enhance tax and audit quality. SQL and Python are recognized as valuable but not yet essential in daily practice. Qualitative feedback emphasizes adaptability, ethical judgment, and communication skills, indicating that technology should complement rather than replace traditional accounting competencies. The findings inform accounting educators seeking to balance digital fluency with professional judgment in curriculum design
CORAZÓN DE LA PUENTISTA: BRIDGING RELATIONSHIPS WITH LATINX PARENTS IN SCHOOLS
No full textParent involvement practices often exclude Latinx parents, favoring white, middle-class ways of participation in schools. As a result of this exclusion, Latinx parents are seen as "lazy" or "uncaring" when they are not able to perform and adhere to dominant ways of engagement. A closer examination of the current and historical contributions of Latinx parents indicated they have always been involved, often in unrecognized ways that contribute significantly not only to their children's education, but also to the benefit of the school as a whole. This study highlighted the importance of centering parent assets by relying on community based participatory action research and pláticas as methodologies. The intention of these research approaches was to elevate culturally oriented ways of joining parent communities to support children's educational futures collectively. This research team's 13-week participation in a weekly Latinx parent group located in a Northern California elementary school revealed that building connections through dialogue was a fundamental process that uplifted the strengths of Latinx parents. The project propelled the parents, who were coresearchers in this project, to share their stories as ways to create community, share information and resources, maintain culture, build critical consciousness, resist, and heal. Reflections on the experience led to the conclusion that all members of the school community should consider themselves to be bridge builders, or puentistas, who rather than require Latinx parents to perform the tasks of the "good parent" in schools, join with parents in culturally meaningful ways to act on their voice and thrive in their communities
Performance and lecture recital
No full textAs a bass student it is important to pay homage to the jazz bass innovators that paved the way for the instrument to be what it is today. None should be more respected than Jimmy Blanton (1918-1942). While his career was short, having passed away from tuberculosis in his early 20s, his legacy lives on and has become the foundation for establishing a uniquely important role attributed to the jazz upright bass. Before Blanton the bass was a supportive instrument largely there to serve more as a rhythmic device centered on the tonal root of each chord. Blanton was the first to stylistically mimic the vocabulary of the jazz horn line. He adopted a right hand technique (string plucking hand) that allowed for faster and more articulated note choices that made the bass viable as a solo instrument within the jazz idiom. This graduate project is a combination of lecture and musical demonstration pertaining to the techniques that Blanton innovated. The main purpose is to highlight these techniques and musical vocabulary as a guide for aspiring bass players. It should also serve as a demonstration of process in how to recognize what aspects of other people's playing clearly derived influence from Blanton
Hera: Where Connections Blossom and Memories Flourish
No full textHera is a novel platform that will transform the way people get connected and arrange social meetings. By breaking the limitations of traditional matchmaking and social planning sites, it will provide users with a seamless, personalized experience. With the application of advanced technologies such as prompt engineering and collaborative filtering, Hera provides highly relevant matches and event recommendations based on individual interests and preferences. The site serves a broad user base, from singles and couples to families, social groups, and working professionals, providing mass appeal. Personalized event creation, Google Maps integration, and premium membership perks are some of the most important features that maximize user experience and interaction. Hera associates with businesses to provide exclusive discounts and privileges, adding to the richness of the user experience. Further down the line, the platform will also incorporate AR/VR experiences to further socializing, as well as predictive analytics for yet more personalized recommendations. With international ambitions, Hera aims to introduce innovative solutions globally, transforming the formation of meaningful connections. Emphasizing flexibility, personalization, and user-led design, the platform stands out in the competitive matchmaking and event-planning market
Facial Emotion Recognition Using Deep Learning Models
No full textThe Emotion Sensing System (ESS) is a vital area of research in computer vision with impactful applications in human-computer interaction, healthcare, psychology, marketing, and security. Its primary goal is to accurately detect and classify human emotions from facial expressions. However, achieving reliable emotion recognition is challenging due to natural variations across individuals, cultures, and environments. Two primary issues in this domain are intra-class variation-where the same emotion is expressed differently by different people-and inter-class similarity-where different emotions may appear visually similar. Recent advancements in deep learning, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have significantly improved facial emotion recognition (FER), achieving near-human accuracy in controlled settings. To further enhance robustness and generalizability in real-world conditions, this project adopts a multimodal approach that fuses RGB and depth data. The integration of depth alongside RGB provides a richer geometric understanding of facial structure, improving resilience to occlusion, lighting variations, and identity-based differences. This enables the model to better capture subtle emotional cues. To effectively manage intra-class and inter-class challenges, we explored various loss functions and selected the Island Loss function, which enhances the discriminative capability of the model. It does so by maximizing separation between different emotion classes while minimizing variations within the same class. The proposed architecture combines a CNN-based feature extractor with a transformer-based encoder and a classification module for precise emotion prediction. Experiments conducted on standard benchmark datasets-Caldermen, BU3DFE, and Bosphorus-demonstrate that this multimodal ESS model significantly outperforms unimodal(RGB-only) systems. The fusion framework proves to be more robust, scalable, and suitable for real-world emotion recognition applications. By advancing the state-of-the-art in emotion recognition, the ESS enhances the design of intelligent, emotionally aware systems, contributing to improved usability and adaptability of AI-driven interactions across various industries
Characterization of oscillations of on-disk spicule-like events
No full textComprehending the mechanisms of energy transport through the chromosphere is important in our understanding of the heating of the corona and the acceleration of the solar wind. We utilize high-resolution, high-cadence observations from the Hydrogen-Alpha Rapid Dynamics camera system on the Dunn Solar Telescope (DST), obtained in support of the Parker Solar Probe perihelia passages, to investigate the properties of spicule-like events in the upper chromosphere. The dataset consists of a one-hour time series of H-alpha images of a limb region, for which we systematically identify plane-of-sky transverse oscillations of the spicule-like structures. We provide a statistical description of the life times and energy content of these dynamic events together with the characteristic frequencies and amplitudes of the waves
Exploratory application of pregnancy outcome sequencing: patterns of prior pregnancy outcomes and the likelihood of subsequent natural pregnancy loss
No full textThe goal of this thesis is to understand the association of pregnancy outcome sequences and the subsequent risk or natural loss. To avoid recall and selection bias, we use Medicaid claims data. Our data consists of Medicaid-eligible women 16 years of age in 1999, with at least one pregnancy in 1999-2015, from the following states: Connecticut, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and West Virginia. The results that we are measuring is the difference in risk of natural loss dependent on a patient's history of prior pregnancy outcomes. In this thesis, we perform a comparative study of the rate of natural loss between women of with various prior pregnancy outcome sequences. Using the MLE, we find the probabilities for each sequence, but, due to sparse data for the higher pregnancies, we cannot make conclusions for the longer sequences. We turn to logistic regression to gain a better understanding of the effects abortion, birth, and natural loss have upon the subsequent risk of natural loss. Our logistic regression model concludes that both abortion and natural loss have a significant positive correlation with an increased risk of subsequent natural loss (p-values of < 2 × 10^(−16) and 0.0205 respectively). Additionally, birth does not have a significant association with a change in the risk of a subsequent natural loss (p-value of 0.50945). We continue to explore these associations through the use of simultaneous confidence intervals: Agresti et al. method [1] and Tukey-Kramer method [16]. We again see that prior birth does not significantly affect the subsequent risk of natural loss. Therefore, to increase the power of the test, we allow prior births to be interspersed when analyzing prior abortions and prior natural losses. For women with 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 prior abortions, their aggregate proportion of natural losses were respectively 0.145, 0.183, 0.238, 0.303, and 0.245 (in total of 4113, 886, 202, 109, and 53 patients). The Agresti et al. SCI finds that there is a significant difference in proportion when comparing 0 prior abortions with 1, 2, or 3 prior abortions and when comparing 1 prior abortion to 3 prior abortions. The Tukey-Kramer SCI finds that there is a significant difference in proportion when comparing 0 prior abortions to 2 or 3 prior abortions. For women with 0, 1, or 2 prior natural losses, their aggregate proportion of natural losses were respectively 0.145, 0.107, and 0.352 (in total of 4113, 543, and 54 patients). The Agresti et al. SCI finds that there is a significant difference in proportion when comparing 0 prior natural losses and 2 prior natural losses, and when comparing 1 prior natural loss to 2 prior natural losses. The Tukey-Kramer SCI confirms these results and also finds that the decrease in proportion from 0 prior natural losses to 1 prior natural loss is significant
Impact of EV charging Schedules on carbon emissions and Network load
No full textThis graduate project presents a multi-objective optimization framework to assess the impact of electric vehicle (EV) charging schedules on carbon emissions and network load. The study focuses on California, utilizing real-world EV charging data from Level 2 stations and real-time carbon intensity data provided by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Two objectives are addressed using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II): (1) minimizing total CO₂ emissions associated with EV charging, and (2) minimizing the peak aggregate power demand on the grid. The emissions objective uses carbon intensity values in place of marginal emission factors (MEFs), offering a more practical and data-accessible method for evaluating environmental impact. The resulting Pareto front reveals the trade-offs between emissions reduction and load flattening. This analysis contributes to the development of environmentally responsible and grid-goals of decarbonization and demand management in power systems
The Possibility of Anticapitalist Time and Identity in the Music of Víctor Jara and the Documentaries of Patricio Guzmán
No full textThis thesis analyzes a concert performed by Victor Jara in comparison with a trilogy of documentaries by Patricio Guzmán, placing both in the context of a search for experiences and understandings of identity that break from capitalist models. Building on existing scholarly analysis of Guzmán's documentaries and Jara's songs, I reflect on the significance of each artists' portrayal of subjects, objects, gender, and identity. These reflections include references to other thinkers and artists who explore the anticapitalist dimension in distinctive ways, helping establish examples and definitions of the concept and identifying barriers to its realization. While grounded in the sociopolitical and historical context of Chile, this study ultimately seeks to enter the global conversation about our relationship to time and identity with the intention of opening doors to dimensions of wonder, peace, and fluidity.https://doi.org/10.46569/rx914052
Assessing non-native species prevalence across multiple protection levels in Central California
No full textMarine protected areas have emerged as the primary place-based tool for ocean conservation. While marine protected areas are proven to have some positive benefits for conservation, there is growing evidence that the ability to achieve these outcomes corresponds to an area's level of protection, with only the areas with the most stringent regulations and well implemented management strategies having any meaningful benefits for conservation. Current global conservation targets aim to significantly increase the number of protected in areas in our oceans, which warrants a comprehensive understanding of the performance of marine protected areas in the face of numerous stressors. Non-native species are recognized as one of the primary threats to marine biodiversity. Despite this, the potential for marine protected areas to mitigate the establishment and impacts of non-native species remains understudied, and existing studies offer contradictory results. While some suggest marine protected areas may hinder the establishment of non-native species, others suggest marine protected areas may be equally likely, or in some cases more likely, to be colonized by non-native species. This study aims to investigate this relationship within a network of protected areas along the Central California coast, with particular attention given to how the occurrence of non-native species varies across three different levels of protection using standardized surveys in the rocky intertidal. Results from this study reveal that some non-native species are rather widespread in the study area but generally remain at low densities. When compared to the results of surveys conducted five and ten years ago, there have been range expansions of some non-natives in the study area as well as novel introductions of others. Additionally, results indicate that regardless of protection level, the proximity of sites to a source for non-native species (i.e., harbor, bay) is a major driver of non-native species presence and abundance. Results from this study show that, at least within this region, designation as a marine protected area does not provide significant resilience to invasion by non-native species.https://doi.org/10.46569/9k41zq35