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The Hero’s Journey
Get PDFThe Hero’s Journey reflects on the continued fascination with fairytales, myths, and legends through time. This project follows the exploration of these stories, themes, and the lessons they can teach one about themselves and the wider world. Such fictional narratives allow one to process and share their lived experiences: the victories and tragedies, losses and growth. This project follows a winged figure as she fights for her freedom and gains her wings. the journey is messy and raw but still beautiful. The project blends classical oil painting and contemporary sculptural elements to compose an evolving narrative culminating in a dynamic, wearable set of wings. The pieces in this project push the bounds of interweaving techniques and narrative to understand the importance of storytelling and an exploration of why fairytales, myths, and legends still captivate humanity
Balancing Act: Navigating Employee Autonomy and Neglect
Get PDFThe fine line between granting employee autonomy and inadvertently falling into patterns of neglect presents a complex challenge within organizational leadership. This study explores the question: What do leaders perceive as effective strategies for providing autonomy to remote employees without being perceived as neglecting them? Employee autonomy empowers employees to make decisions, while leader neglect towards subordinates (LNS) is defined through this research as a gradual decrease in a leader\u27s interest or effort in sustaining positive relationships with employees. Navigating this balance is crucial to maintaining employee engagement.
This qualitative study uncovered nuanced perceptions on this issue using a grounded theory methodology and semi-structured interviews with leaders. The findings suggest the importance of regular check-ins with employees, deprioritizing external factors that influence or detract from leaders\u27 attention, and the concept that autonomy could be an illusion in high-stress environments. A proposed model emerged to guide leaders in balancing these elements. In sum, this research underscores the intertwined nature of employee autonomy and perceived neglect from a leadership perspective in contemporary work settings
Trusting What You Can’t See: Audit Oversight and the PCAOB
No full textThe paper discusses steps that the PCAOB needs to take to improve audit quality and investor trust in audits. This includes a different approach to standard setting, including a reduction in the use of requirements that are entirely principles based. The approach should also address more explicitly address the conflict between audit quality and commercial interests.
The focus of inspections needs to shift away from a primary emphasis on deficiencies to actual improvements in the quality of financial disclosure. In part this means inspecting audits of issuers that have a higher risk of fraud or GAAP violations and, in selecting areas of the audit to inspect, placing greater emphasis on areas of qualitative materiality. Finally, inspections should take into account more explicitly the potential bias that arises from the payment of audit fees by the client. This means targeting audits and areas of the audit that involve an elevated risk of excessive deference to management.
The PCAOB should also place greater emphasis on transparency. Independent oversight will not ensure trust in the audit absent adequate transparency. Without transparency there can’t be accountability
Democracy, Discourse, and the Artificially Intelligent Corporation
No full textDoes the ascendance of the artificially intelligent corporation threaten the integrity and legitimacy of democracy? The question seems particularly important as the 2024 presidential election approaches. Hardly a day passes without a new report regarding the disruptive impact of harnessing artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies. A cascading cadre of academics, business leaders, and politicians warn that unchecked development and dissemination of AI could irreparably damage vital institutions of civil society. Despite the warnings about existential threats AI poses to human agency and democratic processes, reliance on AI technologies proliferates at break-neck speed.
The concern about AI’s destructive impact gets exacerbated by the increasing dominance of corporations in politics. Following the decision in Citizens United v. FEC, corporations enjoy essentially the same speech rights as sentient human beings. With increasing zeal, corporations attempt to dominate the political realm in an effort to enhance the bottom line. Because extant law generally does not require disclosure of corporate political expenditures, corporations clandestinely manipulate voters to increase sales or secure a more favorable regulatory environment.
This Article argues that the proliferation of AI combined with the increasing dominance of corporations in our society calls for revamping basic principles of corporate governance. In particular, the Article examines whether interpreting corporate fiduciary duties through the lens of political “discourse theory” could better ensure corporate practices meaningfully align with the preferences of shareholders and other corporate stakeholders. Considering some of the most important decisions governing our daily lives already get made behind boardroom doors rather than in the public sphere, the rapid integration of AI into corporate decision making and operations threatens the very legitimacy of our democratic society. Without reinvigorating governance structures around democratic discourse, we might surrender political sovereignty to artificially intelligent corporations
The Guided Sequence for Formation of Professional Identity
No full textWhen the ABA approved a requirement that law schools offer opportunities for the formation of professional identity, there were already several courses on the topic that had been developed in numerous law schools. But those are limited to the students who take them, and do not - even taken together - fulfill the ABA rule. Instead of trying to teach a course on professional identity—as if that were teachable in the didactic sense—we should instead create exercises (or modules if you prefer) in which students may practice making these decisions. We must do that in virtually every course a student takes in law school. This way, they can have multiple opportunities to form an identity that is consonant with the identities they brought to law school, their developing understanding of their duty to uphold the rule of law, and their own decisions about what kind of lawyer they want to be. The approach recommended by this article is a Guided Sequence for Formation of Professional Identity, or a GSFPI. It is so named because it starts with a legal question that would likely come from one (or more) of the substantive legal subjects being studied in the course. In this way, a GSFPI can be inserted in any course. It is a five-step process, fully described in this article
The 21st Century Coach: A Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Resource for Youth Lacrosse Coaches
Get PDFThis document provides educational information, resources, and support to coaches and administrators with the goal of empowering and encouraging diversity, equity, and inclusion in daily sporting practices. This document may aid in efforts to increase inclusion and participation in youth sport, specifically lacrosse. Furthermore, it may help to increase coaches’ and administrators’ cultural awareness and competencies
Joy is a Strategy: How We Sparkle Together
Get PDFThe authors reflect on their leadership experiences in the NERL consortium, suggesting that purposefully pursuing joy in collaborative work offers an alternative to traditional academic structures that dismiss affect in favor of stoic isolation and competition
A Study on Multimodal AI for Mild Cognitive Impairment Detection
No full textMild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is an early stage of memory loss or other cognitive ability loss in individuals who maintain the ability to independently perform most activities of daily living. It is considered a transitional stage between normal cognitive stage and more severe cognitive declines like dementia or Alzheimer’s. Based on the reports from the National Institute of Aging (NIA), people with MCI are at a greater risk of developing dementia, thus it is of great importance to detect MCI at the earliest possible to mitigate the transformation of MCI to Alzheimer’s and dementia. Recent studies have harnessed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop automated methods to predict and detect MCI. The majority of the existing research is based on unimodal data (e.g., only speech or prosody), but recent studies have shown that multimodality leads to a more accurate prediction of MCI. However, effectively exploiting different modalities is still a big challenge due to the lack of efficient fusion methods. This thesis proposes a mid-level fusion architecture to make use of multimodal data for MCI prediction. We introduce a multimodal speech-language-vision Deep Learning-based method to differentiate MCI from Normal Cognition (NC). Our proposed architecture includes co-attention blocks to fuse three different modalities at the embedding level to find the potential interactions between speech (audio), language (transcribed speech), and vision (facial videos) within the cross-Transformer layer. To study and evaluated the proposed mid-level fusion model, the I-CONECT dataset was used. It contains a large number of semi-structured conversations via the internet/webcam between participants aged 75+ years old and interviewers. Our experimental results show that the proposed fusion method can detect MCI from NC with an average AUC of (85.3%) which outperforms the unimodal and bimodal baseline models.
This thesis demonstrates that multimodal deep learning models outperform unimodal models in detecting MCI in older adults. To generalize the applicability of these findings, further research employing larger datasets should be conducted
Using Historic Glacial Data and GIS to Predict Mount Rainier National Park’s Glacial Future
Get PDFWill Washington state have glaciers 100 years from now (year 2124)? Due to generally warmer weather glaciers are largely in retreat globally, including the glaciers in Washington state. In Washington state summer glacial meltwater plays a vital role in the survival of wildlife and is needed for human purposes that include recreation, power generation, drinking, agricultural, and industrial. This project looked at the most resilient glaciers in Washington state, the glaciers at Mount Rainier National Park. Historic measurements were used in an exponential growth calculation to project the amount in acres each glacier at Mount Rainer will advance or retreat over the next 100 years. The glaciers were digitized into ArcGIS Pro and then adjusted according to the calculations. The results of the project show that all the glaciers at Mount Rainier should be intact in 2124. This is of vital importance to wildlife and human populations that depend on the summer meltwater for various purposes
Utilizing Machine Learning to Forecast Sector-Level Equity Returns from Sector-Level Financial Ratios
No full textAcademics and equity analysts often utilize fundamental financial ratios to evaluate an industry\u27s financial and operational performance. However, sophisticated econometric methods could be improved for estimating these ratios\u27 importance in predicting sector-level stock return performance. To address this gap, gradient-boosted decision tree methods were applied to the WRDS sector-level financial ratio database to identify if financial ratios effectively forecast sector-level stock returns in future periods. The findings show that these ratios are predictive and economically material, both stand alone and in combination with other macroeconomic factors. Using these predictions, long and long-short sector-level portfolios were created, and most of these portfolios consistently outperformed the market in absolute and risk-adjusted returns. Furthermore, these portfolios generate positive alpha in the presence of the well-established Fama-French factor models. This research demonstrates that sector-level information is effective in forecasting equity market performance