An Examination of Accounting Through Case Studies

This thesis consists of ten case studies that are focused on the principles and standards of financial accounting. The case studies were assigned by Dr. Victoria Dickinson and completed under her guidance throughout the course of Honors Accountancy 420. During the first semester of the class, Dr. Dickinson provided five unique prompts that explored current events and relevant topics within the professional world of accounting. We were able to sharpen our accounting and research skills as well as gain knowledge about potential career paths and opportunities within accounting. Throughout the second semester, we completed five more case studies pertaining to Tyson Foods, Inc, and the work was done in groups. Our group devised tax, audit, and advisory plans for Tyson in order to increase savings, decrease risk, and promote growth. At the end of the semester, we presented our findings and our strategies to tax professionals from across the country. The professionals evaluated our research and provided valuable feedback to strengthen our plans. The research and case exhibition allowed us to become extremely knowledgeable about Tyson’s business structure and operations; our work also simulated the services that professional accountants provide their clients on a daily basis. Because of this, I have gained valuable, real-world experience throughout the course of this thesis

Nimbus-Earth radiation budget instrument analysis

The Wide Field Of View (WFOV) Earth Flux Channels of the Nimbus Earth Radiation Budget (ERB) instrument are studied with the objective of improving the understanding and confidence in the data. Laboratory tests on flight space Earth flux subassemblies followed by a set of in flight verification procedures are examined to see if the laboratory derived correction factors produced consistent results. Intercomparisons between the WFOV data and integrated scanner data as well as other truth are used in these verificaton procedures. The main source of errors are temperature and temperature gradient related offsets. The findings led to construction of a model for the short wave WFOV channel which use instrument temperatures and temperature differences to predict or establish offsets which need to be applied to data reduction algorithms for maximum final data product accuracy

Accelerating Large-Scale Data Analysis by Offloading to High-Performance Computing Libraries using Alchemist

Apache Spark is a popular system aimed at the analysis of large data sets, but recent studies have shown that certain computations---in particular, many linear algebra computations that are the basis for solving common machine learning problems---are significantly slower in Spark than when done using libraries written in a high-performance computing framework such as the Message-Passing Interface (MPI). To remedy this, we introduce Alchemist, a system designed to call MPI-based libraries from Apache Spark. Using Alchemist with Spark helps accelerate linear algebra, machine learning, and related computations, while still retaining the benefits of working within the Spark environment. We discuss the motivation behind the development of Alchemist, and we provide a brief overview of its design and implementation. We also compare the performances of pure Spark implementations with those of Spark implementations that leverage MPI-based codes via Alchemist. To do so, we use data science case studies: a large-scale application of the conjugate gradient method to solve very large linear systems arising in a speech classification problem, where we see an improvement of an order of magnitude; and the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) of a 400GB three-dimensional ocean temperature data set, where we see a speedup of up to 7.9x. We also illustrate that the truncated SVD computation is easily scalable to terabyte-sized data by applying it to data sets of sizes up to 17.6TB.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, London, UK, 201

Impact of Earned Income Tax Credit on Female Labor Force Participation Rate - Analysis of Rural vs. Urban Counties

UROP Poster, 2017, EconomicsSince 1975, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has been used as a mean of transferring income to the poor working class and their families. Within the past 40 years, the EITC has been expanded five times, paving the way for this program to be one of the largest anti-poverty tools currently in use. While research has been done on the impact that the EITC has on labor force participation rates, minimal work has been done on the labor force participation rates of women, and even less so on the impact of living in rural or urban counties. To address this issue, this study examined 3,138 counties (and county-equivalents) in the United States between the years of 2011 and 2014. It is found that while the EITC does contribute positively towards the labor force participation rate of single women with children, the results are not found to be statistically significant within rural counties. Similar results can be seen with married women who choose to leave the labor force due to the EITC that their partner receives; urban counties produce statistically significant results, while rural counties do not. These results have important policy implications, as upcoming tax reform discussions need to focus on incentives to work that better align with the characteristics of the labor force in rural counties.University of Minnesota Undergraduate Research Opportunities Progra

Lattice QCD with light dynamical quarks

We report on the simulation of QCD with light dynamical quarks using the two-step multi-boson (TSMB) algorithm. In an exploratory study with two flavours of quarks at lattice spacing about 0.27 fm and with quark mass down to one sixth of the strange quark mass eigenvalue spectra and autocorrelations have been studied. Here we present results on the volume dependence as well as tests of possible algorithmic improvements.Comment: 6 pages, Lattice2002(spectrum

Solar variability indications from Nimbus 7 satellite data

The cavity pyrheliometer sensor of the Nimbus 7 Earth Radiation Experiment indicated low-level variability of the total solar irradiance. The variability appears to be inversely correlated with common solar activity indicators in an event sense. the limitations of the measuring system and available data sets are described

Matrix Factorization at Scale: a Comparison of Scientific Data Analytics in Spark and C+MPI Using Three Case Studies

We explore the trade-offs of performing linear algebra using Apache Spark, compared to traditional C and MPI implementations on HPC platforms. Spark is designed for data analytics on cluster computing platforms with access to local disks and is optimized for data-parallel tasks. We examine three widely-used and important matrix factorizations: NMF (for physical plausability), PCA (for its ubiquity) and CX (for data interpretability). We apply these methods to TB-sized problems in particle physics, climate modeling and bioimaging. The data matrices are tall-and-skinny which enable the algorithms to map conveniently into Spark's data-parallel model. We perform scaling experiments on up to 1600 Cray XC40 nodes, describe the sources of slowdowns, and provide tuning guidance to obtain high performance

Complex k band diagrams of 3D metamaterial/photonic crystals

A finite element method (FEM) for solving the complex valued k({\omega}) vs. {\omega} dispersion curve of a 3D metamaterial/photonic crystal system is presented. This 3D method is a generalization of a previously reported 2D eigenvalue method. This method is particularly convenient for analyzing periodic systems containing dispersive (e.g., plasmonic) materials, for computing isofrequency surfaces in the k-space, and for calculating the decay length of the evanescent waves. Two specific examples are considered: a photonic crystal comprised of dielectric spheres and a plasmonic fishnet structure. Hybridization and avoided crossings between Mie resonances and propagating modes are numerically demonstrated. Negative index propagation of four electromagnetic modes distinguished by their symmetry is predicted for the plasmonic fishnets. By calculating the isofrequency contours, we also demonstrate that the fishnet structure is a hyperbolic medium