Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

The zine is curated for people who have experienced a world made unlivable for them. It stands strong for those who have faced trauma and felt shattered beyond repair. This is my message to you: Even though some parts of us are lost forever, we can still become someone even greater. We can still cultivate a life that is worth living, having a radically different outlook and appreciation for life.

Everyone will suffer from the effects of climate change and environmental degradation, but it is having the greatest impact on people and communities who are already socially and economically disadvantaged. Historical, political, and economic inequalities have created systemic injustices that have always been present, but are now rampaging society at an ever more menacing pace. In the face of climate change, these inequities are not only a detriment to society, but also a threat to human life, disproportionately assailing the most marginalized communities. The present study explores the environmental injustices that are actively forcing countless people and entire communities out of their homes. Through interviews with experts in the field, as well as people directly affected by the issue, this research aims to raise awareness of the problems and human rights abuses that are arising as a result of climate changes. In addition, it explores possible solutions to these problems threatening the environment and human society.

In this research paper, I have applied the Marxian theory of conflict to the ongoing situation between a teachers union and its corresponding school district. My research uses a mix-method approach, which includes interviews, ethnographic observations, and content analysis. In this dispute, wages and class sizes are the main contentious issues. The teachers believe that smaller classes would greatly improve their working conditions and have concerns about inadequate responses and perceived incompetence, particularly with the superintendent. Despite this, both sides agree on the importance of constructive conversation to resolve this ongoing conflict. According to the orthodox Marxian theory, labor conflicts arise from divergent interests due to economic structural disposition. The teachers seek better treatment while the school district aims to maintain budgets and a professional image under the superintendent’s guidance. Considering these circumstances, I advocate for constructive collective bargaining to achieve a positive outcome instead of engaging in a destructive cycle of mutual harm.

Approach and avoidance motivational orientations play a striking role within close relationships, with approach-oriented goals predicting increased positive affect and relationship satisfaction. As research suggests that motivational orientations influence individuals’ ability to regulate their own emotions (i.e., intrapersonally), we posit that these motives may also moderate individuals’ ability to regulate the emotions of others, thus affecting social outcomes. We hypothesize that individuals whose partners use more affect-bettering (versus affect-worsening) emotion regulation strategies will show improved relationship outcomes, with this link being strengthened in individuals high (rather than low) in approach motives. 37 romantic couples (74 participants) completed daily diary surveys for 10 days, with one partner reporting their use of affect-bettering and affect-worsening emotion regulation strategies and the other partner reporting their relationship outcomes. Preliminary results show that participants high in approach motives experienced significantly improved relationship outcomes in response to their partners’ use of affect-bettering emotion regulation strategies. This has implications for extending our understanding of extrinsic emotion regulation strategies and approach-avoidance motives in the close relationships context.

Recent advances in Deep Neural Networks (DNN's) over the last decade have allowed modern neural networks to be reliably deployed "on the edge" in countless applications ranging from computer vision to natural language processing. Existing hardware is capable of running complex models with low latency, but a problem occurs when applications are scaled to require cheaper hardware with shallower memory resources or minimal latency. The goal of model compression is to take popular pre-trained deep neural networks and reduce their size to allow them to be readily deployed in areas requiring "on-device" inference such as self-driving vehicles and A.I. assistants. This paper covers recent advances in the field of model compression that has allowed us to create a 100x smaller model in terms of memory storage, while maintaining stable F1, Precision and Recall scores.

Oppression does not only occur in the physical space– it also dominates the literary realm. While the majority enjoys the fruits of narrative plentitude, minority groups– most often including Asian-American writers– experience the obstacle of narrative scarcity within dominant society. Due to this identity strung together by oppression and institutionalized colonialism in literary studies, minority writing is forced to assume a kind of antagonism, a prefab agony about being invariably misunderstood. Minority writers– specifically Asian-American writers– are forced to embrace their trauma placed upon them by institutional hardships as their only outlet of writing, as if their generational lesions are only embraced to provide literary entertainment. The value of their voice and their writing is therefore based upon how distressing and damaging their experience of growing up as Asian-American may be. As this issue of the paradox of the Asian-American identity is rooted within the model minority discourse and has now been exacerbated through the xenophobic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is this struggle of belligerent erasure in Asian-American literature that has not only aided in its misrepresentation and representation but has affected the understanding of one’s identity between their racial and ethnic backgrounds. Through a hybrid of critical analysis and a personal narrative poem, this paper researches the dichotomy of the Asian-American identity through two celebrated Filipino-American writers and their contrasting works of literature– Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart and Elaine Castillo’s America is Not the Heart– by illustrating the physical and internal struggle of being Filipino and American while simultaneously being both Filipino-American as they are explored in different yet similar mechanisms.

English and Spanish speakers learn different phonetic systems in their acquisition of their respective languages. Despite having the same phonemic contrast between voiced and voiceless plosives, the stop consonants of the two languages differ in voice onset time, or VOT. They also have different vowels with different formant values. We hypothesized that bilingual children exposed to both languages would display intermediate VOT and vowel formant values for both languages. Measuring readings from lists from four children aged three to five years, we found this to be the case for VOT for only voiced stops and not voiceless stops. VOT for this group seems to collapse into three categories: strongly positive, slightly positive, and negative, to one of which all of their stop productions belong. Vowels did not appear to have a distinct, discernible pattern among bilingual children.

This research will argue for the historical significance of interconnectedness between the United States and Kashmir by using military aid archives, government records, and intellectual history. Together they provide the context needed to dispel the myth of the United States’ neutrality and reveal how Kashmir’s existence in American public life predates Indian Prime Minister Modi’s revocation of Article 370. Additionally, the guise of neutrality hides the impact of the United States’ military investments before and during the Kashmir Insurgency, even when the developments in Kashmir distinctly shaped debates in the United States public sphere.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of the global Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in tackling educational inequity, with an emphasis on the academic experiences of UCSB students. This research was done amidst the various controversies among local academic institutions, which included the 2019 California college admissions scandals and 2020 cost of living adjustment (COLA) protests. PISA is primarily a topdown initiative as it mainly champions educational equity through collaborations with government officials. This neglects the key role of community actors, such as governors and principals, and does not account for localized complexities, such as federalism in the United States. To identify bottom-up approaches that would complement PISA, a pilot study on the academic experiences of UCSB students was done. Key findings included 88% of the respondents coming from counties with higher standards of living, and only 3% having considered an overseas university education. The paper thus suggests that the global PISA initiative is inadequate in resolving localized educational inequities and raises two bottom-up programs – college open-day sessions in disadvantaged counties and local forums on state education policies – to improve socio-spatial disparities in educational equity.

Goodreads elevates the user to a level of content producer, which increases student engagement with literature. As all themembers within the group are simultaneously promoted in statusand begin developing relationships, they create trust and are more willing to take book recommendations from each other, tying in the readers’ advisory component of the site. As a result, Goodreads users are being encouraged to read novels recommended by their peers and are given autonomy to choose based off trusted recommendations. The combination of autonomy and connection that Goodreads offers creates not only a more culturally relevant classroom, but one filled with students more likely to see being a reader as part of their identity significant.

This research project examines the history of women’s involvement in internships. It looks at how women used internships to break into higher paying non-traditionally feminine employment while alsodiscussing the problems that interns encountered with sexual harassment.This project explores the rhetoric that allowed for interns to be unpaid and unprotected against discrimination throughout the 20th century. Through examining the rhetoric surroundinginternships in the 20th century, this paper found that the framing of interns as students, rather than as workers, caused interns to be excluded from employee status and left them without legal protectionfrom sexual harassment.

The purpose of this study is to gauge the effects of perceived general stress levels and acute stress on working-memory-basedcognitive performance. Cortisol is the long-term stress hormone of the body, and is vital to enacting a quick and efficient stress response. However, when chronically present at higher-than-normal levels as often can be the case with long-term perceived stress cortisol has been known to negatively affect many bodily systems, including reproductive, immune, and cognitive function. Our study seeks to explore the effect that higherthan-average perceived general stress levels have on female students’ performance on two cognitive tasks: a math exam with gradually increasing difficulty, and a complicated traceable maze that participants must solve after being shown the answer key for a few seconds beforehand. This study will utilize a basic health questionnaire, a general stressquestionnaire, a mental math exam that gradually increases in difficulty and has a time limit (thus creating increased stress with urgency to complete), and a traceable maze test that is intended to test working memory. This study has far-reaching implications in understanding the relationship between ambient stress, general stress and cognitive performance, and could pave the way for improvements in mental health resources, accessibility to these mental health resources in higher education, and women’s health in general.