From my personal experiences, I’ve noticed that Latinx students and families are most receptive to college-related information communicated as anecdotes. Latinx students are among the most poorly represented demographic at universities nationwide, which I believe can be mitigated through calculated efforts to increase collegiate literacy and understanding. This project is...
In the United States, rates of youth vaping are alarmingly high. In 2018, the U.S Surgeon General declared youth vaping as an epidemic (Truth Initiative, 2019a). However, LGBTQ+ youth are disproportionately affected. In 2017, current e-cigarette usage in youth was 13.2% among heterosexuals, but was 17.5% in LGBTQ+ youth (CDC,...
Background. Flourishing is negatively related with depression, but has been proposed as a separate axis and an independent aspect of overall mental health. One factor that has been shown to affect both depression and flourishing is racial discrimination. This study hypothesizes that, in young undergraduate women of color, discrimination experiences...
The purpose of this thesis is to identify the issues relating to body image in young adult breast cancer survivors, and to observe which physical issues are related to which psychological issues. Participants were recruited through Army of Women and through social media. The study partcipants were 29 English-speaking female...
The free-radical theory of aging proposes that intracellular accumulation of oxidative damage caused by
reactive oxygen species (ROS) is responsible for the process of senescence. ROS are produced during
normal aerobic metabolism and have been shown to cause numerous cellular and sub-cellular defects
that lead to termination of the cell...
A spectral fitting routine was developed to analyze X-ray emissions in neutron capture decay
processes that produce ¹⁹⁷Hg and ¹⁹⁷Pt. Through correcting for X-ray emissions, the
77.3 keV γ gamma ray intensities were analyzed. The thermal cross sections for the production of
¹⁹⁷Hg and ¹⁹⁷Pt were found to be 2088...
Mastering the art and craft of cinematography is a lifelong endeavor requiring an unfaltering amount of passion and commitment to developing creative and technical skills of visual storytelling. Like authors of literature, cinematographers are writers. However, instead of words a cinematographer speaks a visual language using light and camerawork. In...
In order to combine my passion for creativity, my love for children, and my engineering background, I decided to create a very personalized thesis project. Princess Catie Goes to College is a children’s book about a young girl whose older sister leaves for college. I chose to write about this...
This thesis consists of an autoethnography of a sexual assault survivor written using poems, journal entries, annotations, photographs and song lyrics. The ethnography is a chronological record of feelings the author experienced during the day prior to the attack and emotions she navigated during the year and a half after...
Writing an educational children's book to promote the use of American Sign Language and education about Deaf culture while also providing parents with a resource to learn ASL while spending quality time with their child.
This thesis is an exploration of writing a music album from a singer-song writer perspective. It contains the process of writing lyrics and music, inspiration from other artists, as well as performance. It goes through the emotional ebbs and flows of creative writing, ground work for recording an album and...
String theory, one of the more popular approaches to quantizing gravity, is a highly complex
theory, involving high level mathematics and physics. But the basic ideas of string theory are not inaccessible, even to the undergraduate. This document acts as report to my thesis project, the writing of A Detailed...
This is a report on the Workforce Development: Youth Training and Work Experience program provided by Casa Latinos Unidos (CLU) in Linn County. The program is best described in three phases. Phase one consisted of the outreach, recruitment, and retainment aspects of the program. The second phase of the program...
Approximately 2,000 workers in the United States sustain work-related eye injuries that require medical treatment every day. While the majority of eye injuries are not fatal, they can cause temporary or permanent vision loss and result in a decrease in the quality of life of the individuals affected. Unlike blindness...
Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is so common that about 80% of those in the United States will acquire it during their lifetime. In more serious cases, HPV can develop into cancer: each year in the U.S., there are around 32,000 HPV related cancer diagnoses. The HPV vaccine series can prevent the...
This study sought to conduct an in depth analysis of women’s first sexual experiences looking for factors contributing to the experience and the emotional outcomes of first intercourse. Fourteen heterosexual, female, college students were interviewed about their first sexual experience and sexual background using a semi-structured interview format. The narratives...
In a society where equality is sought as the norm, occupational gender representation is still skewed in some disciplines. One field where gender equality in representation has not yet been achieved is engineering, whether in college or at the professional level. This imbalance is not only a potentially vicious cycle...
Bird and bat collisions with wind turbines are a problem that needs to be better quantified for its impact to be fully understood. This thesis documents portions of the design of a sensor patch module for use on wind turbines blades to detect impacts caused by birds and bats. This...
A wireless power transfer system using inductive coupling was designed and implemented as part of a three-member project team. The system uses coupled magnetic fields at a frequency of 606kHz to transfer electromagnetic energy from a charging base to the batteries of portable devices. It succeeded in transmitting power to...
This research aims to demonstrate the viability of actively controlled distributed-electric propulsion as a method to postpone flutter in high aspect-ratio elastic wings. A semi-wing on a spring mount with two propellers powered by electric motors, mounted at alternate pitch angles relative to the chord line, was used as the...
Native bees are critically important organisms that support biodiversity and crop production via their pollination services. Wildfires in temperate conifer forests can increase bee abundance and flowering plant density due to increased light exposure, but little information is available regarding how wildfire severity influences provisioning to bee offspring, which is...
In the U.S., the number of people waiting for an organ donation is increasing exponentially while the number of registered donors is slowly rising. This discrepancy leads to a great number of people dying while waiting for an organ donor. The opt-in system, lack of education around donation, and having...
The purpose of this project was to examine how trauma can be manifested during birth, as well as the tools non-clinical labor support professionals called doulas can provide. I aimed to analyze the first-hand experiences of two mothers with a history of trauma, taking note of the perceived benefits of...
YouTube has turned creating, watching, and interacting with videos into a mainstream activity and has substantial impact on modern society as the most popular video sharing site in the world. However, there is a lack of published research using statistically designed experiments which can aid content creators in making and...
Reducing recidivism rates and raising success rates for individuals who experience mental or behavioral distress and have been through the legal system is the key to lowering the expenditure of valuable resources including time and judicial budget. Regardless, little research attention has been given to post-arrest diversion programming and reentry...
Is there a core set of concepts in psychology? Early work identified keywords in psychology by asking textbook authors what concepts were most important to them to understand what was essential for college students' psychological literacy (Boneau, 1990). Much of the early work showed there is little consistency in the...
We investigated ontogenetic changes in body morphology of Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii) using three three-dimensional (3D) photogrammetry, to estimate surface areas and body volumes for 42 Weddell seals. We sampled ten weaned pups, twelve juveniles (age one or two years), 11 non-breeding adult females, and 9 adult females who had...
The Amazon basin is a natural wonder of biodiversity that serves as one of the largest single carbon storage mechanisms in the world. For these reasons, preserving the Amazon and other similar forests is a worthy goal. Protecting these spaces is not possible without understanding the threats facing animal populations...
As a child of two Khmer Rouge refugees, the Khmer Rouge genocide serves as the prologue of my family’s story. The Khmer Rouge genocide took place in Cambodia in 1975-1979 after a successful coup led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) (Dy 2007, 2). In an attempt to create...
Currently, wax printing is limited to materials that can be processed by a wax printer. Wax transfer printing is a method that allows previously unusable materials to be patterned with wax via an intermediate template. Millipore cellulose, a material too thick to be processed by a wax printer, was patterned...
This project calculates the value of β for ice particles based on wavelength dependent values of their refractive and absorptive indices. β is the ratio of the force due to radiation to the force due to gravity acting on a particle in the solar system. This parameter can later be...
The intent of this report is to provide a brief description of water quality issues in Nicaragua, Uganda and Bangladesh, and the technologies available to address these issues. The water quality parameters considered include: bacterial contamination, heavy metals and arsenic, pesticides and industrious chemicals, turbidity, radiological characteristics, and taste and...
Dams, culverts, and water intake structures can impact the movement of aquatic and semi-aquatic species within streams and rivers. Datagaps exist regarding the impact of water intake structures on larval coastal giant salamanders (Dicamptodon tenebrosus) as these obstructions may produce a barrier to up and downstream movement. The Rock Creek...
Industrial waste heat composed of saturated liquid water can be redirected to charge a thermochemical energy storage (TCES) system. This energy can be stored long-term in the inherently energy-dense chemical bonds and used for space heating. Initial reactor scale cycling experiments were conducted in tandem with TCES material improvements. Hydration...
Childhood obesity and physical inactivity are significant health problems. According to the CDC (2012), only 12.5% of high school students meet the recommended requirements for physical activity. One method to reverse this trend is promoting physical activity. The Walk to School Program promotes active transportation in schools nationwide. PURPOSE: The...
Vox comm is a digital wireless, voice-operated personal communicator developed as an electrical engineering Senior Design project. It is designed to provide a method for hassle-free, short-range communication. The product platform boasts of low power and small size for a host of usage models. This thesis details the product design...
This paper seeks to assess the merits of “Vote With Your Dollar” (VWYD) strategies for consumer and investor activism as a model for changing corporate behavior. A novel framework was constructed to group VWYD strategies and campaigns under shared attributes. To assess one such group, the boycott, the research gathered...
Background: Chronic heavy alcohol consumption is a risk factor for bone fracture.
Using a non-human primate model of voluntary alcohol self-administration, we have recently shown that alcohol consumption suppresses intracortical bone remodeling. The current study extends this investigation to asses the effect of alcohol consumption on cancellous bone mass, architecture,...
Purpose: To compare target dose conformality and OAR sparing afforded by VMAT and HT for pancreatic cancer.
Materials and Methods: A retrospective planning study was performed in 18 patients. Total treatment dose was 59.4Gy. OAR and PTV mean doses, conformity indices, isodose volumes, and integral doses were compared. The relationship...
The types and rates of label noise in real-world data sets present a challenge to machine learning projects. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to address this issue. Our method combines a noise modelling technique for correcting label noise across the entire data set with a robust loss...
High-resolution mass spectrometry was used to measure a range of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in real time as they were produced by the ubiquitous marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus WH8102 during a 24-hour light/dark cycle. Ethenone, acetaldehyde, ethanol, isoprene, acetic acid, dimethyl sulfide (DMS), acetone, phenol, and several as-yet unidentified compounds were...
An interactive map of important watersheds in the United States was created for use as a teaching tool in an estuarine ecology class. Figures and explanations of important factors influencing river ecology were created using data downloaded from the U.S. Geologic Survey. This interface serves as a visualization of biological,...
Platygyra daedalea, a species of brain coral from the Persian Gulf, can withstand higher temperatures than other coral species. This attribute makes the species a potential model organism for thermal tolerance research. Genomic resources such as a linkage map of this species predict that there are 12 to 14 chromosomes...
Osteosarcoma (OSA) is a primary malignant bone tumor sarcoma that occurs in dogs as well as people and has aggressive biologic behavior with devastating consequences. Because of the similarities in morphology and prognosis, OSA in dogs represents an effective model for the equivalent disease in humans. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs)...
This research effort considers bicyclist’s left-turn behavior at roadway intersections with varying levels of traffic control; specifically, seeking to address the question where do bicyclists look to acquire information. A demographic comparison was made to determine if factors such as gender or experience influence the nature of how a bicyclist...
The rise of digital streaming has largely impacted the way the average listener consumes music. Consequentially, while the role of album art has evolved to meet the changes in music technology, it is hard to measure the effect of digital streaming on modern album art. This research seeks to determine...
Rising CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere (396 ppmv as of April 2012)
increase the effect of global warming and climate change. CO₂ sequestration has become
a potential method to mitigate climate change. This study focuses on capillary/residual
trapping as a form of geologic CO₂ sequestration. Capillary/residual trapping occurs
when supercritical...
This paper discusses the merits of providing users variational views when editing variational code. I provide a plugin for the popular Atom Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which replaces #ifdef annotations commonly used by the C PreProcessor (CPP) with colored backgrounds, thus reducing code clutter and attempting to help programmers quickly...
From my personal experiences, I’ve noticed that Latinx students and families are most receptive to college-related information communicated as anecdotes. Latinx students are among the most poorly represented demographic at universities nationwide, which I believe can be mitigated through calculated efforts to increase collegiate literacy and understanding. This project is...
Pulse Oximetry is a technology used ubiquitously across the medical field for measuring oxygen saturation and heart rate monitoring. In this project a system was developed to use a new technology for pulse oximetry: single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs). This work outlines the development process and experimental results of a SPAD...