Nowadays, sports events are a significant part of the every-day entertainment with local, national, and international championships. A lot of money is invested by broadcasting companies to attract new and more viewers, acquire broadcasting rights, or send entire crews on site to cover such events. Journalists are among the few...
In this thesis we focus on a graphical model for multivariate spatially
correlated data--isomorphic chain graphs (ICG; Gitelman and Herlihy, 2007).
We feel ICG allow flexibility for modeling spatial correlation and are intuitively
appealing because each model has an associated graph that visually represents a
complex multivariate system. We examine...
English sole (Parophrys vetulus) is a flatfish found in abundance in the Pacific Ocean and is part of the Pacific Northwest's and California's commercial trawl fishery. Stock levels of this fish are at all time highs but there are decreased landings due to low demand and acceptability. With new regulations...
The purpose of this study is to explore, through their own voices, the higher
education experiences of selected urban American Indian females in California
community colleges. This study is an attempt to identify pathways to academic
success by teasing out college practices and support systems that help Native
women navigate...
Land use alters the physical and biological structure of stream ecosystems and potentially alters their capacity to process nitrogen (N), an essential nutrient that has nearly doubled in abundance on the biosphere
during the past century from human activities. In this dissertation, I quantified uptake and transformation of nitrate (NO₃⁻)...
The atmospheric transport of anthropogenic semivolatile organic compounds (SOCs) from Asian sources to the Western U.S. was investigated. In addition, the SOC extraction method was optimized. Hansen solubility parameter plots were used to aid in the pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) solvent selection of air sampling media in order to minimize...
The relative success of restoration practices on cheatgrass infested sagebrush steppe lands in the Great Basin can affect the probability of crossing an ecological threshold and have economic effects on cattle ranches using federal rangelands. Cheatgrass invasion implies an increase in the risk of fire, which in turn increases the...
There have been many studies that describe the protective degradation or metabolism of potentially harmful plant toxins, such as, mimosine from Leucaena leuconcephala, pyrrolizidine alkaloids from tansy ragwort (Senecio jacobaea), oxalate and some mycotoxins by rumen microbes. There are many cases of plant-related toxicoses suffered by ruminant animals where there...
Fisheries researchers and the general public can greatly benefit from the rapid data sharing and collaborative research that is facilitated by the both the internet and modern digital technology. One of the pioneers of this new strategy of conducting and utilizing fisheries research is Project CROOS (Collaborative Research on Oregon...
Vitamin C is an essential component of the human diet. Uptake of vitamin C in the cell is regulated by the function of sodium-dependent vitamin C transporters (SVCTs). SVCT1 (encoded by the SLC23A1 gene) is expressed in the colon, liver and kidney, where it plays a vital role in determining...
Nanostructured ceramics offer significant improvements in properties over the
corresponding materials with grain sizes on the order of tens to hundreds of microns.
Silicon carbide (SiC) is an important structural ceramic whose properties can
potentially be enhanced due to nanoscale microstructures. It has been suggested that
SiC samples with grain...
Oregon’s gasoline tax no longer serves as an economically efficient revenue source due to increasing fuel efficiency and the emergence of alternative fuels. In response to this problem, the Oregon Department of Transportation is exploring alternatives to the gasoline tax. Among the most promising alternatives is a flat-rate vehicle mile...
The focus of this research was to examine the relationship between the Oregon secondary agricultural education teachers’ level of computer-based technology integration, perceptions of barriers to computer-based technology integration, and learning style preferences. Additionally the correlational analysis of the level of computer-based technology integration and the following demographic variables was...
Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the top ten best-selling children's picture books of 2006 reveals that these books contain elements of systematic privilege and oppression. Dominant group members are numerically overrepresented in the sample. Major emergent themes are the normalization of racism and white privilege, the stereotypical portrayal of the...
The unfolding of human retinoid X receptor α in the presence of the denaturant guanidine HCl was studied using stopped-flow absorbance spectroscopy. The protein's four native cysteine residues were mutated to obtain four single-cysteine mutants, each with the other three cysteine residues mutated to alanine. The thiols of these hRXRα...
There has been little prior research reporting strategy usage in end-user problem solving, and even less using gender as a factor. Without this type of information, enduser programming systems cannot know the “target” at which to aim, if they are to support male and female end-user programmers’ debugging. As a...
Understanding how N availability influences base cation stores is critical for long-term ecosystem sustainability. Indices of nitrogen (N) availability and the distribution of nutrients in plant biomass, soil, and soil water were examined across ten young, unpolluted Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) stands in the Oregon Coast Range spanning a three-fold soil...
Transportation plays such an important role in daily living that, without it, a person might be totally homebound. The nation’s air travel system for persons with disabilities is an area of substantial dissatisfaction, with both passengers and the airline industry recognizing the need for improvement. One of the major concerns...
The present highway funding system, especially fuel taxes, may become less reliable revenue sources in the future, while the transportation public agencies do not have the sufficient financial resources needed to meet the increasing traffic demand. Regarding the socio-economic impact of road privatization, a wide range of approaches and models...
This dissertation consists of two articles to be submitted for publication. The first,
a literature review, makes visible common influences on science teaching self-efficacy
beliefs and also points to potentially invisible validation concerns regarding the
instrument used. The second investigates the participants' invisible science teaching self-efficacy
beliefs and, through the...
Aquatic insects are essential components of healthy stream ecosystems, contributing to nutrient cycling, trophic dynamics and other ecological functions. Aquatic insect species, particularly those in the orders Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera and Trichoptera (EPT taxa) are however, extremely sensitive to insecticide contamination. Given that urban and agricultural use of synthetic pyrethroid insecticides...
The objective of this study was to examine the variation among ammonia-oxidizing and denitrifying communities in soils of a natural Fennoscandian boreal forest and of a forest with a long history of fertilization with different levels of nitrogen (N), and to examine whether there are any changes in the microbial...
Frequent or lengthy predation risk can cause one of two modifications of prey feeding
behavior: 1) postponement of feeding to less risky periods, or 2) resumption of feeding
behavior despite persistent risk. North Pacific flatfishes exhibit both of these responses when confronted with temporal variation in risk, and this experimental...
Wave-induced circulation is the defining characteristic of the nearshore. Within this region, the constant feedback cycle between incoming waves, wave-generated currents, and the mobile sediment bed is responsible for the evolution of complex patterns in nearshore and beach morphology. Central to our understanding of this system is knowledge of the...
At frequencies exceeding 1-2 GHz, the reactive nature of a silicon substrate must be accounted in the substrate network models used in substrate coupling simulation. High-frequency substrate models, containing reactive components, must be validated through high-frequency network analyzer measurements. Prior fabricated test fixtures have been modified to enable high-frequency (up...
Many climatic factors influence grape berry composition including nutrient status, water availability, biotic stress, sun exposure and temperature. Previous research examined the effects of many factors listed above and much progress has been made. It is often difficult, however, to separate effects that typically confound each other, such as sun...
There has been little research into how end-user programming environments can provide explanations that could fill a critical information gap for end-user debuggers – help with debugging strategy. To address this need, we designed and prototyped a video-based approach for explaining debugging strategy, and accompanied it with a text-only approach....
The Cooperative Institute for Oceanographic Satellite Studies
(CIOSS) partners with The Science and Math Investigative Learning
Experiences (SMILE) Program to bring ocean sciences and satellite
oceanography to high school students and teachers around the
state of Oregon. This study was conducted as a formative program
assessment during the third year...
The primary goal of this thesis is to fabricate a magnetic film between the coplanar transmitted stripline for crosstalk suppression. Crosstalk is caused from undesired inductive and capacitive coupling of signals between two conductors. The effective crosstalk suppression results from the inductive coupling of circuit elements through the lossy properties...
Millions of children are exposed to various types of violence throughout their school years. American children, by the time they are 18 years old, have seen more than 100,000 acts of violence on television alone. The effect of exposure to violence becomes a part of a child's life experience and...
Similar to other spectacular scenic areas in the American West, Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains have been a contested landscape since the beginning of the 20th century. Although, legislation was introduced in Congress as early as 1913 to protect the towering mountains of south-central Idaho as a national park, the issue...
Waves are the primary input of energy in the nearshore region, and together with the currents forced through the transfer of momentum that occurs during the wave breaking process they are the principal mechanism for sediment transport in the nearshore. The basic physics of waves and currents are thought to...
Droplet formation from a flexible nozzle plate driven by a prescribed-waveform excitation of a piezoelectric is numerically investigated using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model with the VOF method. The droplet generator with a flexible nozzle plate, which is free to vibrate due to the pressure acting on the plate,...
Great blue heron (Ardea herodias) eggs and prey items were collected from six colonies on the Columbia and Willamette rivers and Puget Sound during 1994-95. Contaminant concentrations, reproductive success, and biomagnification factors (BMFs) were determined and effects of residue levels were measured by H4IIE rat hepatoma and ethoxyresorufin-O-dealkylase (EROD) bioassays....
Immigrants must cross two barriers when entering the United States, the physical border and a cultural border created by a set of exclusive cultural values and profits-before-people economic ethics. Immigrants, coerced by unstable and desperate economic situations, risk their lives and leave behind their families to cross the physical border...
Several large wildfires in southwestern Oregon during the summers of 2001 and 2002 provided the opportunity to investigate the impacts of wildfire on northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina). I used radio-telemetry and demographic surveys to describe demographic performance and habitat selection of spotted owls in the areas burned by...
The halogen bond is a non-covalent, stabilizing interaction analogous to a hydrogen bond in which an anisotropically polarized halogen atom interacts
electrostatically with a Lewis base. Until very recently, the ability of halogens to form these stabilizing interactions in biological macromolecules was all but unknown, but
examples of halogen bonding...
Nowadays, error correction codes have become an integral part in almost all the modern digital communication and storage systems. With the continuously increasing demands for higher speed and lower power communication systems, efficient VLSI implementations of those error correction codes have great importance for practical applications. In this thesis, several...
Transmission over wireless networks presents multiple technical challenges due to
noise, interference, fading, power constraints and bandwidth limitation. Different
solutions have been propposed to overcome these issues and some of them are
treated here. Cooperative diversity has been proposed as an implementation for
networks where terminals are restricted to using...
Low-Density Parity-check (LDPC) codes have attracted considerable attention due to their capacity approaching performance over AWGN channel and highly parallelizable decoding schemes. They have been considered in a variety of industry standards for the next generation communication systems. In general, LDPC codes achieve outstanding performance with large codeword lengths (e.g.,...
Objective ‐ The authors describe a simple and effective tool for selecting digitization
projects from competing alternatives, providing decision makers with objective,
quantitative data.
Methods ‐ The paper adopts the value engineering methodology for the selection,
evaluation and ranking of digitization project proposals. Project selection steps are described. Selection criteria...
From a landscape ecology perspective, meadows are often seen as landscapes in
transition. Succession and change in meadows may be investigated by considering the
physical and anthropogenic factors that influence the landscape through time. What is
often unknown is how changes occur and how physical and anthropogenic factors
contribute to...
I used current water management practices in central and eastern Oregon and Washington as natural experiments to quantify the effects of irrigation water withdrawals on macroinvertebrate community structure and life history strategies. Reduced discharge had direct (e.g. decreased velocity and wetted habitat) and indirect (e.g. increased conductivity and temperature) effects...
This dissertation concerns a broad range of unique phenomena related to the light propagation at nano- and micro-scales. To access the nano-domain, we introduce anisotropy-based waveguides with positive- and negative-index modes. These novel structures allow energy propagation in subwavelength regions and, in contrast to surface waves, have the mode structure...
The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) purports to assess emotional intelligence, which includes the ability to successfully identify and manage emotions. To test the validity of this claim, 21 students took the MSCIET along with a several other performance measures and personality scales, and their scores were correlated. The MSCEIT...
The specific objectives of this dissertation are to determine subsurface flow
behaviors across different antecedent wetness conditions from a top-down perspective
and to mechanistically assess the hydrological controls on DOC and N transport at the
hillslope and catchment scale. The study area is a small catchment where hillslopes
issue directly...
Technology is a key determinant of comparative advantage among nations. As information technology improves and the nations of the world become economically integrated, concern arises over the dissipation of high-income economies’ technological advantage. The three essays in this dissertation explore the trade and technology relationship, which is essential to economic...
New chemical synthesis strategies have been investigated for the preparation of acceptor-type graphite intercalation compounds (GIC's) with fluoroanions in order to obtain new materials and to develop a better understanding of the synthetic approaches and properties of the products. New GIC's containing borate chelate anion such as bis(oxalato)borate, CxB[OC(O)C(O)O]₂•δF, are...
The goal of many machine learning problems can be formalized as the creation of a function that can properly classify an input vector, given a set of examples of that function. While this formalism has produced a number of success stories, there are notable situations in which it fails. One...
Multinational corporations must be aware of the business and financial reporting issues
that await them abroad. Investors also must have this knowledge in order to adequately
interpret the financial information they receive from these companies. This study
compares and contrasts the business environments in the US and Mexico, with a...