Deaf students in mainstream colleges are withdrawing at an alarming rate. Approximately 70% of the 123,000 deaf students enrolled in 2,300 colleges across the United States will not persist until graduation. This qualitative study examined what factors in the academic and social environment are linked to deaf college students' perceptions...
Men today are doing more household labor than in previous generations, but research suggests that gender still strongly influences household labor. A great deal of labor goes into creating family rituals, which may be central carriers for gender construction. Weddings, in particular, are rituals based on a gender dichotomy that...
Different racial/ethnic groups often perceive the realities of the campus environment differently: This difference in perspective and the attendant reactions can be a factor in student satisfaction or dissatisfaction. A quantitative survey administered in 1996 and 1999 revealed that African-American students on the campus of a diverse two-year community college...
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., and new approaches to control cancer are constantly sought. This dissertation is comprised of two parts: (i) improving the uptake and retention of gadolinium in tumors for potential gadoliniumneutron capture therapy (Gd-NCT) and (ii) integration of gemcitabine or...
This research work focuses on the mechanism of 1/f noise in GaAs
resistors on semi-insulating substrates and 1/f noise due to temperature
fluctuations in heat conduction in resistors, diodes, and bipolar transistors. The
goal of this research is to generate accurate models to explain physical origin of 1/f
noise in...
The purpose of this research was to develop and test a radiation detector to perform beta dosimetry and spectroscopy. The detector utilizes plastic scintillator volumes to produce scintillation light in proportion to the amount of energy deposited in them, and a large-area avalanche photodiode to convert the light to electrical...
Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to identify a deep-water running (DWR) style that most closely approximates terrestrial running. Methods: Twenty healthy male and female intercollegiate (NCAA III) distance runners were videotaped from the right sagittal view while running on a treadmill (TR) and in deep water at 55-60%...
Presented here is a case study of the problem-solving behaviors of upper-division undergraduate physics majors. This study explores the role of visual representations in students' problem solving and provides a foundation for investigating how students' use of visualization changes in the upper-division physics major. Three independent studies were conducted on...
Since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, a number of common problems have emerged. Primarily they involve the difficulties both experienced and created by public schools attempting to fulfill the federal mandate to provide students with disabilities an appropriate public education. The purpose of...
Ecosystem management has become an increasingly mainstream paradigm for natural
resource management. Nowhere is this more evident than on the public and private forestland
of the Pacific Northwest. While ecosystem management has become a widely
accepted principle of resource management, substantial questions remain about its
implementation. A case in point...
Angry driving behaviors that lead to acts of road rage have become a major public health concern. Understanding the differences between people who drive with a high level of anger and those who do not provides insight into possible prevention approaches. This study applied Richard Lazarus' Cognitive-Motivational-Relational (CMR) Model to...
Fuelwood is a basic need for rural households in Malawi. However, deforestation has reduced the quantity of forest products such as fuelwood available to households. This has negatively affected rural Malawian quality of life, especially for women who are forced to walk long distances to collect fuelwood, prepare foods with...
Globally intermittent turbulence is characterized by sudden switching from significant turbulence to weak turbulence and back on time scales ranging from seconds to tens of minutes as opposed to microscale intermittency, which is due to organization of small scale gradients by individual eddies on scales as small as the Kolmogorov...
The primary focus of this work is on examining structure-property relationships of interest for high-power nonlinear optical and laser crystals. An intuitive and simply illustrated method for assessing the nonlinear optical potential of structurally characterized noncentrosymmetric materials is introduced. This method is applied to materials including common quartz and tourmaline...
A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of a targeted intervention for community control of Ascariasis was carried out in three rural communities near Quito, Ecuador. Targeted treatment with Paico (Chenopodium ambrosioides) and Albendazole (ABZ) was applied to children aged 5 to 15 years attending primary local schools in Aglla, Checa and Iguinaro. Prevalence...
Overweight and obesity are a growing national concern, particularly among women and selected minority populations (Ayala, Elder, Campbell, Slymen, Roy, Engelberg, et al., 2004; NHANES, 2003). Pregnant women bear a disproportionate risk of becoming overweight or obese (Greene, Smickikias-Wright, Scholl, & Karp, 1988; Gunderson et al., 2000; Rossner, 1999). Although...
Guided by Ogbu's cultural-ecological model of human development, this comparative study offers a comprehensive and explicit way of conceptualizing and measuring parenting within the cultural context. Multiple hypotheses are generated for the cross-cultural comparison of parenting styles in Asian Americans and European Americans. The study uses the National Longitudinal Study...
In many areas of the developing world, the continued overexploiting forest resources has the potential to have significant detrimental impacts be placed on sustainable forest management (SFM) can help communities and organizations responsibly manage and utilize the remaining forests over the long term. Ethiopia’s forest lands provide tangible benefits from...
Individual supervision is a widely accepted practice in the counseling profession, yet the tasks and focus of individual supervision in an agency setting remain largely uninvestigated. The tasks and focus areas inherent to agency supervision are especially important to counselors, counselor educators, agency administrators, and licensing boards, all of whom...
The purpose of this study was to develop a profile
of Christian College physical education faculty members
regarding their academic preparation, professional
experience, and selected duties, as well as to identify
important components of graduate preparation at the
doctoral level for future faculty at these
institutions.
A survey instrument was...
From 1990 to 2000, Oregon community colleges experienced a shift in their revenue sources from primarily local taxes to primarily state funding. Additionally during this time Oregon approved term limits for state officials and legislators. In preparation for the 2001-2003 biennial Legislative session, the community colleges pursued new approaches to...
The purpose of this study was to describe the presidential search process at a
newly created community college and to learn how that process reflected the
emerging organizational culture. A single research question guided the inquiry: How
did the presidential search process at a newly created community college reflect the...
An expedient approach to the synthesis of a wide range of highly programmable biaryl templates has been accomplished. Utilizing the Diels-Alder [4+2] cycloaddition, a wide range of tri- and tetra-ortho-substituted biaryls have been synthesized in only three to four steps from commercially available materials. We have successfully synthesized entire classes...
Commonly proposed ocean wave energy converters (OWEC) use inefficient and maintenance demanding intermediate hydraulic and pneumatic systems. We propose a novel rotary direct-drive OWEC that eliminates these intermediate stages. The new device employs a contactless force transmission system (CFTS) comprising a “piston” and a “cylinder” and a ball screw to...
With the development of high performance power electronic and semiconductor technologies, Adjustable Speed Drive (ASD) systems are increasingly applied in residential, commercial and industrial applications. Due to the advantages at higher power ratings, the three-level Neutral-Point-Clamped (NPC) Voltage Source Inverter (VSI) is being employed in industrial and traction applications, static...
Power quality has become an important concern to both electric utilities and
end users due to the increased use of non-linear loads in modem power systems
over the past decade. Nonlinear loads inject harmonics into the power system and
thus may lead to poor power quality and lower power factor....
This dissertation presents a dual-path 2-0 MASH (Multi-stAge-noise -SHaping) ADC with two verified digital corrections of DAC mismatch error and quantization noise leakage. By using these two techniques, the requirements for the analog circuits are greatly relaxed. The dual-path structure generates two outputs, one only composed of conversion errors, the...
The study of the infra-specific ranks (i.e., subspecies and variety) can be considered
the study of the process of speciation. Astragalus lentiginosus Douglas ex Hooker
(Fabaceae) is the most taxon rich species in the U.S. flora currently including 40
taxonomic varieties. These varieties were described using traditional taxonomic
methods primarily...
Despite recent efforts to improve site safety, construction still accounts for a disproportionate injury and illness rate. According to the 2007 injury and illness data released by the National Safety Council, the construction industry has a fatality and disabling injury rate that is approximately three times higher than the all-industry...
Taiwan has undergone significant social change, particularly in the last forty years, due to economic and industrial growth. Career development intervention is increasingly urgent in helping students face upcoming challenges. This study investigates the implementation and perceived helpfulness of career development interventions in Taiwanese comprehensive high schools. A total of...
Substance abuse is a prevalent occurrence among adolescents. A review of the
literature revealed that adolescent substance abuse has a strong connection to their
academic performance. School counselors address adolescents' academic and
personal/social needs by providing services through prevention education, responsive
services, and collaboration with community members. Yet, there is...
Suicide is currently the third leading cause of death for adolescents ages 15- 24. While much attention has been given to this topic, no research has examined what specific information is being taught to pre-service school counselors. The purpose of this descriptive study was to evaluate the pre-service suicide prevention...
This thesis proposes a novel fully digital technique for the estimation and correction of the DAC error in multi-bit delta sigma ADCs. The structure of the DAC error is indicated through a simple model for unit-element based DACs. The impact of the DAC error on the performance of ADC is...
New approaches are needed to quantify and understand spatial patterns of stream fishes and their environment. Concepts in riverine ecology emphasize the importance of thermal zones and gradual longitudinal changes in physical habitat and biota, but little is known about spatial variability within the river continuum. I present a conceptual...
This study described how and why a Korean elementary teacher taught mathematics as he did. Specifically, the study sought to describe his beliefs about the teaching and learning of mathematics and relate them to patterns of classroom interaction and norms.
An ethnographic inquiry guided the study of one third grade...
Western juniper has rapidly expanded into sagebrush steppe communities in the Intermountain West during the past 120 years. This expansion has occurred across a wide range of soil types and topographic positions. These plant communities, however, are typically treated in current peer-reviewed literature generically. The focus of this research is...
In the context of forest products, a cutting order is a list of dimension parts along with demanded quantities. The cutting-order problem is to minimize the total cost of filling the cutting order from a given lumber grade (or grades). Lumber of a given grade is supplied to the production...
The dominant controls on flow generation in steep, forested hillslopes are poorly understood. This dissertation examined the dominant flow processes operating at the hillslope scale, using a combined macroscale measurement and model development and analysis framework. Irrigation experiments at two steep forested hillslopes were conducted to isolate individual hillslope flow...
Occurrence of human error in highly complex systems, such as a cockpit, can be disastrous and/or overwhelmingly costly. Mismanagement of multiple concurrent tasks has been observed by researchers to be a type of repetitive human error in previous studies of accidents and incidents. This error may occur in the form...
The Penn-State/NCAR MM5 mesoscale model was adapted for mesoscale simulations of the Martian atmosphere (the OSU MMM5). The NASA Ames Mars GCM provides initial and boundary conditions. High-resolution maps for albedo, thermal inertia and topography were developed from Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) data; these baseline maps are processed to appropriate...
This research addresses the large-scale group fleet replacement problem with multiple vehicle types of multiple units, under budget and demand constraints. Past research in group fleet replacement is limited and has focused on one vehicle type, with multiples units and constraints. Many studies in fleet replacement have also dealt with...
Pollen development is an important process in male flower development, the timing of which may be correlated with time of pollen shed in hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.). Early to very late blooming cultivars were identified and the relationship of microsporogenesis and microgametogenesis, and time of pollen shed were studied in...
Increased global competition is forcing organizations to increase their use of group decision making today. Computerized group decision support aids (CGDSAs) are being developed to improve the efficiency of these groups and to improve decision quality. Even though the use of CGDSAs has increased, very little research has been done...
Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with wide dynamic range and high
linearity are required for high-end audio applications. A multi-bit delta sigma
audio DAC, using a novel gain-correction technique, is described in this thesis. For
widely varying on-chip RC time constant, the DAC gain can be accurately
controlled by the correction circuitry....
Evolution of the mobile communication standards and proliferation of hand-held devices mandate stringent Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) specifications. Among various ADCs, a ∆Σ ADC is best known as a power-efficient ADC when more than 12b is required. However, a conventional discrete-time (DT) ∆Σ Modulator (∆ΣM) is inadequate for low-power wideband applications...
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics published their vision of active, problem-centered instruction with a goal of conceptual understanding in 1989. Fifteen years after these reforms were proposed the changes are reflected in school policy and elementary mathematics curriculum, but only limited change has actually occurred in classroom instruction....
Physical distribution is one of the key functions in logistics systems, involving the flow of products from manufacturing plants or distribution centers through the network of transportation to consumers. The function is very costly, especially for the distribution industries. During the past decades, the significance of physical distribution has increased...
Using network architecture to describe a biological system is an effective organizational method. The utility of this approach, which generally applies to qualitative models, is enhanced by the addition of quantitative models characterizing the interactions between network nodes. A chromatophore-based signal transduction network is developed, and the highly interconnected major...
The main result of this written dissertation is a mathematical solution to the problem of multiplex recording for high performance tandem time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The prescription is to use a time-lag accelerator in the second stage to match the ion optical properties of the decay fragments to the requirements of...
The use of an adjacency matrix to determine distant (not maximal or
minimal) subgroup and supergroup relationships between crystallographic spacegroup
types is described. Full lists of space-group types that are supergroups and
subgroups for every space-group type were compiled. A list of the space-group
types connected to each space-group type...