Pacific lamprey, Entosphenus tridentatus, have shown recent and rapid declines in abundance. These anadromous fish return to streams where they mature, spawn and die. It has been inferred that Pacific lamprey enter freshwater and reside for ~ 1 year before spawning. This long exposure to the freshwater environment may affect...
Recruitment of larvae from the plankton is an important determinant of
community structure in marine systems. In populations of many marine species,
recruitment determines the basic demographic parameters of immigration, emigration,
and reproduction. Moreover, the effect of recruitment as an "ecological subsidy" can
determine the strength of interactions among species...
This study examined relationships between pre-tested early literacy skills and post-tested reading achievement in 52 kindergarten and 39 first-grade children. An archival data set was available for statistical analysis. Data analysis was completed in three stages: Participants' entry-level literacy and language scores were compared on two Assessment of Literacy and...
Novel ternary graphite intercalation compounds (GICs) of alkali metal cations
and a wide variety of amines have been synthesized by one-pot chemical syntheses.
Alkali metals studied includes Li, Na and K. The families of amines employed are nalkylamines,
branched alkylamines, and different structural isomers of diamines and
polyamines. Intragallery structures...
Predatory lionfishes (Pterois volitans and P. miles) were introduced to Florida waters during the mid to late 1980s, and eventually established self-sustaining breeding populations in the tropical western Atlantic. These invasive species are now widespread along the southeastern seaboard of the United States, across the Caribbean Sea, and in the...
At the university level, introductory science courses usually have high student to teacher ratios which increases the challenge to meaningfully connect with students. Various curricula have been developed in physics education to actively engage students in learning through social interactions with peers and instructors in class. This learning environment demands...
Acting intelligently to efficiently solve sequential decision problems requires the ability to extract hierarchical structure from the underlying domain dynamics, exploit it for optimal or near-optimal decision-making, and transfer it to related problems instead of solving every problem in isolation. This dissertation makes three contributions toward this goal.
The first...
Chemicals must be bioavailable for there to be a potential for exposure and consequent risk to human or environmental health. Passive sampling devices (PSDs) are used to quantify the time-integrated concentration of bioavailable contaminants. We demonstrate that PSDs can be paired with the zebrafish developmental toxicity bioassay to produce site-specific,...
The War Production Board issued limitation order 85 in April 1942 in order to conserve fabric and manpower needed for the war effort. The L-85 order froze the silhouette so no major style changes in women's wear would occur during the war. It is clear that on the one hand...
The prevalence of childhood illness requiring hospitalization establishes the need for implementation of an applied intervention to decrease levels of hospitalization-induced anxiety in pediatric patients. In addition to anxiety, levels of perceived trauma have also been linked to pre-operative pediatric patients. Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT) within the medical setting has...
Within the past several years the technology of high-throughput sequencing has transformed the study of biology by offering unprecedented access to life's fundamental building block, DNA. With this transformation's potential a host of brand-new challenges have emerged, many of which lend themselves to being solved through computational methods. From de...
This dissertation explores the engineering of carbon nanotube electronic devices using atomic force microscopy (AFM) based techniques. A possible application for such devices is an electronic interface with individual biological molecules. This single molecule biosensing application is explored both experimentally and with computational modeling.
Scanning probe microscopy techniques, such as...
Continued interest in the development of miniaturized and portable analytical platforms necessitates the exploration of sensitive methods for the detection of trace analytes. Nanomaterials, on account of their unique physical and chemical properties, are not only able to overcome many limitations of traditional detection reagents but also enable the exploration...
This study investigates how teachers develop and extend their understanding and knowledge of teaching and learning with digital technologies in a primarily online Master of Science program. The investigation focuses on exploring the relationship between developing an online community of learners and the construction of technological pedagogical and content knowledge...
Thermochemical water splitting cycles have been conceptualized and researched for over half a century, yet to this day none are commercially viable. The heavily studied Sulfur-Iodine cycle has been stalled in the early development stage due to a difficult HI-H₂O separation step and material compatibility issues. In an effort to...
The purpose of this study was to compare how elected and appointed board
trustees provide oversight for the community colleges they serve. The rationale for
this study was that little examination of board governance processes at community
colleges had occurred and, as a result, board members may lack the understanding...
Marine sediments contain an abundance of methane that is biologically produced
and plays a significant role in the global carbon cycle. Microbes responsible for the
carbon cycle in marine sediments, and the processes that they carry out, need to be
characterized in order to fully understand the role of this...
Improved monitoring of forest biomass is needed to quantify natural and anthropogenic effects on the terrestrial carbon cycle. Landsat's temporal and spatial coverage, fine spatial grain, and long history of earth observations provide a unique opportunity for measuring biophysical properties of vegetation across large areas and long time scales. However,...
Interpretive rangers serve as one of the major educational resources that visitors may encounter during their visit to a park or other natural area, yet our understanding of their professional growth remains limited. This study helps address this issue by developing an instrument that evaluates the beliefs of resource interpreters...
The purpose of this dissertation was to increase our understanding of novice counselors as they initially treat adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (ASCSA).
The researcher used the grounded theory approach, a qualitative method, in order to describe richly and sensitively the first interactions between counselors-in-training and ASCSA. Seven novice...
Low power, high speed serial transceivers are employed in a wide range of applications ranging from chip-to-chip, backplane, and optical interconnects. Apart
from being capable of handling a wide range of data rates, the transceivers should
have low power consumption (mW/Gbps) and be fully integrated. This work
discusses enabling techniques...
The 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are two federal mandates which impact general education teachers working with special needs students and diverse learners (second language learners, students from severe poverty, students from different cultures, students who experience occasional emotional needs, and students...
The United States is the third-largest producer of raspberries in the world. Washington
State leads the nation in red raspberry (Rubus idaeus L.) production. 'Meeker', the
most grown red raspberry cultivar in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon and
British Columbia, Canada) is highly susceptible to Raspberry crumbly fruit, a virusinduced...
Chile has experienced great success in terms of economic growth in the last decades. This growing economy brings changes in the Chilean health care system. Its health care system was primarily funded by state sources until 1981, when a major reform was introduced that established new rules for the health...
Literature on the evolution of the American higher education system includes a historical and consistent debate over the definition of the higher education mission in the country. Recent debate focuses on mission differentiation between the university and the community college. Acknowledging systemic changes in higher education historically occurred within regions...
The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of foster alumni in community and technical colleges, with a focus on Washington State, using a qualitative research approach. Foster alumni may be considered a sub-set of first generation students, yet they have needs that extend beyond those of other...
The purpose of this multi-case study was to describe how library deans and directors at large comprehensive community colleges strategically advocate for and support instructional and technological innovation despite the reality of limited resources and the stress caused by recurring funding crises in higher education. It further sought to examine...
Hand-held devices are among the most successful consumer electronics in modern society. Behind these successful devices, lies a key analog design technique that involves high-performance analog-to-digital conversion combined with very low power consumption. This dissertation presents two different approaches to achieving high power efficiency from a two-step pipelined architecture, which...
Solid-state amorphous materials show amazing promise in thin-film electronics. The interface-to-bulk ratio of thin films makes interfacial chemistries of these systems of utmost importance. Thin films of amorphous metals, dielectrics and semiconductors have novel chemistries that are not only based upon their elemental constituent makeup, but also based upon the...
Batch cultures of Candidatus Pelagibacter ubique were grown under iron-, organosulfur-, and nitrogen-limiting conditions to understand how this ubiquitous marine bacterium responds to and interacts with environments where growth is limited by the availability of these nutrients. Global gene expression was monitored using microarrays and quantitative mass spectrometry to observe...
Three trends are occurring today in the United States which inspired this research. First, America is growing increasingly urbanized. Today, more Americans are living in cities than in rural environments, and this pattern is predicted to continue for the foreseeable future. Urban living has benefits, but there are also challenges...
We investigate several aspects of the numerical solution of the radiative transfer
equation in the context of coal combustion: the parallel efficiency of two commonly used
opacity models, the sensitivity of turbulent radiation interaction (TRI) effects
to the presence of coal particulate, and an improvement of the order of temporal...
Ion-selective polymeric optical sensors – ion optodes – are a promising alternative to ion-selective electrodes and fluorescent dyes for analytical and biological applications, e.g. extra- and intracellular measurements. They are non-toxic, highly selective robust probes for ionic fluxes monitoring.
A large-scale fabrication of ion optodes using a solvent displacement method...
Sulfoxide-ligand exchange (SLE) and asymmetric halogen-metal exchange (AHME) processes were separately examined for the enantioselective synthesis of functionalized alpha-haloalkylmetal (carbenoid) reagents. Carbenoids derived from SLE were used to effect stereospecific reagent-controlled homologation (StReCH) of boronic esters and those generated via AHME were engaged in Darzens-type chemistry with aldehydes.
Abstract for...
Managed care plans purport to improve the health of their members with chronic diseases. How has the growing adoption of Medicare Advantage (MA), the managed care program for Medicare beneficiaries, affected the progression of chronic disease? The literature is rich with articles focusing on managed care organizations' impacts on quality...
The intriguing size- and shape dependent properties of nanoparticles have garnered recent attention in many science and engineering areas. When the particle size is in the nanometer size range, the material exhibits very different properties such as surface plasmon resonance (of gold nanoparticles) and superparamagnetism (of iron oxide nanoparticles). The...
Critical success factors (CSFs) are those things that must be done correctly for a project to be successful; however, CSFs are not sufficient by themselves to guarantee success. CSFs, as identified in the literature, vary from study to study. In addition, previous studies have not typically included contextual details for...
Understanding complex traits is a fundamental challenge in plant genetics and a prerequisite for molecular breeding. Tools for trait dissection are markers, maps, and quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis. Marker-assisted selection (MAS) is an application that integrates these tools. In this thesis research, a new sequence-based marker was evaluated, maps...
An interpretative philosophical framework was applied to a case study to document the particular experiences and perspectives of ten women engineering transfer students
who once attended a community college and are currently enrolled in one of two university
professional engineering programs. This study is important because women still do not...
In this thesis we develop a theoretical framework for the identification of situations where the equal frequency (EF) or equal variance (EV) subclassification may produce lower bias and/or variance of the estimator. We conduct simulation studies to examine the EF and EV approaches under different types of model misspecification. We...
Hydrologic processes within mineral flat wetlands, along with their
connections to groundwater and downstream surface water in lowland agricultural
catchments are poorly understood, particularly under different land uses. In the three
field studies included in this thesis, we examined infiltration, wetland hydroperiod,
groundwater recharge dynamics, surface runoff generation, and water...
We developed a model to investigate the dielectric properties of the
BaTiO₃ − Bi(Zn₁/₂Ti₁/₂)O₃ (BT-BZT) solid solution, which is a relaxor ferroelectric and exhibits long range disorder. The model uses ab initio methods
to determine all polarization states for every atomic configuration of 2 x 2 x 2
supercells of...
The phytopathogen Phytophthora ramorum (Werres, DeCock & Man in't Veld), causal agent of Sudden Oak Death (SOD) of oaks (Quercus spp.) and tanoaks (Notholithocarpus densiflorus syn. Lithocarpus densiflorus), is established in coastal forests of the western United States. Since the discovery of SOD in the Douglas-fir / tanoak forests of...
Pseudomonas is a diverse genus of Gram-negative bacteria that includes pathogens of plants, insects, and humans as well as environmental strains with no known pathogenicity. Pseudomonas fluorescens itself encompasses a heterologous group of bacteria that are prevalent in soil and on foliar and root surfaces of plants. Some strains of...
The quality of a digital image pipeline relies greatly on its color reproduction which should at a minimum handle the color constancy, and the final judgment of the excellence of the pipeline is made through subjective observations by humans.
This dissertation addresses a few topics surrounding the color processing of...
This dissertation explores the real world problem of rural youth out-migration and finds that the central problem is one of persistent class difference in this rural Oregon town. The research that informs this dissertation was conducted in a rural community of approximately 2300 residents in Eastern Oregon, here called Talltown....
Thermoelectric materials are playing a larger role in the global effort to
develop diverse, efficient, and sustainable energy technologies: primarily through
power-generating thermoelectric modules. The principal components of
thermoelectric modules are solid-state thermoelectric materials – typically heavily
doped semiconductors – that convert heat directly into electricity. However, this
conversion efficiency...
Men are frequently left out of the picture in the study of family planning and sexual risk behavior. This approach means few programs and policies address men's family planning and sexual health issues. There is also a lack of understanding of the role fatherhood plays in men's development and in...
The high productivity of Eastern Boundary Upwelling Ecosystems (EBUE), some of the most productive ecosystems in the globe, is attributed to the nutrient rich waters brought up through upwelling. Climate change scenarios for coastal upwelling systems, predict an intensification of coastal upwelling winds. Associated with intensification in upwelling are biogeochemical...
Environment, safety and health (ESH) research has a strong tradition of
conducting research in manufacturing to improve workplace ESH conditions and has
tied its management strategy and technical practices to many significant priorities:
illness and injury prevention, environmental sustainability, corporate social
responsibility, compliance with regulatory and insurance requirements, and dealing...
This dissertation integrates a process-based hydrological investigation with an
ongoing paired-catchment study to better understand how forest harvest impacts
catchment function at multiple scales. We do this by addressing fundamental questions
related to the stocks, flows and transit times of water. Isotope tracers are used within a
top-down catchment intercomparison...
In 2004, the Transition Mathematics Project (TMP), funded by the state of Washington and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was established to create projects to help high school students gain the necessary skills to become college and work-ready. Aligned to TMP's College Readiness Mathematics Standards, a fourth-year capstone mathematics...
The United States Pacific Northwest is well known for its shellfish farming. Historically, commercial harvests were dominated by the native Olympia oyster, Ostrea lurida, but over-exploitation, habitat degradation, and competition and predation by non-native species has drastically depleted their densities and extirpated many local populations. As a result, shellfish aquaculture...
The continuous microreactor-assisted solution deposition (MASD) process was used for the deposition of CdS thin films on fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) glass. The MASD system, including a T-junction micromixer and a microchannel heat exchanger is capable of isolating the homogeneous particle precipitation from the heterogeneous surface reaction. The results show...
Latinos are the largest and most rapidly growing ethnic minority in the United States, and they have the highest dropout rates of any major ethnic group in the country (U.S. Department of Labor, 2003). Latinos' educational attainment is consistently lower than that of other students (Gandara, 2008). The majority of...
Concern about college and career readiness has been expressed in both the
business and education arenas. Employers are calling for entry-level employees with
basic academic skills and educators are being held accountable for student
achievement in academic areas similar to those required by employers. In this
environment, WorkKeys has emerged...
Over the last decade the increase in penetration of wind power and its variable nature has begun to add considerable stress to and threatened the stability of the nation's grid. In order to continue growth wind farms will need to have the ability to participate in the same grid frequency...
Current oil production technologies recover only about one‐third to one‐half of the oil
originally present in an oil reservoir. Given current oil prices, even a modest increase in oil recovery efficiency is fiscally attractive. One novel approach to increase oil recovery
efficiency is a process called microbial enhanced oil recovery...
The pathogen Vibrio cholerae uses cations as a primary currency of virulence
and environmental persistence, using gradients of those cations to move, acquire
nutrients, and control virulence gene expression. An understanding of the overlapping
roles of bioenergetics and chemotaxis in the virulence and environmental survival of
V. cholerae issues from...
The wood-based building products industry has experienced significant turbulence over the past several decades as a function of multiple forces including among others globalization, product and process innovation, and shifting customer and consumer interest and demands. Collectively, these changes have challenged the historical tenets which have defined industry strategy and...
The viral family Herpesviridae consists of large double stranded DNA viruses including eight species that infect humans with varying pathology from benign rashes to cancerous cell transformation. From three subfamilies, alpha-, beta- and gammaherpes, the alphaherpes contains the genera iltovirus, mardivirus, varicellovirus and simplex, two of which, the human simplex...
While the locomotion performance of legged robots over flat terrain or known obstacles has improved over the past few decades, they have yet to equal the performance of their animal counterparts over variable terrain. This work analyzes a multi-legged reduced order model of cockroach locomotion on variable slopes which will...
Halogenated organic compounds have had widespread and massive applications in industry, agriculture, and private households, for example, as degreasing solvents, flame retardants and in polymer production. They are released to the environment through both anthropogenic and natural sources. The most common chlorinated solvents present as contaminants include tetrachloroethene (PCE, perchloroethene)...
Understanding continental crust formation and modification is a fundamental and longstanding geologic problem. Influx of mantle-derived basaltic magma and partial melting of the crust are two ways to drive crustal differentiation. This process results in a low density upper crust and denser, more refractory lower crust, creating significant and vastly...
The North Pacific humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) population has been increasing at an average annual rate of ~6% since the early 1990s. In northern Southeast Alaska alone, there are now more whales than estimated for the entire North Pacific several decades ago. An understanding of how this growing population is...
In this thesis, I present studies in the field of terahertz (THz) spectroscopy. These studies are divided into three areas: Development of a narrowband THz source, the study of carrier transport in metal thin films, and the exploration of coherent dynamics of quasi-particles in semiconductor nanostructures with both broadband and...
Caspian terns (Hydroprogne caspia) and double-crested cormorants
(Phalacrocorax auritus) nest in large colonies on East Sand Island in the Columbia
River estuary, the largest known colonies for the two species in the world. Both
species of piscivorous colonial waterbirds have been identified as predators with a
significant impact on the...
Among the myriad of naturally occurring bioactive compounds are the aminocyclopentitol-containing natural products that represent a family of sugar-derived microbial secondary metabolites, such as the antibiotics pactamycin, allosamidin, and trehazolin. Pactamycin, a structurally unique aminocyclitol antibiotic isolated from Streptomyces pactum, consists of a 5-membered ring aminocyclitol (cyclopentitol) unit, two aromatic...
Studies toward the total synthesis of (+)-providencin (1), a highly oxygenated cembranoid dipterpene with a unique bicyclo[12.2.0]hexadecane skeleton and pronounced biological activity, are described. These studies resulted in the synthesis of advanced intermediates 320 and 332 which contain all of the carbon atoms of 1. In a first generation approach...
This research addresses fleet-sizing for reusable containers that are used for
protection, transportation, and storage of parts between a component plant and
assembly plant. These reusable containers are often expensive and occupy a
large amount of storage space when empty and full. Having a large container
fleet comes with higher...
Obtaining accurate estimates of animal abundance is made difficult by the fact that most
animal species are detected imperfectly. Early attempts at building likelihood models that
account for unknown detection probability impose a simplifying assumption unrealistic for
many populations, however: no births, deaths, migration or emigration can occur in the...
Although many science educators and researchers believe that emotion is an important part of the learning process, few researchers have dealt with the topic in a systematic fashion. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of emotion in the learning process, particularly in the learning of science...
Food webs consist of a combination of bottom-up (resource-driven) and top-down (predator-driven) effects. The strength of these effects depends on the context in which they occur. I investigated food web (trophic) relationships between wolf (Canis lupus) predation, elk (Cervus elaphus) herbivory, aspen (Populus tremuloides Michaux) recruitment, and fire. The study...
Irradiation of a tryptamine linked through its side-chain nitrogen to an alkylidene malonate residue results in an intramolecular [2 + 2] cycloaddition to the indole 2,3-double bond. The resultant cyclobutane undergoes spontaneous retro-Mannich fission to produce a spiro[indoline-3,3-pyrrolenine] with relative configuration defined by the orientation of substituents in the transient...
A new adhesive bonding method is introduced for microlamination architectures, for producing low-temperature microchannel arrays in a wide variety of metals. Sheet metal embossing and chemical etching processes have been used to produce sealing bosses and flow features, resulting in approximately 50% fewer laminae over traditional methods. These lamina designs...
Symbiosis is the close and protracted interaction between organisms. The molecular interactions that occur during symbiosis are complex with multiple barriers that must be overcome. Many Gram-negative, host-associated bacteria use a type III secretion system to mediate associations with their eukaryotic hosts. This secretion system is a specialized apparatus for...
This dissertation investigates the effect of endogenous and exogenous events on firm behavior and performance. These are fundamental questions in economics. The contribution of this study is threefold. First, it provides estimates of the impact of mergers on railroad efficiency, which has important antitrust implications. Second, it provides new estimates...
Calcium (Ca) is an essential macronutrient that is increasingly recognized as a biogeochemical factor that influences ecosystem structure and function. Progress in understanding the sustainability of ecosystem Ca supply has been hampered by a lack of information on the various forms and pools of Ca in forest ecosystems. In particular,...
The federally threatened northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) is the focus of intensive conservation efforts that have led to much forested land being reserved as habitat for the owl and associated wildlife species throughout the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Recently, however, a relatively new threat to spotted...
The major components of wheat flour are keys to its functionality in processing and product quality. The major components, other than the lipids, are polymers: starch, protein, and non-starchy polysaccharides (NSP). In wheat NSP are primarily arabinoxylans (AX). These components are compartmentalized in the grain but are forced into close...
Genomic instability underlies diseases of unregulated cell growth that result in
cancers and developmental abnormalities in humans. Similar genome destabilizing
mechanisms are used to create genetic variety in crops for use in breeding and trait
development. Errors that occur during DNA replication may cause mutations if
they are not corrected...
Throughout many of the world’s mountain ranges snowpack accumulates during the winter and into the spring, providing a natural reservoir for water. As this reservoir melts, it fills streams and recharges groundwater for over 1 billion people globally. Despite its importance to water resources, our understanding of the storage capacity...
Microchannel process technology (MPT) offers several advantages to the field of nanomanufacturing: 1) improved process control over very short time intervals owing to shorter diffusional distances; and 2) reduced reactor size due to high surface area to volume ratios and enhanced heat and mass transfer. The objective of this thesis...
This research presents the Colorado River basin as a social-ecological
system. Utilizing event data on cooperative and conflictive interactions over fresh water, the system is decomposed to look for evidence of outcomes of resilience enhancement. The Animas-La Plata Project in the upper San Juan basin is presented as a case...
Finding new examples of compact simply connected spaces admitting a Riemannian metric of positive sectional curvature is a fundamental problem in differential geometry. Likewise, studying topological properties of families of manifolds is very interesting to
topologists. The Eschenburg spaces combine both of those interests: they are positively curved Riemannian manifolds...
Mycobacterium avium subsp. hominissuis (MAH) is a pervasive environmental bacterium that can cause opportunistic infections in humans. Among the most robust and hardy members of the Mycobacterium genus, M. avium can persist and thrive in a range of challenging environments, including many which place it in direct contact with humans....
Chinese international students in American colleges and universities report low levels of physical activity involvement, which may limit them in terms of
realizing their full human potential (i.e., cognitively, physically, socially). The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the psychosocial mechanisms as well as the sociocultural influences to understand...
Understanding the movement behavior and foraging strategies of individuals across multiple spatial and temporal scales is essential not only for understanding the biological requirements of individuals but also for linking individual strategies to population level effects. Glacial fjords scattered throughout south-central and southeastern Alaska host some of the largest seasonal...
Achieving and maintaining sustainability in irrigated agriculture production in the era of rapidly increasing stress on our natural resources require, among other essential actions, optimum control and management of the applied water. Thus, a significant upgrade of the currently available soil water monitoring technologies is needed. The primary goal of...
This study examined the association between poverty and child neglect. The existence of a general association has been established for some time. However, there is much debate, and little detailed research, on the specific processes that create this association. This study focused on the form of neglect that involves the...
The meteoric rise and prevalent usage of wireless networking technologies for mobile
communication applications have captured the attention of media and imagination of
public in the recent decade. One such proliferation is experienced in Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSNs), where multimedia enabled elements are fused with integrated
sensors to empower tightly...
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic human pathogen that infects immunocompromised individuals such as those suffering from burns or the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis. This organism utilizes a cell-cell communication mechanism known as quorum sensing (QS) to coordinate virulence gene expression and biofilm formation. It has three interconnected QS systems, namely...
This qualitative study examined the influence of the 2011 Oregon Writing Project (OWP) Summer Institute (SI) on the professional development of six teachers in the following ways:
1. The development of case descriptions of teachers' personal and professional backgrounds relevant to their teaching of writing.
2. An examination of the...
This research looks at the use of PowerPoint as an instructional tool for teaching English language learners (ELL) who studied in a language program at a state university in the Pacific Northwest. The purpose of the research was to discover and to explore the perceptions of PowerPoint supported teaching and...
Major psychotic disorders are one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, having severe impacts on the people who suffer from the conditions, their families and society. There is evidence that if these conditions are identified and treated early, the prognosis is improved. The purpose of this dissertation study is...
Hobby activities can be viewed through the lens of informal, free-choice learning. A wide range of hobbies combine fun and learning-intensive practices, and can contribute to scientific literacy. Hobby learning involves clear goal orientation, persistence and effort, and often results in more richly and strongly connected knowledge; traits highly valued...
Oregon is a state with great social and ecological diversity. Unfortunately however, Oregon's water-rich reputation is more rumor than reality. As with many Western states, Oregon struggles with water scarcity, especially during dry summer months. Recent efforts by the state to develop an integrated water resource strategy (IWRS) to manage...
Investigating the structure-property relationships of solid state materials can help improve many of the materials we use each day in life. It can also lead to the discovery of materials with interesting and unforeseen properties. In this work the structure property relationships of newly discovered layered oxypnictide phases are presented...
Jordan has a higher fertility rate (3.8) than the averages of countries similar in income to Jordan (2.2) and compared to the Middle East and North Africa region as a whole (2.8) (WHO, WB, UNICEF, & DHS, 2011). The findings of the 2009 Jordanian Population and Family Health Survey demonstrated...
Sexual selection can influence the mating system of an organism through multiple mechanisms. These mechanisms result in variation in reproductive success among individuals, and include scramble competition, endurance rivalries, contests, mate choice and cryptic choice, and sperm competition. Understanding the mating system of a species requires the identification of which...