A large number of sequential decision-making problems in uncertain environments
can be modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In such settings, an agent
can observe at each time step the state of the environment and then executes an
action, causing a stochastic transition to a new state of the environment...
This study evaluated the potential of the aerobic Mycobacterium strain JS6O to grow on a variety of organic acid substrates, and the possible effects an organic acid would have on the degradation rate of vinyl chloride (VC). A series of batch growth tests were designed to determine the time it...
Current compression perpendicular-to-grain (c-perp) design values for wood members are based on mean stress using the ASTM D143 specimen. Base design value, as determined from 0.04-in deformation in the ASTM specimen, is applied to all c-perp applications. While the standard ASTM test was presumably believed to adequately reflect relevant c-perp...
Wildfire impacts have increased in recent years. The management response outlined by recent policy initiatives (e.g., the National Fire Plan, Healthy Forests Restoration Act) emphasizes the use of prescribed fire and mechanized thinning to reduce the risk of future fire events. These policies also call for an unprecedented level of...
This study examined whether polyphenols contribute a harsh bitterness
to beer, and how polyphenols may otherwise modify beer bitterness in the
presence of iso-a-acids. The experimental portions of this project were
divided into effectively two segments. The first section of the study
encompassed groundwork polyphenol extraction development, and the
examination...
This study links together two very complicated, but very important subjects: media bias and metaphor. More specifically, this study investigates whether or not examining a media outlet's use of metaphor is an effective methodology for investigating media bias. Using cluster analysis, I identified the source metaphors most commonly used on...
This study consisted of two research projects in the Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis (Beetle & A. Young) S.L. Welsh) alliance, the most extensive of the big sagebrush complex in the Intermountain West. In the first project, we intensively sampled 107 relatively undisturbed, late seral Wyoming big sagebrush...
The physical demands of rapid and economical running differ from the demands of fighting in ways that may prevent the simultaneous evolution of optimal performance in these two behaviors. Here, we test an hypothesis of functional trade-off in limb bones by measuring mechanical properties of limb bones in two breeds...
This is a phenomenological research study of the lived experience of women student mentors at one community college located in an urban setting on the West Coast. The study participants were women students who served as mentors to other women at the community college who are participants in a returning...
The design of a 10-bit pipelined charge redistribution DAC employing MOSCAPs biased in their accumulation mode is presented in this thesis. A switched capacitor filter and output buffer have also been designed for the system. The effect of MOSCAP nonlinearity on the performance of the pipelined charge redistribution DAC has...
Local aquatic insect diversity and community structure is the result of multiple local and regional factors, and observed patterns depend upon the spatial and temporal scale under examination. Isolated stream systems in arid regions represent a new challenge in understanding the drivers of diversity and community structure, as most studies...
The challenges faced by manufacturing companies have forced them to become more efficient. Cellular manufacturing is a concept that has been accepted as a technique for increasing manufacturing productivity in batch type production by efficient grouping of parts (jobs) with some similarities in processing operations into groups and sequentially matching...
With the ever-increasing demand for portable devices used in applications
such as wireless communication, mobile computing, consumer electronics, etc.,
the scaling of the CMOS process to deep submicron dimensions becomes more
important to achieve low-cost, low-power and high-performance digital systems.
However, this downscaling also requires similar shrinking of the supply...
End-user programmers, because they are human, make mistakes. However, past research has not considered how visual end-user debugging devices could be designed to ameliorate the effects of mistakes. This paper empirically examines oracle mistakes mistakes users make about which values are right and which are wrong to reveal differences in...
We measured iron concentrations off the Oregon coast in spring (May–June) and summer (August) of 2001 as part of the Coastal Ocean Advances in Shelf Transport (COAST) program. Dissolvable and total dissolvable iron levels in surface waters were generally higher in spring (mean of 2.1 and 33.9 nmol L¯¹, respectively)...
High electron mobility thin films of In₂₋ₓWₓO₃₊y(0≤x≤0.075) were prepared on amorphous SiO₂ and single-crystal yttria-stablized zirconia (001) substrates by pulsed laser deposition. Mobilities ranged between 66 and 112 cm² /Vs depending on the substrate type and deposition conditions, and the highest mobility was observed at a W-dopant concentration of x~0.03....
Phytophthora ramorum, a plant pathogen, is the cause of sudden oak death and ramorum blight and shoot die-back. It has a wide host range including many native forest species and common nursery plants. The lack of knowledge regarding infection biology of P. ramorum limits our understanding of its ecology and...
The Surgeon General of the United States in 2003 documented the existence of striking disparities for minorities and immigrants in mental health services and the underlying knowledge base. This thesis expands the knowledge base by examining the personal experiences and perspectives of community health workers (CHWs) employed in a mental...
Livestock grazing has been indirectly related to sage-grouse (centrocercus
urophasianus) declines in the western United States and southern Canada; however,
there is a lack of scientific research that directly relates the two. Our objective was
to investigate the influence of livestock herbivory on sage-grouse nesting habitat by
determining the spatial...
Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is the transmission of data using an extremely wide bandwidth and very low power spectral density. In this thesis, the mereits and challenges of UWB architectures versus conventional narrowband architectures will be compared. Pulsed UWB systems can be implemented with very simple architectures. These advantages make UWB...
In the past, sharks, skates and ray species have mainly occurred in incidental fisheries. Now they are increasingly being directly targeted due to the depleted status of traditionally targeted species. The life history characteristics of many elasmobranch species make them more sensitive to high rates of fishing mortality. The combination...
Ferrites have been used for various high frequency applications as bulk
materials. These applications, however, are limited to large dimension devices. In
this thesis, thin film ferrites were deposited from a low temperature solution-based
deposition process that is suitable for micro-scale high frequency applications. The
low temperature nature of this...
Fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) are becoming more widely used for repair and strengthening of conventionally reinforced concrete (CRC) bridge members. Once installed, the repair may be exposed to millions of load cycles during service life. The anticipated life of FRP repairs for shear strengthening of bridge members under repeated service...
The purpose of this thesis is to provide an estimate of sunk costs in the U.S. brewing industry and analyze the relationships among sunk costs, advertising, and concentration. The estimation procedures involves three steps: (1) estimation of the market value of new and used plant and equipment per barrel of...
The seasonal distribution of bioavailable organochiorine contaminants in surface
water and the potential environmental factors influencing their bioavailability were
evaluated. The study was carried at the lower Willamette River at Portland Harbor, Oregon
where surface water runoff varied according to season. Bioavailable water concentrations of
DDTs and PCBs were determined...
Barley is the fourth most important cereal crop in the world because of its broad adaptation, its utility as a feedstock and for human food, and the superior properties of barley malt for brewing. Three of the most important foliar diseases of barley, on a worldwide level are: barley leaf...
This handbook was developed in order to help departments in Student Affairs continue to improve their services and programs through the implementation of intentional, meaningful, and sustainable assessment programs.
This project, to propose an implementation strategy for standard monitoring
protocols, builds on my Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Fellowship to support a
study entitled Evaluating Cumulative Ecosystem Response to Restoration Projects in the
Columbia River Estuary (Diefenderfer et al. 2005). The major objective of the study was
to develop a...
The Willamette Basin Conservation Project was created to help people and programs work together toward positive results in Oregon’s Willamette Basin for people, lands, communities, waters and native species.
Mosquitoes and mosquitoborne disease transmission
are sensitive to hydrologic variability. If local hydrologic
conditions can be monitored or modeled at the scales at
which these conditions affect the population dynamics of
vector mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit, a means
for monitoring or modeling mosquito populations and mosquitoborne
disease transmission...
A primitive equation model is used to study the finite-amplitude evolution of instabilities associated with the coastal upwelling front. Simulations of increasing complexity are examined that represent idealizations of summer conditions off the Oregon coast, including cases with steady and with time-variable wind in a domain with alongshore-uniform bathymetry and...
Results from a model of wind-driven circulation are analyzed to study spatial and temporal variability in
the bottom mixed layer (BML) on the mid-Oregon shelf in summer 2001. The model assimilates acoustic
Doppler profiler velocities from two cross-shore lines of moorings 90 km apart to provide improved
accuracy of near-bottom...
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are an extensive class of noncoding genes that regulate gene expression through
posttranscriptional repression. Given the potential for large viral genomes to encode these transcripts, we
examined the human cytomegalovirus AD169 genome for miRNAs using a bioinformatics approach. We
identified 406 potential stem-loops, of which 110 were conserved...
Well-defined fronts develop at the seaward edge of riverine plumes where suspended materials and planktonic organisms are concentrated by convergent water flows. Riverine plume fronts have been hypothesized to be favorable fish habitats because they can lead to localized prey
aggregations. We examined the spatial distribution of juvenile Pacific salmonids...
Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) is a perennial, dioecious species in which the female inflorescence (cones) are harvested and used in the beer-brewing process to impart bittering and/or flavoring to beer. Hop breeders have typically utilized clonal selection and hybridization to develop new cultivars. The use of genetically diverse parents for...
Invertebrates are an important food source for grouse chicks, especially within the first 2 weeks of life. Invertebrate abundance is highly patchy and dependent upon herbaceous cover and vegetation structure. We examined the relationship between invertebrate biomass (from sweepnet samples) and habitat structure at lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) brood-use and...
A discrete trap model is developed and employed for elucidation of thin-film transistor (TFT) device physics trends. An attractive feature of this model is that only two model parameters are required, the trap energy depth, E[subscript T], and the trap density, N[subscript T]. The most relevant trends occur when E[subscript...
A counterflow virtual impactor was used to collect residual particles larger than about 0.1 μm diameter from anvil cirrus clouds generated over Florida in the southern United States. A wide variety of particle types were found. About one-third of the nuclei were salts, with varying amounts of crustal material, industrial...
The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions that community college and
university faculty have about similarities and differences in their professional roles.
The research design included a qualitative ethnographic case study methodology
with faculty participants purposively selected from two public colleges in the Pacific
Northwest: a community...
Presently, the production of wood composites relies on the formaldehyde-based wood adhesives such as phenol-formaldehyde (PF) and urea-formaldehyde (UF). However, their dependence on exhaustible fossil fuels and the emission of carcinogenic formaldehyde prompt to develop an environmentally friendly adhesive from renewable natural resources. This work focuses on development and characterization...
Medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs) are important industrial feedstocks for
soaps, detergents and surfactants. Interspecific lines derived from Cuphea lanceolata
and Cup hea viscosissima are being domesticated as a temperate source of MCFAs.
These species also serve as model organisms for understanding the biosynthesis of
MCFAs in seeds. Various markers...
Resistance to acetohydroxyacid synthase (AHAS)-inhibiting herbicides has been reported in over 90 weedy species, including wild sunflower biotypes, since the herbicides were developed in 1982. The AHAS gene family in sunflower, consisting of three paralogs AHAS1 , AHAS2, and AHAS3, has been targeted for inducing herbicide resistance. A polymorphism identified...