Statistical mechanics studies the probability that a system is in a certain state given one or more constraints which are usually fixed conserved quantities. It is a particularly useful and powerful approach for problems with a large number of degrees of freedom where a complete knowledge of the system is...
As the options for open access publishing increase, scientists and students are a bit befuddled by the choices and the costs. Librarians are being asked difficult questions: Is this an okay journal to publish in? Is the editorial board reputable? How much is this going to cost? Is it worth...
This poster was presented at the Linguistic Society of America Conference in Portland, Oregon, on January 11, 2015. The poster session was a part of the symposium “Utilization of language archives in endangered language research, revitalization, and documentation” which featured a number of presentations and accompanying posters. The poster explains...
Projected to reach one million people next year, international students in the United States are undergoing a transformative educational migration. Moving away from the existing study abroad paradigm is the first step to more accurately understand the lived experience of an educational migrant. Discovering the perceptions of what value an...
Consumption of seafood products continues to grow each year, but post-harvest losses and inedible seafood waste remain as high as 25%. Ice-based systems are the most common form of preservation to increase shelf life, preserve product quality, and enhance product safety. Slurry ice is a type of chilling media, consisting...
Baccalaureate attainment represents an important goal among educators and policymakers. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education has stated that affordability and transfer are critical to increasing baccalaureate attainment, and that community colleges have a critical role in this transfer process. On the other hand, some researchers disagree...
In 2012, the Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries Center for Digital Scholarship and Services utilized existing staff and librarian positions to energize OSU’s efforts at building a strong open access collection of scholarly articles by OSU authors. Members of the team begin tracking, requesting, and archiving articles published from 2012...
The data represent 48-state USA weather and climate data (both site and gridded), biological phenology (developmental) models, combined with photoperiod response (diapause inducing sensitivity to short daylengths). The example data sets are specific to a single insect biological control organism (a leaf beetle introduced to control purple loosestrife, an invasive...
A bad software development process leads to wasted effort and inferior products. In order to improve a software process, it is important to first understand it. Our unique approach in this paper is to use code and test changes to understand conformance to a process. We analyze the meaning of...
Multipurpose management of hydrosystems face a number of uncertainties related to hydrologic variability and nonstationarity. Anticipated air temperature increases in the Pacific Northwest region are projected to alter the timing and quantity of streamflow associated with precipitation shifting from snow to rain, including shorter winter runoff periods, earlier spring runoff,...
"Using PressBooks to Engage Students with Campus History" shares the use of PressBooks, an online book publishing software, for a Fall 2014 class assignment.
This project explores the use of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in a population of men and women United States Army veterans. It explores the literature surrounding this treatment, specifically Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and argues a clinical application for this therapy could...
Drug courts are collaborative community programs that provide active oversight and compliance monitoring of individuals engaged in the criminal justice continuum. Adult drug court program requirements include alcohol and other drug treatment, community support services, and other ancillary services intended to promote life changes in participants and ultimately, prosocial behaviors....
This thesis presents two related studies on the methodology for creating, and
subsequently analyzing, an inverse food web model of an intertidal seagrass bed. The first study (Chapter 2) describes, for the first time in the literature, a method for incorporating isotopic information gained from Bayesian mixing models into an...
Over 100 monthly bacterioplankton DNA samples, from each of the surface and 200 m depths at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site, were analyzed for community assembly processes. Correlation networks, filtered for potential autocorrelation artifacts, were constructed for each depth. Network characteristics for the two depths were remarkably similar...
The aim of the research undertaken for this thesis was to develop a new high-performance amorphous oxide semiconductor (AOS) for use as a channel layer in a thin-film transistor (TFT). AOS TFTs offer higher electron mobility than the established amorphous silicon based technology. A new channel material comprised of aluminum...
ScholarsArchive@OSU (SA@OSU) has stood as Oregon State University’s institutional repository for nearly a decade, and has seen a great deal of success, by many metrics, as such. Over that time period, the mission, content types, and stakeholders of the repository have changed, as has the ecosystem of available and emerging...
Academic libraries that offer digital asset management systems (DAMS) and services such as an institutional repository, data curation services, and digitization of historic documents face the need to assess and refine services. This need can be most apparent when considering changes to DAMS infrastructure. The proposed panel presents the experiences...
Illuminated contour lines, where line width and color are varied based on an angle of illumination, date back to the mid-nineteenth century, but their effectiveness compared to conventional contour lines has not been fully examined. Currently, illuminated contour lines are not widely used in computer-based cartography because they are not...
Research and public concern of poly and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) as environmental contaminants has increased significantly due to the increasing number of reports of their detection in humans and wildlife. PFASs have a number of commercial applications including surfactants, coatings, polymers, and levelers, which are used on consumer products like...
Camelids are known for frequent occurrence of general ill-thrift. In other species, neutrophil dysfunction has been identified as a cause of ill-thrift, and linked to chronic fungal and bacterial infections. However, no reference values exist for neutrophil function testing in camelids, which inhibits accurate evaluation of neutrophil deficiency in this...
The topic of student success is beginning to grow in popularity throughout the United States. Student success has a wide variety of definitions ranging from a direct definition of graduation to an indirect definition of a student setting a goal of finishing a class successfully. Now there are stakeholders such...
Fire regimes across the western United States have been altered due to past land management and changing land use. Mitigating increased risks of wildfire occurrence in landscapes such as central Oregon requires landscape level management from both governmental and private organizations. Non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners manage a relatively small...
Meso- and microplastic debris is becoming a rising coastal issue as more research highlighting the detrimental impacts this material has on marine organisms and the environment is performed. This research, however, continues to be conducted in a non-standardized manner meaning that the data being collected cannot be compared spatially or...
A procedure for automating the design and layout of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is presented. This procedure makes use of the existing synthesis and place-and-route tools that are common in digital circuit design. A method for adding rudimentary analog cells to the standard library is described, allowing the designer to synthesize...
The VISualization of Terrestrial and Aquatic Systems (VISTAS) software development project began with the proposition that visualization would increase the ability of scientists to explore and communicate their data, especially complex datasets that span multiple spatial and temporal scales. A case study of VISTAS articulates how and why scientists intend...
This work describes the development of an accurate, low-cost, expandable and wearable health and activity monitoring platform. Wearable monitors used to track physical activity are becoming an increasingly popular and effective way to combat our dangerously sedentary lifestyles. Unfortunately most existing wearable solutions are either costly, inaccurate or cumbersome. The...
In the first set of studies, 2 experiments evaluated the influence of supplement composition on ruminal forage disappearance, performance, and physiological responses of Angus × Hereford cattle consuming a low-quality, cool-season forage (8.7 % CP and 57 % TDN). In Exp. 1, 6 rumen-fistulated steers housed in individual pens were...
Wheat (Triticum aestivum) is one of the world’s major staple food crops, with flour produced from starchy endosperm being used for breads, cakes, noodles and various other wheat-based foods. The unique bread making properties of wheat are primarily attributed to its gluten-forming storage proteins: gliadins and glutenins. This study investigated...
The purpose of this phenomenological study was to discover the experiences nurse educators (NEs) have had with oppression and to uncover how their experiences may have impacted their teaching. This study was significant as nurse retention is negatively affected by oppressed group behaviors (Duchscher & Myrick, 2008; Tinsley & France,...
China’s global influence in the realm of science and technology (S&T) has increased dramatically in recent times. China and the United States are now each other’s main partner in scientific collaboration. As a major research university, OSU is one of the institutions with a large stake in this international collaboration....
In 2011, Governor John Kitzhaber, along with the Oregon legislature, affirmed a clear and ambitious goal for the State. The 40-40-20 goal states that by 2025, 40% of adult Oregonians will have an Associates degree or a meaningful postsecondary certificate, 40% will hold a Bachelors degree or advance degree and...
Microbial natural products represent a massive repository of unique chemical scaffolds with corresponding diverse biological functions. However, in the past decade the development of natural products into new therapeutics has dwindled, in part due to the challenges posed by high rediscovery rates and low throughput associated with classical bioassay-guided fractionation...
Decreases in glenohumeral (GH) rotation motion and rotator cuff strength have been linked to multiple pathologies in the throwing arms of baseball pitchers, but a full understanding of the shoulder mechanisms affected by a total arc of motion deficit (TAMD) has not yet been achieved. This study was designed to...
Pacific Northwest prairies have become significantly reduced in extent, and in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, less than one percent of native upland prairies remain. Many species have been impacted by this extreme loss of habitat, including Castilleja levisecta (golden paintbrush), a threatened hemiparasitic forb species endemic to the Pacific...
In the field of construction safety, many researchers have worked to create assessment tools. These tools focus on different aspects of construction safety, such as assessing safety climate, safety culture, etc. Although research indicates that the majority of incidents are caused by unsafe behaviors and acts, there are no comprehensive...
This thesis details the derivation and application of template-based controls on a bipedal robot, as well as a description of the software framework that enabled experimentation. The software framework uses a combination of open-source tools including ROS, OROCOS, EtherCAT, and Xenomai to create a real-time environment for the controllers. The...
Mercury (Hg) contamination is a global conservation threat to freshwater ecosystems, detected in even the protected lakes of Olympic National Park (Washington, USA). Although considered some of the most remote and pristine US ecosystems, these lakes are currently subject to multiple environmental stressors, including climate change and fish introductions; adding...
Ungulates comprise some of the most well researched and intensely managed wildlife populations on earth. As such, they are recognized as ideal study subjects for developing and modifying management tools or theories (Danell et al. 1994, Shipley 2010). An introduced moose (Alces alces gigas) population on the Copper River Delta...
Ocean Acidification (OA) has emerged as a major threat to marine ecosystems, particularly regarding calcifying organisms. A growing body of literature describing laboratory investigations into pH stress indicates broadly deleterious effects for calcifiers, but responses vary greatly across taxa and can be influenced by variations in other environmental characteristics. Scaling...
Pedestrian distraction at roadway crossings has been correlated with a higher risk of pedestrian-vehicle collisions due to the pedestrian's cognitive, visual, and motor attention being drawn to a wide variety of secondary tasks.
This study is different from previous field studies of pedestrian midblock crossings in that the geometric layout...
Permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs) are widely used in electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles to propel the wheels. Various control strategies have been developed for PMSM drive systems to achieve both high efficiency and safe operation. In a PMSM drive system, generally the high voltage battery and the power...
Supervision is an essential component of the development of pre-professional school counselors. Oftentimes, school counseling site supervisors are called upon to supervise graduate school counseling students without any requisite supervision training. The lack of supervision training is of significant professional concern, and there is an established need to translate recommended...
Title IX's passage into law in 1972 set women’s sports on a course toward gender equity with men's sports at the scholastic and collegiate levels, leading to a definitive growth in women’s professional leagues, corresponding athlete salaries, and athletic marketing and promotional prospects. However, disparities currently exist in the availability...
Interest in measuring soil quality continues to increase worldwide in view of demands on land productivity and the necessity to preserve soil resources, yet identification of suitable indicators for soil quality assessment is still evolving. This study adapted 10 biological, physical, and chemical indicators of soil quality identified by the...
Data converters are essential interface circuits between the analog world that people live in and the digital processors that people live with. Linearity, which often is a tradeoff against other performance criteria, is one of the major performance demands from applications for both analog-to-digital converts (ADC) and digital-to-analog converters (DAC)....
There are approximately 2.2 million cases of End-stage Renal Disease (ESRD) worldwide and current hemodialysis treatment is costly and ultimately insufficient compared to kidney transplantation. There is a strong need to arrive at a better solution for treating ESRD. Microchannel-based hemodialysis is one proposed option, already shown to have improved...
This thesis presents the steps that were taken to develop thematic findings using data from a qualitative study. Using a grounded approach, the study focused on qualitatively exploring Mexican origin caregivers' conceptualizations of elder caregiving in terms of role functioning, social norms, cultural beliefs, and familial obligations. Data collected from...
Analog to digital converters (ADCs) are a critical part of communication between the physical world and the increasingly digital systems humans use every day. ADCs have inherent non-idealities that degrade performance. Nonlinearity is one of the most prevalent non-idealities that designers face. While calibration methods for nonlinearity exist in the...
The exposure needed for a clinically useful image requires much less precision when using digital radiography (DR) than when using screen/film (SF) radiography. The Automatic Exposure Control (AEC) device was developed for ensuring accurate and precise exposures with SF technology. This thesis evaluates the importance of the AEC device in...