Scientists say that climate change is very likely to cause more frequent and more severe weather events. In order to understand how communities respond to changing weather patterns, an exploration of the connection between extreme weather events and climate change awareness, collective action, and policy is warranted. This case study...
In 2014, the Washington State Legislature directed the creation of the Fish Barrier Removal Board (FBRB), a multi-entity committee tasked with the development of a statewide strategy for removing anadromous fish barriers. The strategy shall identify watersheds with the greatest potential for salmon and steelhead recovery and implement the removal...
Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness in Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) is a federal program that aims to significantly increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education. Oregon has been receiving GEAR UP funding since 2002. In 2008-2014, Oregon received its second round...
We model the popular board game of Clue as an MDP and evaluate Monte-Carlo policy rollout in a simulated environment pitting different agents and policies against each other. We describe the choices we made in the representation, along with some of the problems we encountered along the way. We find...
The Vermillion Basin, located in southwest Wyoming is an inhospitable, high altitude desert with unique biota and environmental conditions. The area has a long history of usages by humans including recreation, livestock grazing and mineral development. The natural gas industry has had a strong presence in the area since the...
Forest management planning is critical for the sustainability of natural systems on a site. Managing public ground is a complicated process, and usually involves many stakeholders with a variety of opinions. One such public property is the Evitts Creek Water Company (ECWC) property, owned by the city of Cumberland, Maryland....
This project is a custom output stage for a two-channel signal source design project at Oregon State. Starting in January, I began leading a team tasked with the development of an arbitrary waveform generator via the CreateIT Collaboratory at OSU. Undergraduate students interview into the CreateIT Collaboratory and are assigned...
The Intel Xeon Phi is a relative newcomer to the scientific computing scene. In the recent years, GPUs have been used extensively for mathematical simulations. The Xeon Phi is Intel’s response to the use of these cards. Like the GPU, it is highly parallelizable but can be programmed like a...
Group Engagement Theory describes the relationship between citizen perceptions of policy, individual identity and status judgements, and individual group engagement decisions. Utilizing a least likely crucial case methodology, this paper uses the case of Josephine County, Oregon to determine the validity of the Group Engagement Theory prediction that citizen identity...
Despite widespread public support for renewable energy development, the siting of wind energy facilities can prove problematic due to opposition from surrounding communities. I propose a unifying framework to explain community response to wind energy development – showing how concepts from environmental sociology related to local biophysical and socioeconomic conditions...
Whether media plays a contributory or a conduit role in the policy process has been a salient focus among policy scholars. If media plays a contributory role in the policy process, it not only shares similar policy core beliefs with advocacy coalitions, but also drafts and disseminates stories including policy...
Software Defined Storage is a term for data storage software to manage policy-based provisioning and management of heterogeneous data storage system abstracting underlying hardware. CoprHD is a software defined storage controller and API platform which enables policy-based management and cloud automation of storage resources for block, object and file storage...
Assembly time estimation is a key factor in evaluating the performance of the assembly process in an automated assembly process. The overall goal of this study is to develop an efficient assembly time estimation method by generating the prediction model from an experimental design. In order to estimate these times,...
Liberalization of electricity markets has become a dominant energy sector reform for most of the European Union (EU) countries since 1990s. Despite initial expectations that liberalization will reduce electricity prices and strengthen overall energy security, outcomes of the deregulation reforms proved to be unclear and even contradictory. This study seeks...
We used data from Cascadia Initiative and Blanco Transform Fault Zone array of ocean bottom seismometers and hydrophone to look at the seismicity and specially depth of the Central Cascadia Continental Margin events. Events were detected and located automatically with Antelope software package (Boulder Real Time Technologies). We looked at...
We used data from Cascadia Initiative and Blanco Transform Fault Zone array of ocean bottom seismometers and hydrophone to look at the seismicity and specially depth of the Central Cascadia Continental Margin events. Events were detected and located automatically with Antelope software package (Boulder Real Time Technologies). We looked at...
Researchers and policy-makers interested in assessing public communication to better inform the decision-making process are increasingly utilizing data harvested from social media. Twitter is one of the largest online sources of near-instantaneous information about a myriad of topics socially relevant in the public sphere. Renewable energy (RE) is a socially...
Potential water scarcity and drought conditions are predicted in and around Eugene, Oregon due to decreased snowpack and subsequent decreased snowmelt in the Western Cascade Mountains. This phenomenon was triggered by a long-term trend of warmer winters scientifically linked to global climate change patterns (Dalton et al. 2013). Numerous stakeholders,...
After Colonization and since the beginning of the globalization era, governments in developing countries have been restricted in implementing certain policies and reforms, often being forced to accept or borrow policies from former colonizers or other developed countries and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Previous studies found that borrowing policy often leads...
Debugging, an integral part of software development, is difficult for end-user programmers, especially in the case of complex programs. The process of isolating errors is time consuming without the help of debugging support provided by the tool. For example, the visual programming tool LondonTube supports creation of custom mobile-cloud-web applications,...
Studies suggest that higher investment in human capital boosts economic growth by increased productivity. Education is considered to improve human capital, but it takes relatively long to achieve progress in education. Literacy of female population holds particular importance as it has both direct and indirect effect on growth. Apart from...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Invasive species are one of the most significant threats to native ecosystems in the nation (Mooney, 2001). As defined by Federal Executive Order 13112, a species is considered invasive if it is not native to the ecosystem under consideration, and its establishment causes or is likely to cause...
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many newly independent nations have suffered internal instability as a result of ethnically based regional independence initiatives. This paper seeks to determine the effect historical legacies have on the formation of ethnic identities and the shaping of secessionist movements, using the...
A Finite Element Model of a deployed Fiber-Optic Micro Cable (FOMC) was performed using the marine cable modeling software, OrcaFlex. The focus of this study was a parametric analysis of a two-part, towed cable array with the FOMC dragged behind a depressor and connected to a drogue chute. Length-to-diameter ratios...
General-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) have become a critical component in high-performance computing (HPC) systems in executing modern computational workloads. The high thread level parallelism (TLP) and programmable shader cores allow thousands of threads to execute in Parallel. The fast-scaling of GPGPUs have increased the demand for performance optimizations on...
The impacts of climate change are being observed worldwide. However, some regions and context specific situations make particular areas more vulnerable to the impacts than others. Alaska’s Kenai River Watershed (KRW) is on the front lines of climate change and may be especially vulnerable to the impacts due to distinct...
This study examines the determinants of food consumption behaviors, such as purchasing less meat products, paying attention to how and where food is produced, and reducing food waste within the household. Food consumption is particularly important given that it can often comprise between 10% to 30% of the total household...
This capstone project is presented for the completion of Oregon State University’s (OSU) Master of Natural Resources Program. Water resource reliability in the Pacific Northwest is becoming less dependable, but population and municipal water demand is increasing. The Gales Creek Watershed and its tributary Clear Creek encompass 48,481 acres in...
RNA secondary structure prediction maps a RNA sequence to its secondary structure (set of AU, CG, and GU pairs). It is an important problem in computational biology be-cause such structures reveals crucial information about the RNAs function, which is useful in many applications ranging from noncoding RNA detection to folding...
CoprHD is an open source software defined storage controller platform. It holds an inventory of all storage devices in the data center and understands their connectivity. It is an operating system for a storage cloud. It is designed with two key goals in mind:
• Make an enterprise or a...
Logging residue (slash) consists primarily of the branches and treetops of harvested merchantable timber; excluding snags, downed logs, and stumps. Residues may be scattered about the harvest unit, concentrated in slash-piles (SP), or both depending on the harvest method and equipment used. Accurate estimates of residue biomass are useful to...
While student teaching at West Valley High (a pseudonym), I noticed that the teaching style my
students were used to didn’t seem to offer students many opportunities to engage with the
content and come to deep understandings. Mainly, the class seemed centered around lecture on a
topic and confirmatory activities....
This case study examines the Upper Klamath Basin of Oregon, which is experiencing a water crisis due to over-allocation. The purpose of this case study is to identify land cover / land use change looking specifically at wetland conversion and to discussion the effects of wetland loss on ecosystem services....
In recent years, state governments in the U.S. have promoted improvements to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education as a means to stimulate future economic growth and increase economic mobility into careers with higher earnings. Oregon’s STEM Initiative includes the creation and development of strategic public-private partnerships which aim...
This paper evaluates the previously unknown effect that a Fiscal Stress Label (FSL), a State fiscal intervention program signaling fiscal duress, has on passage rates and voter support for school district tax referenda. Previous research suggests that FSL receipt is associated with increased school district revenue, however the reason why...
At any given time, 60% to 85% of prisoners across the United States are struggling with substance addiction and dependence. Upon release, about two-thirds of former prisoners will reoffend and return to prison. Due to the high rate of substance use and abuse in prisons, drug treatment, specifically Correctional Therapeutic...
Cities of the world today house more than half the world’s population, contribute to 80 percent of the global GDP, consume approximately 70 percent of the global energy and produce 70 percent of the greenhouse gases produced worldwide (Floater et al., 2014; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014). City governments...
Nuclear energy enjoyed widespread support in the United States during its initial decades and has seen extensive study as a potential means of combating contemporary energy issues such as climate change and alternative transportation fuels. Despite the potential contribution to solving these challenges, the industry has been largely stagnant since...
The project location is a pre-historical gathering site for basketry materials utilized by the Wintun people within the boundaries of the Red Bluff Recreation Area. Due to environmental changes and neglect, the site has fallen into disuse and degradation. The aim of this project is ethnoecological restoration, which varies from...
Union density in the United States has declined to historic lows over the past four decades. In 1954, nearly 35 percent of workers were union members while only 11 percent of workers were members of unions in 2015. Simultaneously, economic inequality widened, with one-third to one-fifth of this increase attributed...
In 2003, due to the dramatic growth of economy, China’s National Development and Reform Commission proposed to build 13 dams on the Nu River to fulfill the nation’s rapidly growing demand for hydropower. The 13 dams that comprise the Nu River Project (NRP) are considered among the biggest hydropower development...
Hunger is among the greatest contemporary social problems in the United States. An incredible 48 million people, or 14% of households, experienced food insecurity during 2014. At the same time, public responses to food insecurity, such as the Emergency Food Assistance Program, have increasingly relied on the “emergency food network,”...
The World Health Organization defines food security as “all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.” The reality is that one in six Americans are not food secure, even though the US produces enough food to feed its national...
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a group formed in 1960 and often blamed for the oil shock of 1973, is treated as a cartel that aims to limit oil production and hold oil price at a level above market equilibrium. Recent research has offered a counter theory that...
With the development of technologies in genome sequencing and variant detection, a huge number of variants are detected. To further analyze the variants, it requires an efficient tool to annotate the functional effect of variants. This project managed to develop an efficient program to annotate the functional effect of variants...
Graphics hardware in mobile devices has become more powerful, allowing rendering techniques such as ray-cast volume rendering to be done at interactive rates. This increase of performance provides desktop capabilities combined with the portability of a tablet. Volumes can demand a high amount of memory in order to be loaded...
Collaborative governance strives to address complex environmental problems by building cooperation and consensus among stakeholders. While there are many successful examples of collaborative governance, all too frequently collaborative groups come to an agreement in the meeting room only to struggle to bring their plans to fruition. What are the factors...
Concerns over climate change and energy security have spurred governments worldwide to encourage the development of renewable energy. Although public attitudes and macro-politics, in general, show moderate to strong support for renewables- in particular, wind power- largely because of the economic and environmental benefits associated with it. However, local politics...
Increasing renewable energy development is often seen as an essential tool for combating global climate change, yet despite widespread support in theory, renewable energy often faces problems at the implementation stage. In the state of Washington, where voters have expressed a desire for greater renewable energy by mandating that 15%...