Adolescent pregnancy and childbirth are the second leading cause of death for teen girls worldwide. In Multnomah County, as throughout the United States, teen pregnancy rates are high and disproportionately affect the Hispanic community. Hispanic adolescent females have a teen pregnancy rate over two times higher than white adolescent females....
Early Childhood Caries (ECC) is the most common chronic childhood disease, affecting more than 40% of children by the time they reach kindergarten. A bacterium known as Streptococcus mutans is the primary source of infection, but multiple other factors play a significant role in the progression of the disease. Studies...
Ceratonova shasta is a myxozoan parasite that affects populations of salmonid species in the Pacific Northwest and is the cause of enteronecrosis. It has a complex life cycle involving two hosts; a definitive annelid host, Manayunkia speciosa (polychaete), and an intermediate salmonid host. Klamath River M. speciosa are genetically variable...
Markov chains, discovered over one hundred years ago by Andrey Markov in an
attempt to analyze the distribution of vowels and consonants in Russian poetry, have
evolved in multiple fields over the last century to become a mainstay of statistical
modeling and computation. maRkov is a package of software to...
Childhood obesity and physical inactivity are significant health problems. According to the CDC (2012), only 12.5% of high school students meet the recommended requirements for physical activity. One method to reverse this trend is promoting physical activity. The Walk to School Program promotes active transportation in schools nationwide. PURPOSE: The...
When iron levels are low, the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa secretes the high-affinity iron-binding siderophore pyoverdine. The cognate ferripyoverdine receptor, FpvA, has gained attention as the most divergent gene in the organism’s genome, showing substantial evidence of positive selection. S-type pyocins, bacteriocins with specificity to Pseudomonads, enter cells through FpvA...
In the United States, the state of housing and the lack thereof has been
declared a national crisis. In response, cities have taken measures to police behaviors
that are associated with what they perceive to be disorder and decay. These behaviors
are also commonly associated with houselessness. Laws that criminalize...
Monotone additive models are useful in estimating productivity curves or analyzing disease risk where the predictors are known to have monotonic effects on the response. Existing literature mainly focuses on univariate monotone smoothing. Available methods for the estimation of monotone additive models are either difficult to interpret or have no...
Midwives in the Unites States frequently prescribe herbs and other complementary and alternative therapies for the common complaints of pregnancy, labor, and the postpartum period. Although many studies have reported quantitative data on midwives utilization of herbs, this research aims to convey ethnographic information on midwives use, beliefs, and perceptions...
In this thesis, I read the teachers in four mid-century Victorian novels--Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1850) and Hard Times (1854), Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Charlotte Brontё's Villette (1853)-- within the context of mid-century English educational debate in an effort to explicate the ways in which these characters...