Hume’s division of truth into agreement with matters of fact or relations of ideas casts doubt on our capacity to have moral knowledge, as moral propositions do not seem to fall obviously into either category. This thesis looks at how two views, ‘descriptive moral functionalism’ and ‘moral concept essentialism’, try...
Institutionalized oppression is a large multifaceted system that is regularly unrecognized and misunderstood. Marilyn Frye’s birdcage analogy of oppression (1983) demonstrates why this complex system is often invisible, yet always immobilizing. In this analogy, Frye relates the various manifestations of oppressions to the wires of a birdcage, demonstrating that it...
This study conducts follow up research to my Mechanical Engineering Senior Project that was completed in March 2015. It follows the Student Powered Hydro and Entertainment Device (SPHED) as it is used in various middle school and high school classrooms. SPHED has three modules: a power generation module, a hydropower...
We construct a website to explain how Gaussian mixture models can be optimized using the expectation maximization algorithm. Previous free, online material on this process has been extremely limited. All sources surveyed failed to entirely describe our identified criteria for an in-depth description and useful visualizations. After surveying a variety...
Falls in older adults are a significant issue in the United States. Many older adults are advised to participate in fall prevention exercise programs in an attempt to increase strength and stability, but it is unclear what role limb dominance and potential limb asymmetry has in exercise performance. The purpose...
Current natural product (NP) research is limited by its reliance on bioassay-guided fractionation to identify bioactive compounds in mixtures. Computational approaches may improve NP research by correlating mass spectra (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance spectra (NMR) of bioactive mixtures to their bioactivity patterns. In this study, I use artificial neural...
The pulse-coupled oscillator model is widely used to simulate the dynamics of neural systems. For networks with particular internal (Mirollo-Strogatz) dynamics, I will define three broad patterns of collective behaviors found in literature in terms of inter-spike interval (ISI) statistics. These patterns are i) temporally-regular, characterized by all oscillators in...
I defend robust realism from arguments that raise epistemological challenges to it based on considerations about either moral disagreement or the genealogy of our moral beliefs. The first argument is the “Argument from Conciliationism,” which contends that the moral disagreements that obtain between moral peers give us reason to believe...
Creating an untraditional more personalized thesis allowed me to combine my
passion for children, travel, language, and books all into one. Hans the Adventurer is
a children’s book about a young German boy who loves to go on adventures.
However Han’s has to go on the adventure alone when his...
The scope of this particular research delves into the psychological measurement of
alumni that graduated from the College of Business at Oregon State University. The goal for
this research is to refine the pool of alumni survey items, and to improve the measurement
properties for future use. This research proposes...