The research and analysis presented in this dissertation illustrate how individuals enact lived religion as they seek to navigate social inequalities. The enactment of lived religion involves directing attention towards orientations. I use the term orientations in the sense articulated by Ahmed (2004), to allude to how bodies are situated...
This dissertation focuses on personal privacy in human-robot interaction, which we call "privacy-sensitive robotics." Our understanding of "privacy" is very broad, including not just information privacy but also physical, psychological, and social privacy. We begin by surveying the scholarly literature on privacy and talking about why it applies to interactions...
State-of-the-art personal robots need to perform complex manipulation tasks to be viable in complex scenarios. However, many of these robots, like the PR2, use manipulators with high degrees of freedom. High degrees of freedom are desirable from a functionality standpoint, but make the learning task more difficult by adding a...
Intact sagebrush communities in the Great Basin are rapidly disappearing due
to invasion of non-native plants, large wildfires, and encroachment of pinyon pine
and juniper woodlands. Land management options include the use of prescribed
fire, grazing, herbicides and mechanical treatments to reduce the potential for
wildfire and restore plant communities....
The goal of this study was to advance methods for assessment of forest road hydrologic
response and sediment yield at a catchment scale. This research looked at the effect of
soil depth estimation on the Distributive Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM),
assessed the uncertainty and accuracy of hydrologic modeling of...
Wildfire management has grown increasingly complex in recent years,
particularly in the West and in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) where a steady
population growth has resulted in greater risk to people and property. Recent trends
suggest the process of recovering from large fires (>100,000 acres) will become
increasingly important to...
Forest roads produce fine sediment with traffic during wet weather. If the forest road is connected to a stream it can be a source of turbidity and fine sediment that may be detrimental to aquatic organisms especially salmonids.
The goal of this work was to investigate turbid runoff during wet-weather...
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 phenomenological research study focused on educational change as perceived by 16 Liberal Arts faculty members at a Pacific Northwest community college. Research data were collected through in-depth dialogic interviews and a follow-up dialogue session with six participants. The principal guiding research questions comprised the following: 1) What is the...
Temperature was elevated approximately 4° C in a model stream relative to an unheated, but otherwise similar control stream. The streams were located outdoors, received identical amounts of exchange water from a nearby creek, and followed natural diurnal and seasonal temperature cycles Juvenile spring chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) were introduced...