Humans are remarkably efficient in learning by interacting with other people and observing their behavior. Children learn by watching their parents’ actions and mimic their behavior. When they are not sure about their parents demonstration, they communicate with them, ask questions, and learn from their feedback. On the other hand,...
Understanding the mechanisms regulating mitochondrial respiratory function and adaptations to metabolic challenges, such as exercise and high dietary fat, is necessary to promote skeletal muscle health and attenuate metabolic disease. Autophagy is a constitutively active degradation pathway that promotes mitochondrial turnover and is suppressed by insulin and activated by exercise....
Chemicals must be bioavailable for there to be a potential for exposure and consequent risk to human or environmental health. Passive sampling devices (PSDs) are used to quantify the time-integrated concentration of bioavailable contaminants. We demonstrate that PSDs can be paired with the zebrafish developmental toxicity bioassay to produce site-specific,...
This dissertation explores the real world problem of rural youth out-migration and finds that the central problem is one of persistent class difference in this rural Oregon town. The research that informs this dissertation was conducted in a rural community of approximately 2300 residents in Eastern Oregon, here called Talltown....
Corporate employee volunteer programs are redefining "corporate
social responsibility." Community benefits derived from these
programs are well documented. However, there is limited research on
what internal impact such programs have on the sponsoring
corporations.
Kast and Rosenzwieg (1978) define "organizational performance" as
"effectiveness," "efficiency" and "participant satisfaction." The
study focused...
Diverse scientific fields collect multiple time series data to investigate the dynamical behavior of complex systems: atmospheric and climate science, geophysics, neuroscience, epidemiology, ecology, and environmental science. Identifying patterns of mutual dependence among such data generates valuable knowledge that can be applied either for inferential or forecasting purposes. Vector autoregressive...
Sexual and gender minority (SGM) samples report elevated rates of substance use and substance use disorder compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts across a wide variety of substances (Connolly & Gilchrist, 2020; Krueger et al., 2020; Rice et al., 2019), in part due to the experience of minority stress....
Anomaly detection is the task of identifying observations (points) that differ from the majority of other points, which requires some measure of difference, or distance. Many anomaly detection methods rely on “implicit distance” measures: rather than directly calculating an explicitly defined distance, these approaches quantify a point’s “abnormality” by examining...
Due to recent advances in computer technology, the cost of collecting and storing data has dropped drastically. This makes it feasible to collect large amounts of information for each data point. This increasing trend in feature dimensionality justifies the need for research on variable selection. Random forest (RF) has demonstrated...
Vitamin E was first described in 1922 as an unknown factor required for impregnated rats to carry their offspring to term. In fact, when vitamin E was chemically characterized it was given the name "tocopherol" derived from the Greek: tokos = childbirth; phero = to bear; and –ol, indicating an...