In this thesis I explore the ways in which twenty-first century Americans have access
to Geoffrey Chaucer and his works. I look at issues surrounding Chaucer within the
canon debate, high school history and literature textbooks, and Chaucer in popular
culture, such as in movies like A Knight's Tale. I...
My thesis, entitled “The Clerk’s Tale: Literal Monstrosities and Allegorical Problems,” argues that Chaucer’s Clerk is engaging both sides of a binary system. The Clerk has situated himself in a precarious position between two major schools of thought in the medieval culture, Franciscan and Dominican; the former promotes the will...
This thesis presents two related studies on the methodology for creating, and
subsequently analyzing, an inverse food web model of an intertidal seagrass bed. The first study (Chapter 2) describes, for the first time in the literature, a method for incorporating isotopic information gained from Bayesian mixing models into an...
Continuous process scale-down and emerging markets for low-power/low-voltage mobile systems call for low-voltage analog integrated circuits. Switched-capacitor (SC) circuits are the building blocks for analog signal processing and will encounter severe overdrive problems when operating at low voltage conditions. There exist three techniques to solve the problem, but with their...
The 13 personal essays in Water over Stones: Oregon Watershed Stories explore the author's experiences in dozens of Oregon watersheds. Using the genre of the personal essay, the author, a fifth-generation Oregonian and amateur ecologist, writes about her life and family relationships in stories that are saturated with the waters...
My thesis explores the later work of author J.D. Salinger, including two narratives featured in Nine Stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and "Teddy," and Franny and Zooey, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," and "Seymour: an Introduction." Through my analysis I argue that the religious nature of Salinger's fiction...
Digital systems, in particular microprocessor, have recently experienced phenomena growth in performance. Both technology advancement and clever design have sustained this performance growth. As clock frequency heads into the Ghz range, new circuit design, for both logic and storage, are needed. Such new circuit technology must provide needed performance with...
A new approach to oversampled delta-sigma A/D converters ( AZ modulators ) is introduced, where a differential pseudo-Npath filter stage is used as a basic cell. In this band-pass application, the z to -zN transformation is employed to realize a RAM-type pseudo-2-path lossless integrator. The bandpass second-order and 4th-order delta-sigma...
Recently, an interest in supplementation of vitamin D to improve aspects of health, especially in human fertility, has emerged. However, supplementation of Vitamin D above the minimum required levels to prevent deficiency has yet to be explored in cattle despite evidence for vitamin D receptors in reproductive tissues. The objective...