What does comida rica mean? In this thesis, I explore the meanings of comida rica, sana, and de nuestra tierra through the discourses, practices, and kitchen geographies in six urban, highland households in the Ecuadorean Andes. This research, as part of a larger investigation carried out by a team of...
Winter squash is an important late winter vegetable crop for local and regional markets; however, farmers in western Oregon report that this crop is marginally profitable due to losses in storage and relatively low yields for the high culinary value kabocha and buttercup types. In order to increase the sales...
The television show South Park, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is viewed by millions of people each week, regularly addresses a number of controversial issues and plays a major role in contemporary popular culture. Current academic research acknowledges Parker and Stone's willingness to attack the dominant views surrounding...
A wave-by-wave forecasting system is desired for optimization of wave energy conversion devices and for improving safety of vessel-based marine operations. This study outlines the first validation attempts of a recently developed forecasting system called Wavecast. The forecasting approach uses X-Band marine radar images for data assimilation, then reconstructs and...
This thesis consists of two major components. The first part is concerned with video object instance segmentation (VOS), which is the task of assigning per-pixel labels perframe of a video sequence to indicate foreground object instance membership, given the first frame ground truth mask. VOS has myriad applications, from video...
Ensuring correctness of real-world software applications is a challenging task. Testing can be used to find many bugs, but is typically not sufficient for proving correctness or even eliminating entire classes of bugs. However, formal proof and verification techniques tend to be very heavy weight and are simply not available...
Populations of organisms are influenced by both top-down (predator driven) and bottom-up (environment or resource driven) effects. Seabird research has largely focused on bottom-up factors influencing reproduction, with little emphasis on top-down. Our goal was to better understand top-down impacts on colonial nesting seabirds over a range of spatio-temporal scales....
Agrobacterium tumefaciens is a plant pathogenic bacteria which incites
crown gall tumors. Although virulence has been associated with a
97-156 Mdalton "tumor-inducing" (Ti) plasmid, few potential plasmid gene
products have been identified. The objective of this study was to
identify plasmid-coded gene products through a comparison of protein
fingerprints of...
John Archibald Wheeler (09 July 1911- ) is a familiar name to physicists and historians of physics alike. Among his many contributions to the corpus of knowledge, in 1939 John Wheeler and Niels Bohr co-authored the first paper on the generalized mechanism of nuclear fission. Beyond that seminal work, Wheeler...
Annual flood damages continue to rise in the United
States in spite of massive investments in flood control structures
since 1936. These increased losses can be attributed, in part,
to the inherent Limitations in scope and nature of traditional
"structural" approaches to flood control. Acquisition of flood
plain lands is...