I believe quetzal and aguacatillo are the key species in the cloud forests in Cerro de la Muerte because they are biologically and culturally valuable. This value contributes to ecotourism, which eventually becomes of economic benefit to local people. In this paper, I examine how the cloud forest conservation and...
Background: Hip replacements are considered routine operations which improve the quality of life in patients by reducing pain and restoring function. There are many variations in prostheses with varying benefits and disadvantages.
Methods: Literature from the United States and Europe was collected on total hip replacements between 2001 and the...
Part 1:
White muscle disease (WMD), a degenerative muscle disease brought on by a deficiency of the essential trace nutrient selenium, is thought to be mediated by the protein Selenoprotein W (SeW). In its relationship with WMD, SeW, like many selenoproteins, binds to glutathione, serving some purpose in redox mechanisms...
The Cooperative Institute for Oceanographic Satellite Studies
(CIOSS) partners with The Science and Math Investigative Learning
Experiences (SMILE) Program to bring ocean sciences and satellite
oceanography to high school students and teachers around the
state of Oregon. This study was conducted as a formative program
assessment during the third year...
Horticultural and nursery crops are the leading agricultural commodity in Oregon. Among currently grown nursery plants, Verbena x hybrida is a staple ornamental. It is grown and shipped worldwide, thus requiring a high level of certainty concerning the plants’ health and potential viability. V. x hybrida cultivars have been infected...
This paper focuses on Mexican and Caucasian migration to Lakeview, Oregon. It looks at why people choose to do so and the challenges they face in their new community. Special attention is paid to grocery shopping and gardening, as this research was conducted as part of a larger project on...
This paper explores the meaning of healthy eating in Lakeview, Oregon. It focuses on what community members think about the food available in the community primarily through restaurants and grocery stores. Themes discussed in this paper include the quality of produce, the lack of variety in restaurants, and the isolation...
Light plays an important role in ecological processes in the ocean both day and night. While relatively inexpensive, off the shelf instruments are available to measure Photosynthetically Active Radiation or PAR during the day, efforts to quantify light levels at night have proven more difficult. The goal of this work...
The Department of Administrative Services (DAS) and Oregon State University (OSU) are collaborating to develop an orthoimagery portal application to allow for the distribution of digital aerial imagery for the State of Oregon. The near-term objective of this project is to develop an Imagery Portal that serves the
2005 half-meter...
Written for PSY 482.
Throughout the history of psychotherapy, exposure and response (ritual) prevention (ERP) has widely been considered the most effective treatment for patients who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) (Clark, 2005). Through the utilization of fear hierarchies that aim to desensitize feelings of anxiety and dread, ERP’s empirically...
Thomas More’s text, Utopia, introduces the word “utopia” in conjunction with an ideal society, prodding readers to think of “utopia” as synonymous with “ideal.” Indeed, Utopia is structured as an egalitarian and communal place, rendering it highly ideal to those wishing for equality in their own worlds. However, More overturns...
This study tested natural products from cyanobacteria from the Red Sea in Egypt and marine tunicates from the Algoa Bay in South Africa. Products from marine organisms have been used as lead compounds for the synthesis of new drugs because of their biological activity mechanism. Specifically, these products may contain...
Fifty years ago, swine production was a lot different than it is today. Today, swine are being produced in much tighter confinement, which maximizes production and ultimately profit. As more people educate themselves about swine production, there seems to be an increasing level of concern for swine welfare in terms...
The current study investigated the way in which gender of a character and the presence or absence of a male stereotype affect the perceived masculinity of said character. Forty undergraduates from Oregon State University completed a questionnaire rating the masculinity of one of four possible characters – one male without...
Epidermal RNA samples from FVB/N mice treated with PAH standards and environmental PAH mixtures were harvested and purified using Trizol extraction and RNeasy mini prep kit purification. Epidermal RNA integrity was low (RIN mean 3.5), indicating significant RNA degradation and the need to modify handling, collection, and processing of skin...
At the request of library administration, an investigation was undertaken to assess the status of the current federal depository program, OSU Libraries' history with the program, advantages and disadvantages of OSU's continued participation supported by evidence of document usage (both circulated and in-house use) in the last 3-5 years, the...
For the probabilistic model of shuffling by random transpositions we provide a coupling construction
with the expected coupling time of order C*n*log(n), where C is a moderate constant. We enlarge the
methodology of coupling by including intuitive non-Markovian coupling rules. We discuss why a typical
Markovian coupling is not always...
Outdoor schools are located all over the nation. Many students attend these programs to gain science knowledge and experience nature first hand. Outdoor schools are residential programs for students in upper elementary and middle school. Many of the messages are environmental in nature and promote stewardship. The purpose of this...
The motion of floating objects are of importance to engineers and scientists in a
range of applications. For example, in the design of ships and wave energy convertors
and the study of debris mobilized by tsunamis. Measuring the movement of floating
objects in the laboratory can be challenging. Six degrees...
We solve a class of identification problems for nonparametric and semiparametric models when the endogenous covariate is discrete with unbounded support. Then we proceed with an approach that resolves a polynomial basis problem for the above class of discrete distributions, and for the distributions given in the sufficient condition for...
Data structures are more easily understood when
they are presented visually rather than textually. We have
developed a system, Calypso, to allow the visual
definition of data structures programs using pictorial
pattern/action pairs in an imperative setting. We present
several examples including rebalancing an AVL tree and
sorting an array...
The set of codewords for a standard error-correcting code can be viewed
as subset of the vertices of a hypercube. Two vertices are adjacent in a hypercube exactly when their Hamming distance is 1. A code is a perfect-error-correcting code if no two codewords are adjacent and every non-codeword is...
Basic biological information is stored in strings of nucleic acids (DNA, RNA) or amino acids
(proteins). Teasing out the meaning of these strings is a central problem of modern biology. Matching and
aligning strings brings out their shared characteristics. Although string matching is well-understood in the
edit-distance model, biological strings...
One dimensional nonlinear difference equations have been used to model population growth. The standard biological models have the interesting characteristic that
they display global stability if they display local stability. Various researchers have sought
a simple explanation for this agreement of local and global stability. Here, we show that
enveloping...
This paper introduces the even-odd POMDP, an approximation to POMDPs in which the world is assumed to be fully observable every other time step. The even-odd POMDP can be converted into an equivalent MDP, the
2MDP, whose value function, V*[subscript 2MDP], can be combined online with a 2-step lookahead search...
Many machine learning applications require
classifiers that minimize an asymmetric cost
function rather than the misclassification
rate, and several recent papers have addressed
this problem. However, these papers
have either applied no statistical testing
or have applied statistical methods that are
not appropriate for the cost-sensitive setting.
Without good statistical...
We present a meta-model as a process maturity framework that can be effectively used to
identify the key practices to initiate and sustain a software process improvement effort
focused on a single process area. Our approach moves away from the overall software
development process and computation of maturity levels and...
This paper reports on an empirical study involving end users that addresses the question of whether it is possible to provide the benefits of formal testing within the informal spreadsheet paradigm. We have developed a "What You See Is What You Test" (WYSIWYT) methodology that brings the benefits of formal...
It is well known that the Fibonacci numbers can be expressed in the
form Round {1/√5 λ₀[superscript n]} where λ₀ = (1 + √5)/2. [Knu75] We look at integer sequences which are solutions to non-negative difference equations and show that if the equation is 1-Bounded then the solution can be...
The meaning of biological sequences is a central problem
of modern biology. Although string matching is well understood
in the edit-distance model, biological strings
with transpositions and inversions violate this model's
assumptions. To align biologically reasonable strings, we
proposed the Walking Tree Method [4,5,6,7,8], an
approximate string alignment method that...
Many software maintenance problems are caused by using text editors to change programs. A more systematic and reliable way of performing program updates is to express changes with an update language. In particular, updates should preserve the syntax- and type-correctness of the transformed object programs. We describe an update calculus...
We describe the design of a domain-specific language (DSL) for the specification of generic ocean modeling tools, and we describe the
implementation of its compiler. The goal of the DSL is to allow the specification of widely usable tools for ocean modeling once, and to allow its translation into different...
Can collaborative filtering be successfully applied to digital
libraries in a manner that improves the effectiveness of the
library? Collaborative filtering systems remove the limitation of
traditional content-based search interfaces by using individuals to
evaluate and recommend information. We introduce an approach
where a digital library user specifies their need...
How can rigorous forms of testing be supported in a way that is both compatible with the visual aspect of visual programming languages, and usable by the audiences using those languages -- even when the audience has no background in software engineering? Visual programs are likely to contain at least...
End-user programmers are writing an unprecedented number of programs, primarily using languages and environments that incorporate a number of interactive and visual programming techniques. To help these users debug these programs, we have developed an entirely visual, interactive approach to fault localization. This paper presents the approach. We also present...
End users develop more software than any other group of programmers, using software authoring devices such as email filtering editors, by-demonstration macro builders, and spreadsheet environments. Despite this, there has been only a little research on finding ways to help these programmers with the dependability of the software they create....
A human-centric issue that has not been considered in
the design of end-user programming environments is
whether gender differences exist that are important to the
design of these environments. Ignoring this issue would
miss the opportunity of enhancing the effectiveness of
end-user programmers by incorporating appropriate
mechanisms to support gender-associated...