The present study was a program evaluation of KidSpirit that investigated how gymnastics coaches’ growth mindsets changed over an eight week period after a training intervention. A mixed-method approach was used to measure growth mindset and self-determination theory (SDT). There were three aims of this study: (1) participants would improve...
Tabletop role-playing games (TRPG) such as Dungeons & Dragons™ are widely known and enjoyed by diverse individuals across the world. However, TRPGs and their players historically have experienced significant stigmatization due to the misconception by some that fantasy role play leads to psychological dysfunction. While a large body of research...
Humans have always been fascinated with whales; from prominent features in mythology, to stories of terrifying monsters on the high seas, to globalized utility, to symbolic wildness and radical environmentalism, to figures and statistics, how have human relationships with whales been understood throughout time? Because humans have a need to...
Escalating demand for organic blueberries has driven a significant expansion of northern highbush blueberry (NHB; Vaccinium corymbosum L.) production area. This expansion is particularly pronounced in regions of the Pacific Northwest where native soil conditions are sub-optimal for NHB, notably east of the Cascade Mountain Range of Oregon and Washington,...
The use of genetic algorithms to compose music and generate sounds is an area of interest in the artificial intelligence field. Music and instrument sounds have known rules and structures that can be followed which make them well-suited for genetic algorithms. However, genetic algorithms still struggle to generate sounds comparable...
Although newly independent Central Asian states in 1991, including Kyrgyzstan, started developing their own foreign water policies, Kyrgyzstan’s independence period demonstrated the challenges of determining foreign water policy independently. The conceptual framework of a two-level game was applied in the study to understand and answer the question about how domestic...
This capstone study reports on global warming-induced changes to the Colorado subalpine zone climate and disturbance regimes. It assesses the impacts of these changes upon the dominant subalpine tree species and summarizes future species distribution modeling for these and other nearby species potentially suitable for the future subalpine zone in...
The California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME), located on the eastern boundary of the North Pacific Ocean, is highly dynamic, with variable conditions driven by seasonal upwelling, regional oceanography, and broad scale climate patterns. In the last decade, the northeast Pacific Ocean has experienced several marine heatwaves (MHWs), prolonged periods...
The dehumanization of Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) and marginalized communities does not end once an individual is released from an institution. The dehumanization process is kept alive with ineffective community supervision and the stigma associated with an individual’s incarnation history. Evidence of this continual dehumanization process is reflected...
This thesis examines the experiences of international Latin American graduate students when taking on the role of graduate assistants while completing their academic program. Using phenomenology, a qualitative research approach, and relying on two main theories, Challenge and Support by Sanford (1966) and the Community Cultural Wealth Model, this study...
This paper analyzes the decision-making process utilized in temperate environments for building nuclear facilities and whether it was going to be applicable to nuclear facilities built in arid environments. To answer this question, the total dose to individuals from arid and temperate environments were compared using RESRAD-OFFSITE and changing the...
Emotional understanding is important for social connection and fulfilling relationships across the lifespan. Without these skills, relationships with others can feel chaotic, unpredictable, and unattainable, affecting a person’s health and well being. Early childhood is a critical time to learn and practice foundational emotional skills that build into skills needed...
The oxidation of carbon monoxide (CO) to carbon dioxide (CO2) is ubiquitous throughout many industrial processes and is a common probe reaction used to help understand catalytic systems in research settings. The reaction is essential in power generation and transportation exhaust gas treatment technologies to ensure environmental safety, because CO...
A multidisciplinary perspective is necessitated for the analysis of wave energy conversion systems, spanning hydrodynamics, mechanics, electric power, and control systems. The complexity inherent in these scientific domains poses challenges for unified analysis. This paper addresses these challenges by connecting various domains through the application of circuit theory, characterizing the...
Low-level nuclear power plant outages in the United States can lead to unanticipated costs, potentially compromising the expected operation lifetime of the plant. Nuclear power plants are complex systems of interfacing components and highly regulated processes. This inherent complexity makes predicting outages from system dependencies very challenging. When outages do...
Excavations at the Cooper’s Ferry site (10IH73) revealed a long record of repeated human occupation extending from the late Pleistocene into the early Holocene (~16,000-10,000 cal BP) and have yielded unique insights into the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST), which includes. Several studies have focused on WST pit features encountered at...
The dense Corvallis array deployed in January of 2022 aided in the high-resolution study of local geology. This array was made of 177 SmartSolo 3-component 5 Hz geophones around Corvallis, with a 93 geophone profile going west towards Bald Hill for approximately 5 km at an average of 64 m...
The development of simple, rapid, and sensitive methods for thiophenol detection is of great importance in various fields, including environmental monitoring and food quality. Here, we present a novel approach for the colorimetric detection of thiophenols using gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) as the sensing platform. AuNPs aggregate in the presence of...
Freshwater systems cycle carbon along a spatial and temporal biogeochemical continuum, across which ecosystem processes contribute to transformations of organic matter (OM). Various ecological constraints impact rates OM transformation and production and consumption of the energetic end of respiration, methane. Microbiological processing and complete reduction of carbon substrates to methane...
In Oregon, the effects of climate change on agriculture are already being felt. In the Northwest, climate change impacts agricultural pest pressure, especially insects, whose life cycles are tied directly to weather and climate. The goal of this research was to record and analyze Oregon fruit and vegetable farmers’ relationships...
There is a growing need for individualized instructional designs in 4-year institutions due to: 1) growing undergraduate enrollment trends across the U.S., 2) broader diversity in students backgrounds, and 3) the growing prevalence of asynchronous remote learning. With the growth in computer technology in education, tools such as adaptive intelligent...
Coral reefs, found in tropical regions, are renowned for their rich biodiversity and their contributions to ecological, cultural, and economic aspects worldwide. The success of coral reefs hinges on the symbiotic partnership between corals and their dinoflagellate algae, from the family Symbiodiniaceae. The algae reside within the coral host’s gastrodermal...
Deep mixing events in the ocean’s surface layer act as physical drivers of carbon export by detraining dissolved and particulate organic matter, including surface phytoplankton communities, to depth. Once removed from the sunlit surface ocean environment, phytoplankton accumulation rates are dependent on the relative contributions of loss processes, such as...
Systemic hypertension, a persistent elevation in systemic arterial blood pressure (BP), is a well-recognized disorder in cats. Failing to diagnose it accurately could lead to organ damage or unnecessary lifelong therapy. Doppler ultrasonic flow detectors are commonly used for indirect BP measurements in cats. However, whether the audible static from...
Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is a Knowledge-belief-practice system acquired through intergenerational direct and indirect observations representing past and current understandings of environments and integrates Indigenous value systems. TEK has become a popular topic recently as Indigenous stewarded lands contain more biodiversity and are more adaptable. It is critical for Indigenous...
Since the decline of salmonid populations in the Pacific Northwest, supplementation programs have become frequently implemented by hatcheries as a way to protect and conserve wild stock. However, hatchery-reared fish have lower fitness than wild fish which is likely due to adaptation to the hatchery environment, i.e., domestication selection. Fish...
Long field-life systems are those for which operational, as opposed to capital, expenditures dominate the life time cost of the system. In established product categories, operational experience and historical maintenance data allows engineers to make informed decisions influencing maintenance during the early design stages when design changes are at their...
This set of studies delve into the complex realm of healthy sexuality within sexual addiction treatment, where diverse perspectives often lead to confusion and suboptimal outcomes. The primary goal of most treatment models is guiding clients toward a healthier sexual experience.
Sex addiction, a complex phenomenon, involves compulsive sexual behaviors,...
The present essay discusses themes of dehumanization and reliance on a biomedical model of care within U.S. psychiatric systems in treating individuals diagnosed with psychosis. This model is contrasted with alternative treatment approaches that are person-centered rather than disease-centered. These include Open Dialogue, Soteria, and Hearing Voices Movement. In the...
Over 37,000 people die each year in automobile accidents, with many of these fatalities resulting from collisions with emergency vehicles. The rise of autonomous cars creates the need for an accurate and failsafe method of detecting and responding to emergency vehicles safely and on time. This thesis investigates the ability...
Honey bees are vital for our food production and ecosystem due to their critical pollination services. The beekeepers in the United States and worldwide have reported significant colony losses for over fifteen years. Several stressors are implicated in these colony declines, including parasites, diseases, poor nutrition, and pesticide exposure. There...
Early seral forests regenerating from stand-replacing disturbances provide unique habitat for many species in productive, temperate forest landscapes and contribute to supporting biodiversity. Population declines in some species associated with early seral forests have prompted concerns about the conservation of these habitats, particularly the characteristic structural and compositional complexity associated...
This study evaluates the system efficiency and energy-offsetting capabilities of a closed-cycle thermochemical energy storage (TCES) system. Current TCES research primarily focuses on material selection and reactor design but overlooks the practical limitations faced on a system level. Thus, this study investigates various TCES integration methods for providing building space...
Understanding the magnitude and longevity of wildfire effects in forested watersheds and subsequent impacts to downstream aquatic ecosystems and communities requires congruent investigation into post-fire aquatic and terrestrial processes. However, results from wildfire studies are often confounded by pre- and post-fire land management actions and based on either hydrologic or...
Designs for improved cookstoves aim to decrease the detrimental environmental and health impacts that are associated with traditional biomass cooking practiced by nearly 40% of the global population. Programs to provide improved cookstoves are found worldwide, and regional testing centers support development of these through emissions testing services. Aprovecho Research...
Social media platforms use many techniques to engage users' attention with their platforms, including notifications, popups, and gamification elements. The impact of social media on physical and mental health has been studied, but limited publicly available research exists on how social media users can be helped to disengage from these...
Devaleraea mollis (Pacific Dulse) is becoming a popular food for human consumption. Previously, Pacific Dulse has been used as a nutrient source for cultured abalone species, with some historical food use by indigenous peoples, while the closely related Atlantic dulse (Palmaria palmata) has a long-documented history of use in cuisine...
This study investigates the evaluation of Return on Investment (ROI) in education from the perspective of high school students, introducing a theoretical model that encompasses both financial and non-financial aspects, with a primary focus on the unique insights provided by high school students. Drawing from a literature review and survey-based...
Determining the electrical properties of ceria-based materials is important for their use as electrodes in hot-wall magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) power generators with wall temperatures greater than 1500 ̊C. The electrical conductivity of a material can be used in models for predicting the performance of generator designs. More specifically, the temperature dependent...
Continental shelf sediments are sinks for dissolved oxygen and sources of many major and minor nutrients required for oceanic surface primary production, resulting in a strong coupling between benthic and pelagic biogeochemical cycling. However, the influence and spatiotemporal variability of benthic remineralization on bottom-water chemistry and the supply of nutrients...
Low-power receivers (RX) with 100$\mu W$-scale power consumption can enable several power/energy-constrained IoT applications. However, achieving sensitivity, interferer tolerance and wide operating range with low power presents a challenge for existing architectures, particularly those constrained to highly integrated solutions without high-Q off-chip components. Existing solutions rely heavily on high quality...
This study examined water scarcity and vulnerability in Quintana Roo, along the northern Caribbean coast of Mexico where rapid growth of tourism in the past 40 years has limited the ability of rural and urban communities to obtain safe, reliable, and equitable access to water services and critical water infrastructure...
In a recent effort to strengthen active preservation strategies, Oregon State University Libraries committed to conducting a multi-part annual preservation assessment for our institutional repository, focusing on the sustainability of file formats. This spring we conducted the first assessment, gathered a lot of data, and uncovered a few holes in...
Cell signaling under external stimulation is a critical mechanism that governs many biological processes such as cell proliferation, cell migration, and cell apoptosis, etc. For multicellular organisms, the ability to synchronize heterogeneous individual cellular responses through intercellular communication is crucial to maintain normal functionality. However, even though the biological pathways...
Autonomous robotic agents are on their way to becoming in-home personal assistants, construction assistants, and warehouse workers. The degree of autonomy of such systems is reflected by the manner in which we specify goals to them; the abstraction of low-level commands to high-level goals goes hand-in-hand with increased autonomy. In...
The 1918-1919 influenza pandemic led to a phenomenon termed as pandemic amnesia. It is apparent that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a disturbingly similar pattern. My thesis investigated the prevalence and perils of pandemic amnesia in the context of COVID-19. I explored this issue through a review of scholarly literature...
The impact that Andrew Tate has on his audience paired with the platform he holds has made Andrew Tate one of the most infamous names related to misogyny and “male empowerment”. His ability to connect to his audience and convince them of the superiority of his beliefs allows him to...
A variety of important machine learning applications require predictions on test data with different characteristics than the data on which a model was trained and validated. In particular, test data may have a different relative frequency of positives and negatives (i.e., class distribution) and/or different mislabeling costs of false positive...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...