This exploratory investigation focused on the validity of the concepts of high-context and low-context as a meaningful and powerful construct for examining cultural differences. Specifically, American and
Japanese value differences and communication patterns were examined.
The study tested the hypotheses that Japanese students would rank
high-context group orientation values higher...
This dissertation explores the structural dynamics of human understanding and particularly the concept of meaning and its connections to concepts of ultimate ground, necessity and contingency, language, and perception. It focuses on the history of the concept of meaning in early twentieth-century European physics and philosophy, through an analysis of...
The objective of this study was to characterize an unknown agent associated with decline in black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis) in Oregon. A virus was found consistently associated with decline symptoms of black raspberries and was named Black raspberry decline associated virus (BRDaV). Double stranded RNA extraction from BRDaV-infected black raspberry...
Naked (hull-less) barley has historically been grown for food, but interest in, and breeding efforts for, its use in malting and brewing have increased due to the potential benefits: reduced off-flavors, reduced spent grain, and higher malt extract. These benefits are offset by limiting factors such as high b-glucan and...
In recent years, the role of the City Manager in municipal
policy making has been the focus of considerable attention and debate in
both the academic and local government arenas. The purpose of this
study was to determine the differences in views of elected mayors and
appointed managers with regard...
Due to a growing body of literature documenting declines in pollinator populations, there has been increased public interest in pollinator conservation. In urban and suburban landscapes, many gardeners and urban land managers are interested in gardening for pollinators, particularly bees. Simultaneously, many homeowners and municipalities are interested in other aspects...
The essays in this collection do not cluster about a specific theme, nor do they present a single unified interpretative approach to issues in the history of American foreign policy. Above all, William Appleman Williams is a teacher. And good teachers are disappointed with conformity. No one would ever come...
Raspberries have been popular since the time of the ancient Greeks. Red raspberries are cultivated throughout the world, particularly in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and Canada. The raspberry bushy dwarf virus (RBDV) causes significant reduction in yield and crumbly fruit in raspberries, blackberries and raspberry-blackberry hybrids....
Microbial electrochemical systems (MESs) have attracted much research attention in recent years due to their promising applications in renewable energy generation, bioremediation, and wastewater treatment. In a MES, microorganisms interact with electrodes via electrons, catalyzing oxidation and reduction reactions at the anode and the cathode.
The bacterial community of a...
Marine sediments contain an abundance of methane that is biologically produced
and plays a significant role in the global carbon cycle. Microbes responsible for the
carbon cycle in marine sediments, and the processes that they carry out, need to be
characterized in order to fully understand the role of this...
Experiments focusing on plant growth regulators’ concentrations and combination, mineral salt formulations and TDZ pretreatment formations were conducted to optimize in vitro shoot regeneration from leaf and petiole explants of 'Marion' blackberry. Optimum shoot formation was obtained when stock plants were incubated in TDZ pretreatment medium for three weeks before...
In recent years, red raspberry production in Washington and British Columbia has been severely limited by a newly emerged virus complex that causes symptoms of crumbly fruit. The complex is comprised of three viruses: Raspberry bushy dwarf virus (RBDV), Raspberry leaf mottle virus (RLMV) and Raspberry latent virus (RpLV). Both...
Diseases caused by parasites are recognized as significant sources of mortality in wild fish populations. I assessed the impacts of multispecies parasitism on a threatened stock of juvenile coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch). A crucial prerequisite to this research was proper identification of parasites, which can be difficult for species lacking...
Agrobacterium species transform plant cells by targeting a portion of plasmid-encoded bacterial DNA to the host nucleus. Genetic transformation by A. tumefaciens and A. rhizogenes requires secreted effector proteins. The tumor-inducing (Ti) plasmid from virulent A. tumefaciens encodes VirE2, a secreted single-stranded DNA-binding protein required for efficient transformation of hosts....
Metagenomics has revealed that the marine microbial biosphere is immensely more diverse than originally considered, and is an almost untapped reservoir for the potential discovery of microbial natural products. Despite numerous advances in culturing, biosynthetic engineering and genomic-based screening efforts to uncover much of this diversity in relatively accessible environments,...
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), protein regions (IDRs), and protein complexes continue to emerge at the forefront of protein science. Proteins and protein regions lacking specific structure are found in all organisms, and often have vital roles in numerous biological processes. Breaking the well-known structure-function paradigm, the understanding of disorder-based functionality...
This thesis is a rhetorical analysis of sexual harassment codes on college and
university campuses. The situational model proposed by Lloyd Bitzer is used to examine
representative artifacts from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and Oregon State
University in Corvallis, Oregon, so as to determine whether they operate as "fitting"...
The goal of this dissertation was to improve our abilities in acquiring critical in vivo data by establishing embryo-larva zebrafish as an exemplary model to quantitatively evaluate cancer progression. The living environment that encompasses a tumor has a significant effect on how cancer develops, grows and metastasizes. In order to...
Interventions for young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) focus on core impairments in social communication skills, yet studies have shown a relationship between social and motor skill deficits in children with ASD. The purpose of this study is to further examine individual levels of gross and fine motor skills...
Patterns of nest attendance behavior by breeding birds represent a parent-offspring trade-off in which adults balance self-maintenance with parental care decisions.
Incubation, in particular, is of interest because adults must provide an environment
suitable for embryonic development through nest-building and contact-incubation.
We evaluated how adult incubation constancy and nest visitation...
Introduction: Physical activity (PA) is recommended for all individuals because of the benefits it provides to physical health, mental health, and overall quality of life (QoL). It is also recommended for children with developmental disabilities (DDs), which make up about 15% of all U.S. children ages 3-17 years. Previous studies...
Background. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by impairments in social-communicative deficits and restricted and repetitive behaviors, interests, or activities (APA, 2013). While current estimates suggest 1 in 68 children are diagnosed with ASD, more alarming statistics indicate 1 in 50 school-aged children live with the disorder (Blumberg, Bramlett, Kogan,...
The migrations of four generations of the Powledge family centering around Meriwether County, Georgia were described within the context of social and economic forces in the United States in 1820 to 1900. The family was representative of thousands of families that migrated westward. The migrations were found to correlate with...
Equine-facilitated mental health (EFMH) is a practice within equine-assisted therapy
(EAT) that has expanded greatly in the last 20 years, but scientific research is still
lacking. Thus far, no attempt has been made to characterize the horses and ponies
currently used in EFMH programs, or to define what characteristics EFMH...
I studied developmental rates in a suite of temperate and tropical passerine bird species from the New World to test the hypothesis that tropical passerines exhibit slower patterns of growth and development than temperate birds. I also investigated how the expression of several developmental rates varied with life history traits...
Monophyly of the gomphoid-phalloid clade was confirmed based on multigene phylogenetic analyses. Four major subclades (Hysterangiales, Geastrales, Gomphales and Phallales) were also demonstrated to be monophyletic. The interrelationships among the subclades were, however, not resolved, and alternative topologies could not be rejected statistically. Nonetheless, most analyses showed that the Hysterangiales...
Advances in electronics fabrication, coupled with the demand for increased computing power, have driven the demand for innovative cooling solutions to dissipate waste heat generated by these devices. To meet future demands, research and development has focused on robust two-phase heat transfer devices. A confined impinging jet is explored as...
Two studies used DNA markers to assess their usefulness in germplasm identification and evaluation of genetic stability in four cryopreserved Rubus accessions that were stored for over 10 years in liquid nitrogen. In the first study, 12 robust Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) markers were developed from two microsatellite-enriched libraries of...
Marine sediments are one of the largest habitats for microbial life on earth. These microorganisms play critical roles in biogeochemical cycling both within the subsurface and between the sediment and water columns. However, microbial communities in sediments are highly heterogeneous and the factors defining microbial community structure and metabolic function...
In 7 composite stories--shifting from the roads of Southern Colorado neighborhoods, the fields and unpaved roads of Northern New Mexico, and the streets of Culver City, California--Penitence follows Relles Ortiz and the bleak peripheral existence of the voiceless suburban people living in disorder and disorientation within the harshness of their...
Within the U.S. there is a growing interest in the case of female adolescents being coerced into the sex industry (Bernstein, 2010; Estes & Weiner, 2001; Soderlund, 2010; Williams and Frederick, 2009). This interest, which emerged due to U.S. involvement in the international trafficking phenomena and grassroots organizing, has resulted...
There are more than 87,000 chemicals in current use with little to no toxicity information available. Assessing such a large number of chemicals using traditional methods would take an unreasonable amount of time and money, and require the use a large number of animals. The incorporation of high-throughput in vivo...
Alkaline phosphatase (ALP) is an enzyme present in intestinal mucosa, bile, bone and renal tubule cells. Bile acids have been shown to decrease ALP activity from bone and kidney but not those from intestinal origin. This action can be mimicked in serum and peritoneal fluid samples by the use of...
Garden symphylans (Scutigerella immaculata Newport) are increasingly important pests of below-ground parts of over 100 crops in Oregon. The focus of our work was to improve S. immaculata management through 1) development of a bait sampling method, 2) examination of the susceptibility of selected crops to S. immaculata feeding in...
The fabrication of nano-scale devices is a challenging, but potentially important, technology that has drawn a great deal of interest among researchers. Such nanoscale constructions utilizing a bottom-up approach for device building have many foreseeable applications in areas as diverse as miniaturized electronics, sensors, and biomedical devices.
One of the...
In the midst of the sixth mass extinction, understanding wildlife disease spillover is critical to maintaining protected wildlife areas. Studying ecoimmunology and wildlife disease ecology helps to understand immune and disease traits in an ecological context, which is invaluable in preventing pathogen spillover between livestock and wildlife. To investigate this...
Organismal development requires a precisely orchestrated transcriptional program to correctly deploy genetic information into the genome. This process requires sophisticated gene regulatory networks at multiple spatial and temporal levels from early embryonic development to adult physiological conditions. Molecular differences that define cell types are set up during the pattern formation...
Negative attitudes towards people with disabilities persist in our society, limiting the inclusion of people with disabilities in a multitude of social roles. Despite existing research on the nature of these attitudes and interventions to improve them, people with disabilities continue to cite social barriers as some of their greatest...
Direct anthropogenic stressors have caused drastic declines in wildlife populations over the past two centuries. In the face of these threats, spillover of infectious disease from domestic animals and livestock into wildlife, and novel interactions between parasites and pathogens within wildlife communities, have further suppressed already vulnerable populations. As management...
Cheddar Cheese samples (good cheese, weak cheese, cheese made with pasteurized milk, cheese made with heat-shocked milk, cheese from production plant A, cheese from production plant B, cheese made with adjunct culture, and cheese made without adjunct culture), were evaluated during the ripening stage. Proteolysis was studied by a fractionation...
Fungi in the genus Tolypocladium are diverse in their host associations, but the predominant ecologies include parasites of the ectomycorrhizal genus Elaphomyces and pathogens of insects. The aim of this dissertation research is to examine the evolution of these fungi and their host associations. To accomplish this several lines of...
Shorebirds display great variation in mating systems and breed in dynamic environments that are increasingly subject to human threats worldwide. In order to adequately assess productivity and demography of shorebird populations, it is important to understand factors that influence patterns of parental care and reproductive success. The Black Oystercatcher (Haematopus...
The relationships between nitrogen (N), defoliation, and plant growth in
nursery plants were studied using almond {Prunus dulcis (Mill) D. A. Webb) trees. In
several experiments the effects of N source and availability on tree growth, N uptake,
N remobilization, and nonstructural carbohydrates (TNC) were investigated to
determine the most...
Falls in older adults are an important concern due to the potential injuries associated with falling. Decreases in muscle strength as a result of natural aging could impair the ability of older adults to prevent either a backward or forward fall. Two musculoskeletal models were used to predict the effect...
My thesis examines how the American identity is constructed through thinking shaped by deception and domination, as James Baldwin argues in the corpus of his work. I rely on the work of Eddie Glaude Jr., Sean Kim Butorac, and Joel Schlosser to forward love in Baldwin’s political vision as being...
The sustainable use of wood for rail ties requires chemical treatment to increase service life and maintain structural integrity. Treatment can only be applied after lengthy air-seasoning to reduce moisture content in wood, but seasoning leaves ties exposed to attack by decay fungi for up to a year. One factor...
This dissertation uses a new methodological approach for an in-depth analysis of three cartographic works. Studies within the discipline of the history of cartography have followed various methodologies throughout the past century. This dissertation argues that in order to come to a more complete understanding of how maps were produced...
The purpose of this thesis is to aid in qualitative improvements to technical support documents on the Internet. By using a generic criticism this analysis will make substantive suggestions towards the improvement of this type of document by engaging the rhetoric employed by their authors. It will discuss the history...
Introduction: Parents provide an in-depth and unique perspective on their children with developmental disabilities (DDs) experiences and involvement in physical activity. Furthermore, family pets promote physical activity and quality of life in children with DDs. An imitation based physical activity program for children with DD and their family dog took...
Mental health professionals are dedicated to improving outcomes in therapy. Research over the past 50 years has shown psychotherapy to be effective in both improving the functioning of and diminishing the overall distress experienced by clients. Several factors have been constant predictors of outcome in therapy, including length of treatment,...