This work describes the design and modification of a commercial children’s ride-on car to effectively collect usage data. The design is cheap and could be easily modified to gather more information. This will serve as a viable way to collect information about how motorized independence can help children with developmental...
Freshwater resources are becoming more and more scarce worldwide, and rights to water use is becoming more competitive between stakeholders. Irrigation for agricultural purposes accounts for a large portion of freshwater usage. Using drought tolerant plant species in irrigated pastures could become a necessity in order to reduce competition for...
Two striking characteristics of human beings are the diversity of resources that we use to sustain our lives and the extent to which we engage in coordinated, collective efforts to obtain and consume these resources. Together, these two characteristics are the foundation of human subsistence patterns. In many remote Alaskan...
Question answering forums like Reddit have been quite effective in improving social interaction and disseminating useful information. Community members ask a variety of questions related to a subject which are answered by other community members. The answers are given ratings by other members. In this thesis we study the problem...
Over the past 42 years clay smoking pipes have been excavated from two U.S. army posts, Fort Hoskins (35BE15) and Fort Yamhill (35PO75) and curated at Oregon State University. These two forts were established in Western Oregon in 1856 and by 1866 both had been decommissioned. Numerous theses have focused...
We present a user study to investigate the impact of explanations on non-experts' understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. We investigate both a common RL visualization, saliency maps (the focus of attention), and a more recent explanation type, reward-decomposition bars (predictions of future types of rewards). We designed a 124...
Clear and unbiased question wording is important to obtaining consistent and accurate survey results. However, if the goal is not to obtain accurate results but instead to obtain a specific result, then altering question wording may be effective. To examine this possibility, we created a survey with 9 different versions...
The Jetson Artificial Intelligence Tool chain (JAI-TC) is a set of packages, APIs and libraries for Artificial Intelligence applications to be deployed on the NVidia SOC, Jetson TX2. JAI-TC automates the installation of these items allowing for a wider set of users to leverage these technologies. Prior to this, the...
OSU Libraries Publishing began offering internships as one way to firmly link the program to the library and university teaching mission. Along the way, questions about implementation surfaced. We will consider what best practices are emerging and examine current internship models within library publishing, digital scholarship centers, and academic libraries...
This classification is an update of the 2004 classification of native vegetation of Oregon by Kagan, Christy, Murray and Titus. As before, this classification lists the native plant associations known to occur in Oregon, and includes both successional and climax vegetation types that were part of the presettlement landscape of...
This archive is a compilation of SWMM input files and STELLA models, augmented by R scripts to perform various processing for sensitivity analysis, data import / export, plot generation and computation of various summary outputs. Part I is the sensitivity analysis of a SWMM model representative of the case study...
Through well designed tree placement, redundant use of simple technologies, and stewardship, trees grow. Over time, they mitigate stormwater flooding and enhance livability. This paper offers insights into precipitation patterns, and how small scale redundancy can help build the urban tree canopy. It is specifically geared toward issues in the...
Wave energy is one of the most promising renewable energy sources. Thus, research in this field has increased substantially over the last decade. However, significant costs associated with development and maintenance have so far impeded the implementation of commercially viable projects. Furthermore, the hydrodynamic interactions between water and prototypes meant...
Significant increases in the amount of data being streamed, collected, and processed have resulted in widespread adoption of the use of microservices to build scalable software applications. Unfortunately, current tools and frameworks are often insufficient at providing a simple, unified experience for the design, development, and deployment of microservices. They...
The nuclear industry has shown a large interest in natural circulation driven passive cooling systems following the Fukushima nuclear accident. Despite this interest, there is no widely used heat transfer correlation or friction factor correlation developed for natural circulation driven flow. A CFD analysis including grid convergence testing using Fluent...
Changes to disturbance regimes resulting from shifts in forest management practices have created novel landscape conditions in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). I analyzed the implications of changes to landscape conditions caused by forest management for the spread of a native root disease: black stain root disease (BSRD) of Douglas-fir. BSRD...
College is a vital time to address both emotional and physical health, especially among at-risk populations such as sexual and gender minority college students. However, it has not always been clear whether health services on college campuses are actually reaching these students. The current study aimed to determine if sexual...
The Hippocratic Oath has served as the standard for ethical conduct for physicians and scientists alike since its establishment in 400BCE. In stating, “according to my ability and judgement, I will keep this Oath and this contract…” and through the use of other language, the Hippocratic Oath implies that the...
In response to the increasing pace and scale of wildfire and forest health challenges, the Intertribal Timber Council (ITC) proposed the creation of “Anchor Forests,” where a tribe would convene surrounding landowners to collaboratively manage the entire landscape, across property boundaries. This emergent concept has sparked conversation but has not...
Fisheries management that is based on quantitative assessment has commonly relied on estimating the unfished biomass of a fished stock to compare current and historical population size. Developing predictive models for this requires many years of catch and abundance data. Smaller, new, or mainly recreational fisheries may not have the...
Students who engage in undergraduate research benefit from a wide rage of personal and professional gains, including an increased ability to think analytically (Ishiyama, 2002), defining/refining research, and career interests, and enhanced confidence (Ishiyama, 2002). Promoting undergraduate participation in research also benefits faculty members (i.e. by enhancing research productivity; Hall...
Epidemiological research on HIV/AIDS seeks to determine at-risk populations not reached by current care. In the forty years since the AIDS epidemic began, transgender people were only recently deemed “at-risk” by the CDC and more action was taken to study them. Most current research centers on transgender women, with transgender...
In the wake of climate change, the risk of heat related illnesses has continuously increased over the past several decades. While thermal management solutions have continued to improve, there is a need for efficient cooling systems that conform with the human body. This study combines the solutions from fractal-like flow...
Can a wellness movement and business be an American religion? By tracing three threads of historic American religions - New Thought, Christian Science, and Scientology - we can see how we've arrived at the place of even entertaining the question of GOOP as an American religion.
Ph.D. candidate Qi Wei's thesis consists of two projects: Chemotherapy Project: a study based on the research paper "Predicting chemotherapy response of various cancer types using a variational auto-encoder approach" submitted to the bioRxiv preprint archive and accepted by the BMC bioinformatics; and Wound Monitor Project: implementing and assessing analytics...
Beginning in 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic contributed to an increase in housing insecurity among college students. As awareness around homelessness has increased, so has research aimed at better understanding the causes of homelessness and housing insecurity among college students, as well as opportunities to better support economic access to higher...
This article describes the design and development of an interoperable application that supports green open access with long-term sustainability and improved user experience of article deposit. The lack of library resources and the unfriendly repository user interface are two significant barriers that hinder green open access. Tasked to implement the...
Exemplar-based style transfer techniques reimagine the content of a target image in the style of an exemplar image. Style transfer techniques that make use of patch-based synthesis copy sections of the exemplar to corresponding regions of the target, creating a new image in a patchwork manner. The artistic control one...
Subtitles are an element used within film to further meaning and artistic subtext, intentional or not, within film. Using foreign language and the associated cultural artefacts, one may explore the subtext of that language and culture on screen. The language of Norwegian, the language used in the film, shares much...
These course materials provide students with a theoretical and practical background in operational use of UAS for surveying and mapping. Instructors can use these modules for a standalone course or integrate select modules into their existing curricula, as desired. Specifically, these materials cover the following learning outcomes to enable students...
The objective of this lab is to gain experience collecting imagery with an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) and processing it in structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry software to obtain georeferenced data products, including an orthomosaic in GeoTiff format and a point cloud in ASPRS’s LAS format.
Purposive stakeholder involvement in public lands management has grown in the United States in recent decades as government bodies have initiated advisory groups in addition to public comment modalities of participation. While advisory groups and collaboratives on federal lands have been studied extensively, much less is known about network governance...
About one-quarter of the U.S. adult population lives with a disability, yet ableist presentations of disability as a tragedy in need of a cure (i.e., the medical model) continue to predominate, even in higher education. Previous, qualitative research showed that people with disabilities (PWDs) desire changes in individual and societal...
Grapevine Trunk Diseases (GTDs) are caused by a group of fungal pathogens that attack the xylem tissue of mature grapevines worldwide. In the past 30 years, their incidence has increased, both in emerging grape-producing regions, as well as those with an extended history of viticulture. In the same time span,...
Community forestry is a decentralized form of forest governance that is widely promoted around the world. In the United States, community forestry is growing as a form of forest management, and exists across a range of ownership and governance models, all with different levels of community participation and access to...
Many academic libraries have a strong commitment to open scholarship articulated in strategic planning goals, values statements and policy documents. These ideals exist next to a scholarly communication landscape dominated by corporate publishers, paywalls and licensing agreements that center subscriptions and title lists. Our organizational structures, reflected in our budgets...
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...
Streptococcus pneumoniae and Influenza A Virus both primarily infect the upper respiratory tract, with more severe disease occurring during coinfection than would be caused by either pathogen independently. Until recently, characterization of the interactions between these two pathogens has occurred exclusively in the context of a host or using host-derived...