This dissertation examines development and the implications of information and communication technology, particularly computers, on issues relating to education, labor, and the overall wellbeing of Black and indigenous people in Bocas del Toro, Panama. It details the Black and indigenous legacy of dependency in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on...
Using summertime housing transactions data of 3,309 parcels from multiple years in Eugene-Springfield, OR, we present a hedonic price model to estimate the influence of the urban heat island (UHI) effect on housing prices in this metropolitan area. By taking advantage of the inherent random nature of summertime weather observations,...
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest federal nutrition assistance program in the US aiming at improving health and nutrition among low-income individuals and households. SNAP is a means tested program that provides monthly cash benefits to eligible households and individuals whose assets and net monthly incomes are...
Portions of Yellowstone Lake sit on top of a vigorous but not well understood hydrothermal system situated in a region of intense geologic and environmental forcings. A heat flow study conducted over the Stevenson Island Vent Field (SIVF), a vent field at the bottom of Yellowstone Lake underlain by an...
We study joint nonlinear state estimation with multi-period measurement vectors that are potentially corrupted by sparse gross errors. The identifiability-aware approach is proposed to leverage common characteristics of fundamentally identifiable gross errors to enhance error correction performance. First, we derive a necessary rank condition that the sparsity pattern of any...
Construction is a strategically important industry and its productivity has a significant impact on a nation’s economy. However, productivity in the US construction industry has been widely reported to be on the decline. Among several causes identified, the lack of innovation in project management practices has been described as having...
Silicic caldera-forming eruptions are some of the largest and most destructive volcanic eruptions known, and present significant local and global hazards. The underlying processes within crustal magma plumbing systems that lead to the accumulation and eruption of large volumes of evolved magma remain enigmatic, yet there is broad consensus that...
The emergence of high explosives on the battlefield can be defined both literally and figuratively as a seismic event in the landscape of modern warfare. High explosives first came into common use in war in 1914. By the end of World War I just four years later, more than 2.5...
It is common practice in the unsupervised anomaly detection literature to create experimental benchmarks by sampling from existing supervised learning datasets. We seek to improve this practice by identifying four dimensions important to real-world anomaly detection applications --- point difficulty, clusteredness of anomalies, relevance of features, and relative frequency of...
In the last twenty years, human trafficking has gained attention in government agendas and media coverage, while anti-trafficking projects have burgeoned worldwide. Anti-trafficking efforts, however, have almost exclusively addressed the issue of sex trafficking with a focus on rescuing women, while overlooking other types of exploitation. This is noteworthy, given...