Human-robot teams involve humans and robots collaborating to achieve tasks under various environmental conditions. Successful teaming requires robots to adapt autonomously in real-time to a human teammate's state. An important element of such adaptation is the ability for the robot to infer the tasks performed by their human teammates. Human-robot...
This study is an ethnographic investigation of residential turnover, organizational memory, and the persistence of Lost Valley, an Oregon ecovillage founded in 1989. Literature on organizational turnover, memory, and persistence is reviewed and integrated with scholarship on intentional communities and ecovillages, generating a theoretical framework for data collection and analysis....
This dissertation investigates the microbial diversity and factors influencing the assembly of microbial communities in kombucha production, using a combination of 1H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, 16S and ITS rRNA metabarcoding, and traditional culture-based microbiological methods. It also explores the diversity of kombucha starter cultures through shotgun sequencing and metabarcoding...
The Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMPs) describe ways of thinking and doing mathematics that parallels how mathematicians engage with mathematics (National Governors Association for Best Practices, 2010). These standards reflect a broader goal in K-12 mathematics education focused on moving beyond K-12 learners acquiring knowledge of mathematical...
The Global Overturning Circulation (GOC) is a major component of the global climate system. Understanding its behavior is pertinent to our prediction of climate change in the future. The lack of long-term observations of GOC in the modern instrumental era necessitates studies of GOC using paleoceanographic records. Of great interest...
This dissertation focuses on personal privacy in human-robot interaction, which we call "privacy-sensitive robotics." Our understanding of "privacy" is very broad, including not just information privacy but also physical, psychological, and social privacy. We begin by surveying the scholarly literature on privacy and talking about why it applies to interactions...
During the eighteenth century, diagrams increasingly became an important aspect of scientific inquiry. Diagrams employed simplification as a strategy for representing complex information, played a role in standardizing scientific language, and served as instruments of reason to think through and communicate problems and findings in mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, natural...
Methane is a product of biogeochemical processes which respond to changes in climate. The history of atmospheric methane is recorded by ice cores providing insight into past changes in these biogeochemical processes. This dissertation is comprised of three studies which focus on centennial- and millenial-scale variability of methane from ice...
Whether microevolutionary processes can explain macroevolutionary patterns has long been a matter of contentious debate. The debate has persisted largely because of the challenging task of connecting microevolutionary theory, which examines population-level phenomena on the generation scale, to data collected across larger spatial and temporal scales. My dissertation research broadly...