The purpose of this phenomenological study is to describe how Oregon governors
Barbara Roberts and John Kitzhaber, whose tenures both coincided with the passage
and implementation of property tax limitation measures, determined the community
college budgets within their recommended state budgets. The stories of Robert’s 1993
and Kitzhaber’s 2001 decisions...
This analysis determines the impact of campaign contributions on Senators' legislative activity on the Energy Policy Act of 2003, identifies organizations within the power policy-planning network, and examines the social netwrok of the energy industry and its relationship with the power policy-planning network. After describing the research methods used for...
A significant number of historically existing wetlands that naturally stored rainwater and attenuated flood peaks have now been drained and employed as new farming areas. Beyond the water quality and flow problem, this has resulted in loss of natural habitats of diverse ecological species. Restoring wetlands have hence been proposed...
This study documented the influence of the completion agenda on decision-making by community college career and technical education (CTE) deans. Ten career and technical programs deans were identified as the sample for the study. Washington State was selected because of the Student Achievement Initiative that was developed as a completion...
In 2008, the “Great Recession” gained its momentum and quickly grew into a global crisis that led to massive gross domestic product declines and job losses in countries around the world. Relative to prior economic downturns, young adults were greatly affected by the Great Recession. This likely placed a premium...
This is a case study of the cooperative development of an ocean condition forecasting tool by Oregon commercial fishermen, Oregon State University (OSU) scientists, and OSU student software engineers. Ocean condition forecasting models developed by OSU scientists were used to create an online tool to assist decision-making for fishermen. This...
A key application of microchannel process technology (MPT) is its implementation in heat exchanger devices, since a larger surface contact area can be realized than in conventional approaches, thus achieving high heat transfer efficiency. To justify high volume production of configurations validated as prototypes, and to select from among the...
This dissertation consists of three essays that collectively address the importance of accounting for spatial heterogeneity and spatial dependence of environmental assets and natural resources in policy making. The first essay examines the value of different wetland ecosystem services using an expanded meta-dataset of valuation studies in North America. The...
Recent climate change forecasts have aroused growing interest in the influence of water
scarcity and climate on agricultural production and irrigation practice. However, it is common in
the economic literature to aggregate disparate crops when modeling irrigation choices. That
approach confounds the crop-specific effects of climate and water scarcity that...
The purpose of this study was to explore the factors that influence the ability of teachers and administrators to use data obtained from a data warehouse to inform instruction. The mixed methods study was guided by the following questions: 1) What data warehouse application features affect the ability of an...
Financial stress in agriculture has been a concern over the past
century. Agrarian values and "love of the land" seem to yield public
conclusions for the support of the industry. Much of this support is
in the interest of preserving a viable food producing sector in an
volatile world climate....
The objective of this research was to provide a definitive description of the processes within the physician-patient encounter in an office setting. This description would take the form of a formal process model of the encounter in a provider's office setting, as this represents the most common situation during patient...
One of the basic questions facing transportation planners and road managers is how to provide and maintain a road system that provides efficient access to the forest while limiting adverse effects roads can have on water and soil resources. The purpose of this study is to develop decision support models...
College governance is a function of structure and of how people act within that
structure. Organizational strategies no longer identify administrations as monopolies
that possess all of the good ideas. Recent organizational management approaches to
governance promote inclusiveness in decision-making and are at odds with the
community college's historical structures,...
Recent catastrophic wildfires have forced the forest management community to develop new strategies for reducing forest fuels. Tightly spaced understory trees often create a fire ladder allowing surface fires to encroach into the crowns of overstory trees. This situation can lead to intensive, catastrophic, stand-replacement forest fires. Mechanical removal or...
Forested lands of western Oregon provide aquatic habitat for many fish and riparian dependent species, including a wide variety of salmon species. Current policies set riparian protections using fixed buffers on streams for federal and private lands based on stream type or size. These buffers can create a series of...
Despite apparently supportive national policies, including nation-wide legalization of home birth and coverage by the national health care system of the costs associated with that option, these births account for less than 1% of all births in the Republic of Ireland. Using data collected during participant observation, both in person...
China's Minqin Oasis once welcomed traders along the ancient Silk Road with rivers, lakes, and lush forests, yet today the region's farmland and grassland are increasingly being engulfed by the sands of the Gobi Desert. The severity of this incremental catastrophe for a declining population of 300,000 residents has brought...
Approximately half of the 6.4 million pregnancies occurring each year in the
United States are unintended (Finer & Henshaw, 2006). Unintended pregnancies, defined
as pregnancies not wanted at the time conception occurs, regardless of contraceptive use
(Chandra, Martinez, Mosher, Abma, & Jones, 2005) can have serious repercussions on
women, children,...
Location is a critical component of business decisions. A firm's location decision may be influenced not only by market forces, such as the location of input suppliers, output processors and competitors, but also by government policies if such policies impact their expected profits and are applied non-uniformly across space. Likewise,...
Optimization of reservoir operation is involves various competing objectives for a scarce resource (water). To find the optimal operation of reservoirs, it is essential to consider multiple objectives simultaneously. There are various sources of uncertainty associated with the reservoir operation problem that should be considered as well.
The overarching goal...
Academics and practitioners agree that in water governance, the quality of a decision making process should influence the quality of the outcome and the degree to which it is accepted by interested parties. However, finding a feasible way to evaluate and then improve the quality of a decision making process...
Wildland firefighting is environmentally and socially a risky and complex occupation. Although much attention has been given to understanding the physical components in fighting wildland fire, much less time has been devoted to understanding and developing the capacity of wildland firefighters to handle the dynamic pressures of the physical and...