The Willamette River flows north between the Cascade Mountains and Coast Range of western Oregon within a 29,728-km² basin. The fish community in the geologically young basin consists of 36 native species, but introductions of non-native fishes have added 33 additional species for a total of 69 fish species. During...
The behavior of the thin liquid film formed between a bubble and hydrophobic membrane is of high interest in applications where separating two-phase mixtures is beneficial. One such application is in-situ vapor extraction heat sinks. In these systems, high heat transfer rates are accomplished by taking advantage of the high...
Education as a right has taken off internationally with expanded national policies in recent years. Across Africa over 80% of countries have abolished tuition fees for primary education and several have made the leap to free secondary education as well. With decreased financial barriers keeping kids out of the classroom,...
The purpose of this study was to investigate one individual difference,
i.e., rate of response, and the effect on student performance
when teachers recognize this difference. Using disadvantaged third
grade students as subjects, three null hypotheses were formulated as
follows:
1. Slow responding accurate students' (Group LH) scores will
show...
Laboratory experiments were conducted to study those factors which control the rate at which salts, such as magnesium chloride and sodium chloride, are removed from titanium sponge. The sponge was prepared by reducing titanium tetrachloride with either magnesium or sodium, and the resulting sponge salt mixtures were treated by vacuum...
Models were developed that described cohort strength of female
Dover sole (Microstomus pacificus) and female English sole (Parophrys
vetulus) in stocks off the Columbia River as functions of environmental
variables. The environmental variables considered were those
that could hypothetically influence spawning success or survival.
They included a spawning power index,...
Land use alters the physical and biological structure of stream ecosystems and potentially alters their capacity to process nitrogen (N), an essential nutrient that has nearly doubled in abundance on the biosphere
during the past century from human activities. In this dissertation, I quantified uptake and transformation of nitrate (NO₃⁻)...
This thesis presents a progression of novel planning algorithms that culminates in a new family of diverse Monte-Carlo methods for probabilistic planning domains. We provide a proof for performance guarantees and analyze how these algorithms can resolve some of the shortcomings of traditional probabilistic planning methods. The direct policy search...