Recognized as a site of risk, innovation, and inspiration, failure is a growing area of multidisciplinary inquiry. My thesis draws attention specifically to the way composition studies approaches failure in order to ask: how can we implement failure pedagogies safely, and how do rhetorics of failure move toward social justice...
The dynamics of land use in the State of Oregon are simulated
on a digital computer. The introductory chapter outlines the complex
nature of the problems facing the post-industrial society and argues
that the scientific and professional estates share in the responsibility
for public policy formulation. The second chapter .presents...
Software systems are becoming an essential part of the lives of both individuals and organizations, and as a consequence, these systems are getting bigger and more complex. Because of this, the tasks of maintaining the quality in these complex software systems are becoming increasingly difficult. Furthermore, these systems are subject...
Merge conflicts have long plagued software development. With larger and more dispersed teams comes greater risk of developers working on the same code at the same time. While merge conflicts are known to be painful, their exact impact on software is still largely unknown. Are merge conflicts an isolated problem,...
Coastal and estuarine flooding and erosion events are usually driven by the cumulative effect of multiple individual processes like waves, streamflow, storm surge, and/or tides. This dissertation focuses on separating the influence of the regional and local-scale geomorphologic and hydrodynamic processes driving variability in the magnitude and impacts of extreme...
Coastal hazards are the result of numerous physical processes cumulatively causing water levels to flood and erode the land. The waves, storm surges, tides, and run-off contributing to elevated water levels are each the product of chaotic and random weather patterns. These stochastic weather patterns dissipate energy in Earth's climate...
The goal of dissertation research was to use geochemical, statistical and geological methods to constrain and understand climate variability over several different time scales. Specifically, I have addressed three questions regarding past climate change: (1) how does the record of Irish cirque glaciers constrain the dimensions of the Irish Ice...
In the United States during the last 30 years there has been a shift from extractive natural resource-based economies of the Old West to a New West defined by environmental protection. Over the past century, a growing national support for environmental protection has influenced a lengthening list of national and...