The nonagricultural lands of the world are being called upon today to satisfy tremendous
demands from society at all levels of economic development. Until recently, costs of management
of many of these lands were too high to warrant appreciable management investment for
the relatively low yields. Society is beginning to...
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...
Plant pathogenic Rhodococcus species are persistent pathogens able to cause severe growth deformities on a large range of hosts. The most well studied species, R. fascians is predicted by current models to synthesize a mixture of cytokinins that act to directly perturb the hosts' hormone balances, which results in abnormal...
Verification of fast reactor safety requires experiments
wherein fuel bundles, enclosed in massive steel capsules, are subjected
to simulated accident conditions in reactors such as TREAT(16)
at ANL Idaho. To date, only small bundles (one to seven pins) have
been tested in the experimental series. Determination of the fuel
configuration...
Two strategic approaches to water quality control in Oregon's
Willamette River are presently being utilized: point source treatment
and flow augmentation. Dry weather releases from reservoirs are for
authorized purposes other than water quality. Reservoirs can participate
in pollution control by summer flow augmentation where authorized water
resource objectives (flood...
Metagenomics has revealed that the marine microbial biosphere is immensely more diverse than originally considered, and is an almost untapped reservoir for the potential discovery of microbial natural products. Despite numerous advances in culturing, biosynthetic engineering and genomic-based screening efforts to uncover much of this diversity in relatively accessible environments,...
As the fifth generation of mobile communication systems (5G) is being deployed, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) serves as one of its enabling technologies where reliable and ultra low latency communications are achieved while being power and spectrum efficient. This thesis studies the security aspect of massive MIMO system from the...
There has been serious interest in hydrogen as a source of energy in the United States due to its capability of delivering a sustainable, carbon-free energy future. Currently, most hydrogen in the United States is produced via the steam methane reforming of natural gas, which converts methane to hydrogen through...
The likelihood of a Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) earthquake is estimated between 37 to 42% in the next 50 years, leading to strong shaking, liquefaction, landsliding, and other seismic ground failure resulting in major impacts to critical lifelines such as the western power grid. Electrical power is essential for continued...
At the intersection of basic science research and clinical relevance, cancer metastasis and cell invasion is a multifaceted problem that has been investigated for the past several decades. Importantly, cancer cell plasticity, the ability of a single cell to change its phenotype without genetic mutations in response to environmental cues,...
In this dissertation we consider two application specific flow and transport models in porous media at multiple scales: 1) methane gas transport models for hydrate formation and dissociation in the subsurface under two-phase conditions, and 2) coupled flow and biomass-nutrient model for biofilm growth in complex geometries with biofilm, and...
Successive sampling population size estimation (SS-PSE) is a method used by government agencies and aid organizations around the world to estimate the size of hidden populations using data from respondent-driven sampling (RDS) surveys. SS-PSE ad-dresses a specific need in estimation and helps us evaluate the vulnerability of areas to HIV...
There are five main contributions of this dissertation. The first contribution is new closed-form expressions for channel capacity of a new class of channel matrices. The second contribution is the discovery of the structure for optimal binary quantizer and the associated methods for finding an optimal quantizer that maximizes mutual...
In this dissertation, we attempt to overcome the "curse of dimensionality" inherent to radiation diffusion kinetics problems by employing a novel reduced order modeling technique known as proper generalized decomposition (PGD). After verifying a proposed PGD algorithm and associated solvers through various tests, we explore its performance for computing reduced-order...
This research presents a methodology to identify and analyze human-system interactions, and their potential failure modes using a functional decomposition approach during the early system design stage.
The fundamental research contribution of this work is the development of a framework to identify associations between physical user-product interactions, generic human errors...
Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) is an iconic North American high-elevation tree species currently threatened by climate change, mountain pine beetle, and white pine blister rust (WPBR), a lethal disease caused by the non-native fungal pathogen Cronartium ribicola. In collaboration with the USDA Forest Service Dorena Genetic Resource Center, germplasm was...
Many applications in computer graphics and geometry processing rely on the ability to
locally orient 2D and 3D entities on a surface, or inside a volume, such as the sinusoidal
kernels in Gabor noise, the color and geometry textures in pattern synthesis, and the
finite elements in remeshing. In these...
The project of which this research was a part is designed to
provide an improved system of ecological resource analysis. Specific
objectives of this study were: (1) classification of plant communities
on the fringes of the sagebrush steppes and the salt desert of
southeastern Oregon, (2) development of symbolic and...
This thesis analyzes two systems that can meet low-grade heating
and/or cooling demands by operating in conjunction with thermal-electric
power plants. At the application site, one of the systems, HPS, has
water-to-air heat pumps that are connected to the supply and return
lines of a plant-to-user loop. During heating, the...
This thesis describes a Mossbauer effect and electron
paramagnetic resonance study of iron (III) tetraphenylporphyrinatobenzenethiolate
benzene thiol, an analog compound
for bacterial cytochrome P-450. The compound is unusual in
that it provides a model for the two ferric reaction states
of cytochrome P-450. The iron in the model compound exhibits...
This study was conducted to observe the manner in which three local
public interest organizations participated in a local, environmentallyoriented
decision process. The study period began in December, 1978,
with the passage of a revised solid waste ordinance (Ord. 78-102) for
the City of Corvallis, OR. The main forum for...
Laboratory incubation studies and field studies with sweet corn
and onions were undertaken to evaluate interactions of lime,
phosphorus (P), and copper (Cu). Eight soils were incubated at a
constant temperature of 21 °C with combinations of band placed
monocalcium phosphate (MCP), ammonium sulfate (AmS), and copper
sulfate pentahydrate (CSPH)...
Thirty-four current worksite health promotion programs were
studied in order to obtain comprehensive information about various components
involved in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of existing
programs, and to acquire the necessary data to develop a theory and corresponding
hypotheses pertaining to successful worksite health promotion
programs. The case study...
A variety of laser spectroscopic methods are employed in this
thesis research for studies of CF₃NO, an interesting model
photodissociative system, and for investigation of low energy rotations
and vibrations of small molecules and low molecular weight clusters in
free jet expansions.
Nonradiative energy decay for electronically excited CF₃NO is...
The effects of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) exposure on hepatic
pyruvate carboxylase (PC) gene expression were investigated in C57BL/6J Ah[superscipt b/b male
mice. A dose-dependent reduction of PC levels and activity occurred in animals given a
single intraperitoneal dose of TCDD in a corn oil carrier. The dose ranged from 1 to...
This study co-investigated with students with hidden disabilities the phenomenon of disability identity. This qualitative study utilized phenomenology and strategies proposed by Paulo Freire in an effort to understand identity development specific to individuals with hidden disabilities. There were seven students from a medium-sized, public university who participated in the...
Recent developments in digital communications at microwave frequencies have revealed that local oscillator phase noise is often a factor in the bit error rate (BER) analysis. Digital signals transported across microwave radio links acquire waveform jitter from local oscillator phase noise. As jitter increases so does BER.
The main goals...
This qualitative study explores the experiences of women who are welfare
recipients attending a community college under the auspices of a new program,
Washington State's WorkFirst/Work Study program. The study, conducted over
two academic quarters, includes in-depth interviews with WorkFirst/Work Study
students, observations in a weekly seminar, and interviews with...
Fuelwood is a basic need for rural households in Malawi. However, deforestation has reduced the quantity of forest products such as fuelwood available to households. This has negatively affected rural Malawian quality of life, especially for women who are forced to walk long distances to collect fuelwood, prepare foods with...
Published June 1983. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog
Many species of rodents and insectivores live in subterranean burrows in soils throughout the world. The soil surface perforations of burrow entrances are often connected to complex, subsurface tunnel networks. Burrow entrances and associated subsurface tunnel networks represent a link between surface and subsurface ecological function. Anecdotal observations of surface-water...
Published February 1933. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog
Interactions between surface winds and meanders in mid-latitude sea surface temperature
(SST) fronts with horizontal length scales of 100-1000 km are investigated
from satellite observations and numerical simulations. Observations from the Sea-
Winds scatterometer on the QuikSCAT satellite show that the magnitude, direction,
curl, and divergence of the surface wind...
The integration of renewable energy sources and the associated power electronics to notebook power and thermal management systems was investigated in this work. Both thermoelectric (TE) and photovoltaic (PV) energy extraction techniques were explored with the goal of achieving best sustainability. Semi-realistic usage assumptions were taken into account to evaluate...
This report has been prepared in support of the Pacific Northwest
Coastal Ecosystems Regional Study (PNCERS) to provide
a summary and compendium of the management of estuaries
in the Pacific Northwest of the United States that lie between Puget
Sound, Washington, and Cape Mendocino, California. Federal, state,
and local government...