The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness
of two religious education curricula in facilitating measure-able
concrete-to-abstract movement in children's religious
thinking. Subjects for the study were 47 fifth and sixth
grade children enrolled in the Sunday School classes of four
Oregon United Methodist Churches. Twenty-four children who...
This essay examines community narratives around Keep Virginia Beautiful's Green
Grants initiative. Green Grants is a signature annual program that awards grants to organizations
throughout Virginia in support of projects aligned with one of Keep Virginia Beautiful’s three
pillars: recycling, litter prevention, and community beautification. The primary research
questions are...
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Dr. Lori A. Cramer
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Dr
By 2050 the world population is expected to reach 9 billion. Fears of the impact of such a large population on earth’s environmental systems and finite resources have lead efforts by governmental and non-governmental agencies to assist developing nations in reducing fertility rates to slow population growth by direct medical...
Five lines of turkeys with wide variation in body size, reciprocal
crosses between large and small lines, and backcrosses to the
large parent line were studied to determine the effect of body size
and crossbreeding on growth rate, conformation, feed consumption,
organ size, and other physiological traits.
Selection was made...
Central Oregon's landscape is rich in dry forests prone to frequent wildfires. Climate change studies and improved modeling indicate this region could experience conditions that result in an increase in number and severity of wildfires. With the potential for increased environmental hazards, the nearby communities face potential risks and vulnerabilities...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between
creativity and independent or autonomous behavior among preschoolaged
children.
Forty children, 19 boys and 21 girls, with a mean age of 4 years-
1 month, and a mean I.Q. of 113, acted as subjects for this study. All
children...
The central purposes of this study were to review the
historical sources of David Kolb's formulation of experiential
learning theory, and to determine the effect and
application of Kolb's theory and Learning Style Inventory
as reflected in the literature between 1971 and 1990.
It was found that Kolb based his...
President Clinton’s Executive Order 12898 and subsequent federal environmental justice (EJ) policies and programs have faced significant challenges in implementation. Exploring scientific uncertainty, social complexity of EJ issues, lack of clear policy guidance, and weak regulatory enforcement demonstrate these challenges. However, at the state level, EJ policies, task forces, and...
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a pervasive focus of organizations and is regarded, alongside sustainability and financial profit, as a key element of a triple bottom-line approach. Corporations are realizing that CSR cannot be approached compartmentally but instead must be ubiquitous across departments and operations. Therefore, it is in...
This is an investigative, descriptive study that explored fishing regulation conflicts between commercial fishermen and fishery resource management agencies. The purpose of the study was to develop a rich picture of the conflict phenomenon and apply sociological theory in order to illuminate the underlying structures and functions which contribute to...
Climate change increases weather unpredictability, threatens communities whose livelihoods depend on natural resources, such as rural communities. Utilizing a Community Capital Framework (Flora and Flora, 2013) and Governance of Complex Adaptive Systems (Duit and Galaz, 2008), this study concentrated on the role of cultural and political capital in supporting rural...
Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity where participants (geocachers) utilize a handheld Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or smartphone to download coordinates in order to navigate to the location of a hidden container, a geocache. Since its inception in 2000 geocaching has grown exponentially. The potential ecological and recreation management...
Two theoretical models were examined based on the contributions of
preservice teachers' personal teaching efficacy, ethnic causal attributions, past
teaching, and international interaction experiences to their behaviors toward
international children in multicultural small group activity sessions. Path analytic
results revealed that for both models, these variables together did not significantly...
This thesis seeks to better understand the most pressing cultural barriers to progress in the sustainability movement, and to offer suggestions for overcoming barriers. This research includes a two-year long case study of the sustainability movement at OSU, where the researcher coordinated projects encouraging behavior change. Despite increasing severity and...
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David A. McMurray
This thesis seeks to better understand the most pressing cultural
The purpose of this study was to identify antimutagens in yogurt active against the
experimental colon carcinogen, N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine (MNNG). Our
initial experiments showed that acetone extracts of yogurt, or milk fermented by various
lactic acid bacteria were antimutagenic against MNNG and 3,2'-dimethyl-4-aminobiphenyl
(DMAB) in the Ames test (Salmonella typhimurium TA...
Haiti is far from achieving the UN goal of sanitation access for all; 20% Haitians have no sanitation access, and less than 0.1% of urban excreta is safely managed. Container-Based Sanitation (CBS) may be a key tool for achieving equitable sanitation coverage in Haiti’s cities. CBS is a sanitation strategy...
On February 9th, 2014 Michael Sam stated in an interview with ESPN's "Outside the Lines" that he is gay. Since he was drafted, Sam will become the first ever openly gay player in NFL history. The following study aims to explore ESPN's coverage of Michael Sam, with a goal of...
Global annual average temperatures are rising, creating extreme heat events or heatwaves that are increasing in frequency, length, and severity. The world will endure more of these events as climate change worsens and heat-related mortality and morbidity will increase due to warming conditions. At the center of heatwaves are urban...
Because of the high cost of fuel for nuclear reactors, fuel cycle
costs must be predicted accurately.
This leads to the high cost computer computations and a search for cheaper yet still accurate
methods. For this paper we have chosen to study an alternate
method for calculating thermal neutron cell...
A project funded by the Southern California Edison (SCE) Company, Research
Center of Irwindale, California, has supported the development of a performance and
parameter prediction software program for use during the refurbishment of large
synchronous machines, turbine generators, and synchronous condensers. The computer
program was developed for SCE to allow...
The effects of a school-based social-emotional and character development program, Positive Action, on the developmental trajectory of character development was evaluated using data from three randomized trials. Results come from 1) 4-years of data from elementary children in 20 Hawai`i schools, 2) 3-years of data from elementary children in 14...
A number of thinkers are becoming increasingly persuaded
that our anthropocentric view of nature is inadequate, that we
need a "new morality" with regard to the environment. In this
essay, I argue that an alternative to anthropocentricism is
available to us now-and has been since at least 1836. I look...
A conceptual model of the tidal flat system, emphasizing the
sulfur cycle was presented. Measurements were made of the vertical
distribution within tidal flat deposits of total aerobic and sulfate
reducing bacteria, total sulfides, redox potential, volatile solids,
and particle size. Variations in dissolved oxygen and free sulfides
in the...
Effects of current velocity, irradiance, and grazing on the
biomass, taxonomic structure, physiognomy, and chemical composition
of lotic algal assemblages were investigated. Four experiments,
lasting 32 to 75 days, were conducted in laboratory streams to
determine how these factors affect algal assemblages singly, and in
concert with each other.
Regardless...
This dissertation approaches the problem of how to design process
measurements by identifying process attributes which are common to all product
development processes. By classifying the generic attributes of a product
development process and their relationships, a framework is established which
gives definition and context to individual measurements. At the...
Many nations that invest in aquaculture and fisheries for improved nutrition and food security are located in areas prone to natural disasters, such as typhoons. While all residents are vulnerable to the effects of disasters, research suggests that women are disproportionately affected at all stages of disaster management: preparedness, response,...
The Oregon State University (OSU) Advanced Plant Experiment (APEX) is a one-fourth height, one-half time scale, reduced pressure integral systems test facility designed to model the long-term cooling capabilities of the emergency core cooling systems of the Westinghouse AP600. This study provides a brief description of the APEX test facility,...
This study, based on Brunswik's (1952, 1956) lens model,
examined the judgment policies employed by 67 art students
and faculty when they evaluate instruction. Four groups of
subjects, non-art majors, undergraduate art majors, graduate
and bachelor of fine arts students, and faculty members, judged
a series of 35 hypothetical teacher...
In 2021, Oregon’s legislature passed House Bill 2021 with relative ease. House Bill 2021 is a mandate for the state’s two largest utilities to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation on a decreasing scale, reaching 100% below baseline levels by 2040. This ambitious piece of legislation, meant to reduce the...
Disturbance and microclimate interact to play a central role influencing the composition and structure of plant communities. In this thesis, I examined plant community composition and structure twenty years after high severity wildfires with and without post-fire management (salvage logging, fuel treatment, tree planting, and shrub release) under contrasting microclimatic...
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David E. Hibbs
Disturbance and microclimate interact to play a central role influencing
Riparian areas that can be used as reference sites on which to base goals of vegetation restoration have not been documented in the Oregon Coast Range. I examined the composition and distribution of unmanaged riparian overstories in the central Oregon Coast Range along nine streams which have experienced minimal disturbance...
Hardrock mining is associated with severe environmental and economic costs. Of particular concern is acid mine drainage which has contaminated several thousand kilometers of streams across the United States representing a formidable danger to watershed health. Given the high risks of this activity, ensuring high regulatory standards may be an...
In recent years, model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an increasingly popular alternative to more traditional model-based or optimization-based control methods in solving robotic legged locomotion. However, deploying RL in the real world can be a significant undertaking. Constructing reward functions which compel controllers to learn the desired behavior...
Learning latent space representations of high-dimensional world states has been at the core of recent rapid growth in reinforcement learning(RL). At the same time, RL algo- rithms have suffered from ignored uncertainties in the predicted estimates of model-free or model-based methods. In our work, we investigate both of these aspects...
Metal grating based plasmonic filters are widely researched for their unique properties of field enhancement and localization of light beyond diffraction limit. However, the plasmonic grating filters reported in literature mostly have broadband outputs making them unsuitable for spectroscopy. In this project, we have designed, fabricated, and characterized an array...
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a popular tool for solving control tasks, with multiple works focusing on the complex and dynamic task of locomotion. However, the naive application of reinforcement learning to this problem often produces maladaptive policies that exploit the model or reward function. This results in behavior that...
This thesis focuses on the problem of object tracking. Given a video, the general objective of tracking is to track the location over time of one or more targets in the image sequence. This is a very challenging task as algorithms need to deal with problems such as appearance variations,...
Legged robots have consistently captured our collective imagination through various forms of media, from Hollywood films, anime, and viral Youtube videos of robots accomplishing incredible feats of acrobatics. These robots have the potential to navigate our environments, capable of completing tasks that would otherwise require human intervention. However, developing controls...
We consider the problem of tactical assault planning in real-time strategy games where a team of friendly agents must launch an assault on an enemy. This problem offers many challenges including a highly dynamic and uncertain environment, multiple agents, durative actions, numeric attributes, and different optimization objectives. While the dynamics...
Dynamic bipedal locomotion is among the most difficult and yet relevant problems in modern robotics. While a multitude of classical control methods for bipedal locomotion exist, they are often brittle or limited in capability. In recent years, work in applying reinforcement learning to robotics has lead to superior performance across...
The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between
the similarity of food preferences among parents and children,
and parent attitudes.
Thirty-five children of preschool ages and their parents served
as subjects for this study. All children were enrolled in preschool
programs established by the = Family Life...
Automatic analysis of American football videos can help teams develop strategies and extract patterns with less human effort. In this work, we focus on the problem of automatically determining which team is on offense/defense, which is an important subproblem for higher-level analysis. While seemingly mundane, this problem is quite challenging...
Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is an online-planning algorithm for decision-theoretic planning in domains with stochastic and combinatorial structure. The general applicability of MCTS makes it an ideal first choice to investigate when developing planners for complex applications requiring automated control and planning. The first contribution of this thesis is to...
A branch mortality dating technique and whorl
sampling strategy were implemented to model five-year
crown recession from data collected on temporary
plots. Twenty-eight Douglas-fir from two levels-of-growing-
stock studies in Oregon and Washington were
first dissected to validate the proposed dating
technique and assess alternative sampling strategies.
Branch mortalities in...