Anaerobic co-digestion of fats, oils, and grease (FOG) for increased methane (CH4)
production has been of increasing interest to municipal wastewater treatment plants
(WWTP) due to the potential economic benefit of using the produced biogas for
cogeneration of energy. FOG loading increase must be done carefully to mitigate the
risk...
Final Report regarding race relations in Damascus, Oregon for the Honors College course TCE 408H “Sundown Towns in Oregon.” For more information about the course: http://wpmu.library.oregonstate.edu/oregon-multicultural-archives/2013/11/30/sundown-towns-display-2013/
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted family dynamics, specifically with mothers experiencing unique stressors and challenges. This study explored the association between mothers' anxiety induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and their children’s executive function outcome during preschool. A quantitative approach was used with a sample of 219 families in Oregon, utilizing...
Child behavior disorders are the second most prevalent form of mental illness affecting children in the United States (Perou et al., 2013), with lifetime prevalence estimated at 10% (Nock, Kazdin, Hiripi & Kessler, 2007). Negative outcomes associated with ODD during childhood and adolescence include conflict in families, poor peer relationships,...
Parenting is important to a child’s development of empathy. Specifically, parental warmth provides children with emotional connection and a model to learn how to manage their emotions and respond to others’ emotions. Yet warmth is just one dimension of parenting. Supportiveness may also be important but has not yet been...
Self-regulation skills in children are an important indicator of positive life outcomes such as health and wealth. Techniques to improve self-regulation are important, as well as understanding what factors influence child development of self-regulation. This study investigates the connection between total minutes of physical activity per day, as well as...
BACKGROUND: The association of vitamin D with heart attack and stroke remains unclear.
METHOD: Using data from the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), we collected
dietary vitamin D data from 5,995 participants and serum (25)OH vitamin D from 1,606
participants. The association of vitamin D with prevalent heart attack...
Compassion fatigue is a common struggle that helping professionals face; however, it is not yet well understood in early childhood teachers. Compassion fatigue results from caring for individuals who have had traumatic experiences, which can cause physical and emotional exhaustion, leading to a diminished ability to empathize with individuals in...
Children's early self-regulation skills have long-term implications for a variety of academic, social, and health outcomes. Unfortunately, children facing multiple family risk factors (e.g., harsh parenting, economic disadvantage) are more likely to struggle with early self-regulation. Despite early disparities in self-regulation, promising intervention evidence suggests that high quality prekindergarten experiences...
Positive teacher-child relationships, characterized by warmth and closeness, are associated with better behavioral and academic outcomes for children in preschool and elementary school (Hamre & Pianta, 2005). Supporting teachers to establish these positive relationships with children is important in all early care and education (ECE) programs. Head Start programs, designed...
The interactions young children have with teachers, peers, and tasks in early care and education (ECE) settings support development of social and academic skills. The degree to which families and teachers partner to support children’s development may contribute to child engagement. The current study aims to expand our understanding of...
Families and early care and education (ECE) programs are two important contexts in which young children develop (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). Nearly half of all preschoolers are cared for in nonrelative care (e.g. child care center, preschool, Head Start, teacher’s home; Laughlin, 2013), and ECE programs have the potential to...
Adult development and social experiences are intertwined, which has implications for social policy, health, and well-being across the lifespan. This dissertation explores the benefit and risk that close social partners bring to adults' lives, and the efficacy and consequences of engaging social resources to maintain well-being in the face of...
The social aspects of older adults lives are strongly linked to well-being outcomes. Social relationships in older adulthood are rewarding, but also complex, and to maintain a positive social environment, older adults must reconcile long relationships histories, negotiate changing roles, and deal with increasing dependencies. Older adults are known to...
Identifying effective strategies for increasing access to quality care for children from low-income families has important implications for society. This study examined the effectiveness of expanding child care assistance for low-income families (capping expenses at 10% of income and raising eligibility to 200% of the federal poverty line) to purchase...
Predicting recruitment, which is dependent on parent stock size and climate, is vital for forecasting productivity of fish stocks. The effects of climate can be analyzed via the use of climate indices. Three climate indices, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation, and the Oceanic Niño Index, describe...
In the United States, children from underserved racial/ethnic backgrounds encounter greater environmental risk both in terms of the physical environment (e.g., housing quality, access to resources like health services and jobs, and exposure to environmental toxins) and the social environment (e.g., social support, neighborhood crime, racism, and discrimination), due to...
In recent decades the habitat of North American beaver (Castor canadensis) has expanded from boreal forests into pan-Arctic tundra ecosystems. It is unknown how the advance of beavers into Arctic watersheds will impact microbial communities responsible for the mineralization of organic matter (OM), which has implications for carbon cycling. To...
Algae can be used in a variety of wastewater systems to capture nutrients while fixing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I conducted field trials at three locations in Oregon with both corn and potato crops to assess the agronomic value and environmental impact of using the resulting algal biomass as...
Soil water repellency is one cause of rill soil erosion and overland flow that results in the loss of fertile topsoil. Previous research suggests that since microbial growth depends on temperature/moisture and follows diurnal and seasonal cycles, a biological mechanism would be able to explain the observed seasonality and climate...
Immune-mediated diseases are a frequent cause of morbidity and mortality in canine patients. Treatments currently involve generalized suppression of the immune system, and corticosteroids are often used as a first-line agent. While often effective, corticosteroids are unlikely to induce remission without substantial side effects. Second-line immunosuppressive agents may be effective...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the level of social interaction and social comfort among five undergraduate ethnic groups: African American, American Indian, Asian American, Caucasian American, and Hispanic American. Another purpose was to explore the correlation between the level of social contact and comfort among the five...
Drug courts are collaborative community programs that provide active oversight and compliance monitoring of individuals engaged in the criminal justice continuum. Adult drug court program requirements include alcohol and other drug treatment, community support services, and other ancillary services intended to promote life changes in participants and ultimately, prosocial behaviors....
Close social partners may contribute to or detract from older adults’ health and well-being, in part because daily emotions are closely coupled to the quality of daily social interactions. This study examines variation in this sensitivity to interactions with social partners across the contexts of emotional closeness, interactions with others,...
The goal for this study was to examine within-person processes driving individual development related to social goals. We examined how social regulatory processes travel together over time to understand if daily social goal progress is sensitive to variation in experiences of support and hindrance, and the extent to which maintenance...
Water is one of the most biologically and economically important substances on Earth. A significant portion of Earth's water subsists in the subsurface. Our ability to monitor the flow and transport of water and other fluids through this unseen environment is crucial for a myriad of reasons.
One difficulty we...
Soil water repellency may be influenced by microbes whereby they produce aliphatic constituents (non-wetting materials) that coat the soil particles when they are subjected to desiccation stress.
In order to better predict the aggregation state of nanomaterials, the factors that influence aggregation must be understood. The combined effects of natural and engineered coatings have been shown to factor into nanoparticle aggregation behavior in preliminary research. In this study, aggregation behaviors of gold nanoparticles with two different engineered...
Seven cerebral palsied children living in the home and their
mothers were involved in this study. The mothers attended eight
weekly sessions and were instructed in basic nutrition and feeding
skill development. A Food and Nutrition Education Curriculum was
developed for this instruction. Each of the eight lessons in the...
Automated decision aids can improve human decision-making but the benefits are often compromised by inefficient use. The current experiment examined whether metacognition—the ability to assess self-performance—and numeracy—the ability to understand and work with numbers—predict the efficiency of automation use in a signal detection task. Two-hundred twenty-one participants classified random dot...
The rising demand on freshwater resources emphasizes the benefit of biogeochemical processes that maintain clean water by removing pollutants such as excess nitrogen. The most sensitive step in the removal of nitrogen from waterways is the oxidation of ammonia, a part of nitrification, which is carried out by ammonia oxidizing...
Computer science is, at its core, about solving problems. The "Carry out the Plan" portion of problem solving is often examined and emphasized in CS 1 and CS 2, forgetting to emphasize the other important aspects of the problem solving process. This study focuses on the other problem-solving steps, which...
The secondary structure of a 16S rRNA molecule is a graphical, two dimensional representation used by molecular biologists in determining evolutionary relationships between different organisms. By comparing two secondary structures, scientists can obtain knowledge of how 'related' one species of bacteria may be to another species [OLSE 1986]. To date,...
Celiac disease, an autoimmune response triggered by the consumption of seed storage proteins of cereals, affects an estimated 1% of the human population. In the case of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), one of the world’s most consumed cereals, alcohol-soluble proteins, the gliadins, have been identified as the allergy-eliciting agents. Previous...
When observers monitor for infrequent signals for extended durations, they generally experience a decline in detections over time. This decline is termed the vigilance decrement. Current theories of vigilance attribute the decrement to three potential mechanisms: conservative shifts in response bias, losses of sensitivity, and an increased rate of attentional...
A continuous, low-velocity, nearly monochromatic atomic beam is created using
laser cooling and two-dimensional magneto-optic trapping. Rubidium atoms from an
effusive oven are slowed and cooled using Zeeman-tuned slowing. The scattering force
from a counter-propagating, frequency-stabilized diode laser beam is used to decelerate
the thermal beam of atoms to a...
The quorum sensing regulatory pathway has been extensively studied for its impact on the virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an opportunistic pathogen that causes acute and chronic infections in immunocompromised individuals such as those suffering from the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis. Part of the quorum sensing pathway that has not been...
Algae have shown great potential as a source for renewable fuels. However, current production schemes have not been able to prove a sustainable energy return on investment due in part to the high costs of nutrient addition and the energy required for drying the biomass. Integrated algae-dairy production systems have...
This research investigates the role of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in the life experiences of University Student-Athletes. This qualitative study employs a naturalistic and grounded paradigm in an effort to capture the essence of these experiences. Participants are four student-athletes from Oregon State University who play intercollegiate athletics in the Pac-10...
The purpose of this study was to understand the influence of organic material and nutrients from spawning salmon and supplemented salmon carcasses on stream food webs. My study objectives were to examine 1) assimilation of salmon-derived nutrients (SDN) by producers and consumers in the food web, 2) epilithic biofilm productivity,...
Fluctuations and spatial heterogeneity of habitat and resources is thought to underlie niche variation in animal populations, with intraspecific differences serving to produce or maintain population-, community-, or ecosystem-level patterns. Individual diet variation, defined as individual variation in food resource use within a population that is consistent over time, is...
Early behavioral regulation has been identified as an important component of school readiness, yet few easy-to-administer measures exist that directly assess this skill in young children outside of the United States (U.S.). In this dissertation, two studies were conducted to examine the reliability and validity of a direct measure of...
The act of accessing food is embedded within various systems of power. This dissertation problematizes our understanding of food access for vulnerable populations by making explicit ways that social constructions, including power, affect food access for vulnerable populations. This is accomplished across three manuscripts. The first manuscript presents textual analysis...
Suspensory apparatus breakdown and hyperextension of the metacarpophalangeal and metatarsophalangeal (fetlock) joints is a common condition in the llama and has been observed in llamas of all ages. Llama breeders refer to the condition as "down in the pasterns" or "down in the fetlocks." The condition can result in debilitating...
Biracial and Multiracial people are one of the fastest growing racial groups in the United States. Individuals with a mixed identity have the ability to choose endless racial/ethnic designations that best exemplify their racial/ethnic social identity. However, people who are racially/ethnically mixed may receive criticism if their proclaimed identity does...
Radiochromic film dosimetry offers many advantages over standard film that requires wet chemical processing. Radiochromic film offers: a permanent color change upon irradiation; high spatial resolution; a response that is independent of energy, particle type, and angle of incidence; near tissue equivalence; and a wide dosimetric range. However, there are...
This research paper attempts to identify variables which may influence the public's support for requiring gun permits by looking at areas which may increase their care of safety. The variables that are explored through the General Social Survey are: knowing someone who has commited suicide or not and the number...