Many economic development methods over the years have tried to solve the problem of poverty with varied success. Microenterprise development is a method that works with the poor to create small self-run businesses to increase their income, and therefore bring more freedom from disease illiteracy and discrimination. Within microenterprise development...
The goal of this research was to characterize thermal habitat requirements for juvenile redband steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss gairdneri) in the South Fork John Day River (SFJD), Oregon using physiological indicators of fish condition. Physiological indices of fish condition measured were whole body lipid content and heat shock proteins, specifically...
The Great Recession, which resulted from the burst of housing bubble and officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, started as a national recession in the U.S. and then affected countries across the world. Economies reacted differently to this recession and those systems that lost fewer jobs and/or recovered...
WebGen 5 is a software tool for automatically generating Web scripts that display Web forms and operate on data in a database. WebGen 5 is implemented as a collection of templates. Each template, combined with a corresponding configuration file, generates one of the following six types of Web scripts: search,...
Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are the key building block for sensor applications, such as wireless communications and digital electronics. These applications require ADCs to have medium to high accuracy (normally from 10-14 bits) and relatively low signal bandwidth (ranging from 100Hz-150kHz). Since these applications are often powered by batteries, high power...
We demonstrated a low-cost and high-sensitivity DNA detection method using quantum dot-fullerene based molecular beacons (MBs) and magnetic nanoparticles. The MB tethered magnetic nanoparticles can be well dispersed in analytes for efficient DNA capture and concentrated by an external magnetic field for enhanced fluorescence signal detection. The detection requires only...
Compactness in deep learning can be critical to a model’s viability in low-resource applications, and a common approach to extreme model compression is quantization. We consider Iterative Product Quantization (iPQ) with Quant-Noise [Fan et al., 2020] to be state-of-the-art in this area, but this quantization framework suffers from preventable inference...
In previous work, the Idea Garden was created to help those relatively new to programming overcome their barriers in CoScripter. The goal of this thesis was to generalize the Idea Garden's success to other users and environments. We present a set of principles on how to help EUPs like this...
Relationship between the exchange rate and the trade balance is a key component for a developing nation. Although, in theoretical sense, depreciation of currency would result in an improvement in the trade balance, sluggish response of trade flows to changes in currency has prompted researches to look in to the...
This dissertation consists of three essays that collectively address the importance of accounting for spatial heterogeneity and spatial dependence of environmental assets and natural resources in policy making. The first essay examines the value of different wetland ecosystem services using an expanded meta-dataset of valuation studies in North America. The...