Engineering Commons^™

Understanding Quadrature Modulation By Designing A 7mhz Iq Test Bench To Encode The Polybius Square, William Lee Bradley

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis outlines the design of an IQ Test Bench that allows for experimentation of quadrature modulation techniques. Quadrature modulation utilizes two signals I and Q, 90° out of phase from each other, to greatly increase communication data rates. Using Desmos, a thorough mathematical analysis of waveform mixing is presented, and constellation diagrams are plotted from the results. From this an ancient fire signaling technique known as the Polybius Square is encoded into the system. The IQ Test Bench is built from fundamental components that would be contained within an RFFE: a local oscillator and two frequency mixers. The LO …

An Evaluation Of The Effectiveness Of Innovation Ecosystems In Facilitating The Adoption Of Sustainable Entrepreneurship, Dana Sami Bakry

Dissertations and Theses

Sustainable entrepreneurship has a substantial role of a steadily growing economy and advanced industrial economies. Several strategies have been formed and employed to support the adoption of innovation and technologies in the sustainable entrepreneurship sector. However, the successful outcome of these strategies in achieving their goals depends on how effective they are in satisfying their objectives and thus increasing innovation adoption. One measurement for effectiveness of ecosystem implements can be their support to the input of the process of innovation and technologies adoption and their impact on satisfying regional goals.

The objective of this research is evaluating the effectiveness of …

Augmentative And Alternative Communication Use, Service Delivery Experiences, And Communicative Participation For People With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Betts Peters

Dissertations and Theses

People with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) often experience changes to their speech, and may use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices and techniques to maintain the ability to communicate. The use of AAC may facilitate the participation of people with ALS in various life situations involving communication. There is limited data in the literature about the AAC approaches currently used by people with ALS, the professional services they receive to support communication, or the effects of AAC on their communicative participation. This dissertation involved a nationwide online survey of people with ALS, and comprises three papers intended to add to …

The Impact Of New Light Rail Service On Employment Growth In Portland, Oregon, Lahar Santra

Dissertations and Theses

This study quantitatively examines the impact of the new Light Rail Transit (LRT) service on employment growth in retail, knowledge, and service sectors before and after opening the LRT. At the corridor level, this study conducts a case study of Greenline in Southeast Portland, Oregon. The results of the corridor level study suggest that the new LRT service increased employment along the Greenline corridor among all the three sectors of interest- retail, knowledge, service in the long-term (ten years) while having slightly different results for the short-term (five years), likely due to the slow growth of LRT benefits. This study …

Examining Bicycle And Motorized Vehicle Speeds And Their Relationships In The Context Of Urban Roadways, Jaclyn Sue Schaefer

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis presents a compilation of papers exploring passenger car and bicycle speeds through their interactions with each other and with urban roadway factors.

First, following a concern raised in part of the traffic literature that a large mode shift toward bicycling may cause travel time delays and potentially exacerbate congestion instead of alleviate it unless bicycle lanes are installed, an empirical study detailing how the presence of bicycles on urban roads without bicycle lanes may affect passenger car speeds is presented. Pneumatic tube data from six predominantly low speed, low volume roads in Portland, Oregon were utilized to identify …

Methodologies To Quantify Transit Performance Metrics At The System-Level Using High-Resolution Gps, Stop-Level, And Gtfs Archived Transit Data, Travis Bradley Glick

Dissertations and Theses

Performance metrics have typically focused at two main scales: a microscopic scale that focuses on specific locations, time-periods, and trips; and, a macroscopic scale that averages metrics over longer times, entire routes, and networks. When applied to entire transit systems, microscopic methodologies often have computational limitations while macroscopic methodologies ascribe artificial uniformity to non-uniform analysis areas. These limitations highlight the need for a middle approach.

This dissertation presents a mesoscopic analysis based around timepoint-segments, which are a novel application of an existing system for many transit agencies. For this research, routes are divided into a consecutive group of bus stops …

Utilizing High-Resolution Archived Transit Data To Study Before-And-After Travel-Speed And Travel-Time Conditions, Travis Bradley Glick

Dissertations and Theses

Travel times, operating speeds, and service reliability influence costs and service attractiveness. This paper outlines an approach to quantify how these metrics change after a modification of roadway design or transit routes using archived transit data. The Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet), Portland's public transportation provider, archives automatic vehicle location (AVL) data for all buses as part of their bus dispatch system (BDS). This research combines three types of AVL data (stop event, stop disturbance, and high-resolution) to create a detailed account of transit behavior; this probe data gives insights into the behavior of transit as well as …

Making Software, Making Regions: Labor Market Dualization, Segmentation, And Feminization In Austin, Portland And Seattle, Dillon Mahmoudi

Dissertations and Theses

Through mixed-methods research, this dissertation details the regionally variegated and place-specific software production processes in three second-tier US software regions. I focus on the relationship between different industrial, firm, and worker production configurations and broad-based economic development, prosperity, and inequality. I develop four main empirical findings.

First, I argue for a periodization of software production that tracks with changes in software laboring activity, software technologies, and wage-employment relationships. Through a GIS-based method, I use the IPUMS-USA to extensively measure the amount and type of software labor in industries across the US between 1970 and 2015. I map the uneven geography …

An Analytical System For Determining Disciplinary Vocabulary For Data-Driven Learning: An Example From Civil Engineering, Philippa Jean Otto

Dissertations and Theses

Data-driven learning (DDL), an inductive teaching approach in which students learn through corpus interaction, has gained recent traction as way to teach specialized vocabulary in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes. There is little research, however, that addresses how to choose specialized vocabulary for teaching with DDL.

This study addressed this gap in research by exploring the potential of a three-part analytical, corpus-based system for determining vocabulary to teach with DDL for a specific context of language use. This system included (1) identifying words that were significantly more frequent in a specialized expert corpus than in a corpus of general …

Land Use Mix And Pedestrian Travel Behavior: Advancements In Conceptualization And Measurement, Steven Robert Gehrke

Dissertations and Theses

Smart growth policies have often emphasized the importance of land use mix as an intervention beholding of lasting urban planning and public health benefits. Past transportation-land use research has identified potential efficiency gains achieved by mixed-use neighborhoods and the subsequent shortening of trip lengths; whereas, public health research has accredited increased land use mixing as an effective policy for facilitating greater physical activity. However, despite the celebrated transportation, land use, and health benefits of improved land use mixing and the extent of topical attention, no consensus has been reached regarding the conceptualization and measurement of this key smart growth principle …

Configuring The Urban Smart Grid: Transitions, Experimentation, And Governance, Anthony Michael Levenda

Dissertations and Theses

In the face of challenges of energy security, decarbonization, resilience, and the replacement of aging infrastructure systems, federal, state, and local actors are facilitating the development of smart electricity networks to transition towards a more sustainable electricity system. In the United States, development of "smart grids" is being pursued as a national policy mandate and goal, promising that the deployment of smart grid technologies -- referring in general to digital information and communication technologies that sense, monitor, control and manage the electric grid -- will make electricity systems more environmentally sustainable and reliable, and at the same time, provide opportunities …

Practical Wired Digital Communications Link Analysis, Raymond Matthew Schmelzer

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis deals with the analysis of a Wired High Speed Serial Data Link (PAM2) which is commonly used throughout the data-communications and tele-communications industry. The goal of this study is to build a scalable simulation tool using Matlab that ultimately uses Receiver Bit Error Ratio (BER) as the metric for data link health. This study is also designed to aid in link specification development.

The Matlab and theoretical development is broken up into three sections being Transmitter (TX), Channel (Hs) and Receiver (RX). Realistic noise impairments can be added to each section along the signal path creating signal stresses …

Exploratory Study Of The Adoption And Use Of The Smartphone Technology In Emerging Regions: Case Of Saudi Arabia, Fahad Abdulaziz Aldhaban

Dissertations and Theses

Users' acceptance of a new information technology (IT) is considered to be a key determinant factor of its success. Also, studying users' adoption and use of new IT plays an important role in determining users' needs and reducing business risk, especially in industry segments with rapid changes in IT such as Smartphone technology. Such rapid evolution is influencing consumers' behaviors, their daily lifestyle, the manner of conducting their activities and their ways of consuming and using information.

Smartphone technology holds a promising future with an expected global market that could reach US $258 billion by the end of year 2015 …

Advances In Autonomous-Underwater-Vehicle Based Passive Bottom-Loss Estimation By Processing Of Marine Ambient Noise, Lanfranco Muzi

Dissertations and Theses

Accurate modeling of acoustic propagation in the ocean waveguide is important to SONAR-performance prediction, and requires, particularly in shallow water environments, characterizing the bottom reflection loss with a precision that databank-based modeling cannot achieve. Recent advances in the technology of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) make it possible to envision a survey system for seabed characterization composed of a short array mounted on a small AUV. The bottom power reflection coefficient (and the related reflection loss) can be estimated passively by beamforming the naturally occurring marine ambient-noise acoustic field recorded by a vertical line array of hydrophones. However, the reduced array …

An Exploration Of Bicyclist Comfort Levels Utilizing Crowdsourced Data, Bryan Philip Blanc

Dissertations and Theses

Bicycle transportation has become a central priority of urban areas invested in improving sustainability, livability, and public health outcomes. Transportation agencies are striving to increase the comfort of their bicycle networks to improve the experience of existing cyclists and to attract new cyclists. The Oregon Department of Transportation sponsored the development of ORcycle, a smartphone application designed to collect cyclist travel, comfort, and safety information throughout Oregon. The sample resulting from the initial deployment of the application between November 2014 and March 2015 is described and analyzed within this thesis. 616 bicycle trips from 148 unique users were geo-matched to …

Network Structure, Network Flows And The Phenomenon Of Influence In Online Social Networks: An Exploratory Empirical Study Of Twitter Conversations About Youtube Product Categories, Nitin Venkat Mayande

Dissertations and Theses

Traditional marketing models are swiftly being upended by the advent of online social networks. Yet, practicing firms that are engaging with online social networks neither have a reliable theory nor sufficient practical experience to make sense of the phenomenon. Extant theory in particular is based on observations of the real world, and may thus not apply to online social networks. Practicing firms may consequently be misallocating a large amount of resources, simply because they do not know how the online social networks with which they interact are organized.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how online social networks …

An Analysis Of Bicycle-Vehicle Interactions At Signalized Intersections With Bicycle Boxes, William Robert Farley

Dissertations and Theses

A before-and-after analysis was performed at eleven intersections where a bike box was installed in Portland, Oregon to explore the safety effects of the treatment. Video data were gathered prior to installation at 14 intersections where a bike box installation was planned by the Portland Bureau of Transportation. Cameras were set up to capture three full twenty-four hour days (72 hours) of data for each intersection from Tuesday through Thursday. Of the 14 original selected intersections, 11 intersections actually received the bike box treatment. Video data were again gathered for these intersections after the installation of the bike box for …

Evidence Supporting Treatment Practice Based Delineation Of Stormwater Runoff Zones, Jacob J. Gorski

Dissertations and Theses

Particles mobilized by stormwater negatively affect receiving surface waters. Stormwater best management practices (BMPs) can reduce solids along with associated pollutants in runoff but engineers and environmental managers have been long vexed by the problem of choosing the optimal BMP for a given situation. A common BMP process for solids removal is sedimentation. This thesis addresses the question of whether the effectiveness (and thus choice) of a sedimentation device can be estimated (and thus optimized) from the particle size properties of runoff, which, in turn, could be associated with specific runoff zones or land uses. Presented here is a series …

Trust-But-Verify: Guaranteeing The Integrity Of User-Generated Content In Online Applications, Akshay Dua

Dissertations and Theses

Online applications that are open to participation lack reliable methods to establish the integrity of user-generated information. Users may unknowingly own compromised devices, or intentionally publish forged information. In these scenarios, applications need some way to determine the "correctness" of autonomously generated information. Towards that end, this thesis presents a "trust-but-verify" approach that enables open online applications to independently verify the information generated by each participant. In addition to enabling independent verification, our framework allows an application to verify less information from more trustworthy users and verify more information from less trustworthy ones. Thus, an application can trade-off performance for …

Improving Vehicle Trip Generation Estimations For Urban Contexts: A Method Using Household Travel Surveys To Adjust Ite Trip Generation Rates, Kristina Marie Currans

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this research is to develop and test a widely available, ready-to-use method for adjusting the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Trip Generation Handbook vehicle trip generation estimates for urban context using regional household travel survey data. The ITE Handbook has become the predominant method for estimating vehicle trips generated by different land uses or establishment, providing a method for data collection and vehicle trip estimation based on the size of the development (e.g. gross square footage, number of employees, number of dwelling units). These estimates are used in traffic impact analysis to assess the amount of impact …

Understanding Travel Modes To Non-Work Destinations: Analysis Of An Establishment Survey In Portland, Oregon, Christopher D. Muhs

Dissertations and Theses

During the past three decades, research in travel behavior has generally proceeded from broad-level, aggregate analysis of mode share--the proportions of walking, bicycling, transit, and vehicle travel occurring in traffic analysis zones, census tracts, neighborhood, or other geographical units--to fine-grained, disaggregate analysis of mode choices and other trip-making attributes at the individual level. One potential issue is whether there are differences in the types of conclusions drawn from results of analyses performed at these different levels, as these results directly inform transportation planning and policy.

This thesis aims in part to confirm whether the types of conclusions drawn from different …

Dynamic Characterization Of Aluminum Softball Bats, Danny V. Lee

Dissertations and Theses

On January 1, 2000, the Amateur Softball Association of America (ASA) imposed maximum bat performance limitations on commercial softball bats. The ASA adopted a testing standard defined by the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) to determine the bat performance factor (BPF), a normalized coefficient of restitution that must be less than 1.2 for the bat to be eligible for ASA sanctioned events.

The ASTM standard requires that the softball strike the bat, which is free to rotate in the horizontal plane, at 26.8 mfs ± 0.3 mfs (88 ftfs ± 1 ftfs) with little or no spin. The …

Metrication In Highway Design And Operations, Taher A. Al-Fadhli

Dissertations and Theses

The complex problem of metrication of highway design, construction and maintenance has been the subject of a number of studies and pilot projects carried out by the Federal Highway Administration (F.H.W.A.) of the United States and the Roads and Transportation Association of Canada. Through a research grant, the FHWA of the U.S.A. assigned the Ohio Department of Transportation, the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Oregon Highway Division to design, construct, and maintain these metric projects. The author has reviewed the experience and conclusions of these studies and the problems encountered in the pilot projects relative to the design, survey, …

Entropy Reduction Of English Text Using Variable Length Grouping, Vincent Norman Ast Jr.

Dissertations and Theses

It is known that the entropy of English text can be reduced by arranging the text into groups of two or more letters each. The higher the order of the grouping the greater is the entropy reduction. Using this principle in a computer text compressing system brings about difficulties, however, because the number of entries required in the translation table increases exponentially with group size. This experiment examined the possibility of using a translation table containing only selected entries of all group sizes with the expectation of obtaining a substantial entropy reduction with a relatively small table.

An expression was …