Digital Commons Network^™

Improving Bicycle Crossings At Unsignalized Intersections Through Pavement Markings: Analysis Of The City Of Portland Innovative Strategy, Frank Boateng Appiah

Dissertations and Theses

The increasing trend in the number of bicycle crashes in the U.S since 2009 has been a major challenge to safety. In 2019, a total of 36,096 people were killed on U.S roadways. A total of 846 (2.3%) of these fatalities were bicyclists and around 75% of the bicycle fatalities occur in urban areas and intersections are common locations of crashes. Many bicycle enhancements such as bike boxes, bicycle signals, curb extensions have been installed to improve safety at signalized intersections. The City of Portland OR experimented with an innovative treatment to improve bicycle crossings at unsignalized crossings. This treatment, …

Citoyen.Ne.S: Conversation En Français, Annabelle Dolidon

PDXOpen: Open Educational Resources

CITOYEN.NE.S is a French language method for the conversation class at the intermediate/ advanced level. Content and activities are built around the concepts of diversity, inclusivity and equity, and engage students to practice French while questioning and participating in the world they live in – to be full citizens whatever their background, their race or their gender identity. As the French spelling of the title indicates, the book embraces écriture inclusive and uses it for instructions and general information for all students.

The book is composed of five chapters covering various themes. None of them provides again basic vocabulary from …

Building A Biomechanical Model Of A Rat Forelimb, Joshua Nathaniel Eric Mak

Dissertations and Theses

This paper presents a biomechanical model of the rat forelimb to test theories of determining viscoelastic muscle parameters. Several biomechanical models of rat hindlimbs have been developed and have explored the effects of multi-muscle control during locomotion. The forelimb model uses two ball-and-socket joints to model clavicle and scapula movement. A third ball-and-socket joint is used at the shoulder and two hinge joints are used at the elbow and wrist. Scapula motion is further constrained by muscle and spring elements. Each forelimb has 11 degrees of freedom, and 23 Hill-type muscles. The model has been created in Animatlab, which includes …

Online Activism And Real Life Environmentalism, Emily Grace Anderson

Dissertations and Theses

Past and present human activities have created and accelerated an array of environmental catastrophes and various systems in the environment remain under threat as a result of human behavior. In hopes of mitigating environmental consequences, a social movement has arisen to encourage people to behave in ways that are more environmentally sustainable. Research shows that individual behavior choices impact the environment, and this influence can be used to positively affect the environment through engagement in pro-environmental behavior. Like with many other social movements, the internet has been a tool in spreading awareness of a cause and allowing people the opportunity …

Regionalist Romance: "America Eats" And The Culinary Myth-Making Of The Federal Writers' Project, Icarus J. Smith

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis expands upon food historian Camille Bégin's assertion that the "America Eats" manuscript of the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project was "in tune with the interwar revival of regionalism" in the United States. Using archival material associated with the project and regionalist literature of the period, this study explores the dichotomies inherent in the broader regionalist movement of the Depression Era -- particularly using the project's treatment of the American West. Using foodways as the topic and regionalism as the intellectual framework, the FWP employees sought to document what they believed was the authentic culinary character of the nation …

Improved Predictive Modeling Techniques For Non-Linear Solder Material Behavior, Arman Millian Ahari

Dissertations and Theses

Accurate prediction of fatigue life of solder joints in electronic packaging applications becomes of critical importance as semiconductor device technology and manufacturing constraints grow in complexity. To gain visibility on IC device performance and reliability, thermo-mechanical simulation is performed based on a unified, viscoplastic material model, which is dependent on nine parameters.

In this study, an improved method of Anand parameter extraction, which involves curve-fitting non-linear experimental stress data, is proposed to improve the accuracy of numerical predictions for solder reliability. Theoretical equations for uni-axial stress-strain response and creep response are derived, then details on their relevance to experimental and …

Trump's Legacy In The Middle East: Strategic Shift And The Geopolitics Of American Foreign Policy In The Region, Bilel Kriaa

Dissertations and Theses

The last six months of the Trump administration witnessed interesting developments regarding its legacy in the Middle East. The normalization of ties between four Arab states and Israel constituted major breakthroughs not only in the regional inter-state relations but also for the American foreign policy in the region.

In this context, this thesis offers insights into how to understand and evaluate the administration's approach towards these developments. Based on systematic and empirical research, I analyze a corpus comprised of Trump-era foreign policy documents regarding the Iranian and Israeli-Palestinian questions. I find, firstly, that the Trump administration pursued a strategic shift …

Serfs, Excluded Or Governed By The State? Serfdom In Russia, An Historiographical Analysis, Jason Ferguson

Dissertations and Theses

Serfdom in Russia has often been viewed in Anglo-U.S. historiography as an exceptional institution in that it emerged in the early-modern age, after serfdom in Western Europe had ended, and that it persisted for well over two centuries, spanning the Muscovite and the Imperial eras. Many historians have thus compared serfdom in Russia unfavorably to labor systems that developed in Western European nations at that time, considered to be "modern" and "free," in contrast to the "unfree" labor obtained through Russian serfdom. This thesis presents the scholars who take this view, and refers to them as "Consensus Historians," as their …

Undrained Cyclic Loading Of Low Plasticity Silty Soils In The Pacific Northwest Using Laboratory And Field Cyclic Shear Testing, Angelica Melissa Preciado Reyes

Dissertations and Theses

The cyclic behavior of a fine-grained low plasticity silty soil (plasticity index of approximately 15) at a site in Portland, Oregon, is characterized using a field and laboratory cyclic shear test program. The field cyclic tests were performed using the NHERI@UTexas large mobile shakers T-Rex and Rattler. The laboratory tests were performed using resonant column torsional shear and cyclic direct simple shear devices. This testing program's results were used to evaluate the soil's potential to develop excess pore water pressure with cyclic shear strains ranging from 0.00001% to 3%. The laboratory cyclic test results are compared against field cyclic test …

The Return To Anisotropy Across A Jet In Crossflow, Gregory P. Sakradse

Dissertations and Theses

With data from experiments on a jet of air emitting from an orifice flush with the floor of a wind tunnel providing a transverse flow, analysis is conducted to extract information about the state of anisotropy in the Reynolds stress tensor. Inflow velocities are modulated across two distinct turbulence intensity regimes while holding jet exit conditions constant, providing an opportunity to isolate effects of both jet to crossflow velocity ratio, r and the effects of the turbulence carried by the crossflow. Anisotropy in the Reynolds stress tensor is examined through anisotropy invariant maps and evolution of the function F, …

Freedom Vs. Security: Analyzing The Connection Between States' Prioritization Of Security Over Civil Liberties And Citizen Support For Democratic Norms, Carlyn Trumbull Madden

Dissertations and Theses

Is global democracy declining? This is a question many have argued over, leading to multiple, oftentimes contradictory, answers regarding causes and potential solutions. This thesis seeks to explore the question of democratic decline by analyzing changes over time in public opinion survey data in three states- New Zealand, Turkey, and the United States- looking specifically at how the government has balanced the tradeoff between security and civil liberties in the post-9/11 world. I argue that long-term government prioritization of security over freedoms has eroded support for fundamental democratic norms, as citizens willingly accept restrictions to their rights in exchange for …

Mid-Miocene Icelandites Of Eastern Oregon: Petrogenesis And Magmatic Lineage To Main-Phase Crbg With Constraints On Storage Sites, Melissa Aileen Carley

Dissertations and Theses

The La-Grande Owyhee eruptive axis is a mid-Miocene to Pliocene ~300 km long volcanic belt located at the eastern margin of the Columbia River Basalt Group (CRBG) in Oregon. Within this volcanic belt there are numerous vents that have produced a large volume of petrologically diverse rocks ranging from the tholeiitic flood basalts of the CRBG to rhyolitic tuffs of caldera complexes such as the Lake Owyhee Volcanic field. Icelandites, which are iron rich andesites, are known to occur in association with silica saturated to oversaturated tholeiitic basalts as a minor part of continental flood basalt volcanism. This study investigates …

Major Controls On Diagenesis In The Martin Bridge Formation: Wallowa Mountains, Oregon, Jane Lyra Eisenberg

Dissertations and Theses

Diagenetic alteration in carbonates has long frustrated scientists who wish to use their chemistry and/or texture to understand conditions at the time of deposition. Though indicators of diagenesis are well documented, their interpretation is not always straightforward. Despite the large volume of research on the subject, the positive identification and interpretation of diagenesis is a source of ongoing debate in the scientific community.

The goal of this study is to better understand the timing of, and controls on, diagenetic alteration in the Martin Bridge Formation (MBF), a Triassic-aged limestone that was altered following deposition. Thirty-nine samples of MBF with differing …

Understanding The Role Of Family-Specific Resources For Immigrant Workers, Faviola Robles-Saenz, Rebecca M. Brossoit, Tori L. Crain, Leslie Hammer, Jacqueline R. Wong

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Very few studies to date have examined immigrant workers’ (i.e., workers who were not born in the United States) experiences of the work-family interface. In a sample of healthcare workers across two time points, the present study evaluates the role of different family-specific resources for immigrant workers compared to native-born workers (i.e., workers born in the U.S.). The results suggest that family-specific support from coworkers is especially beneficial for reducing immigrant workers’ experiences of family-to-work conflict. For both native-born and immigrant workers, those who experience more family-specific support from supervisors and coworkers, and those who work in an organization that …

Oer Guide For Wr 227 Instructors: Using Open Educational Resources (Oers) In Wr 227 Courses, Sarah Read, Jordana Bowen, Henry Covey

PDXOpen: Open Educational Resources

The "OER Guide for WR 227 Instructors: Using Open Educational Resources (OERs) in WR 227 Courses" aims to help instructors make sense of and sort the massively decentralized and varying content of existing OERs available to support technical and professional writing courses. This guide is intended as a resource for introductory technical writing course instructors to adapt an existing course to integrate OER resources, or, to build a new course with all-OER student resources. This guide was developed for the specific use of WR 227 instructors at Portland State University and across Oregon; however, the material in the guide or …

The Worth Of Risk: Political Participation And Risk Perceptions, Siri Grubb

Dissertations and Theses

This study draws on concepts from political and risk communication to inform our understanding of what motivates people to be politically active. Inspired by concerns that traditional models of participation do not perform as well among younger and more diverse populations, alternate variables are considered including risk perceptions surrounding policy issues and political parties. Results show that established political variables such as political interest and civic duty remain strongly associated with participation, while offering support for several new variables of interest from the risk communication literature. In the present study, threat and efficacy perceptions explained additional variance in political participation …

My Mountain, Your Mountain, Our Mountain: Incorporating Emotional And Sensory Experiences In Mapping Sense Of Place In Mount Hood National Forest, Alicia Ranae Milligan

Dissertations and Theses

Understanding the complex connections humans have with landscapes is necessary for successful land management and planning practices. Only within the last few decades has mapping the values of forest users been used to produce data that can be incorporated into forest planning as a means to better understand social and environmental dynamics. This research used sense of place web mapping coupled with interviews to understand forest users' emotional and sensory experiences within the Mount Hood National Forest and to improve future sense of place mapping research. Two objectives were addressed in this research: 1) develop a typology of individuals' emotions …

Finding A Community Niche: Rethinking Historic House Museums In Oregon, Liza Julene Schade

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis discusses current preservation and public history in the field of historic house museums in Oregon, looking at two case studies that are undergoing processes of reinterpretation. The first chapter provides a brief history of heritage preservation in the United States, describes the spectrum of historic homes, and presents a key framework of four factors that need to be addressed when evaluating sites today. Current methodology refers to reinterpretation of sites to be more diverse, working with collections, doing research and restaging, along with innovating new programs. Public access and engagement pertain to finding a unique niche in the …

Selenium Probes For The Detection Of Thioredoxin Reductase Activity, Tendai Joseph Mafireyi

Dissertations and Theses

The identification and quantification of proteins and enzymatic activity in living tissues frequently requires the use of invasive procedures such as biopsy. These techniques can inhibit measurements of protein levels in real-time, and the disruption of tissue can lead to the loss of important information concerning the spatial distribution and differential activities in various cell types. The use of small organic fluorescent probes that rely on activation or accumulation within a tissue embody robust methods of detection that address these issues. This dissertation describes the design, synthesis and evaluation of fluorescent probes that can detect the enzyme thioredoxin reductase (TrxR). …

Making It Just In Time: Author-Creator Matsumoto Taiyō, Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Translated by Jon Holt and Teppei Fukuda

The first time I can remember encountering Matsumoto Taiyō’s work was probably when he released his short story collection, Blue Spring (Aoi haru - Matsumoto Taiyō tanpenshū [stories published from 1990 to 1993; Shōgakukan, 1993]). All of the stories concern a bunch of young dudes -- full of desires, frustrations, and violent tendencies -- and no chance they can ever get past those things. I thought to myself at that time, “Ah, I bet this stuff means a lot to readers in their teens, but they don’t really do anything for me.” …

Being Against The Black: Bad Faith And Anti-Black Racism (Guest Editors' Introduction), Amir A. Gilmore, Latoya Brackett, Davida Sharpe-Haygood

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

As a special journal issue, the guest editors continued their study on (anti)blackness within K-12 schooling and teacher preparation programs. Through the introduction’s white space, the guest editors attempt to theorize and center (anti)Blackness. Moreover, they existentially critique the “ordinary” assumptions about who can be a human and explain why Black existence continues on despite their collective suffering. The introductory article is organized as follows: (1) a thorough explanation of bad faith and antiblackness, (2) an illustration of antiblackness’ manifestations in K-12 schooling, and (3) the importance of using jazz as an analytic frame to curate the contributors’ scholarship.

Beyond Brutality: Addressing Anti-Blackness In Everyday Scenes Of Teaching And Learning, Karen Zaino, Jordan Bell

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

While scenes of incredible and troubling violence, such as that of Black children handcuffed or brutalized by school security officers, have sometimes been leveraged to highlight the anti-Blackness endemic in schools, Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America suggests that we must also attend to scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned to identify and unravel the subtle threads of anti-Blackness that pervade contemporary schooling. That is this paper’s aim: to look beyond the scenes of spectacular suffering and to locate the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in the mundane routines of teaching and …

Black Liberation In Teacher Education: (Re)Envisioning Educator Preparation To Defend Black Life And Possibility, Justin A. Coles, Darrius Stanley

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Current configurations of teacher education programs are insufficient in attracting and producing teachers equipped to teach through the permanence of antiblackness, instead still relying on race-neutral or color-evasive pedagogies that perpetuate the misrecognition of antiblackness. As evident by the sustained inequities experienced by Black children and the routine marginalization of Black (teacher) educators in the field, we recognize that teacher education programs, and subsequently P-12 classrooms, are not designed nor equipped to reduce the harm caused by persistent anti-Black racism. Despite the ways Blackness is derided and invisibilized in educator preparation, Black students, families, and communities have long countered anti-Black …

Reflections On The Politics Of Professionalism: Critical Autoethnographies Of Anti-Blackness In The Ela Classroom, Stephanie P. Jones, Robert P. Robinson

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

As Black educators, we are implanted with testimonies of how our pedagogies remained in close proximity to whiteness. We employ antiblackness and critical race theory frameworks. Through what we call vignettes of repair we address ourselves and our students to first, repair the harm we caused and second, to engage in collective witnessing that makes room for (re)claiming and (re)membering our own knowledge. From our critical reflection, we propose that teacher educators engage in a similar practice for their prospective teachers.

Forest Fire Effects On The Temporal Variability Of Landscape Snow Albedo Relative To Burn Severity, Max Gersh

Dissertations and Theses

Snow-water storage is decreasing, while forest fires are increasing in duration, size, frequency, and intensity, due to climate change. Most forest fires occur in the seasonal snow zone, altering snow mass and energy balance for many years following fire. Following forest fires, Surface snow albedo (SSA) decreases, as light absorbing particles (LAP), particularly black carbon (BC) produced in forest fires get deposited throughout the snowpack, altering snowpack energy balance driving earlier snowmelt in burned forests. While SSA decreases, landscape snow albedo (LSA) increases following fire, as more of the snow-covered surface becomes visible beneath the burned forest canopy, brightening the …

This Ain't Yo' Mama's Composition Class: Addressing Anti-Blackness By Implementing Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Sharanna B. Brown

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Kyoko Kishimoto writes that those who practice anti-racist pedagogical practices are not only required to teach about race, but instead "teach about race and racism in a way that fosters critical analytical skills, which reveal the power relations behind racism and how race has been institutionalized in U.S. society to create and justify inequalities" (541). This is the work. And I have chosen to do it.

Steeped in anti-racist pedagogy “This Ain’t Yo’ Mama’s Composition Course” aims to explore the ways that writing classrooms can affirm students’ autonomy while simultaneously equipping them with skills that equate to “cultural capital.” Anti-racist …

Mitonuclear Mismatch Is Associated With Increased Male Frequency, Outcrossing, And Male Sperm Size In Experimentally-Evolved C. Elegans, Brent William Bever

Dissertations and Theses

We provide the first controlled study of how male frequencies and rates of outcrossing evolve in response to mitonuclear mismatch by allowing replicate lineages of C. elegans nematodes containing either mitochondrial or nuclear mutations of electron transport chain (ETC) genes to evolve under three sexual systems: facultatively outcrossing (wildtype), obligately selfing, and obligately outcrossing. In partial support of a tenet of the mitonuclear sex hypothesis, which predicts that outcrossing will be favored in cases of mitonuclear mismatch, we found evolution of increased male frequency in at least one replicate line of all four ETC mutant backgrounds tested--nuclear isp-1, mitochondrial …

Blind Spots And Bottlenecks For Philosophy Of History, Bennett B. Gilbert

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Realist history does not meet many human needs. History needs a great deal more philosophy, but of what kind?

In his essay on this blog, "Reflections on Theory of History Polyphonic," Ethan Kleinberg suggests that historians often use theory to block change in their work rather than to advance it. One way they do this, he points out, is to include a little theory in order to inoculate themselves against greater and more fundamental challenges. They give or take a blow, and then hoist up their shield, thereby avoiding philosophy and miniaturizing it into "historical theory."

I cannot …

A Collaborative Approach To Cultural Resource Risk Assessment, Preservation, And Prioritization: A Case Study From Sauvie Island, Oregon, Phillip James Daily

Dissertations and Theses

New and increasing threats to cultural heritage resources have pushed archaeologists, land managers, and Indigenous peoples to develop strategies to identify at-risk resources, determine condition, vulnerabilities, and value of said resources, and then provide mitigation and preservation prioritizations and recommendations for the future. One such strategy is the risk assessment approach. Typically, to guide ongoing and future management of vulnerable cultural resources, risk assessments consider preexisting archaeological data, alongside geomorphological and hydrological landform characteristics, to prioritize sites for preservation. While such assessments have been conducted around the globe, they have not been widely applied on the Lower Columbia of Oregon …

Efficient Neuromorphic Algorithms For Gamma-Ray Spectrum Denoising And Radionuclide Identification, Merlin Phillip Carson

Dissertations and Theses

Radionuclide detection and identification are important tasks for deterring a potentially catastrophic nuclear event. Due to high levels of background radiation from both terrestrial and extraterrestrial sources, some form of noise reduction pre-processing is required for a gamma-ray spectrum prior to being analyzed by an identification algorithm so as to determine the identity of anomalous sources. This research focuses on the use of neuromorphic algorithms for the purpose of developing low power, accurate radionuclide identification devices that can filter out non-anomalous background radiation and other artifacts created by gamma-ray detector measurement equipment, along with identifying clandestine, radioactive material.

A sparse …