Digital Commons Network^™

Computer Aided Design Of Permutation, Linear, And Affine-Linear Reversible Circuits In The General And Linear Nearest-Neighbor Models, Ben Schaeffer

Dissertations and Theses

With the probable end of Moore's Law in the near future, and with advances in nanotechnology, new forms of computing are likely to become available. Reversible computing is one of these possible future technologies, and it employs reversible circuits. Reversible circuits in a classical form have the potential for lower power consumption than existing technology, and in a quantum form permit new types of encryption and computation.

One fundamental challenge in synthesizing the most general type of reversible circuit is that the storage space for fully specifying input-output descriptions becomes exponentially large as the number of inputs increases linearly. Certain …

The Effect Of Teacher-Identified Classroom Management, Monica Rose Root

Dissertations and Theses

The framework of this study was monitoring classroom management strategies and student behaviors in the classroom, then providing strategies and feedback to increase effective classroom management and decrease problem student behaviors.

There were 15 evidence–based practices that were researched and used in the study. Specifically teachers were asked to focus on 5 of them. These practices were: using 5 positive feedback comments to 1 negative comment; having classroom rules and expectations that were posted, taught, practiced, consistent, and positively reinforced; using an attention getting cue that had been taught, practiced and positively reinforced; having continuous active supervision including moving and …

Preserving Nature Through Film: Wilderness Alps Of Stehekin And The North Cascades, 1956-1968, Nicolas Timothy Bergmann

Dissertations and Theses

On March 22, 1958 David Brower's film Wilderness Alps of Stehekin premiered to an audience of conservationists in Seattle, Washington. Almost two years in the making, the thirty-one minute film advocated the preservation of nature in Washington's North Cascades through the creation of a national park. Over the next decade, Wilderness Alps of Stehekin became the most influential publicity tool in the struggle to preserve the North Cascades. Because of the region's geographic isolation, the film was the first time many people throughout the nation were exposed to the scenic grandeur of the area. Images of craggy peaks and colorful …

A Method For Simulating Acoustic Emissions From Tensile Cracks In Sea Ice, Muciri Nyamu Gatimu

University Honors Theses

As the seasons change, sea ice in the polar regions undergoes a freeze-thaw cycle producing anisotropic sea ice in terms of physical properties and structures. Deformation of these variable structures from the freeze-thaw cycle and flux of energy within the polar regions causes the ice to fracture radiating noise into the water. Simulating the noise from sea ice is difficult due to the variability in the physical properties of sea ice, dynamic environment of the polar regions, complex physics governing sound propagation and numerous methods by which the emission of noise can be generated from sea ice. The radiated ambient …

2013 Commencement Program, Richard Tapia

Commencement Archives 2010-19

The program for the Portland State University 2013 Commencement ceremonies, held June 13, 2013.

Richard Tapia received an honorary degree and delivered the commencement addresses.

Barbara Ames received an honorary degree during the afternoon ceremony for the College of the Arts, School of Business Administration, Graduate School of Education, Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, School of Social Work, and the College of Urban and Public Affairs.

Equivalence Checking For High-Assurance Behavioral Synthesis, Kecheng Hao

Dissertations and Theses

The rapidly increasing complexities of hardware designs are forcing design methodologies and tools to move to the Electronic System Level (ESL), a higher abstraction level with better productivity than the state-of-the-art Register Transfer Level (RTL). Behavioral synthesis, which automatically synthesizes ESL behavioral specifications to RTL implementations, plays a central role in this transition. However, since behavioral synthesis is a complex and error-prone translation process, the lack of designers' confidence in its correctness becomes a major barrier to its wide adoption. Therefore, techniques for establishing equivalence between an ESL specification and its synthesized RTL implementation are critical to bring behavioral synthesis …

Air-Quality And Climatic Consequences Of Bioenergy Crop Cultivation, William Christian Porter

Dissertations and Theses

Bioenergy is expected to play an increasingly significant role in the global energy budget. In addition to the use of liquid energy forms such as ethanol and biodiesel, electricity generation using processed energy crops as a partial or full coal alternative is expected to increase, requiring large-scale conversions of land for the cultivation of bioenergy feedstocks such as cane, grasses, or short rotation coppice. With land-use change identified as a major contributor to changes in the emission of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs), many of which are known contributors to the pollutants ozone (O₃) and fine particulate matter …

Glacier Change In The North Cascades, Washington: 1900-2009, Kristina Amanda Dick

Dissertations and Theses

Glaciers respond to local climate changes making them important indicators of regional climate change. The North Cascades region of Washington is the most glaciated region in the lower-48 states with approximately 25% of all glaciers and 40% of the total ice-covered area. While there are many on-going investigations of specific glaciers, little research has addressed the entire glacier cover of the region. A reference inventory of glaciers was derived from a comparison of two different inventories dating to about 1958. The different inventories agree within 93% of total number of glaciers and 94% of total ice-covered area. To quantify glacier …

Bridging The Missing Link Between "Top-Down" And "Bottom-Up": A Strategic Policy Model For International Collaboration In Science And Technology, Pattharaporn Suntharasaj

Dissertations and Theses

Success in International Collaboration in Science and Technology (ICST) depends on various factors, different players have different perspectives. Governments participate in collaboration in order to meet their country's policy goals. Scientists and researchers establish their contacts through their personal channels or scientific networks in order to pursue their own academic interest. There are two significant approaches in ICST Policy making which are "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches. Both approaches are important. One approach can not fit all. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages. A balance between these two approaches is necessary.

The objective of this research is to develop …

Shaping School Culture: To Support Moving From A Targeted-Assistance To Schoolwide Title I Program, Paul Edward Coakley

Dissertations and Theses

As budget belts tighten in the public schools today, more and more schools are moving toward participation in federal Schoolwide Title I Programs to most effectively meet the needs of struggling students. This study seeks to inform school administrators how best to approach this yearlong change initiative by both meeting the needs of the rigorous federal standards and facilitating a positive school climate for staff, students, and community. Using a Problem-Based Learning method, the purpose of this study was to research, develop, and validate a handbook for shaping school culture during a major school change project while creating or maintaining …

An Investigation Of Fast And Frugal Heuristics For New Product Project Selection, Fatima Mohammed Albar

Dissertations and Theses

In the early stages of new product development, project selection is dominantly based on managerial intuition, rather than on analytic approaches. As much as 90% of all product ideas are rejected before they are formally assessed. However, to date, little is known about the product screening heuristics and screening criteria managers use: it has been suggested that their decision process resembles the "fast and frugal" heuristics identified in recent psychological research, but no empirical research exists. A major part of the product innovation pipeline is thus poorly understood.

This research contributes to closing this gap. It uses cognitive task analysis …

Teachers' Negative Comments Toward Youth In Foster Care With Disabilities: How Do They Relate To Youths' Problem Behaviors, School Attitudes, And School Performance?, Sunghwan Noh

Dissertations and Theses

A large proportion of youth in foster care receive special education services, and poor educational outcomes are one of the most important difficulties facing these youth. One potential risk affecting the low educational achievements of youth in foster care and special education could be teachers' negative and stigmatizing comments toward them. Teachers' negative and stigmatizing comments could have negative effects on youths' behaviors, school attitudes and school performance. Yet, research on the nature and the impact of teachers' negative and stigmatizing comments remains limited.

Based on labeling and attribution theories, this study investigated the nature and impact of teachers' negative …

Type Classes And Instance Chains: A Relational Approach, John Garrett Morris

Dissertations and Theses

Type classes, first proposed during the design of the Haskell programming language, extend standard type systems to support overloaded functions. Since their introduction, type classes have been used to address a range of problems, from typing ordering and arithmetic operators to describing heterogeneous lists and limited subtyping. However, while type class programming is useful for a variety of practical problems, its wider use is limited by the inexpressiveness and hidden complexity of current mechanisms. We propose two improvements to existing class systems. First, we introduce several novel language features, instance chains and explicit failure, that increase the expressiveness of type …

Investigations Into The Regional And Local Timescale Variations Of Subglacial Drainage Networks, Justin Hiester

Dissertations and Theses

Subglacial water plays an important role in the regulation of an ice sheet's mass balance. It may be the dominant control on the velocities of ice streams and outlet glaciers on scales of months to millennia. Recent satellite observations of ice surface elevation changes have given researchers new insights into how subglacial water is stored and transported. Localized uplift and settling of the ice surface implies that lakes exist beneath the ice sheet that are being filled and drained on relatively short time scales. %At the base of an ice sheet water can be transported through a variety of drainage …

Climate Change Impact On The Spatio-Temporal Variability Of Hydro-Climate Extremes, Mohammad Reza Najafi

Dissertations and Theses

The rising temperature of the earth due to climate change has shown to alter the variations of hydro-climate variables, including their intensities, frequencies and durations. Extreme events such as floods are, in particular, susceptible to any disturbances in climate cycles. As such it is important to provide policymakers with sufficient knowledge about the probable impacts of climate change on hydrologic extremes and most importantly on floods, which have the highest impacts on the societies. For this reason analysis of hydro-climate extremes is commonly performed using data at each site (or grid cell), however due to the limited number of extreme …

Identification Of Cisplatin-Binding Proteins Using Agarose Conjugates Of Platinum Compounds, Takatoshi Karasawa, Martha Sibrian-Vazquez, Robert M. Strongin, Peter S. Steyger

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

Cisplatin is widely used as an antineoplastic drug, but its ototoxic and nephrotoxic side-effects, as well as the inherent or acquired resistance of some cancers to cisplatin, remain significant clinical problems. Cisplatin’s selectivity in killing rapidly proliferating cancer cells is largely dependent on covalent binding to DNA via cisplatin’s chloride sites that had been aquated. We hypothesized that cisplatin’s toxicity in slowly proliferating or terminally differentiated cells is primarily due to drug-protein interactions, instead of drug-DNA binding. To identify proteins that bind to cisplatin, we synthesized two different platinum-agarose conjugates, one with two amino groups and another with two chlorides …

Mapping Human-Environment Connections On The Olympic Peninsula: An Atlas Of Landscape Values, Rebecca J. Mclain, Lee Cerveny, Diane Besser, David Banis, Alexa Todd, Stephanie Rohdy, Corinna Kimball-Brown

Occasional Papers in Geography

Occasional Papers in Geography Publication No. 7

The advent of computerized mapping has land managers’ ability to map the biophysical services provided by forested ecosystems. However, mapping the cultural services of those systems is more challenging. Human ecology mapping (HEM), which provides spatially-explicit depictions of the complex connections between humans and their environment, is an approach that can be used to improve understandings of the cultural services associated with landscapes. This atlas provides an overview of what HEM is and draws on experiences with a pilot project on the Olympic Peninsula in western Washington to illustrate what HEM data looks …

Localization Of A Noisy Broadband Surface Target Using Time Differences Of Multipath Arrivals, John Gebbie, Martin Siderius, Reid Mccargar, John S. Allen Iii, Grant Pusey

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Previous studies [Tiemann et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 120, 2355–2365 (2006)] have reported the localization of marine mammals in 3-D from their clicks using multipath arrivals. Bathymetric variations were advantageously used to predict multipath arrival times with a raytracer. These arrivals are directly discernible from the time series for impulsive sources, such as whale clicks, but extension of the method to continuous broadband sources presents additional complications. By pulse compressing noise emitted from a small boat using two hydrophones,the hyperbolic direct-arrival ambiguity can be refined in both range and bearing. Acoustic-derived results are validated with target GPS measurements.

Based On Repeated Experience, System For Modification Of Expression And Negating Overload From Media And Optimizing Referential Efficiency, Peter R. Badovinatz, Veronika M. Megler

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Content items are revealed to a user based on whether they have been previously reviewed by the user. A number of content items are thus received over time. The content items may be discrete content items, or may be portions of a content stream, and may be received over different media. For each content item, it is determined whether the content item was previously reviewed by a user. Where the content item was not previously reviewed, the item is revealed to the user, such as by being displayed or announced to the user. Where the content item was previously reviewed, …

Portland State University Solid Waste Assessment Report, Moonrose Doherty, Brittany Ann Brannon, Eric T. Crum

Campus Sustainability Office Publications, Reports and Presentations

In January of 2013, the Campus Sustainability Office (CSO) of Portland State University (PSU) contacted Community Environmental Services (CES) with the request to conduct a landfill-bound waste assessment for the University’s 50-acre downtown campus, located in Portland, Oregon. CES is a research and service unit within the Center for Urban Studies at Portland State University. PSU is a state university that was founded in 1946, is home to Oregon’s largest undergraduate and graduate enrollment, and is the only public university in the state located in a major metropolitan city. Portland State is world-renowned for its sustainability initiatives, and has had …

Thinking Through Consciousness, Erica Hanson

University Honors Theses

Consciousness is difficult to pin down. Most human beings go about their days with full and more or less uninterrupted consciousness, without contemplating their own (or other peoples’) conscious states. To be in the world, and accomplish great acts takes little metaawareness of consciousness, but in the study of consciousness our inability to think outside of our conscious states creates controversies at the conceptual and methodological levels. As Victor Lamme states (2006), even when we set aside the more difficult (or more poorly defined) questions about conscious experience to focus on finding the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), we face …

Dynamic Modeling Of Nonmedical Opioid Initiation: Epidemic And Access, Alexandra Nielsen, Teresa D. Schmidt, Dennis Mccarty, Wayne W. Wakeland

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

We report development of a systems level dynamic model of initiation and nonmedical use of pharmaceutical opioids in the US. The model calibrated to 1995-2005 National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) data, predicts 2006-2011 data well. Preliminary findings indicate that interventions which reduce the perceived attractiveness of opioids for recreational use may be able to reduce initiation and nonmedical use most significantly, while supply restriction effected through drug take back days and prescribing changes may have more modest effects. We argue that system dynamics is an effective approach for evaluating potential interventions to this complex system where the …

Teaching Through Interactions: Testing A Developmental Framework Of Teacher Effectiveness In Over 4,000 Classrooms, Bridget K. Hamre, Robert C. Pianta, Jason T. Downer, Jamie Decoster, Andrew J. Mashburn, Stephanie M. Jones, Joshua L. Brown, Elise Cappella, Marc Atkins, Susan E. Rivers, Marc A, Brackett, Aki Hamagami

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Validating frameworks for understanding classroom processes that contribute to student learning and development is important to advance the scientific study of teaching. This article presents one such framework, Teaching through Interactions, which posits that teacher-student interactions are a central driver for student learning and organizes teacher-student interactions into three major domains. Results provide evidence that across 4,341 preschool to elementary classrooms (1) teacher-student classroom interactions comprise distinct emotional, organizational, and instructional domains; (2) the three-domain latent structure is a better fit to observational data than alternative one- and two-domain models of teacher-student classroom interactions; and (3) the three-domain structure is …

Effects Of Extraneous Surface Charges On The Enhanced Raman Scattering From Metallic Nanoparticles, H. Y. Chung, P. T. Leung, D. P. Tsai

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Motivating by recent experiments on surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) from colloidal solutions, we present here a simple model to elucidate the effects of extraneous surface charges on the enhanced Raman signal. The model is based on the well-established Gersten-Nitzan model coupled to the modified Mie scattering theory of Bohren and Hunt in the long wavelength approximation. We further introduce corrections from the modified long wavelength approximation to the Gersten-Nitzan model for the improvement of its accuracy. Our results show that the surface charge will generally lead to a blueshift in the resonance frequency and greater enhancements in the SERS …

Guinform: Interactive Fiction For Gui Prototyping, Tesca Fitzgerald

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

There are many methods of rapidly prototyping a graphical user interface (GUI), the most prominent being paper prototyping and wireframe prototyping. In paper prototyping, the developer creates a physical GUI prototype using simple materials such as paper, pencils, and tabbed cards. Paper prototyping, while easy to implement, leads to unrealistic and awkward user interaction. Wireframe prototyping involves the use of simplified software tools to develop a primitive version of the proposed user interface. This method enables graceful interaction, but requires major implementation e↵ort. I propose a middle ground: a method of rapid, interactive GUI prototyping using Interactive Fiction (IF) tools. …

Interview With Candace Russo, Linus Pauling Institute, 2013 (Audio), Candace Russo

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of Candace Russo by Kevin Foster in Corvallis, Oregon on May 31st, 2013.

The interview index is available for download.

Interview With Carter Latendresse, Catlin Gabel School, 2013 (Audio), Carter Latendresse

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of Carter Latendresse by Carmen Vigil at Catlin Gabel School on May 30th, 2013.

The interview index is available for download.

Methods For Efficient Synthesis Of Large Reversible Binary And Ternary Quantum Circuits And Applications Of Linear Nearest Neighbor Model, Maher Mofeid Hawash

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation describes the development of automated synthesis algorithms that construct reversible quantum circuits for reversible functions with large number of variables. Specifically, the research area is focused on reversible, permutative and fully specified binary and ternary specifications and the applicability of the resulting circuit to the physical limitations of existing quantum technologies.

Automated synthesis of arbitrary reversible specifications is an NP hard, multiobjective optimization problem, where 1) the amount of time and computational resources required to synthesize the specification, 2) the number of primitive quantum gates in the resulting circuit (quantum cost), and 3) the number of ancillary qubits …

A Case Study Of After-School Activities In One School That Is Making Progress In Closing The Achievement Gap, Susan Robin Shugerman

Dissertations and Theses

Closing the achievement gap has been a national conversation for several decades and a priority for educators and researchers. By looking closely at one school which is showing exceptional success with closing the achievement gap for low income students and English language learners, this study seeks to understand how school personnel and parents view after-school activities and ways in which those activities may be impacting students who are making significant gains in spite of the achievement gap. After-school activities have been shown to bring many positive outcomes for students. That said, there is much that we do not yet know …

Climate Change Impacts On Precipitation Extremes Over The Columbia River Basin Based On Downscaled Cmip5 Climate Scenarios, Ghulam Hussain Dars

Dissertations and Theses

Hydro-climate extreme analysis helps understanding the process of spatio-temporal variation of extreme events due to climate change, and it is an important aspect in designing hydrological structures, forecasting floods and an effective decision making in the field of water resources design and management. The study evaluates extreme precipitation events over the Columbia River Basin (CRB), the fourth largest basin in the U.S., by simulating four CMIP5 global climate models (GCMs) for the historical period (1970-1999) and future period (2041-2070) under RCP85 GHG scenario.

We estimated the intensity of extreme and average precipitation for both winter (DJF) and summer (JJA) seasons …