Digital Commons Network^™

Comparing Sanitation Delivery Modalities In Urban Informal Settlement Schools: A Randomized Trial In Nairobi, Kenya, Kate Bohnert, Anna N. Chard, Alex Mwaki, Amy E., Kirby, Richard Muga, Corey L. Nagel, Evan A. Thomas, Matthew C. Freeman

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The provision of safely managed sanitation in informal settlements is a challenge, especially in schools that require durable, clean, sex-segregated facilities for a large number of children. In informal settlements in Nairobi, school sanitation facilities demand considerable capital costs, yet are prone to breakage and often unhygienic. The private sector may be able to provide quality facilities and services to schools at lower costs as an alternative to the sanitation that is traditionally provided by the government. We conducted a randomized trial comparing private sector service delivery (PSSD) of urine-diverting dry latrines with routine waste collection and maintenance and government …

Autonomous Navigation And Hazard Evasion Platform For Personal Uav's, Ryan Scott

University Honors Theses

Personal UAV's are experiencing an increase in both functionality and popularity. Consumer-driven markets are encouraging the UAV industry to innovate towards the average user. Despite improvements in user friendliness, cost, and technological capabilities, consumer UAV's are limited by pilot skill and a lack of sensory information. This paper presents two approaches for creating a low-cost, open-source platform capable of enabling a consumer-level UAV to avoid hazards. A single beam LIDAR system and a combined LIDAR-vision system are considered. The LIDAR variant is capable of detecting and avoiding static obstacles in simple environments. The improved LIDAR-vision system is able to detect …

The Pacific Sentinel, November 2016, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

The Pacific Sentinel

Editor: Alex Skousen

Articles in this issue include:

• Grass Roots;
• Under the Sun;
• Get Off the Damn Sidewalk;
• Bagel Memorial;
• Protest Against New Police Contract;
• Pop Quiz: Understanding Andy;
• 22. A Million: Album Review;
• Getting Mystical With Alan Moore's Jerusalem;
• Denial;
• Sustainability; and
• Comics.

Political Polarization And Nisman’S Death: Competing Conspiracy Theories In Argentina, Leopoldo Rodriguez, Shawn Smallman

International & Global Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

The death of Alberto Nisman, the chief investigator of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Argentina, unleashed conspiracy theories and significant political turmoil upon President Cristina Fernández. We study the case and trace two of these theories, asking what they tell us about the Argentine political system and what can be inferred with respect to other countries in Latin America. We confirm that nations with high levels of political polarization are fertile ground for the emergence of conspiracy theories and that domestic and international media play an important role in both giving credence to and spreading such theories.

Keeping Up With… Open Peer Review, Emily Ford

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

Open Peer Review is a current and developing practice in scholarly publishing that librarians need to continue to explore and discuss. To that end ACRL should continue to support experiments with and conversations about OPR in its publications. As academic librarians, we observe and engage with new practices in scholarly communication, and OPR should be no exception. Whether academic librarianship embraces OPR as a model of peer review for its publications, or we simply observe experiments in other disciplines, we can position ourselves to better support our patrons and our publishing ventures by examining OPR.

Narratives Of Native American Women And Tribal Courts: The Framing Of The Violence Against Women Act Of 2013 In Mainstream, Native American, And Tribal Press Coverage, Alesha Marie Sangster

Dissertations and Theses

The Violence Against Women Act is a legislation created to expand more legal rights and services to survivors of domestic violence or intimate partner violence. Frame analysis was used to examine the coverage of the Violence Against Women Act of 2013 in three genres of press media: mainstream press, Native American press, and tribal press. Based on the media frames produced in the three media genres, the legislation was presented as more of a conflicting or controversial issue in mainstream press through the use of the conflict frame and the "Indian as other" frame. But all news coverage also presented …

Heard On The Net: Developing The Balance Of Discovery And Respect With Primary Resources, Jill Emery, Peggy Glahn, Tara Robertson

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

Within libraryland social media this past spring and summer, an emerging story began to unfold. A relatively new upstart company, Reveal Digital has begun developing digital archives of primary resources which are funded by institutions pledging upfront support. The eventual result of this work will be collections made available as Open Access content to everyone. The majority of the content is being sourced from research libraries’ archival collections. Those pledging money get early access to the content as it is being digitized and made available. In addition, source libraries obtain digital copies that they can dark archive. Pledging libraries also …

Improving Public Engagement And Public Records Management At The Oregon Department Of Environmental Quality, Portland State University. Hatfield School Of Government. Center For Public Service, Phil Keisling, Dan Marriott, Marcus Ingle, Sara Saltzberg, Andrew Dzeguze

Center for Public Service Publications and Reports

In February 2016, researchers from the US Forest Service had detected toxics in moss samples adjacent to several businesses in Portland. This began a series of events that highlighted both the significance of public records requests and the difficulty Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has in responding to complex requests.

The interest in issues related to air toxics put a strain on the capacity of the agency to respond in a timely fashion to the news media as well as citizens groups.

In August 2016, DEQ retained the Center for Public Service (CPS) to provide an outside evaluation of …

Mitochondrial Dna Sequence And Lack Of Response To Anoxia In The Annual Killifish Austrofundulus Limnaeus, Josiah Tad Wagner, Florisela Herrejon Chavez, Jason E. Podrabsky

Center for Life in Extreme Environments Publications

The annual killifish Austrofundulus limnaeus inhabits ephemeral ponds in regions of Venezuela, South America. Permanent populations of A. limnaeus are maintained by production of stress-tolerant embryos that are able to persist in the desiccated sediment. Previous work has demonstrated that A. limnaeus have a remarkable ability to tolerate extended periods of anoxia and desiccating conditions. After considering temperature, A. limnaeus embryos have the highest known tolerance to anoxia when compared to any other vertebrate yet studied. Oxygen is completely essential for the process of oxidative phosphorylation by mitochondria, the intracellular organelle responsible for the majority of adenosine triphosphate production. Thus, …

Portland State Library Update: News For Supporters And Friends; Fall 2016, Portland State University Library

Library Newsletters

In this issue: A Message from the Dean, the Viking Yearbooks, Barbara Roberts Videos and Oregon Cultural Trust Grant.

Pathos, Fall 2016, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Jessica Moore

Volume 11 No. 1

Drivers Of Urban Sprawl In Urbanizing China – A Political Ecology Analysis, Yiping Fang, Anirban Pal

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Chinese cities have undergone a process of urbanization that has resulted in significant urban sprawl in the past 20 years. This paper uses the 'ecology of actors' framework to analyze the interactions between various state, market and civil society players that result in excessive land conversion from agricultural to urban use. The paper shows that under the existing institutional setting, the interests of most actors involved in the process are aligned towards greater land development and growth. The more land is developed, the more land lease revenue for the local government, the more profit for developers, and the more opportunities …

Variation In Green Roof Storage Capacity, Associated Drivers, And Implications For Stormwater Management In Portland, Oregon, Melecio Estrella

University Honors Theses

Greens roofs, also known as ecoroofs or living roofs, provide numerous ecosystem services and are becoming widely integrated into urban stormwater management systems. Despite a long and robust history of green roof projects in Portland, Oregon, there is a distinct lack of research on in situ performance. This thesis addressed this gap by investigating the hydrologic performance of five green roofs in Portland for a time period spanning November through February. Despite difficulty with the sensor calibrations, our analysis of moisture content data from these roofs revealed variation in: (1) total evapotranspiration, which serves as a proxy for total stormwater …

Mapped Tent Pitching Schemes For Hyperbolic Systems, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Joachim Schöberl, C. Wintersteiger

Portland Institute for Computational Science Publications

A spacetime domain can be progressively meshed by tent shaped objects. Numerical methods for solving hyperbolic systems using such tent meshes to advance in time have been proposed previously. Such schemes have the ability to advance in time by different amounts at different spatial locations. This paper explores a technique by which standard discretizations, including explicit time stepping, can be used within tent-shaped spacetime domains. The technique transforms the equations within a spacetime tent to a domain where space and time are separable. After detailing techniques based on this mapping, several examples including the acoustic wave equation and the Euler …

Opening Review In Lis Journals: A Status Report, Emily Ford

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

Introduction: Peer-review practices in scholarly publishing are changing. Digital publishing mechanisms allow for open peer review, a peer review process that discloses author and reviewer identities to one another. This model of peer review is increasingly implemented in scholarly publishing. In science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines, open peer review is implemented in journal publishing processes, and, in the humanities and social sciences, it is often coupled with new scholarship practices, such as the digital humanities. This article reports findings from an exploratory study on peer-review and publishing practices in Library and Information Science (LIS), focusing on LIS’s relationships …

Pcc Rock Creek Post Occupancy Evaluations, Ossie Pleasant, Ryan Ngo, Opsis Architecture

Research-Based Design Initiative

The objective of this research is to determine whether the new additions to Building 5 and Building 7 of Portland Community College at Rock Creek Campus fulfill the requirements for the LEED IEQ 7.2: Thermal Comfort-Verification credit for LEEDv2009.

Occupants of the new additions will take an anonymous survey regarding their thermal comfort and other aspects of the new additions via SurveyMonkey.

If the survey results indicate that more than 20% of occupants are dissatisfied with thermal comfort in the building, a plan for corrective action must be developed to fulfill the requirements of the credit. The results from SurveyMonkey …

Hazardous Materials Commodity Flow Study: Marion County, Oregon, Portland State University. Hatfield School Of Government. Center For Public Service, Stephanie Hawke, Aaron Kaufman, Robert Cheney

Center for Public Service Publications and Reports

Hazardous materials are prevalent in all communities in the United States. They are stored and they are transported. Regardless of the method of transport, (for this study defined as: pipeline, rail, roadway, air, or water) hazardous materials are generally transported without incident. However, consequences of a hazmat transportation incident can be extreme with serious repercussions to public safety, life and wellbeing, the environment, and infrastructure. To plan for and mitigate these consequences, communities may choose to examine the transportation of hazardous materials through high risk areas – areas with sensitive ecosystems or high population – to better develop strategies.

Therefore, …

National Security, Mass Surveillance, And Citizen Rights Under Conditions Of Protracted Warfare, Krystal Lynn Conniry

Dissertations and Theses

This paper explores the complex relationship between securing the rights of citizens to privacy and national security priorities under conditions of government mass surveillance. The inquiry examines the conflict between those who support and those who stand in opposition of government surveillance, and is framed around the question of whether changes in technology and the concept of nationalism help inform our understanding of the increase in surveillance post-9/11. From a peace and conflict studies perspective, the work analyzes how the rise of nationalism in the post-9/11 era and the protracted wars against terrorism, in combination with the growth of technological …

Reproducibility And Rigor In Ree's Portfolio Of Research, Mark Mclellan, Patsy Brannon, Adriana Campa, Steven Daley-Laursen, Govind Kannan, Neil Olson, Robert Taylor, Dawn Thilmany

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Science Advisory Council was established in FY2016 as a subcommittee of the National Agricultural Research, Extension, Education, and Economics (NAREEE) Advisory Board to provide advice and guidance, on a scientific basis, on the overall strength, practicality, and direction of agricultural research, including emerging technology and scientific issues and report any findings publicly to the NAREEE Advisory Board.

In spring of 2016, the USDA Science Advisory Council was first charged by the Chief Scientist to examine a number of controversial and challenging issues. The first was to address the general subject of reproducibility in the agricultural and nutrition related sciences. …

The Power Of The Small Press: Entrepreneurial Publishing And Disruption Of The Industry, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Due to the conglomeration of media and publishing companies in the twentieth century (McCleery, 2007), the size of publishing companies has become more polarized, with a majority of small publishers comprising a small percent of revenue and market share compared to the few, but powerful, larger publishing houses (Publishers Association, ‘UK Book Publishing Industry in Statistics’ 2014). In economics, the polarizing principle asserts that ‘developments at one pole of the corporate/cultural spectrum are often counterbalanced by antithetical innovations at the other’ which has, in the publishing industry, led to ‘the emergence of tiny publishing houses’ at the other end of …

Understanding Social Media Program Usage In Public Transit Agencies, Jenny H. Liu, Wei Shi, O. A. Elrahman, Xuegang Ban, Jack M. Reilly

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Social media has been gaining prominence in public transit agencies in their communication strategies and daily management. This study aims to better understand recent trends in social media usage in public transit agencies, to examine which agencies use what kind of social media programs for what purposes, and how they measure their programs. A survey was conducted of the top transit agencies in the nation, and results are examined through descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis and regression modeling. We found that while most agencies still lack clearly-defined goals and performance metrics to guide their social media development, many are increasing …

Selecting Medical Hardware Using Pairwise Comparisons: A Patient's Perspective Of Cochlear Implant Device Selection, Timothy R. Anderson, Shabnam Razeghian Jahromi

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Selecting medical hardware can be a difficult and permanent decision for patients that they are often unprepared for. The authors explore the use of pairwise comparison techniques to better inform medical decision making in an application of choosing between three major cochlear implant manufacturers. This paper appears to be the first study to apply a pairwise comparison decision making approach for cochlear implant device selection. Also, unlike many medical decision making studies that are developed by the healthcare professional, this model and analysis was conducted entirely by the patient for the purpose of making the real-world decision of a device. …

An Inductive Ethnographic Study In Elderly Woman Technology Adoption And The Role Of Her Children, Noshad Rahimi, Antonie J, Jetter, Charles M. Weber

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Elderly woman strives to have a streamlined life surrounded by ease and familiarity. As she is aging, her desire for simplicity grows, her self-efficacy weakens, her prudency intensifies and her overall inclination toward status quo strengthens. As a result, she delays, or refuses, making any decision that might bring complexity and disrupt the continuity in her life, particularly new and unfamiliar technologies (which often bring complexity, before providing ease). Consequently, her technology adoption has a much lower rate than that of other demographics. To open the black box of elderly woman technology adoption process, this study focuses on the role …

Managing The Ethical And Risk Implications Of Rapid Advances In Artificial Intelligence: A Literature Review, Taylor Meek, Husam Barham, Nader Beltaif, Amani Kaadoor, Tanzila Akhter

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The development of emergent technologies carries with it ethical issues and risks. We review ways to better manage the ethical issues and risks of one emerging technology: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Depending on how AI's development is managed, it may have beneficial and/or deleterious effects. The processing capacity of Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer, by some measures, exceeds the processing capacity of a single human brain. but at a prohibitive processing/power consumption ratio and physical size. Given the current pace of AI R&D activities, some estimates in the literature suggest that the technology could become capable of self-determination and super intelligence …

Frequency Based Noise Coherence-Function Extension And Application To Passive Bottom-Loss Estimation, Lanfranco Muzi, Martin Siderius, Peter L. Nielsen

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Accurate modeling of acoustic propagation in the ocean waveguide is important to SONAR-performance prediction. Particularly in shallow waters, a crucial contribution to the total transmission loss is the bottom refection loss, which can be estimated passively by beamforming the natural surface-noise acoustic field recorded by a vertical line array of hydrophones. However, the performance in this task of arrays below 2 m of length is problematic for frequencies below 10 kHz" role="presentation" style="display: inline; line-height: normal; word-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; padding: 0px 2px 0px …

Perceptions Regarding Public Safety In Portland’S Humboldt Neighborhood, Kris R. Henning, Greg Stewart

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) has partnered with Portland State University (PSU) to develop new strategies for improving public safety and police-community relations. The initiative seeks to provide residents with greater voice in where police work in their neighborhood and what steps the police take to address public safety concerns. The current report presents the findings from a household survey conducted in Portland's Humboldt neighborhood. Residents' top concerns were gun crimes, gang activity, and traffic safety. The majority of residents support increased foot patrols by officers and community meetings as a means for reducing crime and strengthening police-community relationships.

Understanding Risk Perception Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, Pei Zhang, Antoine J. Jetter

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

When making decision that can have far-researching effects, such as governmental policies or decisions on new technologies, decision-makers use their understanding of the risks that are associated with their choices to guide their decisions. Measuring how people perceive risks can be helpful for understanding and possibly improving the decision-making process. Building on a review of existing methods for investigating risk perceptions, this paper suggests Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) as a method for investigating differences in risk perception among stakeholders and stakeholder groups. The approach is illustrated with an example of wildfire risk perceptions. Results suggest that FCM can contribute to …

A Framework To Address Challenges In Communicating The Developmental Origins Of Health And Disease, Liana Winett, Lawrence Wallack, Dawn M. Richardson, Janne Boone-Heinonen, Lynne C. Messer

OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

Findings from the field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) suggest that some of the most pressing public health problems facing communities today may begin much earlier than previously understood. In particular, this body of work provides evidence that social, physical, chemical, environmental, and behavioral influences in early life play a significant role in establishing vulnerabilities for chronic disease later in life. Further, because this work points to the importance of adverse environmental exposures that cluster in population groups, it suggests that existing opportunities to intervene at a population level may need to refocus their efforts “upstream” to …

Epilogue: Open Education, Social Practices, And Ecologies Of Hope, Steven L. Thorne

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

For more than a decade, some of the world's top-ranked universities have invited the global public to freely access the very curricular content that previously had only been available to a privileged few. Under the umbrella term Open Education (OE), which refers to the advancement of education through "open technology, open content and open knowledge" (Iiyoshi & Kumar, 2007), this movement encourages universities, as well as educators at other institutional levels, to serve the greater public good through the sharing of topical and thematic learning objects as well as intact course materials and curricula.

The Economic Value Of Forest Park Ecosystem Services: Results Of Five Focus Groups Conducted In Spring 2016, Randall A. Bluffstone, Pablo Barreyro, Jenny Dempsey Stein, Cody Kent, Antonia Machado

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Objective: This initial phase of research lays the foundation for a survey using contingent valuation (CV) and choice experiment (CE) methods. We asked select Portland residents what they care about most in Forest Park, their willingness to pay (WTP) for improving ecosystem services and how they generally think about the value of those goods and services. These results will help us narrow the experimental design of the forthcoming CV/CE study.

Approach: We conducted a focus group in each of Portland’s 5 “quadrants.” We chose each location - Skyline, St. John’s, Cully, Foster-Powell and Hillsdale - based on either its proximity …