Digital Commons Network^™

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: Understanding The Value In Producing Film Adaptations And Movie Franchises, Courtney Mcdonald

University Honors Theses

The business of making movies is not an easy one; in an industry where very few see financial success, risk aversion often takes the wheel. In order to combat the immense amount of uncertainty, existing research has attempted to establish factors of film success, including actor star power and reviews. However, statistical studies evaluating these factors have produced consistently inconclusive results. To approach this idea from another perspective, this paper investigates two specific areas of film—movie adaptations and film franchises—that contain valuable properties not always as explicitly connected to box office results. While many movies are referenced, two film franchises …

Not Your “Typical” Research: Inclusion Ethics In Neurodiversity Scholarship, Liana Bernard, Stefanie Fox, Kay Kulason, Alex Phanphackdy, Xander Kahle, Larry R. Martinez, Ludmila Praslova, Nicholas A. Smith

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Research focusing on neurodiversity^Footnote1 is critical for including all marginalized populations in the organizational diversity literature and for promoting theoretical innovation. It is imperative that such research models the ethics of inclusion (Gowen et al., Reference Gowen, Taylor, Bleazard, Greenstein, Baimbridge and Poole2019; Nicolaidis et al., Reference Nicolaidis, Raymaker, Kapp, Baggs, Ashkenazy, McDonald, Weiner, Maslak, Hunter and Joyce2019). Despite positive intent, majority group researchers have historically produced biased scholarship on novel marginalized populations (Colella et al., Reference Colella, Hebl and King2017). As all research includes some subjective bias, neurotypical researchers are likely to publish information that …

Exploring The Impact Of Interpersonal Trust On Health Outcomes In Rapidly Gentrifying Neighborhoods In Portland, Oregon, Julie T. Ha

PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal

Social determinants have been recognized to be significant factors contributing to the overall health outcomes of individuals. However, there is limited research on how these factors have directly impacted the mental and physical wellness of people in neighborhoods that are experiencing rapid gentrification. The objective of this study is to determine whether the present level of interpersonal trust between individuals in neighborhoods is associated with the mental and physical health outcomes among its residents. This quantitative study uses the Albina-Rockwood Neighborhood Promise Survey, which uses data from a random sample of families living in two rapidly gentrified neighborhoods in Portland, …

Survival In The City Streets: An Autoethnographic Analysis Challenging The Criminalization Of Urban Street Gangs, Robert Northman

PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal

To varying outcomes, many attempts have been made to understand and define urban street gangs. Though these understandings and definitions of gangs may vary, they almost always rely on criminality as at least one of the gang’s “purposes.” The author, a gang member for approximately thirty years seeks to contribute lived experiences to the conversation centered on gangs. This auto-ethnographic analysis of urban street gang culture seeks to highlight the author’s experiences as potential determinants of gang membership while also exacting the realities of some common myths and other misconceptions surrounding the urban street gang, including the criminalization thereof. The …

Invasive Plant Species And Their Impact On Stream Health Using Macroinvertebrates In The Willamette Valley, Oregon, Michelle Hesek, Patrick Edwards

PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal

Oregon spends approximately $83 million annually to maintain invasive plant species, which decreases resource availability for the environment and humanity. Their continued spread affects riparian zones, one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems that supplement stream and upland habitats. Some of the energy flow in these systems circulates by macroinvertebrates that decompose leaf litter during their immature stage of life. Upon metamorphosis, they rely on plants in riparian zones for reproductive habitat, making them prey to predators in stream and upland food webs, referred to as a transformational link. This research examines how invasive plant species affect stream health in …

The Effect Of Rhizophagus Intraradices Mycorrhizal Fungus On Iron Uptake Of Corn: A Global Overview On The Effects Of Climate Change On The Nutritional Content Of Crops, Caitlin R. Costello

PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal

Global iron deficiency is a major factor contributing to malnutrition and varied health conditions. One way to combat this is to maintain or increase the iron uptake of the globe’s major crops. Research has shown that certain types of mycorrhizal fungi can increase the nutrient uptake of plants. To further this research, we looked at the arbuscular fungi Rhizophagus intraradices and its potential relationship with the corn variety “Golden Bantam 8 Row”. This type of mycorrhizal fungi improves plant nutrition including the plant’s ability to source iron from the natural environment. Much of the iron found in the natural environment …

The China Balloon Incident: The Drama Within The Drama, Mel Gurtov

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The recent China Balloon Incident has all the appearance of high drama, though the heat is mainly provided by domestic politics rather than a strategic face-off of the U-2 or Cuba Missile Crisis variety. This is a drama in three acts. In Act 1, “Discovery”, the Biden administration went into action mode on finding that a Chinese “spy” balloon had crossed the US. An air force jet shot the balloon down, displaying Cold War-style toughness with China. In Act 2, “Evaluation”, new facts emerged that shed further light on the episode. Act 3, “Blaming”, involves mutual recriminations that obscure the …

Nanoscale Hafnium Metal-Organic Frameworks Enhance Radiotherapeutic Effects By Upregulation Of Type I Interferon And Tlr7 Expression, Eunseo Choi, Madeleine R. Landry, Nathan Pennock, Katherine Weinfurter, Multiple Additional Authors

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recent preclinical and clinical studies have highlighted the improved outcomes of combination radiotherapy and immunotherapy. Concurrently, the development of high-Z metallic nanoparticles as radiation dose enhancers has been explored to widen the therapeutic window of radiotherapy and potentially enhance immune activation. In this study, we evaluate folate-modified hafnium-based metal-organic frameworks (HfMOF-PEG-FA) in combination with imiquimod, a TLR7 agonist, as a well-defined interferon regulatory factor (IRF) stimulator for local antitumor immunotherapy. The enhancement of radiation dose deposition by HfMOF-PEG-FA and subsequent generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) deregulates cell proliferation and increases apoptosis. HfMOF-PEG-FA loaded with imiquimod (HfMOF-PEG-FA@IMQ) increases DNA double-strand …

Driver And Bicyclist Comprehension Of Blue Light Detection Confirmation Systems, Douglas P. Cobb, Hisham Jashami, Christopher Monsere, Sirisha Kothuri, David S. Hurwitz

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study analyzed motorist and bicyclist understanding and preference of positive confirmation of detection of a bicycle by the traffic signal infrastructure using a blue light detection confirmation (BLDC). The research analyzed results of an online survey of 1,123 respondents and intercept survey of 337 respondents. The study initially found that participants of the survey did not understand the meaning of the blue light itself, but comprehension of the system rose from 40% to 50% when supplemental signs were used. Respondents overwhelmingly indicated that they preferred the sign option that included symbols, text, and a representation of the blue light, …

Racial Politics In The Contemporary Prison Society: The Importance Of Race And Ethnicity To Prison Social Organization, Arynn A. Infante, Stephanie J. Morse, Chantal Fahmy, Kevin A. Wright

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

Prior research documents race and ethnicity as central to how individuals navigate the social and physical space of prisons. Racial segregation persists as a feature of prison life, and in navigating this racialized structure, racial groups construct and enforce a set of racialized norms to govern behavior (i.e., the “racial code”) that reinforce and reify prison racial politics. These processes, however, have remained largely descriptive in nature. Using data from a sample of incarcerated men in Arizona prisons (N = 251), this article extends prior work by operationalizing the concept of the racial code, assessing its dimensionality, distinguishing it from …

Rare, Threatened And Endangered Vascular Plant Species Of Oregon (2023), Sue Vrilakas, Lindsey K. Wise, Gabriel E. Campbell, Michael Russell

Institute for Natural Resources Publications

The Oregon Biodiversity Information Center (ORBIC) is part of the Institute for Natural Resources (INR) located at Portland State University (PSU). ORBIC maintains extensive databases of Oregon biodiversity, concentrating on rare and endangered plants, animals and ecosystems. Since its creation in 1979 as the Oregon Natural Heritage Program, ORBIC has been part of the Natural Heritage network. ORBIC is a constituent member of NatureServe, a non-profit organization with a mission to provide the scientific basis for effective conservation action. NatureServe and Oregon manage data using standards and protocols used across the U.S., Canada, and much of Latin America.

ORBIC has …

“Universities Ain’T What They Seem Like On Tv” A Critical Race Counterstory As A Literature Review About Students Of Color In Higher Education, Martín Alberto Gonzalez

Chicano/Latino Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

As a doctoral student, I was tasked to write a literature review for my dissertation, which focused on the experiences of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx undergraduate students at a predominantly white university in the Northeast. Rather than writing a traditional literature review, I wrote a critical race theory counterstory to convey my findings. Drawing on a systematic analysis of books, peer-reviewed articles, and reports related to Students of Color in higher education, I wrote a story about a first-generation Xicano student who does a college-going presentation at his former high school about racism and resistance in higher education. Specifically, from my analysis …

Community Gis Workshop Design & Delivery: Columbia County Geographic Workshop At Scappoose Public Library, Marty Marquis

Masters in GIS Practicum Reports

Geographic information systems (GIS) provide tools for industry, government, and the public to describe, visualize and organize space both conceptually and materially. Because the technology is complicated and potentially expensive, it is often out of the reach of those communities that might most benefit from its use, even as it’s routinely wielded by business interests, bureaucrats, and representative bodies to identify and legitimize administrative boundaries, potential areas for growth and profit, spatially oriented legislation (restricted areas, zoning), and so forth. Communities whose members know how to use a GIS gain potential advantages in deploying narratives that contest official plans for …

Leveraging A Campus Equity Walkthrough Evaluation (Cewe) Eportfolio To Assess First-Year Students’ Equity-Minded Learning And Campus Belonging, Oscar Fernandez, Andrew Lawrence, Melissa Shaquid Pirie, Gail Ring

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Scholarship demonstrates that ePortfolios enable students to collect work over time and reflect upon personal, academic, and career growth. However, a discussion on whether ePortfolios helps firstyear students describe their equity-mindedness and document their campus belonging perspectives remains mostly unexplored. The purpose of this point-in-time, qualitative research study is to describe first-year students’ experiences completing an on-campus physical walkthrough each spring quarter of 2017, 2018, and 2019. All first-year students were enrolled in a yearlong Freshman Inquiry course at Portland State University in Oregon. This study utilizes Saldaña’s (2016) in vivo coding approach to analyze students’ survey responses and summative …

#Onygo, Géraldine Blattner, Amanda Dalola, Stéphanie Roulon

PDXOpen: Open Educational Resources

#OnYGo is an innovative first-year French language e-textbook, designed as Open Educational Resource (OER), for learning beginning French (equivalent to one year at an American university). It is inspired by a remix of task-based, multiliteracies and communicative approaches, which provides students with opportunities to engage with French language and culture in a variety of contexts and situations, across a range of modalities. Through a wide range of activities, students develop and practice their language skills, and reflect on their cross-cultural knowledge and positionality in their understanding of the vast francophone landscape. #OnYGo is a first-year textbook that takes a DEI-forward …

The Role Of Preprocessing For Word Representation Learning In Affective Tasks, Nastaran Babanejad, Heidar Davoudi, Ameeta Agrawal, Manos Papagelis

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Affective tasks, including sentiment analysis, emotion classification, and sarcasm detection have drawn a lot of attention in recent years due to a broad range of useful applications in various domains. The main goal of affect detection tasks is to recognize states such as mood, sentiment, and emotions from textual data (e.g., news articles or product reviews). Despite the importance of utilizing preprocessing steps in different stages (i.e., word representation learning and building a classification model) of affect detection tasks, this topic has not been studied well. To that end, we explore whether applying various preprocessing methods (stemming, lemmatization, stopword removal, …

Oregon Zero Suicide Implementation Assessment Instrument, V.2.1, Karen Cellarius, Shelby Kuhn, Aliza Tuttle, Meghan Crane, Galli Murray, Canada Taylor Parker, Kathleen Lisborg

Regional Research Institute for Human Services

This 2023 update to the 2019 Zero Suicide implementation assessment tool and the accompanying web survey is a collaboration of Portland State University’s Human Services Implementation Lab, the Oregon Health Authority, the Zero Suicide Institute and other contributors. The assessment was adapted from the Education Development Center’s Zero Suicide resources available at http://zerosuicide.org/.

Related Resource:
Oregon Zero Suicide Implementation Assessment Instrument, v.1.0

Theorizing The Korean Wave| K(Q)Ueer-Pop For Another World: Toward A Theorization Of Gender And Sexuality In K-Pop, Jungmin Kwon

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article argues that the K-pop space, which on one level appears to be homogeneously cishetpatriarchal, actually encompasses multiple configurations of gender and sexual identity. Nonetheless, academic discussions about gender and sexuality in K-pop have been significantly weighted toward the idea of “soft masculinity” regarding male performers, thereby muffling other possible interpretations. I suggest a new term, K(Q)ueerness. It means the aesthetics, imaginations, practices, performances, and ideas of K-pop players sublate binaristic identifications, including masculinity and femininity and heterosexual and homosexual—as well as Butler’s distinction between performance and performativity—to embrace the multifarious expressions of gender and sexuality surrounding K-pop. This …

The Pacific Sentinel, January 2023, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

The Pacific Sentinel

Editor: Dan Chilton

Articles in this issue include:

• Letter From the Editor
• Jeffrey Gibson at the Portland Art Museum
• Dakota Modern Exhibit
• Defining Abolition With Walidah Imarisha
• We Keep Us Safe
• Psilocybin Solution
• The Case For ACAB
• Something Needs to Be Done
• Comic

Developing A Standard Operating Procedure For Irrigated Agricultural Field Delineation And Irrigation Identification Using Examples From The Oregon-Idaho Border And Central California, Scott Milleson

Masters in GIS Practicum Reports

This practicum draws from experience working as an intern for The Freshwater Trust (an environmental nonprofit organization based in Portland, Oregon) from June to December of 2022. The work performed in this internship involved the delineation of agricultural fields using ArcGIS Online, an online collaborative mapping tool, as well as identifying and assigning irrigation type attributes on the Oregon-Idaho border along the Snake River, and the Deschutes Basin.

The purpose of this practicum project is to create a generalized guide for the delineation of agricultural fields and identification of irrigation type using a standard operating procedure for GIS interns, mapathon …

Learned Compressive Representations For Single-Photon 3d Imaging, Felipe Gutierrez-Barragan, Fangzhou Mu, Andrei Ardelean, Atul Ingle, Claudio Bruschini, Edoardo Charbon, Yin Li, Mohit Gupta, Andreas Velten

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Single-photon 3D cameras can record the time-of-arrival of billions of photons per second with picosecond accuracy. One common approach to summarize the photon data stream is to build a per-pixel timestamp histogram, resulting in a 3D histogram tensor that encodes distances along the time axis. As the spatio-temporal resolution of the histogram tensor increases, the in-pixel memory requirements and output data rates can quickly become impractical. To overcome this limitation, we propose a family of linear compressive representations of histogram tensors that can be computed efficiently, in an online fashion, as a matrix operation. We design practical lightweight compressive representations …

National Emissaries For Preventive Healthcare. Visiting Nurses In Interwar Bulgaria And Yugoslavia, Evguenia Davidova

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the interwar period, as part of a wholesale reorganization of public healthcare, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia saw the emergence of a new healthcare protagonist: the visiting nurse. Grounded in archival materials, by means of an analysis that intertwines gender and class, this article argues that the visiting nurse became a crucial (and cheaper) link between the hospital and the home in the fight against social diseases and reducing child mortality. These social interactions were often mediated by international humanitarian organizations. In this context, the visiting nurse serves as another bridge—this time between national and international public health policies. Visiting nurses …

Exploratory Analysis Of Factors Affecting Home Delivery Returns, Michael Bronson, Miguel Figliozzi, Ali Riahi Samani, Sabya Mishra

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

E-commerce and house deliveries have experienced a rapid growth in the last two decades. The return of online shopping products is an undesirable side effect of online shopping that has not been properly studied in the transportation literature. Utilizing binary logit models, this research answers two novel research questions focusing on the online shopping channel: (i) What household characteristics are associated with a higher or lower propensity to return online purchases? and (ii) What type of products contribute to positive return delivery rates? To answer these questions models are developed using data collected from a household online survey of e-commerce …

Rdkg: A Reinforcement Learning Framework For Disease Diagnosis On Knowledge Graph, Shipeng Guo, Kunpeng Liu, Pengfei Wang, Weiwei Dai, Yi Du, Yuanchun Zhou, Wenjuan Cui

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Automatic disease diagnosis from symptoms has attracted much attention in medical practices. It can assist doctors and medical practitioners in narrowing down disease candidates, reducing testing costs, improving diagnosis efficiency, and more importantly, saving human lives. Existing research has made significant progress in diagnosing disease but was limited by the gap between interpretability and accuracy. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a method called Reinforced Disease Diagnosis on Knowlege Graph (RDKG). Specifically, we first construct a knowledge graph containing all information from electronic medical records. To capture informative embeddings, we propose an enhanced knowledge graph embedding method …

The Pacific Sentinel, January 2023, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

The Pacific Sentinel

Editor: Dan Chilton

Articles in this issue include:

• Wednesday & the Challenges of Adaptation
• First Impressions: A Newcomer's Guide to Portland
• Ooligan Press's Comic Debut
• The Land, the Water, the Sky
• Notes From Behind the Bar
• A Chat with ChatGPT
• Measure 110 & the Roadblocks of Negative Perceptions
• Pre-Covid: It's a Jungle out there. Post-Covid: It's a Jungle in Here

Pathos, Winter 2023, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Bret Steggell

Conspiracy Theories And Ebola: Lessons Learned Important For Future Pandemics, Shawn C. Smallman

International & Global Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

The public health campaign against Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo faced serious challenges, some due to conspiracy theories and denial. These beliefs were so powerful that they even caused repeated attacks upon health care providers and medical centers. These conspiracy theories were nothing new, as they are a common feature of all frightening epidemics, such as HIV and COVID-19. These narratives also circulated during the 2015 West African Ebola outbreak. Addressing conspiracy theories during an epidemic requires a coordinated campaign involving not only local leaders but also the cooperation of social media organizations

Unequal Trust: Bottled Water Consumption, Distrust In Tap Water, And Economic And Racial Inequality In The United States, Daniel Jaffee

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reviewing public health, nutrition, and social science literature, this article examines how bottled water consumption and spending in the United States differ along lines of race, ethnicity, and income, how these consumption patterns have changed in recent years, and how those shifts map onto perceptions of the safety and trustworthiness of tap water supplies, both before and since the Flint water disaster. It also addresses the differential impact of bottled water spending on household income. The findings challenge the truism that bottled water consumption is positively correlated with income, instead showing a bimodal racial and class consumption pattern that reflects …

Subito 2023, Portland State University. School Of Music & Theater

Subito: Student Voices from Portland State University School of Music & Theater

Issue 6, Spring 2023

Multiple articles from the new History of Hip-Hop course, faculty spotlight with School of Music & Theater Choir Directors Ethan Sperry and Coty Raven-Morris, analysis and commentary on multiple musical scores, tips for conductors avoiding injury, and so much more.

Unexpected Wins: Curating Comics And Teaching Manga From The Dark Horse Comics Collection, Elsa Loftis, Jon Holt

Library Faculty and Staff Publications and Presentations

A familiar staple of entertainment for a wide variety of readers, the comic book has not always held a regular place in the academic library. Concerning themselves with collecting more traditional expressions of scholarship, libraries have not historically dedicated much of their acquisitions budgets to this area. Therefore, the comic book or graphic novel was largely relegated to someone’s personal collection and would more likely be found on the shelves of a comic book store than the shelves of a university library.

Fast-forward to the present day, where library collections more commonly provide access to comic books, either in regular …