Digital Commons Network^™

Proximity To Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric Care And The Utilization Of Facility-Based Delivery Services Across Six Low-And-Middle Income Countries, Chioma T. Amadi

Dissertations and Theses

Background: More than 90% of maternal deaths occur in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) and are largely attributed to preventable pregnancy-related causes. Comprehensive emergency obstetric care (EmOC), also known as signal functions, is the most effective life-saving intervention for managing obstetric and newborn emergencies. Health facilities offering delivery services are generally classified as having either comprehensive, basic or less than basic EmOC capacity based on their obstetric resources. Multiple EmOC methods are regularly utilized in characterizing facility obstetric capacity and this introduces inconsistencies that pose significant public health and policy implications for access to delivery care among women within a service environment. …

Memristive Architectures And Algorithms For Approximate Graph-Based Inference, Mohammad M.A. Taha

Dissertations and Theses

The goal of this thesis is to design fast, low-power, robust graph-based inference systems. Our approach to this is by using (1) in-memory computing, (2) approximate computing principles, and (3) memristive devices.

This work is motivated by the fact that conventional von Neumann architectures are not efficient for inference applications, mainly due to the data transfer bottleneck. Adding cache memories and using GPUs is a remedy, however, does not eliminate this bottleneck. In-memory computing is an alternative approach that performs all computations inside the memory, thus eliminating the data transfer bottleneck.

The memristor, which is a passive two-terminal device, is …

Evaluating R&D Projects In Regulated Utilities: The Case Of Power Transmission Utilities, Edwin Garces

Dissertations and Theses

R&D project selection is essential for many organizations; however, it is a complex decision since it is affected by many factors. These factors vary among organizations because of their different objectives and conditions. There are limited budgets for the investments, and the current R&D project selection methods are focused on financial analysis or complex mathematical probabilistic calculations. Therefore, the main motivation of this research is to create a method to help improve the ex-ante selection of R&D projects in regulated organizations. More importantly, the case application is the electric transmission utilities sector, which plays one of the most critical roles …

A Market Diffusion Potential (Mdp) Assessment Model For Residential Energy Efficient (Ee) Technologies In The U.S., Momtaj Khanam

Dissertations and Theses

The Diffusion of Residential Energy Efficient (EE) Technologies has been studied for many years. Finding ways to bridge the energy efficiency gap and increase the diffusion of these technologies have been of much interest to researchers and practitioners alike. However, in most studies, diffusion is equated to adoption of EE technologies by consumers. The present study tries to break this mindset and develops a model to assess the diffusion of residential EE technologies from the market's perspective. The model assesses diffusion of an EE technology based on the market's ability to provide benefits to customers that are identified to be …

Spatial Statistical Approaches To Water Quality Modelling, Janardan Mainali

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation aims to advance the existing knowledge related to spatial modeling of water quality by exploring and introducing innovative approaches to different spatial conceptualizations for water quality modeling and incorporating upstream-downstream relations in geographically weighted regression. By carrying out a systematic literature review of four different classes of spatial models in Chapter One, this dissertation identifies the following major research gaps: lack of incorporation of multiscale processes, not enough emphasis on spatial weights matrices, and unavailability of upstream-downstream relationships in geographically weighted regressions. Chapters Two and Three were designed to address these gaps in the literature. In Chapter Two, …

Ce-Qual-W2 Hydrodynamic And Water Quality Model Of The Cedar River Municipal Watershed, Amory Spencer Cervarich

Dissertations and Theses

The laterally averaged, two-dimensional model CE-QUAL-W2 was used to develop a water quality model of the Cedar River Municipal Watershed as a reservoir management and climate change scenario tool. The 90,638-acre watershed, located 56 kilometers southeast of Seattle, WA, provides drinking water to over 1.4 million people. The watershed relies on two waterbodies for storage, Chester Morse Lake and the Masonry Pool. The Masonry Dam is the main storage structure in the watershed. The Cedar River flows downstream from the Masonry Dam for 57 kilometers to Lake Washington. The reservoir model simulated Chester Morse Lake and the Masonry Pool. The …

Examining Employee Needs At Work And Home: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective, Dana Anuhea Auten

Dissertations and Theses

This research study utilizes self-determination theory (SDT) to examine employees' daily need satisfaction for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in work and nonwork domains and their association with work outcomes. Specifically, daily work-related need satisfaction and need frustration are theorized to represent resource-rich and resource-depleted states within employees that are associated with cognitive engagement or disengagement with work during nonwork time (i.e., psychological detachment, positive work reflection, negative work reflection), and subsequent next day work engagement and exhaustion. Furthermore, previous research indicates that need satisfaction and frustration exist in multiple life domains. Daily experiences of need satisfaction and frustration are therefore …

Examining The Narratives Of Military Sexual Trauma Survivors, Maria Carolina GonzáLez-Prats

Dissertations and Theses

Background: The return of military sexual trauma (MST) to the national spotlight has been fueled by a combination of continued reports of sexual assaults across the various military branches, increased visibility of sexual abuse scandals in the media, and mounting calls for accountability from veteran advocacy groups and legislators. Although there have been numerous reforms implemented by the military, there still exists a significant gap between the military's official efforts and the reality of the survivors' experiences. Consequently, more research is needed to understand how survivors perceive the military's efforts, how these efforts affect their experiences, and how future …

An Assessment Of The Decision-Making Units' Efficiency In Service Systems, Maoloud Yakhlif Dabab

Dissertations and Theses

Most tools and models of performance and quality of service management are generic and do not solve complex technical systems. The critical components of the system need such tools to assess their efficiency to make a better decision about them. One of the primary objectives in the service systems is to improve the ability of efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability of critical assets. One of the challenges with improving critical assets is the amount of major capital spending needed to upgrade a technology infrastructure with a high obsolescence rate. This along with usage and reliability issues, makes evaluating mobile cells to …

Trajectories, Time Windows, And Alternative Pathways Of Engagement: Motivational Resources Underlying Academic Development During Middle School, Heather Anne Brule

Dissertations and Theses

The middle school years are, in many ways, a key window for students' motivational development. Despite the numerous developmental gains that characterize early adolescence, levels of academic motivation tend to decline as students age, and show steeper drops during the transitions to middle school and to high school. Maintaining high levels of motivation during this period may be particularly important for students from marginalized groups who are at risk for even steeper motivational drops--and for whom academic motivation may be an especially critical resource for later success. Because academic motivation seems to stabilize after middle school, students' later success may …

Dynamic Response Of Highway Bridge Superstructures Subjected To Wave Action: Experimental Analysis And Numerical Modeling, Alaa Waleed Hameed

Dissertations and Theses

Bridges are critical lifeline components of the infrastructure network, enabling economies to function under normal conditions and disaster response and recovery missions to take place after extreme events. Therefore, ensuring satisfactory performance increases community resilience and minimizes both human and economic losses. Coastal bridges, which are the focus of this PhD dissertation, are vulnerable to coastal storms. High failure rates of these bridges during two major hurricane events in the mid-2000s have spurred research activities to better understand the wave-induced forces of coastal bridges.

This PhD research represents a continuation effort to build, implement, and introduce new fundamental concepts and …

Design Of A 7-Mhz Portable Direct Conversion Transceiver With Digitally Controlled Keying, Abram Morphew

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis outlines the design of a portable direct conversion transceiver system for the 7-MHz (or 40m) band. This band is popular due to its propagation characteristics which allow for world-wide communication with very low power. The transceiver utilizes a crystal-stabilized local oscillator optimized for frequency agility, low power consumption, and an optimal drive level of +7 dBm. A low power 8-bit microcontroller acts as an interface for either a straight key providing manual Morse code operation or digital logic control from a personal computer. It also acts as a side tone oscillator providing audio feedback to the operator during …

A Multivariate Assessment Of Climate Change Projections Over South America Using Cmip5, Valerie Maria Thaler

Dissertations and Theses

A multivariate assessment of climate model projections over South America from the CMIP5 archive is presented. Change in near-surface temperature, precipitation, evapotranspiration, integrated water vapor transport (IVT), sea level pressure, and wind at multiple pressure levels is quantified across the multi-model suite and an assessment of model-to-model agreement on projected change performed. All models project warming by the mid- and late-21st century throughout the continent, with the highest magnitude projected over tropical regions. The CMIP5 models are in strong agreement that precipitation will decrease in all seasons over portions of Patagonia, especially along the northern portions of the current-climate mid-latitude …

Follow The (Electronic) Money: How Bitcoin And Blockchain Technology Are "Shaking The System", Jim Robert Mignano

Dissertations and Theses

Bitcoin is the first digital medium to allow global, "purely peer-to-peer" exchange. At the height of the Great Recession, Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator introduced the electronic cash to sidestep political and economic institutions. Today, it is praised as an opportunity for the unbanked, a liberating force, and a pioneering technology. It is also infamously associated with volatility, illicit activities, and profligate energy consumption.

Bitcoin has also flown under the radar of political science, whereas computer scientists, economists, and legal scholars have written extensively about it. To address the gap in the literature, I describe Bitcoin as an actor in global affairs, …

Christine De Pizan's Passive Heroines: Recoding Feminine Identities In Le Livre De La Cité Des Dames And Le Ditié De Jehanne D'Arc, Evelyn Ives Mills

Dissertations and Theses

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Christine de Pizan has resurfaced in the academic and literary spheres as a paragon of proto-feminist thought. This modern fascination with the fifteenth-century writer is largely grounded in her surprisingly progressive views on a woman's right to receive an education, to govern and achieve financial freedom. More recently, scholars have lauded Christine's later works for their reinterpretation of what it meant to be a woman in fifteenth-century Europe. The present study examines this latter goal of Christine de Pizan's writing specifically in the context of the heroic feminine identity she constructs …

Social Saints In The City: Race, Space, And Religion In Chicago Women's Settlement Work, 1890-1935, Johanna Katherine Murphy

Dissertations and Theses

Many scholars on the settlement movement have mentioned Hull-House's interactions with the Catholic Church and/or the surrounding immigrant communities, but have failed to fully examine the dynamic between Hull-House women, Catholic laywomen who took up settlement work, and the various Catholic immigrant groups of Chicago. This research seeks to place these relationships within the context of space -- meaning physical space in the neighborhood, access to spaces, and space as influence. This lens acts as a thread connecting the tangled and fluctuating dynamics of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender surrounding the settlement house movement.

Hull-House residents and Catholic laywomen contended …

Examining Mindfulness Training For Teachers: Theoretical And Methodological Extensions Of Intervention Effectiveness, Jaiya Rae Choles

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation seeks to extend the field of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) for teachers, both theoretically and methodologically. The first study is a systematic review conducted of randomized controlled trials examining the effectiveness of MBIs for school teachers. The purpose of Study 1 was to determine theoretical and methodological next steps for the field. Results of the theoretical review indicate more empirical evidence is needed examining mindfulness practices used in the interventions, distal impacts on classrooms and students, and mediation tests connecting proximal and distal outcomes. The methodological review indicates that more studies should focus on measuring the fidelity of implementation …

Weekend Spanish Immersion Camp: A Non-Traditional Teaching World Language To Middle School American Students, Jorge Oscar Ramirez

Dissertations and Theses

The nature of today's global economy demands that students demonstrate high levels of proficiency in foreign languages. To meet global demand, most countries around the world are including comprehensive world language instruction in their educational systems beginning at an early age. The increasingly multi-lingual nature of culture within and beyond the Unites States. is escalating the importance of immersing students in world languages as early as possible to ensure a high level of written and oral foreign language skill proficiency by the time students graduate from high school. However, most American students do not have the opportunity to study a …

Assessing Adaptive Capacity To Climate And Population Change At The Urban-Rural Interface: Human-Water System Dynamics In The Hood River Valley, Oregon, Alexander Reid Ross

Dissertations and Theses

An exurban nook on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge named after the Hood River that runs northward from the glaciers of Mount Hood to the confluence seems ideally poised for the kind of relaxed, natural lifestyle that once brought suburban areas their appeal. However, like other exurban areas, Hood River also lies at an uncertain fault-line between economic and environmental transformation in the U.S.'s exurbs.

This study maps the socio-economic and climatological transformations of exurban areas as they contend with different approaches to sustainability and resilience. To determine the major climate and development hazards facing exurban areas …

Designing Gates And Architectures For Superconducting Quantum Systems, Sahar Daraeizadeh

Dissertations and Theses

Large-scale quantum computers can solve certain problems that are not tractable by currently available classical computational resources. The building blocks of quantum computers are qubits. Among many different physical realizations for qubits, superconducting qubits are one of the promising candidates to realize gate model quantum computers. In this dissertation, we present new multi-qubit gates for nearest-neighbor superconducting quantum systems. In the absence of a physical hardware, we simulate the dynamics of the quantum system and use the simulated environment as a framework for test, design, and optimization of quantum gates and architectures. We explore three different simulation-based gate design methodologies: …

Mathematical Silences, Matthew Nathan Petersen

Dissertations and Theses

Previous studies have shown that mathematicians employ lengthy silences in their collaborations, contrary to the norms that govern every-day collaborations. Such results shows the relevance of an investigation of silence in mathematical collaboration. This dissertation builds off these results in a series of three papers. The first paper describes a methodology that can be employed in the investigation of silence in mathematical collaboration. The second paper analyses silence in the mathematical collaboration of students in junior-level introductory proof classes. It identifies two forms of mathematical activity, reading and ruminating, that students regularly engage in, and which violate the norms of …

Settler Colonial Curriculum In Carlisle Boarding School: A Historical And Personal Qualitative Research Study, Patrick Gerard Eagle Staff

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation research study brings together a historical account and one scholar's personal and family stories of how Indigenous children were stolen and sent to the first Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding schools and tribal schools. In the case of the researcher's family, the educational experiences at Carlisle Indian Industrial School immediately started a traumatic assimilation process on Indigenous children that instilled generational trauma for them and their descendants. At these schools, Indigenous children were forced to conform to a foreign European school designed to abolish their Indigenous identity that demanded they give up their language and culture to …

The Role Of Strategic Governance In Reducing Infant Mortality Under Crisis Conditions, Lynn Christine Finley

Dissertations and Theses

The infant mortality rate (IMR) in some developing countries has decreased faster than the global average even though these countries lack strong economic growth, good governance, and democracy (often acknowledged precursors to improved health outcomes). What accounts for the improvement of the IMR in the absence of these traditional pathways to health gains? Some scholars suggest that the concept of "strategic governance" might help direct attention to intermediary factors that reduce neonatal deaths in countries that experience crisis conditions. The main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the set of governance practices that have reduced IMR in two such …

The Economically Disadvantaged Speak: Exploring The Intersection Of Poverty, Race, Child Neglect And Racial Disproportionality In The Child Welfare System, Angela Gail Cause

Dissertations and Theses

The relationship between poverty and child maltreatment has long been addressed in the literature. Disproportionally, children, especially those of color, are more likely to live in poverty than adults. It has been established that the risk of child maltreatment increases the longer impoverishment is experienced. Thus, the likelihood that racial disproportionality may have negative impact upon the child welfare system is potentially increased. Much attention has been given to the overrepresentation of certain children of color within the child welfare system when cared to their representation within the general population. This study explores the intersection of poverty and race upon …

Long Term Changes To The Lower Columbia River Estuary (Lcre) Hydrodynamics And Salinity Patterns, Aqeel Al-Bahadily

Dissertations and Theses

Changing the morphological and hydrological conditions of an estuary can affect the estuarine hydrodynamics. The hydrograph of the Lower Columbia River Estuary (LCRE) and its bathymetry have been altered significantly over the past 150 years, such that the spring-freshet has decreased by 40-50% while winter flow has increased by 50%. In addition, the inlet width has been narrowed from 9.7 to 3.2km by the construction of jetties, and the controlling depth of the navigation channel has been deepened from 6 to 13m by continuous dredging. Also, ~70% of the shallow water habitat has been lost due to diking and wetland …

Medical Cannabis In New York State, David Steven Younger

Dissertations and Theses

Background: In July 2014, New York State became the 23rd state to legalize marijuana (“cannabis”) for medical consumption under the New York State Medical Marijuana Program (“Program”). Three years later, during his Executive budget address, the NYS Governor, Honorable Cuomo, directed the Department of Health in consultation with other NYS agencies, to evaluate the experience, consequences and effects of legalized marijuana in neighboring states and territories, and to review the health, criminal justice and economic impacts of regulating marijuana use. That report concluded that the positive effects of a regulated marijuana market outweighed the potential negative impacts.

Objective: This dissertation …

The House We Built In Challenging The Status Quo: House And Ballroom Community Leadership And Health Justice, Jennifer Lee

Dissertations and Theses

Background: The House Ballroom Community (HBC), an underground queer subculture, has been leading actions in large urban cities throughout the Unites States to address health inequities exacerbated by stigma, systemic neglect, and economic disparities, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The HBC is an inventive and dynamic space that posits new leadership paradigms for health equity and health justice, where collective actions and their resulting social impact center the embodied knowledge of their members to create social change.

Methods: Community-based participatory research (CBPR) was a fundamental method and framework for each of the studies (Aims 1, 2, and 3). The meaningful …

The Role Of Agency In Early And Unwanted Adolescent Pregnancy: A Multi Country Analysis, Katharine Mccarthy

Dissertations and Theses

Purpose. The agency to decide one’s reproductive future is paramount, yet an estimated 75 percent of adolescent girls in the United States (U.S.) and 49 percent of those in low and middle-income countries experience mistimed or unwanted pregnancy. This dissertation characterized empirical representations of agency over the course of adolescence and investigated the relationship between agency and early and unwanted pregnancy and childbearing using data from three countries (India, Zambia and the U.S.).

Methods. Using latent class and latent transition analysis, multi-dimensional profiles of adolescent agency were assessed using data from: (1) a state representative cross-sectional cohort study of adolescents …

Agnostic Search For Metabolites Causally Implicated In Alzheimer's Disease, Sal P. Leggio

Dissertations and Theses

This paper uses two sample Mendelian randomizations to conduct an agnostic search of the metabolic GWAS published by Tao Long and co-workers. GWAS for AD from IGAP and from UK Biobank were used for outcomes. The author uses two sample Mendelian randomization (MR) to test for causal relationships between common blood metabolites and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). First, estimates for a set of 22 metabolites which are statistically significant for both outcome GWAS are determined. Egger regression, Mendelian Randomization Pleiotropy Residual Sum and Outlier (MRPRESSO), and weighted median regression are used as sensitivity checks. AD shares risk factors with both heart …

Addressing Structural Inequalities In Planning Processes: A Case Study Of An Equity Lens, Marta Conklé Mcguire

Dissertations and Theses

The use of equity lenses is growing rapidly in the public sector as a means to reform institutional practices that produce racialized outcomes; yet, organizations are interpreting and using an equity lens in different ways, leaving open questions on the extent to which a lens addresses structural inequalities. This dissertation focuses on an in-depth case study of a planning process that incorporated an equity lens in the development of a large scale urban system plan in Portland (OR) to build understanding of how an equity lens may change the institutional planning process. Insights from the study suggest an equity lens …