Digital Commons Network^™

Engaging In A Rural Deaf Community Of Practice, Kara Gournaris

Dissertations and Theses

The number of students taking American Sign Language (ASL) at the post-secondary level continues to increase as more Deaf-related graduate programs and employment settings require fluent ASL skills. Western Oregon University (WOU) is one of the few existing programs in the United States that offers four years of ASL instruction; however, as a rural university it has limited access to a Deaf community. The problem of practice is that students often have little exposure to rich language models who are fluent in ASL, which impacts their legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) in the local Deaf communities of practice (CoPs) and reduces …

Measurements Of N₂O And Sf₆ Mole Fraction And N₂O Isotopic Composition Between 1978 And 1997 In Archived Air Samples From Cape Meares, Oregon, Terry Clinton Rolfe

Dissertations and Theses

Nitrous oxide (N₂O) is the third most important greenhouse gas (GHG) behind carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄). Sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆) does not add significantly to climate forcing by itself due to the low concentration in the atmosphere; however, it is one of the most powerful GHG known. Measurements of atmospheric N₂O made prior to mid-1990 have larger uncertainties than later periods due to advancements made in gas chromatography (GC) methods. Few atmospheric SF₆ measurements pre-1990 exist, especially in the northern hemisphere. Archived samples may be analyzed using updated …

"To Call Or Not To Call?" The Impact Of Supervisor Training On Call Center Employee Attitudes And Well-Being, Whitney Elan Schneider Vogel

Dissertations and Theses

Call center customer service occupations represent a growing proportion of the U.S. economy in the digital age. These roles are characterized by low control, high levels of emotional labor, and burnout. Turnover rates in call centers are often twice as high as in other industries. To combat these challenges, I delivered a supervisor-focused mental health training intervention targeted at improving supervisor supportive behaviors and employee outcomes. The indirect effect of supervisor training on employee outcomes related to perceived supervisor support, problem-focused coping, burnout, turnover intentions, and withdrawal behaviors were evaluated. A waitlist control design (N = 74) was used …

Sensory Relevance Models, Walt Woods

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation concerns methods for improving the reliability and quality of explanations for decisions based on Neural Networks (NNs). NNs are increasingly part of state-of-the-art solutions for a broad range of fields, including biomedical, logistics, user-recommendation engines, defense, and self-driving vehicles. While NNs form the backbone of these solutions, they are often viewed as "black box" solutions, meaning the only output offered is a final decision, with no insight into how or why that particular decision was made. For high-stakes fields, such as biomedical, where lives are at risk, it is often more important to be able to explain a …

Parr Going The Distance: How Migratory Difficulty Influences Red Muscle Lipid Storage In Juvenile Oncorhynchus Mykiss, Emily Jean Morse

Dissertations and Theses

Adult salmonid populations embarking on difficult migrations have evolved to store more somatic energy prior to river entry. While it is known that lipids are the primary fuel for endurance swimming in fish, uncertainty still surrounds how these mechanisms are utilized by juvenile fish during seaward migration. A key phase in salmonid migration is the preparatory season of feeding and growth before swimming downstream. During this period, juvenile fish build somatic fuel stores through dietary uptake. Intestinal microbiota of steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) vary drastically across their geographic range, with significant differences in the coastal and inland subspecies' …

The Spatial And Temporal Evolution Of The Portland And Tualatin Basins, Oregon, Usa, Darby Patrick Scanlon

Dissertations and Theses

The Portland and Tualatin basins are part of the Puget-Willamette Lowland in the Cascadia forearc of Oregon and Washington. The Coast Range to the west has undergone Paleogene transtension and Neogene transpression, which is reflected in basin stratigraphy. To better understand the tectonic evolution of the region, I modeled three key stratigraphic horizons and their associated depocenters (areas of maximum sediment accumulation) through space and time using well log, seismic, outcrop, aeromagnetic, and gravity data. Three isochore maps were created to constrain the location of Portland and Tualatin basin depocenters during 1) Pleistocene to mid-Miocene (0-15 Ma), 2) eruption of …

Indigenous Party Formation And Success: The Strategic Roles Of Reserved Seats, Parties, And Horizontal Accountability, Michael Fitzgerald

Dissertations and Theses

More than twenty legislatures reserve a portion of seats for ethnic minority groups, often in an attempt to prevent violent conflict and redress historical oppression. The intention of reserved seats coincides with indigenous group objectives--to achieve political representation while maintaining autonomy. Yet the formation and electoral success of indigenous parties does not always follow adoption of a reserved seat system. I explain this inconsistency by taking reserved seats as a necessary but insufficient condition of indigenous party formation, and arguing that two additional conditions must be met to motivate indigenous groups to form a viable party: the failure of the …

Architectural And Philosophical 'Makerspace' Redesign Impact On Teacher Beliefs And Practices: A Case Study, Rurik-Rory James Nackerud

Dissertations and Theses

Current jobs in a global economy require more complex cognitive skills, such as critical thinking, cooperation, creativity, and collaboration, in addition to content knowledge. To address these areas, researchers have suggested the use of a 'makerspace' in schools. As with many other establishments, my school remodeled the primary school to create a makerspace for developing these skills. What impact might a makerspace -- a physical as well as a curricular change -- have on teachers' individual and collaborative learning? The purpose of this case study was to describe how the makerspace concept and changes to classroom or instructional space influence …

The Fate Of Atmospherically Deposited Mercury In Mountain Lake Food Webs, And Implications For Fisheries Management, Ariana Martos Chiapella

Dissertations and Theses

Mountain lakes are an iconic feature of the landscape in the Mountain West. They hold significant ecological and cultural value, and are important sentinels of environmental change. Despite their pristine image, these remote waterbodies are subjected to numerous anthropogenic stressors. Mountain lakes are naturally fishless systems, but historical fish stocking has led to major changes in mountain lake food web structure, including declines of resident amphibians, large-bodied zooplankton, and emergent insect populations. Atmospherically deposited contaminants, such as mercury, can accumulate in mountain lake food webs, leading to relatively high levels in the fish relative to the water. Managing for these …

Drinking On A Work Night: A Comparison Of Day And Person-Level Associations With Workplace Outcomes, Brittnie Renae Shepherd

Dissertations and Theses

Alcohol use and misuse is costly for U.S. employers, primarily due to health care expenses and lost work productivity. Despite high costs for organizations, employee alcohol use is understudied within the organizational literature. The scant research conducted largely utilized cross-sectional designs examining differences across individuals, despite prevailing theoretical frameworks describing primarily within-person processes. This study examined the simultaneous within-person and between-person relationships between employee alcohol use and work and well-being outcomes. The separation and comparison of within-person and between-person effects is essential for the evaluation of key theoretical frameworks around employee alcohol use. Additionally, this study investigates one mechanism (i.e., …

"What About The Men? Investigating Alcohol Consumption, Masculinities, And Risky Sex In Peri-Urban Eswatini, Aaron Jackson Levine

Dissertations and Theses

This study focuses on the narratives Swazi men create around drinking, masculinity, and sexual behavior. Alcohol myopia theory, motivational-expectation theory of drinking, and Connell's theory of masculinities were used to create research that details how alcohol and the cultural environment of gendered social drinking intertwine and interact with each other to form the gender structure of eSwatini. Twenty Swazi men were sampled by convenience, given semi-structured interviews, and questioned about their perceived and internal reasoning for the drinking of themselves and others, the observed drinking behaviors of others, their own drinking behaviors, how they viewed women in and accepted women …

Drafting In Self-Timed Circuits, Christopher Lee Cowan

Dissertations and Theses

Intervals between data items propagating in self-timed circuits are controlled by handshake signals rather than by a clock. In many self-timed designs, a trailing data item will catch up with a leading item or token, even when it trails by thousands of gate delays. This effect, called "drafting," can be seen in many of the self-timed designs, e.g., GasP, Mousetrap, Click, and Micropipeline. The purpose of this dissertation is to reveal the circuit mechanism of drafting in self-timed circuits typically used in FIFO stages. Drafting is usually considered to be incidental to the operation of self-timed circuits since interval timing …

Interrogating The Construction And Representations Of Criminalized Women In The Academic Social Work Literature: A Critical Discourse Analysis, Sandra Marie Leotti

Dissertations and Theses

In the United States today, there are 2.3 million people behind bars in jails and prisons. Mass incarceration has swept up the United States to such a degree that we are known globally for holding more people in correctional facilities than any other country in the world. Although women have always, and still do, reflect a smaller proportion of the correctional population, over the last 40 years, their rates of criminalization and imprisonment have far outpaced that of men's. Drastic increases in the criminalization of women are intimately connected to the entrenchment of social disadvantage enabled under neoliberal globalization. Neoliberal …

Use Of Two-Replisome Plasmids To Characterize How Chromosome Replication Completes, Nicklas Alexander Hamilton

Dissertations and Theses

All living organisms need to accurately replicate their genome to survive. Genomic replication occurs in three phases; initiation, elongation, and completion. While initiation and elongation have been extensively characterized, less is known about how replication completes. In Escherichia coli completion occurs at sites where two replication forks converge and is proposed to involve the transiently bypass of the forks, before the overlapping sequences are resected and joined. The reaction requires RecBCD, and involves several other gene products including RecG, ExoI, and SbcDC but can occur independent of recombination or RecA. While several proteins are known to be involved, how they …

"Poverty Wages Are Not Fresh, Local, Or Sustainable": Building Worker Power By Organizing Around (Re)Production In Portland's "Sustainable" Food Industry, Amy Katherine Rose Coplen

Dissertations and Theses

Although conscious consumers flock to sustainability-branded restaurants and grocery stores to "vote with their forks" for environmental sustainability and vibrant local economies, workers in these industries face the same poverty wages, discrimination, and exploitative labor practices that plague the food service and retail industries at large. Despite rapid growth and labor degradation, low-wage workers in these industries have largely been left behind by the mainstream labor movement and the alternative food movement. Whereas in the past, progressive social movements worked to alter power relations between labor and capital through collective action, today's mainstream labor movement focuses on servicing its dwindling …

Estimation Of Association Between A Longitudinal Marker And Interval-Censored Progression Times, Naghmeh Daneshi

Dissertations and Theses

In longitudinal studies, we observe the subjects who are likely to progress to a new state during the study time. For example, in clinical trials the stage of a progressing disease is recorded at each follow-up visit. The primary goal is to estimate the relationship between the attributes and the subject's progression state. In such studies, some subjects complete all their follow-up visits and their progression state are observed without any missingness. However, others miss their follow-up visits and when they come back, they learn that they have progressed to a new state. In this case, not only are their …

A Secure Anti-Counterfeiting System Using Near Field Communication, Public Key Cryptography, Blockchain, And Bayesian Games, Naif Saeed Alzahrani

Dissertations and Theses

Counterfeit products, especially in the pharmaceutical sector, have plagued the international community for decades. To combat this problem, many anti-counterfeiting approaches have been proposed. They use either Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or Near Field Communication (NFC) physical tags affixed to the products. Current anti-counterfeiting approaches detect two counterfeiting attacks: (1) modifications to a product's tag details, such as changing the expiration date; and (2) cloning of a genuine product's details to reuse on counterfeit products. In addition, these anti-counterfeiting approaches track-and-trace the physical locations of products as the products flow through supply chains.

Existing approaches suffer from two main drawbacks. …

Versatile Binary-Level Concolic Testing, Bo Chen

Dissertations and Theses

Computing systems are experiencing an explosive growth, both in complexities and diversities, ushered in by the proliferation of cloud computing, mobile computing, and Internet of Things. This growth has also exposed the consequences of unsafe, insecure, and unreliable computing systems. These all point to the great needs of sophisticated system validation techniques. Recent advances in research on symbolic execution has shown great promises for automated software analysis, e.g., generating test cases, finding bugs, and detecting security vulnerabilities. However, symbolic execution is mostly adopted to analyze user applications, while modern computing systems in practice consist of many components shipped by various …

An Examination Of Non-Waged Labor And Local Food Movement Growth In The Southern Appalachians, Amy Kathryn Marion

Dissertations and Theses

Farmers have traditionally depended on their families or paid employees to cover their extensive labor needs. Today, non-waged labor models are gaining popularity, especially among small, ecologically-oriented farms. Apprenticeships and internships can be a primary form of training for a population of new and beginning farmers, many of whom are entering the field without farming backgrounds. However, many question the sustainability and justness of these arrangements. As a new phenomenon, very little research examines the relationship between non-waged labor models like agricultural apprenticeships and alternative food movements. In this exploratory study, the author surveyed nearly 250 farmers growing for local …

Design Of A Canine Inspired Quadruped Robot As A Platform For Synthetic Neural Network Control, Cody Warren Scharzenberger

Dissertations and Theses

Legged locomotion is a feat ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom, but modern robots still fall far short of similar achievements. This paper presents the design of a canine-inspired quadruped robot named DoggyDeux as a platform for synthetic neural network (SNN) research that may be one avenue for robots to attain animal-like agility and adaptability. DoggyDeux features a fully 3D printed frame, 24 braided pneumatic actuators (BPAs) that drive four 3-DOF limbs in antagonistic extensor-flexor pairs, and an electrical system that allows it to respond to commands from a SNN comprised of central pattern generators (CPGs). Compared to the previous version …

Design And Experimental Evaluation Of Deepmarket: An Edge Computing Marketplace With Distributed Tensorflow Execution Capability, Soyoung Kim

Dissertations and Theses

There is a rise in demand among machine learning researchers for powerful computational resources to train complex machine learning models, e.g., deep learning models. In order to train these models in a reasonable amount of time, the training is often distributed among multiple machines; yet paying for such machines (either through renting them on cloud data centers or building a local infrastructure) is costly. DeepMarket attempts to reduce these costs by creating a marketplace that integrates multiple computational resources over a distributed TensorFlow framework. Instead of requiring users to rent expensive GPU/CPUs from a third-party cloud provider, DeepMarket allows users …

Situational Context Of Police Use Of Deadly Force: A Comparison Of Black And White Subjects Of Fatal Police Shootings, Shana Lynn Meaney Ruess

Dissertations and Theses

Police use of deadly force is an understudied yet deeply important issue in our society. Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in public concern over use of deadly force, particularly when that force is used against people of color. Due to the relative low frequency of deadly force incidents, little is known about when such force is used, or who it is used on. Recent studies have found a racial disparity between white and black subjects of deadly force, with black subjects significantly over represented as a proportion of the population. This study further expands our understanding of police …

Are We Providing Preferred Floral Resources For Bees In Our Neighborhoods? : Assessing The Relationship Between Small Scale Vegetation Metrics And Bee Presence In Se Portland, Hailey Wallace

Dissertations and Theses

Bee pollinators can thrive in highly urbanized environments if their preferred floral resources and habitat types are available. Enhanced pollinator habitats are being created globally, with a large local effort in Portland, Oregon. This project determined if we were providing the most preferred floral resources at enhanced pollinator sites for bees, if floral resources were available throughout the season, and if differences in dietary preferences between native and honey bees would allow for the identification of "native bee floral resources" in South East Portland. Bee pollinators were monitored from June to August at three enhanced pollinator sites in South East …

Closure Or Censure? Examining The Determinants Of Disclosure Of Sexual Assault Among College Students, Whitney Head-Burgess

Dissertations and Theses

Sexual assault is an ongoing problem on college campuses, with some projections indicating that one in four college women has experienced some sexual coercion or assault during her time at university. Recent national policy has strove to address the problem through legislation like the 2013 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act. Nonetheless, the crime remains the most underreported in the nation despite policy and law which explicitly defines what constitutes sexual assault. However, most victims of sexual assault will disclose what happened to someone else, even if they choose not to report.

This research examines sexual assault disclosure practices on a …

Effects Of Regulation Intensity On Marijuana Black Market After Legalization, Sikang Song

Dissertations and Theses

Since 2012, many states and Canada have legalized the use and sale of recreational marijuana. One of the expected benefits of the legalization is that the establishment of a legal cannabis market would eliminate the black market which has been the main form of marijuana trade for decades. Even though legal options are available for marijuana producers and consumers, the black market is still thriving in states where recreational marijuana has been legalized. The reasons behind the persistence of the marijuana black market are complex. One of the main arguments is that the legalized states have failed to establish a …

Large-Scale Der Aggregations Of Electric Water Heaters And Battery Inverter Systems, Kevin Marnell

Dissertations and Theses

Distributed energy resources like residential electric water heaters and residential battery inverter systems offer a small amount of change to the grid individually. When aggregated however, these assets can cause major effects to the electric grid. Aggregating these resources allows them to take on generator-like functions with the ability to increment power and decrement power.

The Western Energy Imbalance Market is an energy market offering 15 minute and 5 minute markets for energy transactions between balancing areas. Generation assets make increment and decrement bids. Traditionally the only entrants to this market have been large scale generators and large scale assets …

An Evaluation Of Clackamas County's Transition Center Using Propensity Score Modeling, Alicia De Jong Mckay

Dissertations and Theses

Part of the purpose of Justice Reinvestment Initiatives (JRIs) involve a focus of funds and effort toward implementing practices that increase the chances of successful reintegration of people recently released from incarceration. Similar to other jurisdictions, Oregon's JRI has taken a number of forms of reintegrative efforts. In 2016, JRI funding opened a services hub and reintegration/reentry center in a rural county. The Center offers a central location for reentry services, such as employment and housing assistance, but is not a requirement of an offender's supervision. Relying on the risk-need-responsivity framework, this program aims to reduce recidivism by mitigating barriers …

Regional Modeling Of The Glaciers Of The North Cascades Mountains, Washington, Usa, Christina Eileen Gray

Dissertations and Theses

Glaciers in the North Cascades store winter snowfall as ice and release it in late summer as melt, providing an important regional source of water and hydroelectric energy. The future of glaciers in the North Cascades, Washington, were evaluated using a regional glaciation model driven by the Community Climate System Model 4 global climate model. The climate model was coupled with three Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5. These RCPs provide a business-as-usual scenario (RCP 8.5), which assumes society makes little to no efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a best-case scenario (RCP 2.6) with strong attempts to …

Gender And The Voir Dire Process, Tasha Ann Lane

Dissertations and Theses

The jury selection process (also known as voir dire) has been examined previously in many ways, including racial impacts. Previous research suggests the need for more examination of how and if gender impacts the voir dire process. The lack of knowledge about how gender impacts voir dire might also have implications for public respect and trust in the court system. For example, theories of procedural justice suggest that individual experiences with the legal system affect whether they view the entire legal system as being legitimate. This is important because this perception then impacts how the public interact with the system. …

Nine Times Out Of Ten, You Don't Die, Patrick Ronald Wensink

Dissertations and Theses

My novel, "Nine Times Out of Ten, You Don't Die," is the story of Layla Wisnewski and her quest to write a book about her famous father. In the 1970s, "Big Dan" Wisnewski was a motorcycle stuntman who broke more bones than anyone living. He jumped cars and buses and rivers atop a white Harley Davidson. Big Dan was considered an American Hero.

Fast forward forty years, Big Dan has been dead for decades, and his daughter Layla is writing a book about his life. While researching the book, she learns she was kidnapped as a baby. This …