Digital Commons Network^™

Sampling Fish: A Case Study From The ČḮXWIcən Site, Northwest Washington, Laura Maye Syvertson

Dissertations and Theses

Researchers on the Northwest Coast (NWC) are often interested in complex questions regarding social organization, resource intensification, resource control, and impacts of environmental change on resources and in turn human groups. However, the excavation strategies used on the NWC often do not provide the spatial and chronological control within a site that is necessary to document their variability and answer these research questions. The Čḯx^wicən site has the potential to address some of the limitations of previous Northwest Coast village site excavations because of its unique and robust sampling strategy, the wide expanse of time that it was …

Development Of The Global-Self Through Collegiate Recreational Sports, Alexander Rocco Accetta

Dissertations and Theses

Today's student has more access to global issues than any previous generation. Nearly one million higher education students study abroad worldwide, the workplace reflects a need to be interculturally competent, and students rarely have opportunities to learn how to thrive in the new global environment. This study explored how higher education, and specifically collegiate recreation, is responding to this reality. The development of Killick's global-self is a guiding theme and was used to investigate how students perceive the development of their global-self after experiencing interventions designed to introduce the concepts of internationalization and globalization into a collegiate recreation intramural program. …

"Are We Building Biking Solidarity": Gendered, Racial, And Spatial Barriers To Bicycling In Portland, Oregon, Kyla Jean Tompkins

Dissertations and Theses

Although Portland, Oregon is widely regarded as a "bike friendly" city, its bike equity remains in question. This thesis explores the barriers to biking that women and people of color face in Portland. This research uses feminist geography scholarship to understand how cycling spaces are unequal for marginalized cyclists. Using data from 28 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with infrequent and marginalized cyclists, I found that gender and race inequalities shape their barriers to biking. A hegemonic white, elite, and masculine bike culture controls the domination of cycling spaces. Women's gendered spatial inequalities are shaped by their childrearing demands, geography of fear, …

"First"-Matters: Projecting The Displacement Of Responses To Questions In The Context Of Presidential Primary-Campaign Debates, Kristella Marie Montiegel

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis takes a conversation-analytic approach examining the pragmatic functions of the linguistic marker "first (off/of all)" in second-pair-part (i.e., responsive) position relative to questions. Using data from question-answer sequences in the 2015-2016 U.S. Presidential Republican primary debates, I propose six claims regarding the composition, position, and action of what is referred to as the practice of "First"-prefacing. Analysis reveals that "First"-prefacing projects the displacement of a response (conforming or non-conforming) to a question. In projecting the displacement of a response, "First"-prefacing does two things: (1) it projects that the unit(s) of talk to come immediately next will be something …

Development Of Physics Curriculum For Pre-Health Students, Elliot Eckman Mylott

Dissertations and Theses

Many pre-health students are required to take introductory physics as undergraduates, though they often struggle to see the relationship between medicine and what they learn in these courses. In order to help students make that connection, reformed curriculum was adopted that teaches physics through the context of biomedicine. This dissertation will discuss the development, implementation, and assessment of the reformed curriculum for the introductory and intermediate level physics courses that targets the needs of pre-health students.

The curriculum created during this project include laboratory activities, multimedia content, and other instructional materials all of which present physics in biomedical contexts. The …

Ozone Interaction With Indoor Building Materials And Hvac Filters, Omed Akber Abbass

Dissertations and Theses

As modern life develops, humans spend most of their time inside buildings. Understanding the effects of different building materials that exist indoors on indoor air quality is crucial to ensure comfort, health, and productivity of building occupants. Indoor air quality (IAQ) is an important field of building science that focuses on studying the existence of different compounds indoors. These compounds include: airborne particles such as dust, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as carbonyls, reactive gases such as radon, ozone and others. Ozone is a strong oxidant gas that has adverse effects on human health, and is highly reactive with building …

Expanding Metabolic Diversity Of Two Archaeal Phyla: Nanoarchaeota And Korarchaeota, John Forad Kelley

Dissertations and Theses

Culture independent studies have revealed a greater diversity of Archaea than the two kingdoms initially defined by Carl Woese. Culturing species from the newly discovered archaeal lineages, as with the majority of microbes, has been difficult. To overcome the culturing dilemma, metagenomics is being used to reconstruct environmental genomes. Two metagenomic studies are presented in this thesis, with the aim of recovering newly proposed archaeal genomes from the Nanoarchaeota and Korarchaeota.

In the first study, a sediment sample, NZ13, was collected from a terrestrial New Zealand hot spring. Along with the sediment sample, two complex enrichments were sequenced on an …

The Tension Between Technocratic And Social Values In Environmental Decision-Making: An'yang Stream Restoration In South Korea, Chang-Yu Hong

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examined the extent to which interests and values of diverse stakeholders were considered through participation-oriented decision-making. It covered the An' Yang Stream restoration case in South Korea, which has been judged a successful stream management endeavor led by public-private partnership governance.

This research utilized a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. It addressed the extent to which the collaborative and participatory decision-making processes incorporated diverse stakeholder values and visions. The relevant data on stream restoration was collected through nominal group technique (NGT), analytic hierarchy process (AHP), semi-structured interviews, observations at collaborative stakeholder meetings and workshops, and …

Reduced Order Description Of Experimental Two-Phase Pipe Flows: Characterization Of Flow Structures And Dynamics Via Proper Orthogonal Decomposition, Bianca Fontanin Viggiano

Dissertations and Theses

Multiphase pipe flow is investigated using proper orthogonal decomposition for tomographic X-ray data, where holdup, cross-sectional phase distributions and phase interface characteristics within the pipe are obtained. Six cases of stratified and mixed flow with water content of 10%, 30% and 80% are investigated to gain insight into effects of velocity and proportion of water on the flow fields. Dispersed and slug flows are separately analyzed to consider the added interface complexity of the flow fields. These regimes are also highly applicable to industry operational flows. Instantaneous and fluctuating phase fractions of the four flow regime are analyzed and reduced …

Soputan Volcano, Indonesia: Petrological Systematics Of Volatiles And Magmas And Their Bearing On Explosive Eruptions Of A Basalt Volcano, Syegi Lenarahmi Kunrat

Dissertations and Theses

Soputan volcano is one of the few basaltic volcanoes among 127 active volcanoes in Indonesia. It is part of the Sempu-Soputan volcanic complex located south of Tondano Caldera, North Sulawesi and commonly produces both explosive eruptions with VEI 2-3 and effusive lava dome and flow eruptions. Over the last two decades, Soputan had thirteen eruptions, the most recent in 2016. Most eruptions started explosively, followed by dome growth and in some cases pyroclastic flows. Our study focuses on understanding the magmatic system of Soputan and what processes are responsible for its highly explosive eruptions, which are typically uncommon for a …

Evolution And Metabolic Potential Of Francisella-Like Endosymbionts Of Ticks, Jonathan Graham Gerhart

Dissertations and Theses

Endosymbiosis in arthropods involves intracellular bacteria that supply an array of benefits to the host. Endosymbionts likely enhance the health of ticks by provisioning amino acids such as cysteine and tyrosine, and cofactors such as biotin and folic acid that are not available in blood--the sole nutrient source of ticks. Endosymbionts of ticks are of special interest due to their close evolutionary relationship with tick-vectored pathogens that impact livestock and human health. For example, ticks typically contain Coxiella-like endosymbionts (CLEs) that are the closest relatives of the human pathogen Coxiella burnetii. In order to understand the evolutionary relationship …

Holocaust, Memory, Second-Generation, And Conflict Resolution, Leslie O'Donoghue

Dissertations and Theses

Ten Jewish second-generation men and women from metro Portland, Oregon were interviewed regarding growing up in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The American-born participants ranged in age from fifty-one to sixty-four years of age at the time of the interviews. Though the parents were deceased at the time of this study the working definition of a Holocaust survivor parent included those individuals who had been refugees or interned in a ghetto, labor camp, concentration camp, or extermination camp as a direct result of the Nazi Regime in Europe from 1933 to 1945.

A descriptive phenomenological approach was utilized. Eight open-ended …

Assessing A Fluorescence Spectroscopy Method For In-Situ Microbial Drinking Water Quality, Taylor Jeffery Sharpe

Dissertations and Theses

Waterborne disease is a significant contributor to the global burden of disease, in particular among high-risk populations in developing nations. State-of-the-art methods for the enumeration of microbial pathogens in drinking water sources have important limitations, including high initial cost, 24-48 hour delays in results, high staffing and facility requirements, and training requirements which all become especially problematic in the developing nation context.

A number of alternative approaches to microbial water quality testing have been proposed, with the goal of decreasing the required testing time, decreasing overall costs, leveraging appropriate technology approaches, or improving sensitivity or specificity of the water quality …

Issues In Urban Trip Generation, Kristina Marie Currans

Dissertations and Theses

In the 1976, the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) compiled their first Handbook of guidelines and methods for evaluating development-level transportation impacts, specifically vehicular impacts (Institute of Transportation Engineers 1976). Decades later, these methods--essentially the same as when they were originally conceived--are used ubiquitously across the US and Canada. Only recently, with the guidelines in its third edition of the ITE's Trip Generation Handbook (Institute of Transportation Engineers 2014) new data and approaches have been adopted--despite substantial evidence that questions the accuracy of older data, automobile bias, and lack of sensitivity to urban contexts.

This dissertation contributes to this literature …

Analyzing The Online Environment: How Are More Effective Teachers Spending Their Time?, Scott Davis Barrentine

Dissertations and Theses

Teaching at an online school is so different from classroom teaching that traditional training includes few of the skills necessary to be a successful online teacher. New teachers to an online environment face a steep learning curve in how they'll use the instructional technology, prioritize their time, and establish relationships with their students. The literature has advice for these teachers about effective online practices, but there has been little research to establish which strategies are most effective in motivating students. This pre-experimental study, conducted at an online 6th-12th grade hybrid school, investigated the practices used more often by the most …

Anthropogenic Effects On The Fouling Community: Impacts Of Biological Invasions And Anthropogenic Structures On Community Structure, Whitney Elizabeth Mcclees

Dissertations and Theses

Coastal anthropogenic infrastructure has significantly modified nearshore environments. Because these structures often have a strong association with shipping as would be found in ports and harbors, they have been identified as invasion hotspots. Due to propagule pressure from shipping and recreational boating and suitable uncolonized substrate that provides a refuge from native predators, a greater number of non-native species have been found on these structures compared to nearby natural substrate. The mechanisms that limit the spread of non-native species from anthropogenic structures to natural substrate have been explored for several taxa at a species-specific level, but less so from an …

The Discovery And Development Of Metal-Free Arylation Reactions With Unsymmetrical Diaryliodonium Salts, Sunil Kumar Sundalam

Dissertations and Theses

Functionalizing arenes and heteroarenes has been an active area of research since the 19th century, due to the presence of these molecular structures in many industrially important sectors. A tremendous amount of research has been published in achieving these chemical transformations using stoichiometric reagents and transition metal-catalyzed reactions. However, challenges still remain. An alternative and comparable methodology to metal-catalyzed reactions to overcome the drawbacks will advance this particular area of research is desirable.

Hypervalent iodine compounds offer a promising approach to metal-free arylation reactions. These mild, air and moisture stable compounds have showed significant success as non-toxic and metal-free reagents …

Enhancing Value-Based Healthcare With Reconstructability Analysis: Predicting Risk For Hip And Knee Replacements, Cecily Corrine Froemke

Dissertations and Theses

Legislative reforms aimed at slowing growth of US healthcare costs are focused on achieving greater value, defined specifically as health outcomes achieved per dollar spent. To increase value while payments are diminishing and tied to individual outcomes, healthcare must improve at predicting risks and outcomes.

One way to improve predictions is through better modeling methods. Current models are predominantly based on logistic regression (LR). This project applied Reconstructability Analysis (RA) to data on hip and knee replacement surgery, and considered whether RA could create useful models of outcomes, and whether these models could produce predictions complimentary to or even stronger …

Trade-Offs: The Production Of Sustainability In Households, Kirstin Marie Elizabeth Munro

Dissertations and Theses

Over the past half-century, environmental problems have become increasingly serious and seemingly intractable, and a careless, clueless, or contemptuous consumer is often portrayed as the root cause of this environmental decline. This study takes a different approach to evaluating the demand for resources by households, assessing possible pro-environmental paths forward through a study of highly ecologically-conscious households. By modeling "green" households as producers of sustainability rather than consumers of environmental products, the sustainability work that takes place in households is brought into focus. An investigation of household sustainability production makes possible the evaluation of the trade-offs inherent in these pro-environmental …

Sustaining The Human Spirit Of The High School Principal Leading For Equity, Ryan David Richardson

Dissertations and Theses

Shrinking budgets and swelling public accountability characterize public education in the 21st century. Pressures to increase achievement while assuring the emotional and physical safety of all students make the work of the secondary principal daunting. A leader for equity must be a symbolic, visionary, and instructional leader that creates positive change that leads to student achievement, especially for students that are traditionally underserved. The demands placed on school administrators generate leadership burnout. As we strive to meet the rigorous goals of improving academic achievement while teaching and caring for each child, we must create environments for effective administrators to thrive …

Faculty Job Satisfaction And Morale In Biomedical Research, Richard John Goranflo Iii

Dissertations and Theses

High faculty morale and job satisfaction are vital for optimum performance and important to the quality and vitality of the academic enterprise. However, research on faculty morale and job satisfaction has historically been limited to faculty at traditional comprehensive institutions and specific professional programs. Faculty who conduct biomedical research at academic health centers experience substantial differences in employment expectations and how they are funded than other faculty. The purpose of this study was to explore how personal and professional factors contribute toward positive morale and job satisfaction for faculty in biomedical research programs at one academic health center. This qualitative …

What Is The Nature Of The Conflict Experienced By Japanese Workers In International Companies Based In Japan And What Type Of Conflict Management Do They Access?, Tomoko Shinohara Le

Dissertations and Theses

The aim of this thesis was to identify and analyze workplace conflict by enquiring into the nature of conflict, conflict management, and human resources (HR) strategies for conflict management in international companies based in Japan (ICBIJ). This study explores one part of a conflict system comprising cultural issues, HR strategies, conflict, and its effect on retention. The research question is "What is the nature of the conflict experienced by Japanese workers in international companies based in Japan and what type of conflict management do they access?" 16 Japanese workers were surveyed yielding qualitative and qualitative data. Findings indicate that workplace …

The Cul3 Ubiquitin Ligase: An Essential Regulator Of Diverse Cellular Processes, Brittney Marie Davidge

Dissertations and Theses

Cul3 forms E3 ubiquitin ligase complexes that regulate a variety of cellular processes. This dissertation describes Cul3's role in several of these pathways and provides new mechanistic details regarding the role of Cul3 in eukaryotic cells. Cyclin E is an example of a protein that is regulated in a Cul3-dependent manner. Cyclin E is a cell cycle regulator that controls the beginning of DNA replication in mammalian cells. Increased levels of cyclin E are found in some cancers, in addition, proteolytic removal of the cyclin E N-terminus occurs in some cancers and is associated with tumorigenesis. Cyclin E levels are …

Humor Detection, Manan Jain

Dissertations and Theses

Humor is a very complex characteristic concept that defines us as human beings and social entities. Humor is an essential component in personal communication. How to create a method or model to discover the structures behind humor, recognize humor and even extraction of humor remains a challenge because of its subjective nature. Humor also provides valuable information related to linguistic, psychological, neurological and sociological phenomena. However, because of its complexity, humor is still an undefined phenomenon. Because the reaction that make people laugh can hardly be generalized or formalized. For instance, cognitive aspects as well as cultural knowledge, are some …

Knowing Nature In The City: Comparative Analysis Of Knowledge Systems Challenges Along The 'Eco-Techno' Spectrum Of Green Infrastructure In Portland & Baltimore, Annie Marissa Matsler

Dissertations and Theses

Green infrastructure development is desired in many municipalities because of its potential to address pressing environmental and social issues. However, despite technical optimism, institutional challenges create significant barriers to effective green infrastructure design, implementation, and maintenance. Institutional challenges stem from the disparate scales and facility types that make up the concept of green infrastructure, which span from large-scale natural areas to small engineered bioswales. Across these disparate facilities 1) different performance metrics are used, 2) different institutions have jurisdiction, and, 3) facility types are differentially classified as assets, producing epistemological and ontological variegation across the spectrum of green infrastructure that …

Laser As A Tool To Study Radiation Effects In Cmos, Bahar Ajdari

Dissertations and Theses

Energetic particles from cosmic ray or terrestrial sources can strike sensitive areas of CMOS devices and cause soft errors. Understanding the effects of such interactions is crucial as the device technology advances, and chip reliability has become more important than ever. Particle accelerator testing has been the standard method to characterize the sensitivity of chips to single event upsets (SEUs). However, because of their costs and availability limitations, other techniques have been explored. Pulsed laser has been a successful tool for characterization of SEU behavior, but to this day, laser has not been recognized as a comparable method to beam …

Culturally Responsive School Leadership For Latino/A Students Success, Victor H. Vergara

Dissertations and Theses

Historically, education in the United States has been tailored to fulfill the needs of White students. As the Latina/o population increases in the United States, we must prepare teachers and school administrators to provide opportunities for an equal education for minority students of all races, cultural backgrounds, or ethnicities. School leadership plays an important role in the effectiveness of educational access for minority students. Leaders must review and modify their practices to ensure that minority students have the opportunity to be productive citizens in our society. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the characteristics of effective high school …

Properties Of Carbon Nanotubes: Defects, Adsorbates, And Gas Sensing, Micah C. Eastman

Dissertations and Theses

Carbon nanotubes and graphene have been a trending research topic in the past decade. These graphitic compounds exhibit numerous advantageous properties (electronic, mechanical, thermal, optical, etc) which industry and researchers alike are excited to take advantage of. Beyond the challenges of yield and controlled growth, there are a number of standing questions which govern some of the more fundamental characteristics of these materials: What role do lattice defects play in the adsorption of gas molecules on the surface of carbon nanotubes? How are the electronic states of the carbon nanotubes influenced by these adsorbed molecules? And how can we develop …

Using The Task Analysis Process With Teachers To Uncover Language Demands Within An Eight-Week Ngss Summer Course, Leah Plack

Dissertations and Theses

The state of Oregon has adopted the Next Generation Science Standards as well as the English Language Proficiency standards, both of which affect elementary school teachers. These standards adoptions challenge teachers and professional developers to rethink how they approach science conceptual understanding and language acquisition. The Math Science Partnership K-6 Instructional Specialist Grant made the decision to incorporate a Task Analysis process, which asks the participant to analyze the demands of a content-based task in the domains of content knowledge, analytical skills and language, into six eight-week summer courses focused on the Next Generation Science Standards. A pre and post-assessment …

Newspaper Construction Of Homelessness In Western United States Cities, Charlie Allan Sheese

Dissertations and Theses

The paths to homelessness are complex and attributable to a combination of structural issues associated with poverty that can magnify personal vulnerabilities. However, as homelessness became more prominent in news media during the 1980s, media discourse increasingly focused on personal characteristics within the homeless population which cast people as personally responsible for their plight. Simultaneously, media explanations for homelessness that called attention to structural conditions that contribute to homelessness decreased during the decade. Scholars explain this shift by situating it within the social and political climate of the time.

This study extends the line of research on homelessness in news …