Digital Commons Network^™

A Study Of Soil Organic Matter And Its Controlling Factors In Portland, Oregon, Megan Dillon

Dissertations and Theses

Traditionally, local above- and below-ground plant and microbial communities, temperature and precipitation, topography and texture and composition of parent material have been thought to govern the soil processes that lead to soil organic matter accumulation over decades or centuries. Soil organic matter is a substantial global reservoir of carbon and disturbance of equilibrated soils often leads to efflux of significant quantities of CO2. Anthropogenic influences shift the inputs, disturb the structure and alter the biochemistry of soil, profoundly disrupting soil-forming processes. Urbanization leads to soil organic matter equilibria that are different from those in naturally forming soils. Measurement of soil …

Low-Latency Estimates For Window-Aggregate Queries Over Data Streams, Amit Bhat

Dissertations and Theses

Obtaining low-latency results from window-aggregate queries can be critical to certain data-stream processing applications. Due to a DSMS's lack of control over incoming data (typically, because of delays and bursts in data arrival), timely results for a window-aggregate query over a data stream cannot be obtained with guarantees about the results' accuracy. In this thesis, I propose a technique, which I term prodding, to obtain early result estimates for window-aggregate queries over data streams. The early estimates are obtained in addition to the regular query results. The proposed technique aims to maximize the contribution to a result-estimate computation from all …

Identifying Modifiable Factors Associated With Depression Across The Lifespan In Stroke Survivor-Spouse Dyads, Michael Joseph Mccarthy

Dissertations and Theses

Depression is the most common psychological sequela associated with stroke, affecting approximately 33% of stroke survivors (Hackett, Yapa, Parag, & Anderson, 2005) with corresponding impacts on spouses, partners, or other informal caregivers (Han & Haley, 1999; Low, Payne, & Roderick, 1999). Although stroke is more common in older persons, persons of all ages are at risk for stroke and especially post-stroke depression (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2007; Barker-Collo, 2007; Hughes, Giobbie-Hurder, Weaver, Kubal, & Henderson, 1999). One of the factors which could explain increased risk of depression is "biographical disruption" (Bury, 1982), which happens when couples experience …

Perceptions And Voices Of South Sudanese About The North-South Sudan Conflict, Machar Wek Aleu-Baak

Dissertations and Theses

The conflict in Sudan reflects historic hatred and ethnic discrimination between Northern Arab Muslims and Southern African Christians and Animists. The longest and worst conflict began in 1983 and ended in 2005, when African Christians and Animists struggled to form an interim autonomous government. This conflict claimed 2 million lives from both sides and displaced almost 4 million people from the South. This thesis attempts to understand how people from Southern Sudan perceive the root causes and sustaining factors of the Sudanese conflict between Arab Muslims and African Christians. This research looks specifically into the roles of ethnic differences and …

Motivation In Late Learners Of Japanese: Self-Determination Theory, Attitudes And Pronunciation, Shannon Guinn-Collins

Dissertations and Theses

The present study examined a hypothesized relationship between the following variables: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as described by Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), integrative and instrumental orientation (Gardner & Lambert, 1972), attitudes toward pronunciation, and accent in English-speaking late learners of Japanese. Data collection occurred in two steps: First, English-speaking participants completed three questionnaires designed to measure their motivation and attitudes toward pronunciation; they then provided speech samples in Japanese. Native speakers of Japanese then rated these speech samples holistically on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 indicating a strong foreign accent, and 5 indicating a native …

The Moving To The Beat Documentary And Hip-Hop Based Curriculum Guide: Youth Reactions And Resistance, Jennifer Wallin-Ruschman

Dissertations and Theses

Many of the academic and popular treatments of hip-hop overlook the complexity of the phenomenon. Hip-hop is often portrayed solely as a source of corruption and regressive tendencies or, alternatively, as a sort of savior for otherwise marginalized individuals and source of revolutionary power. This thesis situates hip-hop between these poles and draws out its progressive and regressive aspects for analysis. Considering its vast global influence and a growing body of academic literature, hip-hop has been notably understudied in the field of psychology. Alternatively, educational theorists and practitioners have realized the power of hip-hop in revisualizing an emancipatory education that …

Family-Supportive Supervisory Behaviors As A Moderator Of The Relationship Between Job Strain And Workers' Blood Pressure, Christopher Scott Harper

Dissertations and Theses

Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of death in industrialized nations. Research indicates that job strain may be significantly related to cardiovascular disease in employees with little to no social support. Using the JDC-S model developed by Karasek (1979) and elaborated upon by Johnson and Hall (1988), the family-supportive supervisory behaviors (FSSB) measure created by Hammer et al., (2009), and the blood pressure wrist monitor device Omron317T, this study examined FSSB as a moderator of the relationship between job strain, job demands, job control and workers' blood pressure on work and non-work days. Sixty-nine grocery store workers from …

"Art Feeling Grows" In Oregon : The Portland Art Association, 1892-1932, Patrick A. Forster

Dissertations and Theses

Founded in 1892, the Portland Art Association (PAA) served as Oregon's and the Pacific Northwest's leading visual arts institution for almost a century. While the Association formally dissolved in 1984, its legacy is felt strongly today in the work of its successor organizations, the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Emerging during a period of considerable innovation in and fervent advocacy for the arts across America, the Association provided the organizational network and resources around which an energetic and diverse group of city leaders, civic reformers and philanthropists, as well as artists and art educators, coalesced. This …

Assessment Of An Optimal Bus Stop Spacing Model Using High Resolution Archived Stop-Level Data, Huan Li

Dissertations and Theses

In practice, the design of bus routes and stop placement involves calculated trade-offs between service frequency, quality, and access. Increased stop density improves access but contributes to slow operating speeds and increased operating costs. In this thesis, a optimized bus stop spacing model is applied using the high resolution archived stop-level bus performance data from the Bus Dispatch System (BDS) provided by TriMet, the regional transit provider for the Portland metropolitan area. Two cost components are considered in the stop spacing model including passenger access cost and in-vehicle passenger stopping cost, and are combined and optimized to minimize total cost. …

Storytelling As Loving Praxis In Critical Peace Education: A Grounded Theory Study Of Postsecondary Social Justice Educators, Amanda Smith Byron

Dissertations and Theses

Looking through the philosophical lens of love, this study seeks a deeper understanding and appreciation of how postsecondary social justice educators use storytelling, in the context of critical peace education, to create social change. This research explores the guiding question of how storytelling is used to encourage social change and to inspire action toward the goal of greater social justice. The argument for the importance of this research is located within the crisis of neoliberalism, where the very tenets of democratic education are being challenged by an educational agenda that favors standards-based learning and employment training over the critical and …

The Pursuit Of Commerce: Agricultural Development In Western Oregon, 1825-1861, Cessna R. Smith

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines how the pursuit of commercial gain affected the development of agriculture in western Oregon's Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River Valleys. The period of study begins when the British owned Hudson's Bay Company began to farm land in and around Fort Vancouver in 1825, and ends in 1861--during the time when agrarian settlement was beginning to expand east of the Cascade Mountains. Given that agriculture in Oregon, as elsewhere, would eventually reach a standard of national development, and given that most of Oregon's immigrants arrived poor and lacked the farm implements needed for subsistence, the question this study …

Scalable And Efficient Tasking For Dynamic Sensor Networks, Thanh Xuan Dang

Dissertations and Theses

Sensor networks including opportunistic networks of sensor-equipped smartphones as well as networks of embedded sensors can enable a wide range of applications including environmental monitoring, smart grids, intelligent transportation, and healthcare. In most real-world applications, to meet end-user requirements, the network operator needs to define and update the sensors' tasks dynamically, such as updating the parameters for sensor data collection or updating the sensors' code. Tasking sensor networks is necessary to reduce the effort in programming sensor networks. However, it is challenging due to dynamics and scale in terms of number of nodes, number of tasks, and sensing regions of …

Information Processing In Two-Dimensional Cellular Automata, Martin Cenek

Dissertations and Theses

Cellular automata (CA) have been widely used as idealized models of spatially-extended dynamical systems and as models of massively parallel distributed computation devices. Despite their wide range of applications and the fact that CA are capable of universal computation (under particular constraints), the full potential of these models is unrealized to-date. This is for two reasons: (1) the absence of a programming paradigm to control these models to solve a given problem and (2) the lack of understanding of how these models compute a given task. This work addresses the notion of computation in two-dimensional cellular automata. Solutions using a …

A Computational Model Of Adaptive Sensory Processing In The Electroreception Of Mormyrid Electric Fish, Eran Agmon

Dissertations and Theses

Electroreception is a sensory modality found in some fish, which enables them to sense the environment through the detection of electric fields. Biological experimentation on this ability has built an intricate framework that has identified many of the components involved in electroreception's production, but lack the framework for bringing the details back together into a system-level model of how they operate together. This thesis builds and tests a computational model of the Electrosensory Lateral Line Lobe (ELL) in mormyrid electric fish in an attempt to bring some of electroreception's structural details together to help explain its function. The ELL is …

Marginalized Characters In Contemporary American Short Fiction, Timur Shishkin

Dissertations and Theses

The focus of the present research work is the contemporary American short stories that bring up issues of compulsory norm and the conflict between marginalized characters and their environment. This research was based on those short stories that seemed to represent the idea of being "different" in the most complex and multilayered way, and its goal was to unfold new aspects of the conflict between "normal" and "abnormal"/"different". Variations of norm as well as diversity within the marginalized raise a number of questions about the reasons for their inability to coexist peacefully. The close reading and the analysis of the …

Writing Her Way To Spiritual Perfection: The Diary Of 1751 Of Maria De Jesus Felipa, Stephanie Oliver

Dissertations and Theses

Throughout the colonial period of Mexican history, cloistered nuns wrote spiritual journals at the request of their confessors. These documents were read and scrutinized, not only by the confessors, but also by others in the hierarchy of their Orders. They are important sources of study for historians in that they provide a window into the religious culture of the times and the spiritual mentality of their authors. This thesis will examine one such record, discovered in a collection of volumes at the Historical Franciscan Archive of Michoacán in Celaya, Mexico. The diary covers eleven months of 1751 in the life …

Scratched Petroglyphs In The Bennett Hills, Idaho, Karla Lucille Hambelton

Dissertations and Theses

This study examines rock art sites containing scratched petroglyphs in the Bennett Hills, Idaho. Despite their research potential, scratched petroglyphs have received little attention in rock art research or literature. This study contributes valuable data to scratched rock art research and the corpus of rock art research in general. Two samples of ten scratched petroglyph sites were examined and recorded for a total of twenty petroglyph sites. Using formal and contextual research methods, multiple attributes of scratched petroglyphs are identified and analyzed. The formal qualities of scratched petroglyphs are examined to define the extent and to characterize the motif assemblage. …

Student Approaches To Combinatorial Enumeration: The Role Of Set-Oriented Thinking, Elise Nicole Lockwood

Dissertations and Theses

Combinatorics is a growing topic in mathematics with widespread applications in a variety of fields. Because of this, it has become increasingly prominent in both K-12 and undergraduate curricula. There is a clear need in mathematics education for studies that address cognitive and pedagogical issues surrounding combinatorics, particularly related to students' conceptions of combinatorial ideas. In this study, I describe my investigation of students' thinking as it relates to counting problems. I interviewed a number of post-secondary students as they solved a variety of combinatorial tasks, and through the analysis of this data I defined and elaborated a construct that …

High Speed Wireless Networking For 60ghz, Candy Yiu

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the problem of providing high data-rate wireless connectivity to users in indoor environments. The goal is to be able to reach Gbps/user rates even when there are multiple users present. The technology that we study is to use the 60 GHz spectrum whose special propagation properties make it ideally suited to this task. The approaches developed include using multiple spatially distributed smart antennas in a room or multiple co-located antennas to provide coverage where needed and when needed. All the antennas are connected to a single access point which allows us to dynamically change spectrum and link …

Molecular Genetic Analysis Of Creld1 In Patients With Heterotaxy Disorder, Samaneh Zhian

Dissertations and Theses

Heterotaxy refers to the abnormal arrangement of internal organs in relation to each other. Model organism studies have shown that functions of more than eighty genes are required for normal asymmetric left-right organ development. CRELD1 has been shown to be necessary for proper heart development and mutations in CRELD1 are known to increase risk of cardiac atrioventricular septal defects (AVSD). AVSD is the most common form of heart defect associated with heterotaxy, and we have previously shown that some individuals heterotaxy-related AVSD have mutations in CRELD1.

Therefore, we propose to examine the CRELD1 gene in a large sample of …

Early Childhood Inclusion: Teacher Perception Of The Supports Needed To Fully Include Children With Special Needs, Meredith Villines

Dissertations and Theses

Inclusion of children with disabilities in early childhood settings remains a goal for many early care and education centers and professionals. In this study, the perceptions of supports needed to accomplish this goal were examined. Early childhood teachers from a university-based child care center, which is inspired by the schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy, were interviewed and asked to explore their feelings and thoughts on fully including children with disabilities in their classrooms. An examination of their perceptions led to the identification of four major themes: a) everyone is valuable in the classroom community, b) additional training is needed, c) …

A Functional Approach To Memory-Safe Operating Systems, Rebekah Leslie

Dissertations and Theses

Purely functional languages--with static type systems and dynamic memory management using garbage collection--are a known tool for helping programmers to reduce the number of memory errors in programs. By using such languages, we can establish correctness properties relating to memory-safety through our choice of implementation language alone. Unfortunately, the language characteristics that make purely functional languages safe also make them more difficult to apply in a low-level domain like operating systems construction. The low-level features that support the kinds of hardware manipulations required by operating systems are not typically available in memory-safe languages with garbage collection. Those that are provided …

Cultivating Environmental Stewardship In Middle School Students, Kelly Anne Fischer

Dissertations and Theses

Environmental stewardship is an important attribute for students and populations of all ages to have. This study looked at the effect of middle school students of a teacher who participated in a summer field ecology training program taking part in a long-term ecology project, and the impact of the experience on their environmental stewardship attitude. A variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques were used to look at changes in students' environmental stewardship attitudes including: surveying in a pre/post format, teacher, parent, and student focus groups, and teacher interviews. The teacher's experience with the summer field ecology training provided a foundation …

A Self-Configurable Architecture On An Irregular Reconfigurable Fabric, Avinash Amarnath

Dissertations and Theses

Reconfigurable computing architectures combine the flexibility of software with the performance of custom hardware. Such architectures are of particular interest at the nanoscale level. We argue that a bottom-up self-assembled fabric of nodes will be easier and cheaper to manufacture, however, one has to make compromises with regards to the device regularity, homogeneity, and reliability. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the performance and cost of a self-configurable computing architecture composed of simple reconfigurable nodes for unstructured and unknown fabrics. We built a software and hardware framework for this purpose. The framework enables creating an irregular network of …

"Outing" Queer Issues In Teacher Preparation Programs: How Pre-Service Teachers Experience Sexual And Gender Diversity In Their Field Placements, Olivia Jo Murray

Dissertations and Theses

Currently in the United States there are more than 4 million lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students in K-12 public schools (Bochenek, Brown, & Human Rights Watch, 2001). Despite the prevalence of LGBT youth and the diversification of family populations, teacher preparation programs rarely acknowledge "queer" aspects of multiculturalism (Letts, 2002). As a result, a majority of K-12 educators enter the field of teaching unwilling and/or unprepared to engage with queer issues as they relate to students and families, curriculum, and instruction. The culture of silence around homosexuality can put queer youth at risk and deter school stakeholders from …

Implicit Bias And Immigration Courts, Fatma Marouf

Scholarly Works

This Article highlights the importance of implicit bias in immigration adjudication. After tracing the evolution of prejudice in our immigration laws from explicit "old-fashioned" prejudice to more subtle forms of "modem" and "aversive" prejudice, the Article argues that the specific conditions under which immigration judges decide cases render them especially prone to the influence of implicit bias. Specifically, it examines how factors such as immigration judges' lack of independence, limited opportunity for deliberate thinking, low motivation, and the low risk of judicial review all allow implicit bias to drive decisionmaking. The Article then recommends certain reforms, both simple and complex, …

Sensory Discrimination Testing With Children, Karen Melissa Garcia

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Literature concerning children’s performance in sensory discrimination methods is not as extensively published as performance with adults. Therefore, in this dissertation children’s performance in discrimination methods was investigated. First, performance in the triangle and 3-AFC methods was explored with children 6 to 12 years old. The paradox of discriminatory non-discriminators states that the proportion of correct responses in the 3-AFC method will be higher than that of the triangle. However, Thurstonian theory predicts that despite the difference in proportions of correct responses the degree of difference between the stimuli will be similar. The paradox and the Thurstonian predictions were challenged …

The Emergence Of Challenging Behaviors In At-Risk Toddlers With And Without Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Cross-Sectional And Risk Factor Study, Jill Cherie Fodstad

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Challenging behaviors including aggression, property destruction, stereotypy, and self injury occur at a high prevalence in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). These behaviors are pervasive and chronic. Despite an increased probability and negative consequences, one area which has received little attention is the presence of challenging behaviors in infants and toddlers with ASD. Furthermore, there is a dearth of information identifying early age trends in the emergence of challenging behaviors and associated risk factors. The purpose of this investigation was to utilize a validated measure, the Baby and Infant Screen for Children with aUtIsm Traits - Part 3, to …

Learning And Teaching Conducting Through Musical And Non-Musical Skills: An Evaluation Of Orchestral Conducting Teaching Methods, Jose Mauricio Valle Brandao

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The current state of conducting as an academic and professional pursuit shows a plethora of conventional traditions and techniques that are accepted without question, but a dearth of ideas and approaches that will develop the skills essential to producing an effective conductor. This profile is especially apparent in the field‘s literature. This monograph will compile a list of these titles and annotate each one, in order to determine the common threads that run between them. This information will be distilled into categories, identifying levels of approach and target audience. Evaluation of these data may lead to a discovery that many …

Regulation Of Gene Expression By Chromatin Boundary Elements, Richard Alton Kleinschmidt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Boundary elements consisting of barriers and insulators are genomic sequence elements that along with their associated DNA-binding proteins block the spread of heterochromatin into euchromatic regions or prevent the targeted activation of promoters from distal/proximal enhancers, respectively. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the deletion of RPD3, a histone deacetylase, results in an extended SIR protein-mediated silencing effect bypassing a tRNAthr barrier element adjacent to the cryptic mating locus, HMRa. We mutagenized rpd3Δ strains and identified suppressor mutants through a genetic screen that no longer displayed this enhanced silencing effect. Our results identified BRE1 and BRE2, which are either directly or indirectly responsible …