Digital Commons Network^™

Fostering Critical Thought Alongside The Common Core State Standards, Bianca Arias

University Honors Theses

This thesis evaluates a segment of the second grade English language arts and literacy (ELA) curriculum presently utilized in Portland Public Schools (PPS) school district in Portland, Oregon, using five principles for evaluation. These principles address the extent to which lessons are hands-on, engage home life, integrate the academic disciplines, encourage student autonomy, and are relevant to society today. These criteria were established following a review of John Dewey’s ideas and philosophies, and of two practices that model Deweyan principles: Project-Based Learning (PBL) and progettazione in the Municipal Infant/Toddler Centers and Preschools of Reggio-Emilia, Italy. This analysis of the ELA …

The Adverse Effects Of Maternal Depression And Poverty On Child Development, Courtney A. Nyseth

University Honors Theses

This thesis examines the issues of maternal depression and poverty, their connection, and the overall adverse effects on child health, behavior, development, and school achievement. Poverty and maternal depression are ongoing social issues in the United States. They are both influenced by several factors such as socioeconomic status, maternal health, and family instability. These factors all directly relate to childhood health and social inequalities.

Poverty, maternal depression, substance abuse, and domestic violence are known to be the most common factors that place young children at high risk for poor health (Azzi-Lessing, 2013). Some of the health outcomes from poverty and …

Spellbound: The Process Of Adaptation, Amanda Sonju

University Honors Theses

Writers write in many forms and, while most specialize in one form or another, there are those that move back and forth through multiple formats. Screenwriters are a special breed who are expected to write new material, adaptations and specs. As a screenwriter the pressure is on being able to write in someone else’s voice while still expressing your own. Unfortunately, the process of adaptation is a cloudy one. It is expected that a writer can alternate between forms by nature and not through education. The purpose of this thesis is to approach the adaptation process through a combination of …

Early-Stage Transition To Predictive Maintenance : Using Cmms, Ir Scans, And Vibration Analysis To Improve Uptime And Lower Maintenance Costs, Jason Hamilton

University Honors Theses

Implementing a predictive maintenance model does not have to be a five year, million dollar project. There are relatively simple steps a maintenance team can take to see results within the first year. Because overall cost of predictive maintenance is up to four time less expensive than preventative maintenance, as many assets as possible should be covered by predictive maintenance. Facilitating the transition to predictive maintenance is made easier with a Computerized Maintenance Management System. A good CMMS is user-friendly, automatically produces preventative maintenance work orders, and tracks all work done on each piece of machinery. IR scans and vibration …

Development And Initial Application Of Low-Molecular Weight Organic Acids And Inorganic Ionic Species In Aerosol Particulate Matter Via Ion Chromatography, Clarissa D. Karpinski

University Honors Theses

Air pollution, especially particulate matter, is a widespread environmental and public health risk. In this work, a method has been developed to separate, resolve, and quantitate monovalent anionic and cationic organic acids in aerosol particulate matter through ion chromatography (IC). The standard samples were analyzed on a Dionex ICS-5000 Ion Chromatography System with suppressed conductivity detection, and calibration curves for all analytes were created. A preliminary tobacco smoke sample was also analyzed. This method may be applied to the analysis of atmospheric particulate matter, as well as tobacco smoke particulate matter, in order to determine and quantitate primary anions and …

Estella, Roxana L. Arguello

University Honors Theses

This collection of short interconnected vignettes is centered on Estella, a young Mexican American woman, and the bicultural lens through which she sees the world. Each vignette is a part of a larger exploration of virginity, identity, and relationships—in particular the one with her mother.

Effective Methods Of Constituency Service In Oregon State, Thanh T. Ngo

University Honors Theses

One would think that casework is the most effective method to reach constituents, however, that was not the case with this research about the Oregon State Legislature. Out of the 90 State Senators and House Representatives, there was a total of 50 surveys conducted and four interviews. The purpose of this research was to determine between casework, outreach and providing information, which method is deemed most effective within the Oregon Legislature when it comes to constituency service. Calculations show that third method, providing information, was the most effective with a solid 63%. These results shows that our legislator still lack …

Diversity Within Asian Americans: Barriers To The Public Discussion Of Discrimination, Samantha I. Ing

University Honors Theses

This purpose of this thesis is to discuss barriers to the public discussion of discrimination against Asian-Americans. The literature addresses three major barriers: model minority status, portrayal in media, and cultural desire to assimilate. This thesis discusses how Asian-Americans contain generational, ethnic, and immigration-based diversity that complicates these barriers, while also positing that diversity itself presents a barrier. This project concludes with a brief discussion of "intra-ethnic othering," the discrimination that occurs between Asian subgroups, as another barrier to public discussion of Asian-American discrimination.

Understanding Patterns Of Localized Poverty In The United States: Identifying Strengths And Weaknesses In Contemporary Statistical Analysis, Gregory Dyck

University Honors Theses

The localization and concentration of poverty causes many problems throughout the world, and is linked to multiple adverse effects on individuals, households, and society at large. However, determining the relationship between poverty and these affects is limited by the current state of affairs regarding how theory does and does not fit with the indicator variables being used or available. I will attempt to evaluate the current usage of variables and strategies, both how they succeed, and how they fall short in the analysis of concentrated poverty. The results of this analysis should open holes for the development of better indicators …

Culture Is A Language, Can't You Read?: Reading Gay Rights As Human Rights, Jen Corbridge

University Honors Theses

Scholars writing about postcolonialism, race, and gender have warned against universal conceptions of identity, but Western states have managed to expand their agendas through the production of a sexual citizenship. In this paper, I attempt to unpack the component structures of Clinton’s “Remarks in Recognition of International Human Rights Day” speech in order to tease out the ways in which she reproduces racist, Orientalist and Islamophobic rhetoric in order to advocate for a universal conception of sexual identity. Using contemporary scholarship that explores the intersection of sexuality, race, and nationalism, I argue that Clinton’s speech, using tried and true colonialist …

Organizational Culture Change Resulting From Human Resources Outsourcing, Emily Murrell

University Honors Theses

Human Resources outsourcing has become a way for businesses to save money, but has also become a problem in keeping organizational environments the same (Cook, 2000; Cobb 2009; Mol, 2007). Outsourcing includes work that can be done by employees, but services can also be provided by an outside vendor for a lower price (Cook, 2000), and can affect an organizations performance (Mol, 2007). There are parts of Human Resources functions such as staffing, recruiting, training, succession planning and organizational development, and benefit planning that can be outsourced (Cook, 2000). Studies have looked at the difference between organizations that have outsourced …

Promotion Of Thriving In Youth: The Intersections Of The Positive Youth Development Perspective And Challenge Course Programming, Zachary H. Snyder

University Honors Theses

This paper’s intent is to explore the Positive Youth Development (PYD) perspective, its applications, and the growing research topics pertaining to it. I will demonstrate the importance of developmental assets and PYD centered programs in the human journey towards "Thriving," which is understood as the ultimate state of being achieved by the systematic promotion of positive development across time in a youth’s life (Lerner et al, 2005). My paper also explains challenge course programming and its relationship to the Positive Youth Development perspective. Upon demonstrating this relationship, I offer a few ideas for future challenge course programming that would foster …

On The Role Of Probability In Hume's Imagination And Associationism: A Bayesian Response To Fodor's Hume Variations, Jason Krivo Flores

University Honors Theses

In his 2003 book Hume Variations, Jerry Fodor argues the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) has obviated the need for Hume's associationism and faculty of imagination. Contrary to Fodor, in this paper I argue that contemporary Bayesian models of cognitive science suggest that Hume’s account continues to comprise a viable theory of mental operations. I propose a Bayesian interpretation of Hume's associationism wherein the "liberty of the imagination to transpose and change its ideas" is accounted for by the contributions of randomness, noise, or stochasticity--i.e., probability.

If my analysis is on track, Fodor has misconstrued the Humean mind by interpreting …

Differentiability Of Correlations In Realistic Quantum Mechanics, Alejandro Cabrera, Edson De Faria, Enrique Pujals, Charles Tresser

Publications and Research

We prove a version of Bell’s theorem in which the locality assumption is weakened. We start by assuming theoretical quantum mechanics and weak forms of relativistic causality and of realism (essentially the fact that observable values are well defined independently of whether or not they are measured). Under these hypotheses, we show that only one of the correlation functions that can be formulated in the framework of the usual Bell theorem is unknown. We prove that this unknown function must be differentiable at certain angular configuration points that include the origin. We also prove that, if this correlation is assumed …

Continuity Vs. Discontinuity: The Issue Of Race And Forced Labor After Emancipation In The American South, Alexander Elliott Clarke-Ritter

University Honors Theses

The United States emancipation narrative endures in the popular American conscious as a watershed moment in American history that marked the end of slavery and the beginning of freedom for African Americans. Freedom is also commonly thought of as something that was bestowed upon African Americans by the benevolent Northern government and the efforts of Union forces. The popular American conscious has been hard-pressed to question this romanticized narrative in American history. It is thus the goal of this analysis to challenge these commonly held, popular beliefs. This study argues that emancipation in many ways did not truly mark the …

Geochemistry And Petrography Of Igneous Components Of The Dalles Formation In The Dufur West Quadrangle, Oregon, Heather H. Herinckx

University Honors Theses

The Dalles Formation is a sequence of volcanic, volcaniclastic and sedimentary deposits of the late Miocene to Pliocene. The unit stretches along the eastern flanks of Mount Hood from Maupin, northward to the Columbia River, near The Dalles, Oregon (Figure 1). The Dalles Formation consists of lavas that are generally dacitic in composition and are composed of block-and-ash flows, debris-flows, and reworked fluvial sediments. Past workers have mapped the unit as the Dalles Formation "Undivided". The scope of this project has been to investigate the geochemical and petrographic characteristics and whether they may suggest distinct units. A section of the …

Matrix Multiplication, Trilinear Decompositions, Apa Algorithms, And Summation, Victor Pan

Publications and Research

Matrix multiplication (hereafter we use the acronym MM) is among the most fundamental operations of modern computations. The efficiency of its performance depends on various factors, in particular vectorization, data movement and arithmetic complexity of the computations, but here we focus just on the study of the arithmetic cost and the impact of this study on other areas of modern computing. In the early 1970s it was expected that the straightforward cubic time algorithm for MM will soon be accelerated to enable MM in nearly quadratic arithmetic time, with some far fetched implications. While pursuing this goal the mainstream research …

Household Food Security And Food Sovereignty : Framing The Future Of Hunger And Agriculture, Andrea Wilson

University Honors Theses

Globally, agriculture is both threatened by and contributing to the converging, interlinked problems of hunger, malnutrition, climate change, resource competition, and the degradation of natural resources critical to food production, including the health and resilience of agroecosystems. Sustainable solutions to hunger will maximize the multifunctional potential of agriculture to address a multi-faceted crisis. Realizing this potential depends on the resolution of a political struggle over contrasting food system models, rooted in contrary visions of what it means to resolve hunger. This paper analyzes the logics and claims embedded in the "food frames" employed by the World Bank and peasant organization …

Person First Planet: A Comprehensive Review Of Person First Language, James Kirszenbaum

University Honors Theses

Person First Language has been around for thirty years yet remains confined to the borders of government agencies, special education classrooms, and professional psychology. Beginning here in Salem, Oregon as an offshoot of the People First Movement (Wehmeyer, Bersani, & Gagne, 2000), a self-advocacy group for persons with disabilities at Fairview Rehabilitation Center. It has since grown from an isolated appeal into an international movement and is the current accepted terminology in the APA and reflects in the language of all pertinent government acts (ADA, IDEA, etc.). Despite all these well intended improvements everyday use of PFL by non-laypersons has …

English Education In Thailand And Singapore : Differences In English Education, Use And Identity, Chelsey Hice

University Honors Theses

The Secretary General of ASEAN asserted the importance of education and the use English in promoting and bringing prosperity to the ASEAN nations. "Through education, through the use of English language and, more importantly, with a heightened sense of ASEAN Identity and ASEAN Community, we hope that ASEAN integration and cooperation will bring both benefits and opportunities to the region" (Le Luong Minh, 2013). Taking Thailand and Singapore into consideration, it is clear that national realities vary greatly within the region in regards to English proficiency rates. Education First’s 2013 English Proficiency Index Report revealed that Singapore was the second …

Heteroskedasticity Of Unknown Form In Spatial Autoregressive Models With A Moving Average Disturbance Term, Osman Dogan

Publications and Research

In this study, I investigate the necessary condition for the consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of spatial models with a spatial moving average process in the disturbance term. I show that the MLE of spatial autoregressive and spatial moving average parameters is generally inconsistent when heteroskedasticity is not considered in the estimation. I also show that the MLE of parameters of exogenous variables is inconsistent and determine its asymptotic bias. I provide simulation results to evaluate the performance of the MLE. The simulation results indicate that the MLE imposes a substantial amount of bias on both autoregressive and …

Importance Of Contract Attributes On Conservation Reserve Program Enrollment Decisions In The Prairie Pothole Region, Neeraj Dhingra

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

U.S. farmers’ interest in CRP has waned. Enrollment for 2015 was targeted at 26 million acres but as of the end of February, actual enrollment had declined to 24.6 million acres (USDA, 2015). Available studies point to recent fluctuations in commodity prices as a predominant factor in this enrollment gap. Other potentially influencing factors remain understudied, including farmer preferences for contract design. A choice experiment survey was conducted in the Prairie Pothole region to assess these preferences. An exploded logit model was used to evaluate the preference heterogeneity among program attributes. Results indicate that an increase in the maximum payment, …

Costs And Risks Of Testing And Blending For Eaa In Soybeans, David Jorgen Hertsgaard

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

Soybean quality is typically measured by protein values. Essential Amino Acids (EAA) and Critical Amino Acid Value (CAAV) provide alternative measures of valuing soybeans. The following thesis analyzes the effects of testing soybeans for specific quality traits. A dual-marketing system is developed to analyze the costs and risks that may arise for grain handlers to segregate soybeans into high-quality and low-quality grain flows based on various importer purchasing strategies. A stochastic optimization model is used to determine the optimal testing locations within the dual-marketing system in order to minimize costs and risks to grain handlers. The model includes a blending …

Survey Of California Pharmacists' Awareness Of And Readiness For The New Authorities Granted By Sb 493: A Pilot Study, Clipper Young, Kajua B. Lor, Gordon C. Mccarter, Robert J. Ignoffo

Faculty Publications & Research of the TUC College of Pharmacy

The recent passing of Senate Bill (SB) 493 – effective on January 1, 2014 – addresses a primary care provider shortage in California by declaring pharmacists as health care providers and authorizing new roles for them in patient care. The aims of this pilot study were to examine California registered pharmacists’ awareness and knowledge of the expanded authorities granted by SB 493 as well as to assess their perception of their own readiness to exercise these new authorities. A cross-sectional, observational study was designed, and a 40-question survey was administered electronically through Qualtrics to adjunct faculty, clinical faculty, and alumni …

Solid Microneedles For Transdermal Delivery Of Amantadine Hydrochloride And Pramipexole Dihydrochloride, Mylien T. Hoang, Kevin B. Ita, Daniel A. Bair

Faculty Publications & Research of the TUC College of Pharmacy

The aim of this project was to study the influence of microneedles on transdermal delivery of amantadine hydrochloride and pramipexole dihydrochloride across porcine ear skin in vitro. Microchannel visualization studies were carried out and characterization of the microchannel depth was performed using confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) to demonstrate microchannel formation following microneedle roller application. We also report, for the first time, the use of TA.XT Plus Texture Analyzer to characterize burst force in pig skin for transdermal drug delivery experiments. This is the force required to rupture pig skin. The mean passive flux of amantadine hydrochloride, determined using a …

Quantitative Spatial Frequency Fluorescence Imaging In The Sub-Diffusive Domain For Image-Guided Glioma Resection, Mira Sibai, Israel Veilleux, Jonathan T. Elliott, Frederic Leblond, Brian Wilson

Dartmouth Scholarship

Intraoperative 5- aminolevulinic acid induced-Protoporphyrin IX (PpIX) fluorescence guidance enables maximum safe resection of glioblastomas by providing surgeons with real-time tumor optical contrast. However, visual assessment of PpIX fluorescence is subjective and limited by the distorting effects of light attenuation and tissue autofluorescence. We have previously shown that non-invasive point measurements of absolute PpIX concentration identifies residual tumor that is otherwise non-detectable. Here, we extend this approach to wide-field quantitative fluorescence imaging by implementing spatial frequency domain imaging to recover tissue optical properties across the field-of-view in phantoms and ex vivo tissue.

A Sip Of Cool Water: Pregnancy Accommodation After The Ada Amendments Act, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Robust Fast Direct Integral Equation Solver For Quasi-Periodic Scattering Problems With A Large Number Of Layers, Min Hyung Cho, Alex H. Barnett

Dartmouth Scholarship

We present a new boundary integral formulation for time-harmonic wave diffraction from two-dimensional structures with many layers of arbitrary periodic shape, such as multilayer dielectric gratings in TM polarization. Our scheme is robust at all scattering parameters, unlike the conventional quasi-periodic Green’s function method which fails whenever any of the layers approaches a Wood anomaly. We achieve this by a decomposition into near- and far-field contributions. The former uses the free-space Green’s function in a second-kind integral equation on one period of the material interfaces and their immediate left and right neighbors; the latter uses proxy point sources and small …

A Basic Guide For Empirical Environmental Social Science, Michael Cox

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this paper, I address a gap in the literature on environmental social science by providing a basic rubric for the conduct of empirical research in this interdisciplinary field. Current literature displays a healthy diversity of methods and techniques, but this has also been accompanied by a lack of consistency in the way in which research in this area is done. In part this can be seen as resulting from a lack in supporting texts that would provide a basis for this consistency. Although relevant methods texts do exist, these are not written with this type of research explicitly in …

Robust And Efficient Solution Of The Drum Problem Via Nyström Approximation Of The Fredholm Determinant, Lin Zhao, Alex Barnett

Dartmouth Scholarship

The “drum problem''---finding the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Laplacian with Dirichlet boundary condition---has many applications, yet remains challenging for general domains when high accuracy or high frequency is needed. Boundary integral equations are appealing for large-scale problems, yet certain difficulties have limited their use. We introduce the following two ideas to remedy this: (1) We solve the resulting nonlinear eigenvalue problem using Boyd's method for analytic root-finding applied to the Fredholm determinant, and we show that this is many times faster than the usual iterative minimization of a singular value. (2) We fix the problem of spurious exterior resonances …