Efficacy of forest restoration treatments across a 40-year chronosequence at Redwood National Park

Following 20th century logging, much of the natural coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) range consists of dense second-growth stands with slow tree growth and low biodiversity. There is a landscape-scale effort in much of coastal northern California to increase tree growth rates and ecosystem biodiversity via thinning treatments, thereby hopefully accelerating the development of old-growth forest characteristics. Redwood National Park (RNP) has been experimenting with thinning in these forest types since the 1970s. Given the interesting history of logging and restoration in RNP and the future plans for widespread thinning in this region, my thesis examined the effects of land management on forest productivity, biodiversity, and ecocultural resources. The first chapter provides a basic history of land management within the North Coast region. The second chapter investigates how redwood physiology, redwood growth, and forest biodiversity respond to restoration treatments. My Chapter 2 investigations found that thinning second-growth redwood forests 1) does not meaningfully influence tree water status, 2) increases tree gas exchange in the short-term, 3) increases tree growth in the long-term, 4) increases understory plant diversity, and 5) does not affect bird or mammal diversity. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that thinning second-growth redwood forests has the potential to accelerate the development of old-growth characteristics. This verification of the efficacy of restoration treatments is important information for land managers, as plans are currently underway to apply these treatments at the landscape-scale. Ideally, this thesis can provide useful baseline data to aid future assessments of long-term forest responses to contemporary restoration efforts

Regulating intimate relationships in the European polity: same-sex unions and policy convergence

Since 1989, twenty-three European countries have implemented same-sex union (SSU) laws. We argue that the political processes leading to the adoption of these policies have been shaped by international influences such as policy harmonization, elite lesson-drawing and most importantly by social learning fostered within transnational networks. We examine SSU policies in four West European countries—Germany, Austria, Belgium, and Spain—to illustrate how these international influences and transnational networks have shaped SSU policy outcomes, and argue that the workings of these networks resemble those of the “velvet triangle” policy communities identified by gender scholars

Framework for Auto-Generating Agents that Fight in a Semi-Coherent Way

This project aimed to explore the potential of computer and video games by pursuing a depth in gaming that is uncommon or non-existent in current games. That pursuit consisted of creating a coding framework that can automatically generate many more components of the fighting logic than are normally used in current games. This framework is extendable, which allowed this project to scale to the time available. The other main part of this framework is the interface control document which describes how to use it. The end point of this project is a functional framework with a decent interface document so another developer could pick up this project and incorporate it in their game

Quantitative Character and the Composite Account of Phenomenal Content

I advance an account of quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that presents as an intensity (cf. a quality) and includes experience dimensions such as loudness, pain intensity, and visual pop-out. I employ psychological and neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that quantitative characters are best explained by attentional processing, and hence that they do not represent external qualities. Nonetheless, the proposed account of quantitative character is conceived as a compliment to the reductive intentionalist strategy toward qualitative states; I argue that an account of perceptual experience that combines a tracking account of qualitative character with my functionalist proposal of quantitative character permits replies to some notoriously difficult problems for tracking representationalism without sacrificing its chief virtues

Experimental and Numerical Modeling Investigation of CO2 Foam Mobility Control

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Statistical aspects of carbon fiber risk assessment modeling

The probabilistic and statistical aspects of the carbon fiber risk assessment modeling of fire accidents involving commercial aircraft are examined. Three major sources of uncertainty in the modeling effort are identified. These are: (1) imprecise knowledge in establishing the model; (2) parameter estimation; and (3)Monte Carlo sampling error. All three sources of uncertainty are treated and statistical procedures are utilized and/or developed to control them wherever possible

Identifying Naturally-occurring Direct Assessments of Social-emotional Competencies: The Promise and Limitations of Survey and Assessment Disengagement Metadata

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is gaining increasing attention in education policy and practice due to evidence that related constructs are strongly associated with long-term academic achievement and attainment. However, the work of educators to support SEL is hampered by a lack of available, unbiased measures of related competencies. In this manuscript, we review a recent and growing body of literature suggesting that metadata captured when assessments are administered via computer can provide data on not only test engagement, but also SEL constructs. Implications of this new source of data for practice, policy, and research are discussed

Does Loudness Represent Sound Intensity?

In this paper I challenge the widely held assumption that loudness is the perceptual correlate of sound intensity. Drawing on psychological and neuroscientific evidence, I argue that loudness is best understood not as a representation of any feature of a sound wave, but rather as a reflection of the salience of a sound wave representation; loudness is determined by how much attention a sound receives. Loudness is what I call a quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that is determined by the amount of attention that an underlying perceptual representation commands. I distinguish quantitative from qualitative character; even qualitative characters that represent degrees of sensible magnitudes are phenomenally and functionally distinct from quantitative characters. A bifurcated account of phenomenal character emerges; the phenomenal is not exhausted by the qualitative