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Addressing Injustices Toward Individuals with Schizophrenia-Spectrum Conditions: a Call to Action for Social Work Practice
No full textThe field of social work has a lengthy history of training social workers for community mental health settings, and an ethical commitment to advance human rights and social justice. However, individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum conditions continue to suffer from myriad social injustices, including poverty, social isolation, and lower-life expectancy. This paper outlines these injustices, and reviews historical social work contributions and current training for supporting this population. Finally, the authors outline actions to 1) adopt national practice guidelines that formally acknowledge injustices, including anti-oppressive practice guidelines that are inclusive of lived experience, and 2) revitalize social work’s contributions to models of care for schizophrenia-spectrum populations
Citizen\u27s Rare Plant Watch 2025 Recap
No full textCitizen\u27s Rare Plant Watch (CRPW) is a community science program which takes volunteers out to visit populations of rare and threatened Oregon native plant species. Volunteers assess their health and viability, update the Oregon Biodiversity Information Center (ORBIC) state database for rare species, and help contribute to data driven management decisions throughout the state. Housed at Portland State University, this program is open to the public and attracts plant lovers from diverse backgrounds. Each spring, CRPW trains volunteers on methods of data collection, and this year we implemented new technology using Survey123 to streamline population assessments. We focus on species which are data deficient and in need of updated information, and we partner with land managers across Oregon to help fill the gaps in their capacity to survey rare plants. This year we had more than 30 volunteers participate in data collection on populations of nine species of rare plants in Oregon during ten outings between May and September. Our work informs strategies for protecting Oregon\u27s state-listed and regionally rare plant species
Online Decision Mamba
No full textOnline in-context reinforcement learning enhances offline-trained policies through online fine-tuning. We introduce Online Decision Mamba (ODM), an architecture that replaces the attention mechanism in Online Decision Transformers (ODT) with the Mamba module to improve long-context sequence modeling and overall RL performance. We performed in-depth evaluations on MuJoCo (OpenAI Gym) and Atari benchmarks, comparing ODM against state-of-the-art offline and online baselines—including Decision Mamba (DM) and ODT. Our results show that ODM achieves competitive or superior performance, with particularly robust gains when initial datasets lack expert demonstrations. In the Qbert Atari environment, ODM shows context-length sensitivity similar to offline DM; however, we demonstrate that adjusting the Mamba delta-parameter initialization range effectively mitigates any performance degradation. Further experiments explored the effects of frame stacking, action-embedding dimensionality, exploration strategies, multinomial sampling temperature, pretraining iterations, and replay-buffer size. These findings confirm that ODM is a flexible, high-performance framework for online in-context reinforcement learning, adaptable to diverse tasks and dataset characteristics
Flow Control Tactics for Photovoltaic Modules: Coherent Structure and Heat Shedding Amplification
No full textSolar photovoltaic systems have become the fastest growing renewable technology in the last several years. However, large-scale systems are at the mercy of their external environments, where extreme heating and wind-flung debris impact their efficiency and useable life. The work in this dissertation presents studies aimed to both understand and mitigate for these effects by identifying the underlying physics which govern them. Exploring flow control as a tactic to combat environmental heating, collective work discusses the role of turbulent fluid dynamics within large-scale systems as pertains to convective heat transfer, turbulent structure formation, and particle-laden environments. Wind tunnel experiments on a two-panel model array compare fundamental wake behavior to that of arrays equipped with vortex generators and flow deflectors. The role of flow control in wake modification and subsequent surface shearing is related to variations in convective heat transfer using flow field measurements in the regions surrounding the downstream panel. Impacts on the turbulence kinetic energy budget and associated coherent structures are examined using reduced-order modelling in the panel wakes and at the panel surface, informing the mechanisms responsible for cooling. Framework is presented for understanding how panel turbulence couples with particle debris fields through Voronoï analysis and lacunarity-based heterogeneity. This work motivates flow control as passive mitigation for adverse environments and introduces new perspectives toward understanding the complex nature of industrial photovoltaic systems
Freer Arrows and Why You Need Them in Haskell
No full textFreer monads are a useful structure commonly used in various domains due to their expressiveness. However, a known issue with freer monads is that they are not amenable to static analysis. This paper explores freer arrows, a relatively expressive structure that is amenable to static analysis. We propose several variants of freer arrows. We conduct a case study on choreographic programming to demonstrate the usefulness of freer arrows in Haskell
You Have to CUT&WALK Before You Can CUT&RUN: Regulation of Gene Expression by the Vitamin D Receptor (VDR) in the Annual Killifish, \u3ci\u3eAustrofundulus limnaeus\u3c/i\u3e
No full textThe annual killifish, Austrofundulus limnaeus, found in ephemeral ponds in South America, possesses a remarkable ability to survive extended periods without water and oxygen. This ability is associated with developmental dormancy known as diapause. Numerous genetic and environmental factors influence the entry into diapause and tolerance to environmental stress. Among these is vitamin D3 signaling mediated by the vitamin D receptor (VDR), which plays a crucial role in regulating entry into diapause and the continuous development of an embryo in a temperature-dependent manner. Vitamin D3 signaling influences a variety of physiological processes in vertebrates. While extensively characterized in mammalian systems, the role of VDR in non-mammalian vertebrates, particularly in the context of development, remains poorly understood. In this study, I explore the role of VDR signaling in regulating the development of A. limnaeus embryos. I employ a new technique, called a CUT&RUN assay, that uses a custom anti-VDR A. limnaeus antibody to identify genomic binding sites occupied by the VDR. Here, I report a new dissociation protocol to generate single-cell suspensions from early-stage embryos, enabling the first implementation of CUT&RUN in this species. Sequencing data processed through motif enrichment analysis and Gene Ontology (GO) analysis generated a de novo VDR motif sequence as well as VDR-associated genomic sites and biological processes potentially regulated by the VDR. These data provide preliminary evidence for VDR-mediated transcriptional regulation in early embryonic stages of A. limnaeus, while also laying methodological groundwork for future chromatin profiling research in a non-mammalian model
Linking Climate and Demography to Predict Population Dynamics and Persistence Under Global Change.
No full textPredicting the effects of climate change on plant and animal populations is an urgent challenge for understanding the fate of biodiversity under global change. At the surface, quantifying how climate drives the vital rates that underlie population dynamics appears simple, yet many decisions are required to connect climate to demographic data. Competing approaches have emerged in the literature with little consensus around best practices. Here we provide a practical guide for how to best link vital rates to climate for the purposes of inference and projection of population dynamics. We first describe the sources of demographic and climate data underlying population models. We then focus on best practices to model the relationships between vital rates and climate, highlighting what we can learn from mechanistic and phenomenological models. Finally, we discuss the challenges of prediction and forecasting in the face of uncertainty about climate-demographic relationships as well as future climate. We conclude by suggesting ways forward to build this field of research into one that makes robust forecasts of population persistence, with opportunities for synthesis across species
Gianjara\u27s Ribs: The Ecosystem, Body, Animalia, and Politic
No full textThis work is a series of four six foot tall full-body portraits of people, which are displayed alongside an actual, physical item or garment present in the associated painting. The purpose of this is to blur the line between the fiction of the individuals depicted and the viewer. By creating portals through which to view them as equals in stature, Linus Gomez Ellis is taking something that can be seen in the ecosystem of this fiction and making it into an objective reality. The most enduring, well preserved, and eternal pieces of history and anthropology are tall tales. This ecosystem, taking place in a society built on the fossilized body of an ancient colossal organism, is a rumination on symbiosis, the natural world, social class generated in response to natural resource extraction and the act of extraction itself. Before the modern age, there was less emphasis placed on the distinct line between fiction and science - the pursuit of truth was paramount, less so the pursuit of fact
An Offline Approach for Frequency Event Detection in Power Systems: TKEO and Statistical Analysis
No full textThe increasing integration of renewable energy sources in power grids and the transition from conventional thermal-based generation to inverter-based resources for power generation have reduced power system inertia and increased the rate of change of frequency, which constitutes a challenge for frequency stability in modern power systems. These changes necessitate robust frequency event detection algorithms that can rapidly and accurately identify events, providing essential support to maintain stability. This paper proposes a frequency event detection algorithm with six tunable parameters for offline post-processing, leveraging the Teager-Kaiser Energy Operator method and statistical analysis. The algorithm is tested on a dataset comprised of Phasor Measurement Unit data from the Western Interconnection of the USA. Detection performance is evaluated against another algorithm with four optimized parameters, using key metrics and binary classification to assess the accuracy and reliability of the featured algorithm. The results demonstrate solid performance of the proposed method in detecting frequency events, showcasing its potential and paving the way for further parameter optimization
Seizing the Moment: Post-COVID-19 Enrollment Trends Among Nontraditional Honors Students
No full textThis article investigates the motivations behind the rising enrollment of nontraditional students at Portland State University’s Honors College, which nearly doubled from 2019 to 2022 following the COVID-19 pandemic. Aleph argues that nontraditional students viewed education as a means of reclaiming agency and reshaping their futures. Through interviews and a focus group with four nontraditional students, Aleph explores how the pandemic created disruption and opportunities. The study finds that while economic instability and isolation were factors, intrinsic motivations—especially a desire for self-improvement, intellectual challenge, and rewriting personal narratives—were more prominent factors shaping enrollment decisions. Drawing from this qualitative analysis, Aleph concludes that the pandemic was not only an economic and social crisis, but also a transformative catalyst for nontraditional students re-entering academic life