Urbanisation is a global issue, and rapidly gaining attention from researchers as a major cause of biodiversity loss. Gardens represent a considerable proportion of the urban landscape in the UK and have significant potential to promote urban biodiversity and reduce species loss providing they can be designed and managed appropriately. This research focused on gardens in St Andrews, Scotland, and investigated the influence of environmental variables such as age and area on arachnid and beetle biodiversity with the aim of identifying key predictors of arthropod species richness in urban environments. The key result of this research was that the age and area of individual gardens was not a strong predictor of ground active arthropod biodiversity. This suggests that more recently developed or smaller gardens can contribute to the overall urban region species richness pool as well as larger or more ancient gardens. The most important predictor of ground active arachnid and beetle species richness was the proportion of porous (or 'green') habitat surrounding each garden, and suggested that urban density and habitat connectivity at the regional scale are of key importance. In general, variables measured within gardens (e.g. the provision of microhabitats such as leaf litter, non-managed vegetation, etc.) did not exert any measurable effect on the biodiversity of arachnids or beetles. The findings of this research suggest that the regional availability of heterogeneous greenspace habitat is of high importance for promoting and maintaining urban arthropod biodiversity.

The Augustinian canons have never enjoyed the level of scholarly attention afforded to the monastic and mendicant movements of the central middle ages. This disparity has been particularly acute in the British Isles, despite being its most prolific religious movement. Scholars working in England, Ireland, and Wales have begun to correct this historiographical lacuna. In Scotland, the regular canons have also received comparatively scant attention, and, indeed, have largely been understood on the basis of imported paradigms. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to address a deficiency in Scottish historiography and make a contribution to the growing scholarship on the regular canons in the British Isles. The regular canonical movement is examined within the kingdom of Scotland over the course of roughly a century. Eleven non-congregational houses of regular canons are considered, namely Scone, Holyrood, Jedburgh, St. Andrews, Cambuskenneth, and Inchcolm and the dependencies of Loch Tay, Loch Leven, Restenneth, Canonbie, and St. Mary’s Isle. The kingdom of Scotland provides both a common context, and a diverse milieu, in which to consider the foundation and development of these institutions and the movement as a whole. The chronological parameters have been determined by the foundation of the first house of regular canons in Scotland in c. 1120 and the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which had the effect of artificially creating the Order of St Augustine. By examining individual houses separately, as well as in unison, this study seeks to present an integrated picture of the regular canonical movement in the kingdom of Scotland during the period of its organic development from c. 1120 to 1215. The fundamental question concerning the regular canons is the nature of their vocation and their societal function. It has increasingly been recognised that a spectrum of different interpretations of canonical life existed ranging from the active – pastoral, practical, and outward looking – to the contemplative – ascetic, quasi-eremitical, and inward looking – which were all part of the same decentralised religious movement. This thesis attempts to situate the Scottish Augustinians, as far as possible, within this spectrum. It argues that a unique manifestation of the regular canonical movement emerged in the kingdom of Scotland as the result of a range of factors – including shared patrons, leadership, and episcopal support – which had the effect of creating a group identity, and, thereby, a collective understanding of their vocation and role in society. The subject institutions have been particularly fortunate in terms of the quality and variety of the surviving source material. The evidence is comprised principally of charter material, but also includes chronicles and foundation narratives produced by Scottish Augustinians, and these provide an essential supplement. This thesis sheds light on an important group of religious houses in Scotland and on a complex religious movement that is only beginning to be fully understood, and, thus, it is hoped that this study will lay the groundwork for future research.

Developing portable mass spectrometry systems is an active area of research due to its broad range of useful applications, including environmental monitoring, threat detection, and space exploration. The mass analyzer is one of the key elements of the mass spectrometry system to develop for a portable system. Ion traps are a good candidate for the mass analyzer in a portable mass spectrometry system because the operating pressure scales with size. This allows for scaling down the other components of the system including the vacuum and electrical systems. Researchers at BYU are making an effort to develop miniature ion traps based on a planar geometry. The ion traps are made using microfabrication processes. A summary of the plates developed at BYU is presented in this work. Results from experiments to test the effects of pitch alignment on one design of planar ion trap plates are also presented. Conventional ion traps use a sinusoidal waveform to drive them. Driving the ion trap with a digital waveform has many benefits including extended mass range, lower voltage, and more control over the waveform. One of the difficulties involved in using a digital waveform is creation of a high voltage, high frequency waveform. This work details the design of a digital circuit capable of outputting a waveform with an amplitude of 100 VP-P at a frequency of 5 MHz and lower. This waveform was applied to a new ion trap design based on wire electrodes instead of planar electrodes. This trap offers many benefits over the planar ion traps developed at BYU. This work presents mass spectra obtained using a square digital waveform applied to the wire ion trap.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2001. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-110). Also available on the World Wide Web.

The purposes of this work are to examine the development and functions of the church court which came to be known as the presbytery during the late sixteenth century and during the early seventeenth century in Scotland, as well as providing a more readily accessible primary source for further studies within the area. The development of a presbyterian polity in Scotland during the sixteenth century is attested to by the surviving records of its kirk sessions, presbyteries, synods and general assemblies. This study is concerned primarily with the record of the St. Andrews presbytery; it was among the first established, and its importance as the presbytery of which Andrew Melville was a member and in which he had significant influence marks it as a church court of unusual interest and marks its records as a valuable source for the study of the development of presbyteries. The introduction surveys the historical background and the evolution of church courts along with the extant records of the earliest presbyteries. Specific attention is given to the St. Andrews record and its condition, history and characteristics. Further analysis of the responsibilities of the presbytery is included along with comparisons to other contemporary records and the relationships between the presbytery and other ecclesiastical judicatories, as well as the effects of changing political circumstances. Textual notes are supplied as is a complete index of subjects, persons, and places.

This examination looks at the contextual and cultural implications of learning, using sources from story-telling traditions. The thesis proposes that perceptions of reality are manipulable fictions. It uses the teachings of the American visionary writer, Lynn Andrews, to illustrate how a person's perceptions can be altered to his or her advantage, and how, when not properly attended to, perceptions can manipulate the person. Andrews' work is compared to that of Carlos Castaneda and other contemporary visionary writers, as well as to very old teachings from an oral tradition. I have set the study of Andrews' insights in the social, environmental and educational contexts of North America in the final years of the 20th century, as I experience those contexts in my private and professional academic life. I conclude that including knowledge such as that which Andrews offers, in the menu of teachings available to and tolerated by North Americans, is essential. / The thesis details a set of extra-ordinary teachings proffered by Lynn Andrews, purportedly of native origin. Attention is given both to the techniques used to teach and to the exceptional knowledge imparted. In Part I, I speak of the distinct culture of learning which I come from, and reply to detractors of cross-cultural teaching. I outline the general purposes which I believe these teachings can serve in any culture, and most particularly in the global culture of life on earth. Part II is a detailed exposition of the teachings in the first two books by Lynn Andrews. Part III addresses some of the challenges confronting those who wish to take her teachings to heart and pass them on to others. This section makes it clear that such teachings are not appropriate for everyone, and are not to be instituted in a systemic context.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State College, 1954. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-51). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1919. / "Private edition, distributed by the University of Chicago libraries, Chicago, Illinois." "Reprinted from the Physical review, n.s. vol. XI, nos. 3 and 4, March and April, 1918."

Spring plant phenology is often used as an indicator of a community response to climate change. Remote data and low-resolution climate models are typically used to predict phenology across a landscape; however, this tends to miss the nuances of microclimate, especially in a mountainous area with heterogeneous topography. I investigated how inter-annual variability in regional climate affects the distribution of microclimates (i.e., areas <100m2) and spring plant phenology across a 6400-hectare watershed within the Western Cascades in Oregon. Additionally, I created species-specific models of bud break at the microclimate scale, that could then be applied across a wider landscape. I found that years with warm winters, few storms and low snowpack have a homogenizing effect on microclimate and spring phenology events, and that bud break models developed at a local scale can be effectively applied across a broader landscape. This thesis includes previously unpublished coauthored material.

“The present work has been approached as a Mission Study. This is a wide enough category, but if I have had a model in mind, it has been E.J. Sharpe's study of the thought of J.N. Farquhar, published in the series, “Studia Missionalia Upsaliensia” ¹⁰ I have tried to take account of J. Kent's appeal, in an essay on “The History of Christian Missions in the Modern Era”, to take secular history more seriously “for its own sake”, than was the case in an earlier generation of mission studies.¹¹ Not that any other study of Andrews would have made much sense, so active and perspicuous a participant was he in that history. I have also suggested that it is helpful to see Andrews within the special context of The Cambridge Mission to Delhi and its distinctive theology of mission, and indeed, my argument that this theology found a new authentication in his work during these years, provides a framework to the thesis. Two omissions ought to be justified, I have not attempted an elaborate review of the 19th century background of “Protestant missionary thought”, desirable as this might have been, because this has been done very thoroughly in the first part of Sharpe's study referred to above. Sharpe's omission, however, of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi and of “the missions of the Catholic tradition” (“with one exception, the Oxford mission to Calcutta”) because they lie to “one side of the dominant Evangelical stream of missionary thought”, provides a convenient space in which to establish the distinctive approach of the Delhi Mission.¹² Another omission is any general survey of the history of the Cambridge Mission, partly because a useful one is already available, by F.J. Western, but partly also because the essential context of Andrews' work was the completely new situation that developed almost immediately after his arrival in India, for which the earlier activities of the Mission provided no precedents. The sources used are exclusively English sources for English was almost exclusively the language in which the matter of Indian nationalism at this stage, and of Hindu reformation and of much of progressive Indian Islam occurred.¹³ For the unpublished sources for this study, I have relied largely on the well-known collections, in particular the archives of the C.M.D. and of S.P.G., the papers of two of the viceroys, Minto and Hardinge, and the correspondence of Tagore, Munshi Ram and Gandhi. The published sources have been in many ways quite as important as the unpublished, for Andrews became, from late 1906, something of a compulsive communicator in the nationalist press, and the evidence for his developing thought is to a considerable extent in print here. Many of these published sources are excessively rare. Thus, for example, there is, in India, only one surviving run of the St. Stephen's College Magazine for these years, and the same is true of the journal, Young Men of India, while there is in Britain only one microfilm copy of the nationalist newspaper, the Tribune, so important for this study. Because of the interest of much of this source material, and a wish to make it more accessible, I have allowed the notes to tend towards the copious. A full account of these sources is given in the Bibliography. Although, as is said above, Andrews' approach to his work, as representing a sort of realization of a distinctive theology of mission, provides a thesis on which this study is constructed, it is perhaps more important simply to claim a profound intrinsic interest in the story of this "gentle, eager and many-sided saint” ¹⁴ and in his perception of the necessities, still far from fulfilled, of a Christian response to the Asian revolution.” – from the Introduction.