Strategic planning is a frequently used method for defining appropriate institutional responses to changing internal and external conditions. Numerous efforts have been made to adopt strategic planning styles that were originally developed in manufacturing businesses to the purposes of higher education. Despite theses efforts, community colleges have not yet developed...
Podosphaera macularis causes one of the most important diseases, powdery mildew, of Humulus lupulus (hop). If left unmanaged, hop powdery mildew can cause total crop loss due to disease or browning of hop cones rendering the cones unmarketable to buyers. The Hop Powdery Mildew Infection Risk Index (HOPS) is heavily...
Private land-use decisions can have important effects on private and public welfare. Market-based policies to regulate land use have the potential to move the privately-optimal allocation of land closer to what is socially optimal. To implement these policies in the Rocky Mountain states, it is necessary to understand the effects...
Social robots benefit from a sense of humor, which requires the ability to recognize and adapt to human responses during playful interactions. Past work on humorous robots has classified audience responses with audio-based and preliminary visual-based methods following the joke punchline. Building on this progress, we conducted a survey of...
Deep pressure therapy (DPT) is a method of anxiety relief that uses pressure sensations to lower the stress response produced in the brain, and functions in a manner similar to a hug. Heavily weighted blankets and weighted vests are most commonly used to apply DPT, though recent work has shown...
Vaccinia virus (VV) is a large DNA virus belonging to the Orthopoxvirus
family. The viral replicative life cycle takes place solely within the cytoplasm
of a mammalian host cell. The VV genome contains 196 open reading frames
which are expressed in a highly regulated and temporal fashion in order to...
Exposure to TCDD suppresses the generation of immune responses through unknown mechanisms. Interestingly, TCDD enhances inflammatory responses to various stimuli. The goal of the studies presented in this thesis was to examine the role of hyperinflammation in TCDD-induced immunotoxicity. Previously we observed an increase in Mac-1⁺ cells in the spleen...
The development of microfluidic devices for heavy metal extraction is presented in this dissertation. Various research areas, covering subjects from photochromic compound syntheses to microchip fabrication techniques are explored to develop microfluidic devices capable of extracting heavy metal ions from drinking water. Through integration of the beneficial characteristics of both...
The research conducted here originated with the question of what caused the massive build-up of nuclear arsenals, which included ever larger and more powerful bombs and delivery systems from them, in the United States and the Soviet Union, even though the consensus beforehand was that nuclear energy should be prohibited...