Implementing a Gravel Road Conversion Process

Boone County has over 330 miles of gravel roads in its network and a long list of public requests for conversion to hard surface. This session presents a systematic process developed to score roads based on criteria such as traffic volumes, connectivity, road classification, public support, right-of-way dedications, and private owner financial participation to improve public acceptance and department transparency. Challenges, benefits, and lessons learned from creating a new process will be discussed

Administer and Manage Construction Projects with Ease

Trying to balance the daily challenges of a county highway department while managing multiple capital projects and/or contracts can become challenging and sometimes over-whelming. We will present processes and procedures put in place at the Boone County Highway Department to streamline the project development process. We will also discuss tools we have developed to help us maintain project schedules and deliver our capital program

The Best Decision by Design: Professional Services Selection

Working with a design professional will give you the advantage of his or her expertise and innovative approaches to your project to provide more successful project outcomes: durable and sustainable facilities, lower construction costs, shorter construction schedules, and lower life-cycle costs. Join us to gain a critical perspective on why owners choose to hire design professionals based on a negotiated procurement process instead of bidding

Integrating Private Company Principles into a Government Department

In this session we present steps taken to improve the public image and employee culture at the Boone County Highway Department, including policies, processes, and strategies we implemented successfully and attempted changes that weren’t successful. We will discuss challenges we faced and the image we had to overcome at the onset of our transformation, as well as goals established in planning for the future of the department

LPA Design Certification for Non-Highway System Projects

This session presents the LPA Certification Program. This program enables all locals to take more control of their projects with federal funding for non-NHS facilities. We will share success stories and have plenty of time to answer questions

Understanding the Role of Theory on Instrument Development: An Examination of Strengths and Weaknesses of Discriminant Validity Analysis Techniques

Numerous researchers have called attention to many important issues in instrument development throughout the relatively short history of the information systems (IS) academic research discipline (e.g., Petter, Straub, & Rai 2007; Straub, Boudreau, & Gefen 2004; Straub 1989). With the accumulation of knowledge related to the process of instrument development, it has now become necessary to take a closer look at specific aspects of this process. This paper focuses on construct validity, specifically discriminant validity, and examines some popular methods of supporting this type of validity when using cross-sectional data. We examine strengths and weaknesses of these analysis techniques with a focus on the role of theory and informed interpretation. We highlight the applicability of these techniques by analyzing a sample dataset where we theorize two constructs to be highly correlated. With this paper, we provide both researchers and reviewers a greater understanding of the highlighted discriminant validity analysis techniques

A highly specific Escherichia coli qPCR and its comparison with existing methods for environmental waters

The presence of Escherichia coli in environmental waters is considered as evidence of faecal contamination and is therefore commonly used as an indicator in both water quality and food safety analysis. The long period of time between sample collection and obtaining results from existing culture based methods means that contamination events may already impact public health by the time they are detected. The adoption of molecular based methods for E. coli could significantly reduce the time to detection. A new quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) assay was developed to detect the ybbW gene sequence, which was found to be 100% exclusive and inclusive (specific and sensitive) for E. coli and directly compared for its ability to quantify E. coli in environmental waters against colony counts, quantitative real-time NASBA (qNASBA) targeting clpB and qPCR targeting uidA. Of the 87 E. coli strains tested, 100% were found to be ybbW positive, 94.2% were culture positive, 100% were clpB positive and 98.9% were uidA positive. The qPCR assays had a linear range of quantification over several orders of magnitude, and had high amplification efficiencies when using single isolates as a template. This compared favourably with qNASBA which showed poor linearity and amplification efficiency. When the assays were applied to environmental water samples, qNASBA was unable to reliably quantify E. coli while both qPCR assays were capable of predicting E. coli concentrations in environmental waters. This study highlights the inability of qNASBA targeting mRNA to quantify E. coli in environmental waters, and presents the first E. coli qPCR assay with 100% target exclusivity. The application of a highly exclusive and inclusive qPCR assay has the potential to allow water quality managers to reliably and rapidly detect and quantify E. coli and therefore take appropriate measures to reduce the risk to public health posed by faecal contamination