Growing Small: Citizen Preferences for New Development in Highland County, Virginia, and the Town of Monterey

“Growing Small: Citizen Preferences for New Development in Highland County, Virginia and the Town of Monterey” is a plan by Charles Wilson for Highland County (“Highland”) as they reconsider the future of the Town of Monterey (“Monterey”). Highland is a rural county in western Virginia at the intersection of U.S. Routes 250 and 220. In the Summer of 2021, a new Family Dollar was issued permits to demolish an historical lodging facility and construct a new store—just a few buildings away from an existing Dollar General. This was not without controversy, but ultimately prompted reflection amongst community members for how Monterey can maintain its character over time. Aiding in this reflection, “Growing Small” asked Highland and Monterey citizens to respond to a “visual preference survey” that was administered in-person. The survey distilled planning concepts and outcomes by presenting two contrasting scenarios for specific subjects (such as street design, land use patterns, building features, and parking location) and asking respondents to measure their preference for either scenario. These preferences were tabulated and summarized, as shown at the end of the Findings chapter. Enabling Legislation in Virginia was analyzed to recommend three potential methods of codifying these preferences into local ordinance(s). The primary takeaway of “Growing Small” is that community preferences for a quality built environment are easily revealed by this methodology. The recommendations are mindful of small locality’s bandwidth for codification and enforcement, and because of that this plan may offer a template for other places to consider

Letter From Charles F. Wilson to Francis Mairs Huntington-Wilson, July 12, 1910

The document is a typed letter from Charles F. Wilson to the Assistant Secretary of State replying to his letter of the previous day.https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/fmhw_other/1210/thumbnail.jp

Letter From Charles F. Wilson to Francis Mairs Huntington-Wilson, July 29, 1910

The document is a typed letter from Charles F. Wilson to the Assistant Secretary of State regarding the Minister to Peru and the Charlton case.https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/fmhw_other/1211/thumbnail.jp

A heterokaryon instability gene in the Rockefeller-Lindegren strains of Neurospora crassa and its possible relation to the het i gene in Oak Ridge-St. Lawrence strains

The het I/i genes in the Oak Ridge-St. Lawrence (OR-SL) strains of Neurospora crassa are unique among the het genes in that they do not cause cell death in incompatible heterokaryons. Instead, within certain nuclear ratios, forced heterokaryons are unstable. They become homokaryotic for the het I component, and stop growing. Similar alleles have now been found in Rockefeller-Lindegren (RL) strains. The latter differ from those of the OR-SL strains in that the heterokaryons become homokaryotic over a wide range of initial nuclear ratios. Evidence is presented that suggests the two sets of alleles may be the same

A systems thinking approach to collaborations for capacity building and sustainability in engineering education

Abstract: Please refer to full text to view abstract

Managing Lawns to Protect Water Quality: Watering, Fertilizing, and Applying Pesticides

Maintaining a quality lawn requires that you use intensive lawn care practices like watering, fertilizing, and/or applying pesticides. A number of best management practices (BMPs) provide safe-guards for preventing the contamination of surface water and groundwater supplies with lawn fertilizer and/or pesticides

Asynchronous response of coupled pacemaker neurons

We study a network model of two conductance-based pacemaker neurons of differing natural frequency, coupled with either mutual excitation or inhibition, and receiving shared random inhibitory synaptic input. The networks may phase-lock spike-to-spike for strong mutual coupling. But the shared input can desynchronize the locked spike-pairs by selectively eliminating the lagging spike or modulating its timing with respect to the leading spike depending on their separation time window. Such loss of synchrony is also found in a large network of sparsely coupled heterogeneous spiking neurons receiving shared input.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev. Let