Effects of neighboring plants on herbivore damage to a focal plant (associational effects) have been documented in many systems and can lead to either increased or decreased herbivore attack. Mechanistic models that explain the observed variety of herbivore responses to local plant community composition have, however, been lacking. We present a model of herbivore responses to patches that consi...

In 2008 the U.S. Department of Energy set a target of 20% wind energy by 2030. To date, induction-based turbines form the mainstay of this effort, but turbines are noisy, perceived as unattractive, a potential hazard to bats and birds, and their height hampers deployment in residential settings. Several groups have proposed that artificial plants containing piezoelectric elements may harvest wi...

Field trial design is a crucial consideration in efficient, cost-effective plant breeding programs. Design properties and specific designs relevant to plant breeding are considered. Good field designs are important at all major stages of a plant breeding program from the earlier stages of screening hundreds, possibly thousands of entries through identification of a few elite selections for rele...

-Screening tools are developed which provide nonconservative estimates of the achievable performance in the presence of general structured model uncertainty. These tools allow the rational selection among plant designs, or can be applied to provide recommedations on how to modify a plant design to improve the closed loop performance. Many of these tools are applicable to the pairing or partitio...

This research examines a chronic problem in academic settings – inappropriate copying or misuse of source materials–i.e., plagiarism. We conduct a computer-based writing experiment to examine the effects of psychological and situational characteristics on subjects’ propensity to misappropriate text. Specifically, we examine to what extent such misappropriations may be explained by available tec...