University Of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Research Articles

David Chandler. 15 October 1944—18 April 2017

David Chandler, a major figure in statistical mechanics, spent his career at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California Berkeley. Starting in his graduate work, he made significant advances in many areas of statistical mechanics theory, such as the structure and thermodynamics of simple liquids and nonpolar molecular liquids, the nature of hydrophobic hydration and hydrophobic interactions in aqueous systems, chemical reaction rates, quantum processes in liquids such as electron transfer and the solvation of an excess electron in water, ‘transition path sampling’ (a method for using computer simulations to study chemical reaction rates and other dynamic processes in liquids), and the ‘dynamic facilitation’ theory of the properties of supercooled liquids and the glass transition. He received the Hildebrand Award and the Theoretical Chemistry Award from the American Chemical Society and the Irving Langmuir Chemical Physics Award from the American Physical Society. He was elected to membership in the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Hollow peg holds key to click beetles’ explosive flips

Struggling to right themselves when stranded on their backs, click beetles have a remarkable correction strategy. Arching the joint between the front and second section of the thorax, the beetles suddenly release the deformation and spring spontaneously into the air. ‘The jump is almost vertical, but only 50% of cases result in the beetle landing on its feet’, explains mechanical engineer Aimy Wissa, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, who is fascinated by the tiny insects’ acrobatics. And entomologist Marianne Alleyne, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, adds, ‘Considering that insects have a small internal volume and, therefore, limited space for large musculature, it is rather amazing how high they can jump without using their legs to push off the ground’. Instead, the beetles depend on a latch structure – situated in the joint between the thorax and the abdomen – which locks the body in position, storing the energy that was released slowly by the muscles that arched the body, ready to be released as soon as the latch lets go. But it was not clear how the two halves of the latch click together, so Wissa, Alleyne and their engineer colleague Alison Dunn teamed up to scrutinise the structure in fine detail.As there are almost 10,000 click beetle species, the team focused on the beetles that reside in their neighbourhoods. ‘We let colleagues, family and friends know that we were in need of living click beetles’, says Alleyne, who recalls how insects were delivered for identification by Alexander Hazel from as far afield as Michigan and Ohio; ‘even the mechanical engineers got involved’, she chuckles. Then, Ophelia Bolmin scrutinised the latch structure of four different click beetles – Alaus oculatus, Parallelostethus attenuatus, Lacon discoideus and Melanotus spp. – in microscopic detail using environmental scanning microscopy. Meanwhile, Lihua Wei CT scanned the head and thorax region of A. oculatus, P. attenuatus and Melanotus spp. to learn about the latch's internal construction.Describing the latch structure, Alleyne explains that a peg on the front section of the thorax slots perfectly onto the lip of the second portion of the thorax, locking the insect's body into an arched position. Also, rows of hairs around the lip cavity guide the peg in to place, and the friction plate toward the tip of the peg locks the latch. Most surprisingly, the CT scans revealed that the peg is hollow. ‘Maybe we shouldn't have been surprised’, says Wissa, explaining that that hollow elongated structures such as pipes and tubes have a higher strength-to-weight ratio than similarly shaped solid structures. And when Dunn calculated the strength of the hollow peg and compared it with the strength of a solid beam, she confirmed that the hollow peg was much stronger, suggesting that a solid peg may be too flexible to hold the latch in place.So click beetles wedge open the latch that allows the insects to store the explosive energy required to fling themselves into the air with a hollow peg. Also, the team suspects that the latch slips when the tension is too high and friction can no longer hold it in place. In addition, they are keen to apply the lessons about power amplification that they have learned from the click beetle to design agile robots that can get out of tight corners.

Maximizing Learning Potential with Multimodality: A Case Study

<p><em>In today’s increasingly fast-moving digital world, learners are immersed in multimodal online communication environments in their daily life, through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others. This requires educators to reflect the environment in which these learners live, and thus design instructional practices from a multimodal perspective. Multimodality offers new opportunities for digital learners to express themselves, analyze problems and make meaning in multimodal ways as they interpret knowledge differently according to their various educational needs (Kalantzis </em><em>&</em><em> Cope, 2015). In this paper we will discuss the significance of integrating multimodality in e-Learning contexts to make meaning and improve learning. The paper will also present a case study of an online course from the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign to show how multimodality works in practice to cater to learner differences by offering a range of activity options and modes of meaning. We will also examine learners’ perceptions of adopting such an approach in the online course. We used survey techniques for data collection and quantitative and qualitative methods for data analysis. Results revealed illuminating insights about the importance of multimodality approach to increase learning potential for digital learners and provided suggestions for future iterations.</em></p>

A chip design with 40 GPUs: Engineers plan to use “silicon interconnect fabric” to put 40 GPUs on a single wafer - [News

Back in the 1980s, parallel-computing pioneer Gene Amdahl hatched a plan to speed mainframe computing: a silicon-wafer-size processor. By keeping most of the movement of data on the processor itself, computing would be faster and more energy efficient. With US $230 million from venture capitalists, the most ever at the time, Amdahl founded Trilogy Systems to make his vision a reality. This first commercial attempt at “wafer-scale integration” was such a disaster that it reportedly introduced the verb “to crater” into the financial press lexicon. Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at the University of California, Los Angeles, think it's time for another go.

The African American Community in Brushy Fork, Illinois, 1818-1861

Research Article| July 01 2019 The African American Community in Brushy Fork, Illinois, 1818-1861 Charles R. Foy; Charles R. Foy Dr. Charles R. Foy is Associate Professor, Emeritus, Early American & Atlantic History at Eastern Illinois University. His scholarship focuses on eighteenth century black maritime culture. Dr. Foy has published more than a dozen articles on black mariners and is the creator of the Black Mariner Database, a dataset of more than 29,000 eighteenth century black Atlantic mariners. He is completing a book manuscript, Liberty’s Labyrinth: Freedom in the 18th Century Black Atlantic, that details the nature of freedom in the eighteenth century through an analysis of the lives of black mariners. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Michael I. Bradley Michael I. Bradley Michael Bradley is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and has a Master of Arts degree from Eastern Illinois University in Early American & Atlantic History. His scholarship focuses on the long eighteenth century and the social history of convict transportation from Britain to America. Mr. Bradley has published an encyclopedia entry on the Black Atlantic, and is the creator of a dataset of more than 3,000 transported convicts who have been tracked from Britain to America and whose lives are under analysis for his forthcoming dissertation. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) (2019) 112 (2): 129–162. https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.112.2.0129 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Charles R. Foy, Michael I. Bradley; The African American Community in Brushy Fork, Illinois, 1818-1861. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) 1 January 2019; 112 (2): 129–162. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.112.2.0129 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Daʿwain the Neighborhood: Female-Authored Muslim Students Association Publications, 1963–1980

AbstractFounded in 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada (MSA) expanded to 116 local chapters by 1968, with members representing more than forty countries. During the Cold War, the MSA embraced the project ofdaʿwa, or renewing and correcting other Muslims’ devotional practice, and improving the public image of Islam. Extant scholarship on the MSA portrays the organization as ambivalent, if not antagonistic, toward U.S. society during the Cold War because it was deeply enmeshed in the political and religious ideologies associated with the global Islamic Revival. This article offers a different view by examining female-authored writings published under the auspices of the MSA Women's Committee between 1963 and 1980. Aspirational in scope and pedagogical in approach, MSA women's literature shifts conceptions of the MSA's political and religious priorities during this period, from one of detachment to one of selective engagement with American culture. This article makes three main interventions. First, it demonstrates that a focus on the publications of MSA female members yields a more robust understanding of how this important group of American Muslims envisioneddaʿwaas a local and global project of religious revival during the Cold War. Second, it shows that, to achieve their revivalist aims, female MSA members identified points of affinity with certain religious non-Muslim Americans, namely, upwardly mobile Christians and Jews. For these authors, the ground on which they found affinity with families of other faiths was not theology or Abrahamic lineage but, rather, a shared gendered and classed vision of raising devout children to meet the unique threats posed by modernity. Finally, this article examines how female MSA authors conceived of the patriarchally organized yet maternally driven nuclear family as essential for reinvigorating Muslim practice.

Charles Dickens, Cairo, and the Panic of 1837

Research Article| December 01 2018 Charles Dickens, Cairo, and the Panic of 1837 Peter Pellizzari Peter Pellizzari Peter Pellizzari is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Harvard University. A native of Cary, Illinois, he received his B.A. in History and Political Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2013. His primary research interests include the American Revolution, political economy, and trans-Atlantic slavery in early America, the early Caribbean, and the early modern British empire. He is also author of an article on the material culture of the Federalist Papers. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) (2018) 111 (4): 9–42. https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.111.4.0009 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Peter Pellizzari; Charles Dickens, Cairo, and the Panic of 1837. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) 1 January 2018; 111 (4): 9–42. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.111.4.0009 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Le Pays des Illinois Finds its Context: The Early History of Illinois in a Continental Perspective

Research Article| July 01 2018 Le Pays des Illinois Finds its Context: The Early History of Illinois in a Continental Perspective Robert Michael Morrissey Robert Michael Morrissey Robert Michael Morrissey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, specializing in the history of early America and the Atlantic world, American frontier and borderlands history, ethnohistory, and environmental history. In addition to several articles on early Illinois history, he is the author of Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in the Colonial Illinois Country (2015). His next book project is entitled “The Illinois and the Edge Effect: People, Environment, and Power in the Tallgrass Prairie Borderlands.” It is a study of the relationship between people and non-human nature in one of North America’s most distinctive ecological and social frontiers from 1200 to 1850. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) (2018) 111 (1-2): 9–30. https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.111.1-2.0009 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Michael Morrissey; Le Pays des Illinois Finds its Context: The Early History of Illinois in a Continental Perspective. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) 1 January 2018; 111 (1-2): 9–30. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.111.1-2.0009 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Managing Research Data: Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Researcher Perspectives

The authors conducted six focus group semi-structured interviews consisting of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in order to understand their roles within research groups and their ability to manage research data. More specifically, participants were asked how they manage, organize, and describe data, as well as the challenges they face in these activities. This study revealed graduate students primarily discuss managing research data in terms of the software they use and that their focus is task specific. Additionally, the language and concepts librarians use in conversations about data management creates a barrier to understanding for graduate students. This study confirms that there is a significant disconnect between the faculty members who design and direct research projects and the graduate students and postdoctoral researchers that do the front-line work. This study helped identify that more data management engagement, interaction, and instruction within research groups is needed. Acknowledging this will allow librarians to develop more meaningful data management instruction and enhance the research data support services provided to faculty.

Temporal control of growth factor‐mediated signaling pathways during cell differentiation and Xenopus embryonic development

Growth factor‐mediated signaling pathways regulate a wide‐spectrum of cellular functions such as survival, proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis. Different growth factors typically trigger the activation of the same set of downstream signaling pathways which includes the mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK), phosphoinositide 3‐kinase (PI3K)‐AKT, and phospholipase C (PLC) pathways Evidence suggests that precise spatiotemporal regulation of these signaling pathways is involved in generating diverse cellular outcomes. Although conventional genetic and pharmacological approaches have helped us understand different aspects of signaling pathways, a quantitative delineation of their signaling kinetics is pending due to a lack of tools that allow for precise temporal control of these pathways. Non‐neuronal optogenetics, an emerging technique that utilizes light to control intracellular signaling pathways, is a remarkable tool to help achieve this goal. Here, we introduce a bicistronic optogenetic system which we recently developed in our laboratory to achieve temporal control of the MAPK pathway. This tool uses the photoactivatable protein cryptochrome 2 (CRY2) and the N‐terminal domain of cryptochrome‐interacting basic‐helix‐loop‐helix (CIBN) from Arabidopsis thaliana. This novel system allows reversible, light‐mediated activation of the MAPK signaling pathway in intact mammalian cells as well as in developing Xenopus laevis embryos. In PC12 neuronal cells, light‐controlled, intermittent MAPK activity reveals a memory effect in light‐induced neurite outgrowth. In Xenopus embryos, developmental stage‐specific MAPK activation further reveals that this pathway can reprogram cell fate after a crucial time window when germ layers are specified. Our strategy can be generalized to control other kinase pathways with a similar activation mechanism. Results from our research will help resolve intracellular mechanisms of growth factor‐mediated signal transduction during cell differentiation and embryonic development.Support or Funding InformationKai Zhang, Department of Biochemistry, University of Illinois Urbana‐ChampaignThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequencing of a Burial from a Romano-Christian Cemetery in the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt: Preliminary Indications.

The curse of ancient Egyptian DNA was lifted by a recent study which sequenced the mitochondrial genomes (mtGenome) of 90 ancient Egyptians from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq. Surprisingly, these ancient inhabitants were more closely related to those from the Near East than to contemporary Egyptians. It has been accepted that the timeless highway of the Nile River seeded Egypt with African genetic influence, well before pre-Dynastic times. Here we report on the successful recovery and analysis of the complete mtGenome from a burial recovered from a remote Romano–Christian cemetery, Kellis 2 (K2). K2 serviced the ancient municipality of Kellis, a village located in the Dakhleh Oasis in the southwest desert in Egypt. The data were obtained by high throughput sequencing (HTS) performed independently at two ancient DNA facilities (Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, Dover, DE, USA and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA). These efforts produced concordant haplotypes representing a U1a1a haplogroup lineage. This result indicates that Near Eastern maternal influence previously identified at Abusir el-Meleq was also present further south, in ancient Kellis during the Romano–Christian period.

Electronics That Flex Themselves.

Readers may remember that in our last column, we featured the work of John Rogers' laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which is working on stretchable, skin-like, body sensors (1). This month, we continue our stay in the world of stretchable sensors, but now we look at it through the lens of Zhenan Bao's laboratory at Stanford University. While each of the laboratories shares “some common goals in our vision, we take different paths,” says Sihong Wang, a postdoctoral fellow in the Zhenan Bao Research Group. Rogers' focus on stretchable electronics plays out by taking existing silicon models and pairing them with a stretchy substrate that conforms to the skin. This could be considered more of a “hybrid approach” to flexible electronics, says Joshua Windmiller, PhD, the founder and Chief Technology Officer at Biolinq Inc., a company that develops skin-applied electrochemical sensors that analyze body fluids. “Hybrid” in that it takes a traditional rigid circuit, mounts it on a flexible substrate, and places that unit on the body to get the wearable sensor. On the other hand, Windmiller says the Bao laboratory is trying to create “core building blocks of electronics that flex themselves.” Windmiller is not involved with either of the labs, but thinks about stretchability and semiconduction in his role at Biolinq. Wang agrees, saying, “We are trying to create stretchability for the entire system.” Today, we discuss what that means by focusing on a recent proof-of-concept paper from the Zhenan Bao Research Group (2), of …

Mapping Thermal Flow under the Skin.

Galen, the ancient Greek physician, believed that the balance of the 4 humors within the body—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—could determine the temperament and health of an individual. Hence, techniques such as bloodletting became routine practice. In introductory classes today, medical students giggle when they hear of such primitive medicine. But Hippocrates, Galen, and other humoralists were definitely right on one point—that we are highly individualistic (thus the growth of precision medicine), and possibly right on another—that how fluids flow within the body could indicate health and disease. Professor John Rogers, from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has invented a way to noninvasively and continuously measure blood flow across the body that could prove the second point. The journal spoke to him about his latest innovation. Rogers has developed skin-like patches that contain a heating element—an actuator—and an array of sensors that pick up the spread of thermal power. “The chemistry innovation is how you make sensors that are similar to skin itself,” says Rogers. Bernard Bulwer The devices (Fig. 1) are “super thin with low thermal mass,” according to Rogers. This gives the devices an insignificant thermal footprint. To effectively thermalcouple to sense small temperature variations under the skin, there must be “intimate physical contact between device elements and skin,” explains Rogers. Air gaps are no good, …

Pinning a bull’s-eye on cancer cells

A new small-molecule strategy could help cancer drugs selectively target tumors with the help of click chemistry (Nat. Chem. Biol. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/nchembio.2297). Many cancer drugs attack healthy tissue in addition to tumors, leading to harmful side effects. So scientists want therapeutics to target cancer cells more selectively. One such approach that has reached the clinic is antibody-drug conjugates. Antibodies recognize antigens, such as HER2 on some breast cancer cells, allowing antibody-attached drugs to kill those cancer cells selectively. But disease-specific antigens aren’t always available, and antibody-drug conjugates are costly and must be administered intravenously. A group led by Jianjun Cheng of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Lichen Yin of Soochow University, and Xuesi Chen of Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry has now come up with a strategy called active tissue targeting via anchored click chemistry (ATTACK) that may have advantages over antibody-drug conjug...

C&EN talks with Rommie Amaro, computational chemist

Determining the structures of enzymes and other biomolecules with X-ray crystallography has deepened biologists’ understanding of the inner workings of cells and led to the design of many important drugs. Increasingly, researchers are using computer modeling to attain a more realistic picture of the movement of these biomolecules in their natural environment. Rommie E. Amaro, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), uses computational techniques to predict how enzymes regularly shift their configurations, revealing potential vulnerable areas for drug targeting. C&EN talked with Amaro about how she’s using dynamic models of enzymes to develop a new class of cancer drugs, work that is being commercialized by Actavalon, a San Diego start-up Amaro cofounded. How did you get into working on computational drug design? I fell in love with physical chemistry as a chemical engineering undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I

O TREINAMENTO DE PRÁTICAS CORPORAIS DA DANÇA: DE MURO À GUERREIRO, O TRABALHO COM A IMAGINAÇÃO NA COMPOSIÇÃO INSTANTÂNEA DE JULYEN HAMILTON

Melanie Bales e Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, pesquisadoras da Universidade de Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Departamento de Dança), partem da premissa de que, na dança, o treino de práticas corporais não estaria apenas no lugar da construção de habilidades, mas sim no de invenção, descoberta e desenvolvimento da dança. O treino de práticas seria assim um lugar generativo de arte e produção de conhecimento. A partir da composição instantânea segundo a concepção do coreógrafo britânico Julyen Hamilton, este artigo propõe-se a discutir como o conceito de imaginação emerge e é trabalhado nas práticas corporais da dança. Para tanto, realizou-se uma etnografia de prática artística, em que o campo privilegiado foi o próprio estúdio e workshops realizados em circuitos berlinense de treinamento da dança contemporânea entre janeiro e junho de 2015. As considerações metodológicas foram feitas com base em uma pesquisa da autora e de seu aprendizado de práticas corporais da dança como locus de um devir-coreográfico, via um processo de imersão na prática propriamente dita.

Data Management Practices and Perspectives of Atmospheric Scientists and Engineering Faculty.

This article analyzes 21 in-depth interviews of engineering and atmospheric science faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to determine faculty data management practices and needs within the context of their research activities. A detailed literature review of previous large-scale and institutional surveys and interviews revealed that researchers have a broad awareness of data-sharing mandates of federal agencies and journal publishers and a growing acceptance, with some concerns, of the value of data-sharing. However, the disciplinary differences in data management needs are significant and represent a set of challenges for libraries in setting up consistent and successful services. In addition, faculty have not yet significantly changed their data management practices to conform with the mandates. The interviews focused on current research projects and funding sources, data types and format, the use of disciplinary and institutional repositories, data-sharing, their awareness of university library data management and preservation services, funding agency review panel experiences, and struggles or challenges with managing research data. In general, the interviews corroborated the trends identified in the literature. One clear observation from the interviews was that scientists and engineers take a holistic view of the research lifecycle and treat data as one of many elements in the scholarly communication workflow. Data generation, usage, storage, and sharing are an integrated aspect of a larger scholarly workflow, and are not necessarily treated as a separate entity. Acknowledging this will allow libraries to develop programs that better integrate data management support into scholarly communication instruction and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Validation of General Nutrition Knowledge Questionnaire for Adults in Uganda

Knowledge is a significant component of several behavioral theories used in nutrition, including the health belief and stages of change models. In Uganda, the evaluation of nutrition interventions is limited by the lack of validated tools, especially of nutrition knowledge. The objective in this study was to validate (i.e. construct validity and reliability) a general nutrition knowledge questionnaire (GNKQ) for adults in Uganda.A revised version (i.e. after expert review and face validation) of the GNKQ comprised 47 questions grouped in five domains assessing knowledge on recommendations (4), food groups (17), food choices (10), nutrition and disease relationship (11), and food fortification (5). A purposive sample of teachers (n=40) from Kampala and students (n=77) from Makerere University was recruited to complete the GNKQ twice, at least within one week apart. Students completed the questionnaire using the Qualtrics online platform; while the head teachers completed the GNKQ by hand. Item difficulty (acceptable range: 0.1–0.9) and discrimination analyses (acceptable above 0.2) were applied to data to remove simple and complex items, and those that failed to predict scores within each of knowledge domains. After removing the items, the questionnaire remained with a total of 28 questions with 89 items. Before deletion of any items, we assessed the internal consistency (Cronbach α), the content validity (Student t‐test) and test‐retest reliability for all subjects and each sub‐population group. The overall Cronbach alpha (all groups) was 0.93 and 0.94 at the first and second round, respectively. This was 0.84 and 0.85 for the head teachers and 0.94 and 0.95 for the students, at the first and second round, respectively. Overall internal consistencies for the following domains were considered acceptable (i.e. 0.70–0.95), food groups (0.81 and 0.81), nutrition and disease relationship (0.78 and 0.84), and food fortification (0.94 and 0.94) in the first and second rounds, respectively. For nutrition recommendations and food choices the internal consistencies were below 0.7. The overall test‐retest reliability using Pearson correlation was 0.89. The Pearson correlation coefficients were 0.93 and 0.63 for students and head teachers, respectively. The overall nutrition knowledge scores of nutrition students (104.8), engineering students (71.8) and head teachers (76.2) were significantly different (P<0.05). Trends and differences in knowledge scores remained similar after the second round of the questionnaire, 106.7, 72.0, and 79.7, respectively. Overall findings showed that the GNKQ is valid and reliable to evaluate nutrition knowledge among adults in Uganda. Low internal consistencies for some dimensions require continuous review of specific items. Further studies will address test‐retest reliability of the GNKQ using a larger population sample.Support or Funding InformationUSAID Borlaug Higher Education for Agricultural Research and Development (BHEARD) Program fellowship. Margin of Excellence funds from the Division of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana‐Champaign (UIUC). UIUC Graduate College's Focal Point ‐UCOUNT project.

Effect of particle intrusion on rail seat load distributions on heavy haul freight railroads

ABSTRACTThe rail seat load distribution is critical for analysing failure mechanisms associated with rail seat deterioration (RSD), the degradation of concrete surface at the sleeper rail seat. RSD can lead to wide gauge, cant deficiency, and an increased risk of rail rollover. Previous experimentation with matrix-based tactile surface sensors (MBTSS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has yielded concern regarding the feasibility of crushing of the concrete material at the rail seat. This paper examines data collected from laboratory experimentation in which the particle size, particle intrusion, vertical rail seat load, and lateral over vertical force ratio were varied to generate extreme loading environments. No pressures exceeded the concrete compressive strength. However, certain loading scenarios yielded pressures exceeding the concrete fatigue strength. It was therefore concluded that accumulated crushing damage due to a high number of repeated load applications is a feasible failure mechanism of RSD initiation.

Perceptual Effects of Nasal Cue Modification

Acoustic or perceptual cues used for speech perception can be very helpful in almost all areas of speech signal processing. A new methodology 3-Dimensional-Deep Search and a new visualized intelligible time-frequency computerbased model AI-gram have been developed and are being researched since the last several years (Human Speech Recognition (HSR) research group at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) for isolation of stable perceptual cues of consonants. The perceptual cues of nasal consonants [1] have been successfully found considering these techniques [1]. The previous work is extended by assessing the changes in nasal sound perception and cue region is modified by using digital signal processing method. The amplitude of the perceptual cue region is amplified, attenuated or ignored completely and then the perception score is measured. A high correlation between the amplitude of the cue region and the perception score is found. The intelligibility of the entire token is increased or decreased approximately in a similar fashion as the cue region modified amplitude which is measured by the MMSE shift of the perceptual score curve. This validates that the regions identified are perceptual cue regions for nasal consonants. The digital signal processing method proposed can be used as a new approach for enhancing speech signal in noisy conditions.