University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship RepositoryNot a member yet
123813 research outputs found
Sort by
What is "Having Sex?": An Exploratory Investigation into Sexual Communication and Sexual Education Experiences
No full textAlthough engaging in sexual activity is a common activity for many, research suggests the sexual communication skills of individuals are lacking. This may be due to a lack of knowledge about sexual communication, as well as an individual's own disposition toward sexual openness. Using survey data collected online via Qualtrics, this project explores the relationship between sexual education experiences in high school and how the big five personality traits are related to the perception of sex and sexual communication. The goal of this research is to subsequently identify the areas where sexual education can be improved based upon individuals’ gaps in knowledge about sexual health and sexual communication
Legionella Pneumophila Testing
No full textFlier advertising the ISTC Institutional Water Treatment (IWT) program's service to test for Legionella pneumophila, the bacterium that causes Legionnaires’ disease, in building water systems. IWT is one of only a few laboratories within Illinois that is CDC ELITE Certified for Legionella testing. The CDC Environmental Legionella Isolation Techniques Evaluation (ELITE) is a yearly
program where laboratories demonstrate their proficiency in successfully identifying Legionella in water sample
Bedrock geology of Elizabeth Quadrangle, Jo Daviess County, Illinois
No full textUSGS National Cooperative Geologic Mapping Program under StateMap award number G23AC00586, 202
Bedrock geology of Hanover, Illinois
No full textUSGS National Cooperative Geologic Mapping Program under StateMap award number G22AC00573, 2022
Bridging borders: The role of anime in fostering Japanese acceptance in South Korea and China
No full textThis study examines the relationship between anime consumption and the acceptance of Japanese individuals among South Korean and Chinese populations, given the historical and geopolitical tensions between these countries and Japan. Using data from the 2018 East Asian Social Survey (EASS), we analyzed responses from 1,031 South Koreans and 4,499 Chinese participants, stratified by generational cohorts. The study assessed Japanese acceptance in three social capacities: coworkers, neighbors, and married kin. Logistic regression models were employed to evaluate the impact of anime consumption, alongside sociodemographic factors, on attitudes toward Japanese acceptance.
Results showed that younger generational cohorts in both South Korea and China were generally more accepting of Japanese individuals compared to older generations. Anime consumption correlated significantly with increased acceptance among those who watched anime "sometimes" or "seldomly." Higher education levels also positively influenced Japanese acceptance in both groups.
These findings suggest that anime, as a distinctly Japanese cultural product, can serve as a bridge for fostering cross-cultural understanding and reducing long-standing historical tensions. The study highlights the potential of shared cultural consumption in promoting regional tolerance and emphasizes the need for further research on the role of media in shaping perceptions of national identity and cross-border relationships. This study underscores the potential of cultural media like anime in fostering mutual understanding and bridging divides in the East Asian regio
Computational approaches for democratizing online community governance
Get PDFAlthough democracy is a common real-world governance model, large swaths of the social media landscape are run in a quasi-dictatorial manner. From Usenet newsgroups to Reddit subreddits, online communities are managed by volunteer moderators who have sole authority to create and enforce community rules. While rules are vital to community health (preventing trolling, keeping communities on-topic, etc), community members have little voice in their creation or implementation. Part of this is due to inadequate tooling. Online communities require democratic governance technologies that are able to function within the unique dynamics of online social life: massive scale, highly fluid user populations, and pseudo-anonymous communication. Although the potential benefits of democratizing online community governance have been broadly argued for in prior work, designing effective governance technologies has remained elusive.
As such, this thesis has dual goals. First, I seek to conduct quantitative analysis to better understand the contexts in which online communities should utilize democratization. Second, I want to use this analysis to inform the design and deployment of new democratization technologies. Concretely, I provide evidence that democratization efforts may have the most impact if they target what I call the “practice”-level of governance, focusing on the application of rules to specific cases. Further, I highlight the potential problems that user-base fluidity poses to democratic governance: when a community doubles in size overnight, whose concerns should prioritized? Those of long time users? Or newcomers? In light of these insights, I design Venire, a machine-learning based tool for facilitating practice-level democratization. My work provides a roadmap for future efforts to democratize online community governance, ensuring that the online social spaces we participate in actually reflect our values.Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2026-02-19 without embargo termsThe student, Vinay Koshy, accepted the attached license on 2025-08-22 at 12:20.The student, Vinay Koshy, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-08-22 at 12:43.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-08-26 at 15:11.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22776 on 2026-02-19 at 18:24:1
A qualitative analysis of teachers’ and psychologists’ perceptions of disproportionality within special education
Get PDFThroughout the last few decades, the number of students receiving special education services in public schools has steadily increased (Education Week, 2019). As students serviced has increased, so has “disproportionality” – that is, the rate at which one racial group is overrepresented or underrepresented in special education or within specific disability categories (Skiba et al., 2008). This problem has roots deeper than just within education, connected to oppression, discrimination, and civil rights concerns due to special education settings being removed from the general education classes in certain circumstances depending on the disability category (Smedley, 2007; Skiba et al., 2008). A variety of interventions have been utilized to track and attempt to reduce this problem including providing improvements to federal policy and analyzing data on geographic location, student socio-economic status, and teacher education.
This study is conducted in the Chicagoland area and interviewed 16 participants- eight special education teachers and eight school psychologists. This study utilizes the DisCrit theory which informed the research questions and interview protocols. Analysis of the data resulted in three themes: 1) knowledge of disproportionality and the overrepresentation of Black students; 2) perceived contributors to disproportionality; and 3) systemic barriers for Black students. Findings suggest that school psychologists have a breadth of knowledge of disproportionality and the overrepresentation of Black students. In contrast, teachers have less substantial knowledge of this concept. Perceived contributors to disproportionality by practitioners interviewed are family advocacy and involvement, school and family socioeconomic status, and administration and district involvement. Participants identified teachers' negative bias towards Black students’ behavior, practitioner knowledge gaps, and the influence of trauma as systemic barriers for Black students in regard to overrepresentation in special education.Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2026-02-19 without embargo termsThe student, Samantha Smith, accepted the attached license on 2025-11-11 at 08:44.The student, Samantha Smith, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-11-11 at 08:52.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-11-11 at 09:45.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22857 on 2026-02-19 at 18:24:3
Learning-based shared control for open world, dexterous robot teleoperation
No full textTeleoperation allows people to extend their perception and interaction capabilities to remote locations in cases where distance or safety constraints prevent them from physically traveling. It is especially useful for operation in “open-world” environments, environments that cannot be accurately modeled ahead of time, where traditional automation techniques often prove unreliable. However, while humans are extremely adept at a wide variety of manipulation tasks, transferring these skills through a robot has remained an open challenge for over half a century. Given constraints on an operator’s total cognitive load, high degree-of-freedom systems face a tradeoff between flexibility and precision. Giving the operator direct control over every joint on the robot provides them with the maximum flexibility to complete many kinds of tasks, but the high cognitive load associated with such an interface makes it impossible to properly coordinate the joints for tasks requiring high precision. In contrast, shared control systems that let the operator control the robot at a higher level of abstraction reduce this cognitive load and can improve the operator’s precision, but simultaneously reduce the flexibility of the interface to accomplish tasks for which it was not explicitly designed. Towards the goal of creating truly telepresent systems, this thesis introduces several learning techniques to dynamically adapt robotic teleoperation interfaces to specific users and tasks, allowing operators to more naturally express their intent and enabling greater transfer of their manipulation skills. This approach has lead to improvements in mappings for retargeting operator inputs to robot actions, harnessing the operator’s existing manipulation skills to flexibly complete many kinds of tasks while maintaining a high degree of precision.Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2026-02-19 without embargo termsThe student, Patrick Naughton, accepted the attached license on 2025-11-16 at 17:34.The student, Patrick Naughton, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-11-16 at 17:38.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-11-17 at 13:18.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22874 on 2026-02-19 at 18:24:4
Esports implementation in higher education: a quantitative analysis
Get PDFeSports is a billion-dollar industry globally, and colleges and universities have begun to implement their own eSports programs. At the same time, an enrollment cliff that has its seeds in the 2008 economic crisis has finally come to bear for higher education. Colleges must find a way to adapt in a new environment where there are fewer potential students to recruit. Institutional Theory, specifically Loose Coupling, provides a way to examine how institutions change and what factors currently have a relationship with eSports implementation. This study investigates whether the Carnegie Research Classification, Institutional Financial Health, Athletic Conference Affiliation, and Athletic Budget Size are associated with the implementation of eSports in higher education. I hypothesized that lower Carnegie Research Focus, stronger financial health, conference affiliation, and larger athletic budgets would have negative relationships with eSports implementation. This study employed quantitative methods, specifically linear regression models, to investigate the relationship between institutional characteristics that may influence the implementation of eSports. Data from the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act Database, the Knight-Newhouse Athletics Database, and the Integrated Postsecondary Education System database were utilized to examine the relationships. The study found that enrollment size, higher research focus, expenses per student, debt as a percentage of institutional expenses, and conference affiliation had a statistically significant increase in percentage point implementation, while endowment size and percentage of total budget that is athletics had statistically significant negative impacts in percentage point implementation. These results practically affect practitioners who may be tasked with implementing a new eSports team, policymakers who may be deciding whether to implement eSports at their institutions, and future researchers can take the results of this study and examine specific research questions in greater detail or change the sample sizes to include private institutions or add additional levels of traditional athletic competition.Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2026-02-19 without embargo termsThe student, Aaron Surratt, accepted the attached license on 2025-11-21 at 15:31.The student, Aaron Surratt, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-11-21 at 15:56.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-11-25 at 12:40.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22924 on 2026-02-19 at 18:25:1
Kinetic modeling frameworks for the chemical recycling of polyolefins
Get PDFPlastics have become essential to modern life, yet their durability has led to a global waste challenge (> 360 Mt per year). Among this gigantic among of plastic wastes, most of them have been landfilled, incinerated, or even mismanaged. Only a small portion of them have been recycled. However, current mechanical recycling cannot solve the issue that material properties will degrade during the recycling process. Chemical recycling offers new pathways by converting polymers back into valuable molecules selectively, but the underlying reactions are extremely complex due to a wide range of chain lengths in polymers, different features and functional groups among products, and different phases in a reactor scale that stretch traditional kinetic tools past their limits.
This dissertation develops a set of kinetic modeling frameworks for the chemical recycling of polyolefins. First, we examine mass-transfer limits using a diffusion–reaction model that describes how processive catalysts perform inside stagnant and stirred polymer melts. The core of the dissertation then advances the mechanistic modeling for polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) depolymerization. We begin with a length-agnostic microkinetic model (MKM) that includes all surface and bulk species for a model compound, allowing extraction of rate constants and validation of mechanistic hypotheses from experiments. Then, we started with PP pyrolysis mechanism to build a continuous feature x population balance models (PBMs) that resolve the realistic molecular weight distribution (MWD) while keeping track of the evolution of functional motifs such as double bonds or end groups with a feature balance framework (FBM). We show how FBMs can be coupled to PBMs to follow both detailed kinetics and evolving MWDs across multiple species and predict experimental observables and MWDs.Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2026-02-19 without embargo termsThe student, Jiankai Ge, accepted the attached license on 2025-11-25 at 19:07.The student, Jiankai Ge, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-11-25 at 19:28.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-12-01 at 11:12.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22961 on 2026-02-19 at 18:25:2