The latest news from the UW

Online education has great potential to improve lives, but few people in developing countries have access to such classes. The UW Information School’s Technology & Social Change Group will conduct research as part of a $1.55 million multiagency initiative to study and address this need. The project will include research on online course enrollment in Colombia, the Philippines and South Africa, and is being conducted by the U.S. Agency for International Development together with Coursetalk.com, the largest source of online…

A document from the UW Sephardic Studies Program‘s Digital Library and Museum appears in a new PBS documentary called “The Jewish Journey: America.” The documentary will be broadcast at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 16, on KBTC, Tacoma’s public broadcasting station, and is now available for viewing online as well. The hour-long film, directed by Emmy-winner Andrew Goldberg, traces Jewish immigration to America over five centuries, using the perspectives of immigrants, historians and Jewish-American writers. The film’s producers contacted Devin Naar,…

No matter what your business — from a nonprofit museum that wants to deepen visitor engagement to a chain store looking for new markets — it’s essential to be able to extract meaningful patterns and results from often massive reservoirs of data. Improving this “art and science” of data analysis, reporting and visualization is the focus of the DRIVE/conference developed by the University of Washington, which will draw more than 700 IT and data professionals to Seattle and Bellevue on…

New research from the UW College of Built Environments on the “spatial clustering of obesity” in urban areas has helped clarify and build upon work a 2007 study began. The takeaway, in brief: In King County, Washington, at least, low property values match with high body-mass indexes, or BMIs in less diverse, lower-income South King County, and higher property values match with low BMIs in more populous, prosperous North King County. Body-mass indexes are a measure of a person’s relative…

The power of social media in fueling movements such as Black Lives Matter, the racial justice campaign sprung from last year’s protests in Ferguson, Missouri, has become increasingly evident in recent years. Recognition of those grassroots efforts is the focus of the fifth annual Women Who Rock “unconference” event, to be held Saturday, March 7, at Rainier Valley Cultural Center in South Seattle. The event’s theme, Rocking Media Justice, celebrates the use of social media to document the realities of…

Take five minutes and experience the life of a rocket scientist building a prototype to bring back samples of objects in space. In these tests, success is nose-diving into the California desert, which stands in for the surface of an asteroid. In the “Asteroid Sampler” video, which aired Jan. 15 on Discovery Channel Canada, a UW team of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates launched a new type of rocket in California. The work is part of a NASA-funded project to…

Seattle’s first-ever “Handathon” will bring together students, faculty and clinicians in a hackathon-style, 24-hour event that challenges two dozen graduate and undergraduate students to design creative improvements to an existing 3-D printed prosthetic hand. Research teams from the University of Washington, UW Bothell and Seattle Pacific University have been designing and printing prosthetic hands, and now they’re hoping a larger community of students can help improve the design with a little friendly competition. “We are hoping for lots of fun,…

What does climate change mean to you, in three minutes or less? That’s what the UW’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences is asking all high school and undergraduate students in the state of Washington in a video competition that will award up to $5,000 to the top entries in each age category. The UW Climate Change Video Contest, running now until April 13, is open to any student in the state who wants to enter as an individual or…

Fendall Yerxa, a former faculty member in the Department of Communication, died in October 2014 at the age of 101. He is remembered as a patient teacher and an insightful and highly professional old-school journalist. He worked as Washington, D.C., bureau chief for The New York Times and managing editor of the International Herald Tribune. He anchored ABC News and even hosted his own television magazine-style program. He was an on-air news analyst for KOMO News in Seattle. And he…

Polar Science Weekend, held in partnership with the UW Applied Physics Laboratory, blows into the Pacific Science Center this Friday through Sunday. For the 10th year, this event will give visitors a taste of exploration at the ends of the Earth. Discover why polar regions are crucial to climate change, examine real ice cores from Greenland, and learn about penguins and narwhals from some of the world’s experts. The schedule includes presentations, exhibits and demonstrations for all ages. This year…

The possibility of longtime prisoners being released from prison and leading happy, productive lives may seem unlikely. But a new radio documentary project aims to dispel that perception. The Rethinking Punishment Radio Project is a collaboration between UW professor Katherine Beckett and two radio journalists from the University of British Columbia. The first episode, which aired Feb. 25 on the Cited podcast, tells the story of Jeff Coats, who served 17 years in adult prison for charges including robbery and…

Five University of Washington professors have received the 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships that honor early career scientists and scholars who are seen as rising stars in their fields. The UW’s winners are Brandi Cossairt, assistant professor of chemistry; Cole Trapnell, assistant professor of genome sciences; Shyam Gollakota, assistant professor of computer science and engineering; Emily Fox, assistant professor of statistics; and Thomas Rothvoss, assistant professor of computer science and engineering and of mathematics. Each faculty member will receive $50,000 from…

In the first half of her March 2 faculty recital in Meany Hall titled “Around Robin,” Robin McCabe will play a well-loved piano suite by French impressionist composer Maurice Ravel. And then in the second half, things are going to get a little nutty. McCabe, UW professor of piano, said she’ll start with Ravel’s “Miroirs,” which she calls “very evocative, heady music, and a nice foil for the antics of the second half.” And by antics, she means second-half performances…

Factors affecting the quality of life for marginalized populations are the focus of a three-part UW lecture series that starts tomorrow. The 10th Annual Allen L. Edwards Psychology Lectures presents, “The Psychological Science of Inequity and Inequality,” bringing together faculty from the UW Department of Psychology with national experts for the free public talks. The first, at 7 p.m. Feb. 18, is titled “Implicit Bias: How Should Psychological Science Inform the Law?” and features UW psychology professor Anthony Greenwald and…