The latest news from the UW

We are attached to our devices nearly 24/7. As our number of activities and time spent outdoors shrinks, it’s perhaps no coincidence that the larger society faces higher occurrences of depression, child and adult obesity and attention deficit disorder. Getting more people outside and engaged with nature is the topic of this year’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences annual Sustaining Our World Lecture, 6-7 p.m. Thursday, April 2, in Kane Hall 210. The talk is free and open to…

One would imagine a glacier’s melt to be fairly quiet. That would be wrong. Recordings by current and former University of Washington researchers in fjords shows that melting at glacier edges in the narrow rock-edged canyons are some of the noisiest places in the sea. The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, recorded the sound near glacier tongues in narrow fjords in the Arctic and Antarctica. The sounds were louder than any natural or human-generated ocean noise, at least within…

The Labor Archives of Washington, part of UW Libraries Special Collections Department, is creating an online resource called the Minimum Wage History Project to document the 2013-2014 campaign that succeeded in mandating a $15 minimum hourly wage in the cities of Seattle and Sea-Tac. The effort kicks off with a public program, “Preserving Solidarity Forever: The Minimum Wage History Project,” 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday, April 11, in Kane Hall’s Walker-Ames Room. James Gregory, UW professor of history, will speak,…

No one would argue that exposing children to secondhand smoke is bad, but should it be considered child abuse? Taryn Lindhorst, a UW associate professor of social work, says no. In an opinion piece published online in the Annals of Family Medicine earlier this month, Lindhorst argues that treating children’s exposure to secondhand smoke as child abuse and reporting parents to authorities takes a punitive approach to addiction and harms both children and families. “Removing kids from their families, their…

Years ago, a fellow educator made a comment that stuck in Christine Stickler’s head. University students don’t need to travel to a foreign country for spring break to immerse themselves in another culture, she said — they can do that right here in Washington state. That observation led Stickler to launch the UW’s Alternative Spring Break program, which sends out teams of undergraduates to small rural and tribal communities throughout Washington to work with elementary and middle school students on…

The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory and Everett-based company OceanGate this month unveiled the first model of its joint project to build a new type of submarine for human research and exploration in the deep sea. Cyclops 1 was a developed over the past year and a half in the Applied Physics Lab’s co-laboratory space down by the Ship Canal. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush introduced the vessel and gave tours of the inside March 11 on the dock of…

The University of Washington’s latest step toward its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050 came last week, with the release of its Climate Action Strategy for Transportation, or CAST. The CAST follows the UW Climate Action Plan, a set of broad strategies to guide the UW to the goal of carbon neutrality that was released in 2009. The CAST suggests specific actions for reducing emissions in the transportation sector. “This represents an important step toward strategically reducing a significant portion…

Norman J. Johnston will be remembered as a dedicated and community-minded architect, city planner, teacher and critic. He died Monday, March 16, 2015, in his Seattle home. He was 96. Memorial for Norman J. Johnston 2 p.m. Sunday, May 31, University of Washington Club. Johnston earned a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Washington in 1942. He returned to the campus in 1960 as a faculty member in architecture and urban planning, and taught until his retirement in…

Members of the UW community are invited to a free daylong conference for technology professionals at the 2015 UW TechConnect Conference on March 24. Explore, learn and connect with other IT colleagues and choose from a dozen presentations about the future of information technology at the UW – from human resources and payroll modernization to accessibility and the latest in computer networking. Keynote speakers start the day with a presentation at 8:30 a.m. by UW Vice Provost for Innovation Vikram…

Attorney General Bob Ferguson has appointed Senior Counsel Karin Nyrop as the new chief of his office’s University of Washington Division. The division provides legal services to the university, including UW Bothell, UW Tacoma and the UW Medical Center. “The University of Washington will be well served by Karin’s impressive combination of legal expertise, leadership experience, personal achievements and demonstrated commitment to public service,” said Ferguson in a statement. Nyrop brings 30 years of legal experience to this position. She…

UW Libraries has opened up a new multimedia space on the third floor of Allen library for the use of students, faculty and staff. It’s called the mediArcade, and is open weekdays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to those with a Husky card. With iMacs, large televisions and DVDs, video game consoles, several media editing programs and even VHS playback, UW community members can use the room to watch videos and listen to music, or to create and edit their…

One of modern science’s grand challenges is understanding how the human brain actually works — from cataloging millions of individual cells to figuring out how the circuitry that underlies our thoughts and actions decodes information. By deconstructing these intricate processes, engineers can use the human brain to build everything from smarter computers to better speech recognition programs to artificial limbs that can “recognize” thoughts. Some of the University of Washington’s leading experts on this process — called “Reverse- Engineering the…

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…