The Jacob Lawrence Gallery and the School of Art + Art History + Design present Departing Figures: BA in Art Graduation Exhibitions, featuring the work of the 2024 graduating class in the BA in Art programs: 3D4M: ceramics + glass + sculpture, Interdisciplinary Visual Arts, Painting + Drawing, and Photo/Media. Students work closely with the gallery’s curatorial team to present their senior capstones in one of three group shows that run for two weeks each.

May 23, 3:30 – 5:00 pm | Thomson Hall or Online via Zoom

May 23, 5:00 – 7:00 pm | Hans Rosling Center

This event will celebrate the release of Linh’s new book, Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production, and she will have another author joining her to share their book and connect with UW faculty, staff, students, and the broader community.

Free |

May 23, 7:30 pm | Meany Hall

The University Singers, Treble Choir, and UW Glee Club present an eclectic program of music from around the world, folk tunes, and arrangements of popular music standards.

Tickets |

May 23, 7:30 pm | Meany Hall

The UW Percussion Ensemble, led by Director Bonnie Whiting, performs music by Caroline Shaw, Elena Rykova, and Qu Xiao-Song. The performance will also have open scores by Pauline Oliveros, George Lewis, and Stacey Bowers and feature first-year undergraduates in ragtime arrangements for xylophone and marimba.

Tickets |

May 23 – June 2, 2:00 or 7:30 pm | Floyd and Delores Jones Playhouse

In this unique adaptation of “The Adding Machine,” the unremarkable Mr. Zero, an accountant, is unexpectedly replaced by an adding machine. What follows is a series of remarkable events during and after his life that are outside of his control–or are they? In this devised adaptation, Director Ryan Purcell and student artists will examine the present-day emergence of artificial intelligence in the context of Rice’s prescient expressionistic classic of the 1920s.

Tickets |

May 24, 1:30 – 3:00 pm | Husky Union Building

For this �IJ��� International Security Colloquium, PhD candidates Jessica Sciarone and Jihyeon Bae come together to discuss “Dark Visions for Society: The Spread of Extremist Ideas.”

Free |

May 24, 3:30 – 4:30 pm | Smith Hall

Free |

May 24, 7:30 pm | Meany Hall

Thirteen UW students and recent alumni were selected for Fulbright exchange awards.�IJ���

Thirteen UW students and recent alumni were awarded����scholarships this year, joining about 2,000 students and recent graduates from around the country to study and teach abroad.

The scholarship program is the largest U.S. international exchange opportunity for students to pursue graduate study, advanced research and teaching in elementary and secondary schools worldwide.

Five UW undergraduate students or recent alumni are among this year’s Fulbright Student Program recipients and plan travel to Asia, Europe, South America and the Middle East to take part in research and teaching assistantships. Eight graduate-level students plan to travel to the Middle East, Central America, Europe, and East and South Asia. The UW had three students — two undergraduates and one graduate level — selected as alternates.

This year’s awardees are:

• Vecksle Drake: English teaching assistantship in Mongolia
• Anna Feit: Study and research, Brazil
• Lukas Metzner: Study and research, Germany
• Lexi Rohrer: Study and research, Thailand
• Ela Sezgin: English teaching assistantship, Turkey

This year’s at the UW are:

• Aaron Barker, Doctoral student, Philosophy: Research grant to Germany
• Rachel Andersen, Doctoral student, Nursing: Research grant to Jordan
• Claudia Herrero Rapagna, Master’s student, International Studies: English teaching assistant grant to Jordan
• Nicolás Kisic Aguirre, Doctoral student, Digital Arts & Experimental Media: Creative arts research grant to Mexico
• Kaya Mallick, Master’s student, International Studies: Research grant to India
• Brian Park, Doctoral student, History: Research grant to Japan
• Claire Rater, Master’s student, Epidemiology and Social Work: Research grant to Colombia
• Frankie Leigh Shelton, Master’s student, Health Administration: Study grant to United Kingdom

For the past several years, The Chronicle of Higher Education has ranked the UW a “Top Producer” of student awardees. The Fulbright program, funded by the U.S. Department of State, provides round-trip travel, health insurance, a housing stipend and visa assistance to awardees.

Read more about this year’s student winners and the projects they will pursue abroad at the Office of Merit Scholarships, Fellowships & Awards�� and the Graduate School’s��.

Tropical forest canopy in Caxiuanã, Brazil.Jake Bryant

Spending time in nature is good for us. Studies have shown that contact with nature can lift our well-being by . Even brief exposure to nature can help. One well-known study found that hospital patients recovered faster .

Knowing more about nature’s effects on our bodies could not only help our well-being, but could also improve how we care for land, preserve ecosystems and design cities, homes and parks. Yet studies on the benefits of contact with nature have typically focused primarily on how seeing nature affects us. There has been less focus on what the nose knows. That is something a group of researchers wants to change.

“We are immersed in a world of odorants, and we have a sophisticated olfactory system that processes them, with resulting impacts on our emotions and behavior,” said , a �IJ��� assistant professor of environmental and forest sciences. “But compared to research on the benefits of seeing nature, we don’t know nearly as much about how the impacts of nature’s scents and olfactory cues affect us.”

In a published May 15 in Science Advances, Bratman and colleagues from around the world outline ways to expand research into how odors and scents from natural settings impact our health and well-being. The interdisciplinary group of experts in olfaction, psychology, ecology, public health, atmospheric science and other fields are based at institutions in the U.S., the U.K., Taiwan, Germany, Poland and Cyprus.

At its core, the human sense of smell, or olfaction, is a in constant operation. The nose is packed with hundreds of olfactory receptors, which are sophisticated chemical sensors. Together, they can , and that information gets delivered directly to the nervous system for our minds to interpret — consciously or otherwise.

The natural world releases a steady stream of chemical compounds to keep our olfactory system busy. Plants in particular exude , that can persist in the air for hours or days. VOCs perform many functions for plants, such as repelling herbivores or attracting pollinators. Some researchers have studied the impact of exposures to plant VOCs on people.

“We know bits and pieces of the overall picture,” said Bratman. “But there is so much more to learn. We are proposing a framework, informed by important research from many others, on how to investigate the intimate links between olfaction, nature and human well-being.”

A subalpine meadow on Mount Rainier in the summer.Elli Theobald

Nature’s smell-mediated impacts likely come through different routes, according to the authors. Some chemical compounds, including a subset of those from the invisible realm of plant VOCs, may be acting on us without our conscious knowledge. In these cases, olfactory receptors in the nose could be initiating a “subthreshold” response to molecules that people are largely unaware of. Bratman and his co-authors are calling for vastly expanded research on when, where and how these undetected biochemical processes related to natural VOCs may affect us.

Other olfactory cues are picked up consciously, but scientists still don’t fully understand all their impacts on our health and well-being. Some scents, for example, may have “universal” interpretations to humans — something that nearly always smells pleasant, like a sweet-smelling flower. Other scents are closely tied to specific memories, or have associations and interpretations that vary by culture and personal experience, as research by co-author of the University of Oxford has shown.

“Understanding how olfaction mediates our relationships with the natural world and the benefits we receive from it are multi-disciplinary undertakings,” said Bratman. “It involves insights from olfactory function research, Indigenous knowledge, Western psychology, anthropology, atmospheric chemistry, forest ecology, — or ‘forest bathing’ — neuroscience, and more.”

Investigation into the potential links between our sense of smell and positive experiences with nature includes research by co-author at University College London, which shows that the cultural significance of smells, including those from nature, can be passed down in communities to each new generation. Co-author at Birmingham City University has delved into the associations people have with scents in built environments and urban gardens.

Other co-authors have shown that nature leaves its signature in the very air we breathe. Forests, for example, release a complex chemical milieux into the air. Research by co-author at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute shows how natural VOCs can react and mix in the atmosphere, with repercussions for olfactory environments.

The authors are also calling for more studies to investigate how human activity alters nature’s olfactory footprint — both by pollution, which can modify or destroy odorants in the air, and by reducing habitats that release beneficial scents.

“Human activity is modifying the environment so quickly in some cases that we’re learning about these benefits while we’re simultaneously making them more difficult for people to access,” said Bratman. “As research illuminates more of these links, our hope is that we can make more informed decisions about our impacts on the natural world and the volatile organic compounds that come from it. As we say in the paper, we live within the chemical contexts that nature creates. Understanding this more can contribute to human well-being and advance efforts to protect the natural world.”

Other UW co-authors on the paper are , profess of psychology; , a graduate student in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences; and , a clinical associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences. Additional co-authors are of Stanford University; at the University of Pennsylvania; Thomas Hummel of the Dresden University of Technology; of the University of California, Berkeley; John Miller of Wildwood|Mahonia; Anna Oleszkiewicz of the University of Wrocław; of Oregon Health and Sciences University; of the Monell Chemical Senses Center; and of Harvard University; and Chia-Pin Yu of National Taiwan University.

For more information, contact Bratman at bratman@uw.edu.

�IJ��� researchers interviewed 16 older adults in Washington and Oregon, ages 65 to 80, about how their technology use with their social support networks changed during the pandemic.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic changed how nearly everyone mediated their social interactions through technology. Some moved happy hours into video chats. Others delved deeper into social media, or took a step back from it. Millions of people worked or learned through computers.

�IJ��� researchers took particular interest in how this tech shift affected older adults’ social relationships. A team interviewed 16 older adults in Washington and Oregon, ages 65 to 80, about how their technology use with their social support networks changed during the pandemic. Researchers found that these adults used technology both in their roles as recipients of support — such as a family member checking in on them — as well as providers of support — such as sending money to family members through apps like Zelle or PayPal.

The team published April 26 in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

UW News spoke with lead author , a UW doctoral student in the human centered design and engineering department, about the paper’s findings.

Why did you study this?

Shengzhi Wang: The rapid adoption of technology we’ve seen in recent years has typically left older adults slightly behind. There is what’s called a “gray divide,” where older adults tend to be a bit later in adopting technologies like smartphones, tablets and smartwatches compared to younger demographics. But in recent years, we’ve seen quite a bit more adoption among older adults, and the pandemic spurred that on. Essentially, it forced a lot of people to start using these technologies out of necessity.

This paper looks at how technology affects the way older adults communicate with their social circle: people like family, friends, acquaintances or others that are a bit farther off in their�� networks, maybe their postal worker or people that they come across in the store once in a while. We were looking at what role technology plays in that circle.

What surprised you about the findings?

SW: The participants in our study were mostly able to overcome a lot of the technological and accessibility barriers that we’ve seen in past studies — for example, text that’s too small. Those kinds of issues are definitely still around, but we found that these barriers didn’t significantly affect the participants’ willingness to use or adopt some of these services and technology.

We also found how much older adults were not only receivers of support but providers of it, whether that was emotional or financial or physical support. They were providing it for fellow older adults, as well as family members and friends.

Could you explain why understanding the dual role of supporter and supported is important when considering technology and how it’s designed?

SW: Technologies we typically think of older adults using are for providing them with support. For example, you might have smart cameras for families to keep an eye on older adults or other things that let people check in on whether the older adult in their life is doing well. Those technologies definitely have their role. But we found that older adults tend to also have other needs when it comes to using technologies, especially in how they can provide support to others. Those uses aren’t highlighted as much by technology designers and the people who are communicating about how technologies can be used.

What’s an example of a technology that maybe isn’t being used as much for that, but that already exists?

SW: In the study, we highlight technologies that try to replace in-person support experiences, such as an older adult having a coffee meeting with their friends. If you try to replace that with a Zoom meeting, which happened often, at least in the beginning of the pandemic, the closeness that they felt with their friends was extremely lacking. One participant described it as feeling like watching TV from afar. It was just not a great use of videoconferencing. The common belief was that this technology can replace in-person experiences, and that was definitely not how it worked out.

On the other hand, a lot of older adults really enjoyed telehealth for accessing mental health services. And that’s basically the same technology. But they came in with the right expectations, and the technology provided something that they couldn’t access in person. We also found people liking technology that supports in-person meetings and in-person activities, rather than trying to replace them. We saw a lot of people using text messaging or short video chats to plan in-person activities. In this case, we’re not looking at technology and in-person as two completely separate things. When they work well together, they work really well together.

How could tech better serve older adults in their social connections?

SW: We highlight the need to codesign. Researchers and designers need to bring older adults into the design process of technology and take into account their individual circumstances, their social connections and how those affect technology use when they’re both providing and receiving support.

This two-way communication is also important within families. We saw in some interviews that family members were really pushing older adults to start using some of these technologies, like social media or one way surveillance via smart cameras. From the family members’ points of view, the older adults are missing out on some of the benefits of social media, like seeing photos or posts from families and friends or being provided with more safety. But sometimes older adults prefer in-person experiences, and they don’t always like the privacy component of some technologies, for example. Technology should move away from enabling disempowering relationships or experiences for older adults.

What should the public know about this research?

SW: That older adults provide and receive social support is the most important piece. If you’re thinking of buying technology for an older family member, you should really think about how it can play a part in that person’s life. It might be a hindrance if it doesn’t provide what they need. So it’s really important to start that conversation early and respect their preferences.

Additional co-authors included , a regional design researcher at Daraz, who completed this work as a UW master’s student, and and , both UW professors of human centered design and engineering. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Wang at shengzw@uw.edu.

STRIVE proposes to launch a satellite that takes a sideways view of Earth’s atmosphere, at what is sometimes called “Earth’s limb.” This photo of Earth’s limb was taken Feb. 12, 2020, from the International Space Station. The central dark band is smoke from summer wildfires in Australia. The smoke layer has reached the stratosphere, at 25 to 30 kilometers elevation, lofted to record heights during the wildfires by pyrocumulus clouds. If the STRIVE satellite receives final funding from NASA, its instruments would observe these processes in much greater detail than is possible today.

A project led by the �IJ��� to better understand our atmosphere’s complexity is a finalist for NASA’s next generation of Earth-observing satellites. The space agency this week the projects that will each receive $5 million to advance to the next stage and conduct a one-year concept study.

seeks to better understand the troposphere that we inhabit and the stratosphere above it, where the ozone layer is, as well as the interface where these two layers meet. That interface, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) above the surface, is where important atmospheric chemistry, circulation and climate processes occur.

In addition to STRIVE, two other teams among the finalists also include researchers from the UW.

The four teams that reached the proof-of-concept stage will spend the next year refining their proposals. NASA will then review the concept study reports and select two for implementation. Projects that reach the final stage will have a budget of up to $310 million to build the instruments, which NASA will launch into orbit in 2030 or 2032. The satellites are expected to have an initial working life of two to three years.

, professor of atmospheric sciences at the UW, is principal investigator of STRIVE, or “Stratosphere Troposphere Response using Infrared Vertically-Resolved Light Explorer.” The national-scale team includes partners from academia, industry and federal science labs.

The two instruments aboard the STRIVE spacecraft would observe temperature, ozone, water vapor, methane, reactive gases, smoke and other aerosol particles. They will collect 400,000 sets of observations every day — hundreds to thousands of times more than what’s possible now. Instead of looking straight down at the Earth, the STRIVE instruments point at an angle to Earth’s surface, allowing them to capture the atmospheric layers in greater detail.

The STRIVE project proposes a new, high-tech satellite to observe the lower two layers of the atmosphere, between 3 and 40 miles (5 and 70 kilometers) elevation. Human and natural emissions first enter the troposphere (white) layer enveloping the Earth. The stratosphere (blue) above contains the UV-blocking ozone layer. STRIVE would track both atmospheric layers, as well as the atmospheric chemistry, circulation and climate processes happening at the interface.Lyatt Jaeglé/�IJ���

These observations could help to monitor how the UV-absorbing ozone layer is rebuilding or deteriorating in the atmosphere; how smoke particles from volcanoes, wildfires or human emissions travel through the atmosphere and influence air quality; and how water vapor, ozone, and high-elevation clouds influence the climate system.

The STRIVE system would also support longer-range weather forecasts.

“Before a major weather event at the surface, there can be precursor signs that happen in the stratosphere,” Jaeglé said. “And we see those weeks ahead of time. Observing the stratosphere and how these signals propagate down will be key to getting better weather forecasts on subseasonal to seasonal scales, so two weeks to two months in advance.”

As several NASA satellites of their working lifetimes, the agency is looking for future possibilities to continue their legacy of tracking Earth’s changes.

“For observing the Earth, before we’ve had these multibillion-dollar instruments and platforms that take much longer to design and to put in operation. I think the overall idea is to move to a nimbler, faster set of satellite missions that will be designed more quickly and cost less,” Jaeglé said. “NASA will still pursue the bigger missions, but these smaller missions are another tool that they’re moving forward with.”

at the University of Iowa is the deputy principal investigator of STRIVE, and at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is the project scientist. Several NASA Goddard scientists are also involved. Other UW members of STRIVE are professor , assistant professor and affiliate faculty member , all in the UW Department of Atmospheric Sciences.

Other institutions include the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NorthWest Research Associates, Science Systems and Applications, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Toronto and Morgan State University.

The STRIVE team will spend the next year developing a report with an in-depth engineering, cost and technical analysis.

“It’s extremely exciting. This was a team effort, with many people involved,” Jaeglé said. “Also a bit daunting because the next year will be a very busy one, but very exciting for how to make these concepts become a reality.”

Two other projects among the four finalists also involve UW scientists

The proposal, led by the University of California, San Diego, proposes a new laser instrument to measure the height of vegetation, glaciers and polar ice sheets.

“The current state-of-the-art for satellite laser altimetry, the satellites that measure surface height, is ICESat-2, which has six laser beams. GEDI, on the International Space Station, has eight beams. EDGE will have 40 laser beams, so the level of detail is just much, much higher,” said , a research scientist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory who’s a member of the ICESat-2 science team and is an investigator on the EDGE proposal.

The EDGE satellite would collect data for the world’s forests with the ability to resolve individual trees. Unlike existing satellites it would span all latitudes, from the boreal forests to the equator, surveying dense rainforests to sparser temperate woodlands. EDGE would also observe polar ice sheets and glaciers worldwide, including in the Western U.S., Alaska and the Himalayas, where populations rely on meltwater for hydropower, agriculture and household use.

“It’s very nimble, so it can be off-pointed to collect very dense 3D measurements over priority areas,” said , a UW assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who is also involved with EDGE. “So for example, we could scan the entire Nisqually Glacier on Mount Rainier, and potentially many other Pacific Northwest glaciers, in a single pass.”

STRIVE science team member Alex Turner is also a member of the proposal led by CalTech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Carbon-I would sample carbon dioxide and methane gases, tracking both emissions and sinks in places like the Amazon rainforest. It would have a global resolution of 300 meters, or about the length of three football fields, and could zoom in to a resolution of just 100 feet (30 meters) to investigate particular sources.

“We suspect that for methane in particular there are ‘superemitters,’ or a small number of sources that emit massive amounts of methane,” Turner said. “From a regulatory perspective, if you can find and fix those superemitters in a timely manner, you can cut your emissions by a pretty large amount.”

The awards are part of NASA’s new Earth System Explorers Program. The other finalist proposal is , led by the University of California, San Diego.

“As we continue to confront our changing climate, and its impacts on humans and our environment, the need for data and scientific research could not be greater,” said Nicky Fox, associate director at NASA headquarters. “These proposals will help us better prepare for the challenges we face today, and tomorrow.”

For more information on STRIVE, contact Jaeglé at jaegle@uw.edu.

�IJ��� leadership has been engaging with representatives of the encampment in the Quad for over a week to find common ground that would result in their voluntary decamping. These efforts continue. The University has a long history of engagement with students on issues that they care deeply about. These discussions are not always easy, but they are essential to learning, understanding, and collective action.

Every day the encampment remains, the security concerns escalate and become more serious – for our UW community and for the people in the encampment itself. The University is aware of a counter-protest being organized this Sunday that gives us significant concern because of the likelihood for confrontations. We have repeatedly conveyed our concerns about these risks to encampment organizers and to those who organize counter-protests. We are grateful to all, including leadership in the Jewish community, who are working to deescalate the situation. We also welcome the efforts of Muslim and Palestinian leaders who are working to deescalate.

The University’s response to students’ call for change will not be based on an encampment. It will be through constructive engagement on issues that are important or meaningful to our students and broader campus community. We call on members to dismantle the encampment voluntarily for everyone’s safety and continue constructive engagement for collective action.

This post was updated on May 11.

Attend this Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies panel that brings together Washington state legal professionals to discuss the variety of ways in which they work in and with the law. Representing a range of demographic backgrounds and lived experiences, the panels will talk about the paths that brought them to careers in the law, as well as how they view their work in the current legal, social, and political moment.

May 15, 3:30 – 5:00 pm | Communications Building

May 15, 7:30 pm | Meany Hall

An evening of software performances and human-machine communions, drawing lines between the worlds of immersive sound, performing arts, and experimental extended reality. The familiar, the bearable chaos and illusions of��order unfold across technologically mediated hyper-realities, temporalities, and mnemonic worlds. Performances where interactions and reactions occur across choreographies and spatial arrangements, binding the virtual with the real in unexpected knots and impossible behaviors.

Free |

May 16, 2:30 – 3:30 pm | Kane Hall

UW faculty member Shirley J. Yee (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies department) will be in conversation with UW Women’s soccer coach Nicole Van Dyke, Courtney Gano (UW Softball ’16) and Amy Griffin (UW Women’s Soccer and Executive Director of the Seattle Reign Academy). This event is part of the Jackson School’s new Global Sport Lab.

Free |

May 16 – 19, 2:30 or 7:00 pm | Meany Hall

The UW MFA candidates in dance invite everyone to the premiere of eight diverse dance works, created for 70 undergraduate dancers. Join the Department of Dance for an evening of dance in styles drawn from contemporary modern, ballet, Chinese dance, hip-hop, street, and club dances, to explore themes about humanity, homogeneity, community, and support.

Learn about the program to support the development of educators in any dance form.

Tickets |

May 16, 12:00 – 1:30 pm | Gowen Hall

Becca Peach, a Political Science Ph.D. candidate, will lecture on “Replacing the Welfare State As We Know It: Neoliberal Welfare Policy & Development of the Religious Right’s Institutional Capacity Under Charitable Choice” for the Political Theory Colloquium.

Free |

May 16, 7:30 pm | Kane Hall

Join paleontologist Dr. Jingmai O’Connor for a trip back in time to learn how birds became birds and the adaptations that helped them thrive. Dr. O’Connor will share a new fossil discovery that tells more about the earliest birds and the dinosaurs they evolved from.

Free |

May 16, 5:00 – 7:30 pm | Husky Union Building

Join the UW Center for Human Rights for a very special 15th-anniversary edition of the annual Spring Symposium & Awards Celebration featuring stories from those deported through Boeing Field.

This year’s event features a storytelling project collaboration between UW students, immigrant rights group La Resistencia, and Hinton Publishing, showcasing stories of those held in deportation proceedings in Washington state.

Free |

May 16, 7:30 pm | Brechemin Auditorium

Free |

May 16, 7:30 pm | Meany Hall

Tickets |

May 17, 5:00 – 7:00 pm | ��Communications Building

During that incident, academic student employees occupied the dean’s office area. They continuously yelled chants and slogans, preventing staff from working and forcing many to leave the office. They crowded the hallways, blocking access to an exit and explicitly articulating an intention to trap the dean in her office, and crowded outside the Dean’s office door, where they remained all day. They repeatedly pounded on the dean’s door and shouted demands that she make or secure UW concessions in bargaining. At the end of the day, the crowd followed the Dean and staff to the entrance to a parking area, hollering angry chants and attempting to block their progress.

UAW 4121 represents academic student employees at the UW, who are mostly graduate students. They are negotiating a new contract with the UW and have threatened that they may strike on May 14.

The UW values the work of academic student employees, and our hope is that the ASEs will join us in these good-faith negotiations — at the bargaining table — and avoid any negative impacts on UW students and their studies. We have held 17 bargaining sessions, including the most recent with a PERC mediator present, and have reached agreement on 34 of 37 provisions. The UW remains hopeful that the union shares our interest in good-faith negotiations, however its recent actions indicate otherwise.

The UW has formally requested that the Union cease all unlawful tactics of harassment, intimidation, interference and failure to bargain in good faith. The UW has also requested, among other remedies, that the union be required to make the University whole, including compensating it for the additional costs and attorneys’ fees incurred due to the Union’s unlawful activities.

The full Unfair Labor Practice Complaint can be found .

Bob Wilbur thought he’d found a retirement home that would be a place of peace. Nestled against Admiralty Bay on the western edge of Whidbey Island, the three-story house is surrounded by trees and shoreline. It offers the kind of quiet that only an island can provide. Except when the Growlers fly.��

As often as four days a week, Boeing EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft based at the nearby Naval Air Station Whidbey Island fly loops overhead as pilots practice touch-and-go landings. The noise is immense, around the level of a loud rock concert. “It interrupts your day,” Wilbur said. “You’re unable to have a pleasant evening at home. You can’t communicate. You constantly try to organize your day around being gone when the jets are flying.”��

New research from the �IJ��� shows that the noise isn’t just disruptive — it presents a substantial risk to public health. in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, an analysis of the Navy’s own acoustic monitoring data found that more than 74,000 people are exposed to noise levels with adverse health effects.����

“Military aircraft noise is substantially more intense and disturbing than commercial jet noise,” said lead author , a graduate student in the UW College of the Environment. “Noise exposure has many downstream effects beyond just annoyance and stress — high levels of sleep disturbance, hearing impairment, increased risk of cardiovascular disease — these have real impacts on human health and quality of life. We also found that several schools in the area are exposed to levels that have been shown to put children at risk of delayed learning.”

Guided by conversations with community members and local advocacy groups, researchers analyzed four weeks of acoustic and flight operations data , in addition to prior-year data collected by a private acoustics company and the National Park Service. Researchers then mapped noise exposure across the region to estimate how much noise specific communities were exposed to in an average year.��

This map shows the simulated noise exposure associated with adverse health effects. Contours are shown in 5 decibel increments, beginning at 45 decibels day-night average sound level.

Researchers estimated that two-thirds of Island County residents, including everyone in the cities of Oak Harbor and Coupeville, were exposed to potentially harmful levels of noise, as was 85% of the population of the Swinomish Indian Reservation. ��

In total, an estimated 74,316 people were exposed to average noise levels that posed a risk of annoyance, 41,089 of whom were exposed to nighttime noise levels associated with adverse effects on sleep. Another 8,059 people — most of whom lived within fairly close proximity to aircraft landing strips – were exposed to noise levels that can pose a risk of hearing impairment over time.��

“Our bodies produce a lot of stress hormone response to noise in general, it doesn’t matter what kind of noise it is. But particularly if it’s this repeated acute noise, you might expect that stress hormone response to be exacerbated,” said co-author , a UW professor of environmental and occupational health sciences. “What was really interesting was that we’re reaching noise exposure levels that are actually harmful for hearing. Usually I only think of hearing in the context of working in factories or other really, really loud occupational settings. But here, we’re reaching those levels for the community.”����

Taken as a whole, the potential harms can be quite serious, Seto said. “Imagine people trying to sleep, or children in school trying to understand their teachers and you’ve got these jets flying.”��

Every monitoring station on Whidbey Island measured noise events in excess of 100 decibels when jets were flying. In some instances, noise levels were “off the charts” — exceeding the limits of models used to predict the health effects of noise exposure around the world. ��

“We found it striking that Growler noise exceeds the scientific community’s current understanding of the potential health outcomes,” said co-author , a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. “For this reason, our estimates of health impacts are conservative.”��

The noise has been the subject of community disputes and legal controversy since 2013, when the U.S. Navy moved more Growler jets onto Whidbey Island and increased the number of flights to more than 110,000 per year. Bob Wilbur is a member and the current chair of Citizens of Ebey’s Reserve, a community group that has sued the Navy over the jet noise and increased flight operations. The group also helped facilitate the UW study, and Wilbur is a co-author.����

Like other military aircraft, the Growlers’ noise differs significantly from commercial jets — louder and deeper, the kind of sound that people feel before they hear.����

“It’s the intensity, the intermittent nature of the noise, and the low-frequency energy specifically,” Jacuzzi said. “Those three things are very different than what you experience from normal commercial flights, which are predictable and high in altitude. When Growlers fly over a home, they emit a rumbling noise that penetrates windows and shakes walls.”����

While commercial jet noise has been the subject of extensive study, research into military aircraft noise is relatively rare. Previous UW-led research found that military flights were the largest cause of noise pollution on the Olympic Peninsula. While discussing that study, Whidbey residents complained that the noise disturbed their sleep and interfered with students’ schoolwork, which prompted this new line of inquiry. While conducting this study, researchers worked closely with community members and advocacy groups and held multiple webinars to share results and shape future work.����

“Our research was motivated by the growing chorus of complaints by Washingtonians across multiple counties,” Olden said. “We believe the science speaks for itself. It’s no longer a question of whether noise impacts people, but how, where and how much these effects are experienced.”��

Other authors are Lauren Kuehne of Omfishient Consulting, and Anne Harvey and Christine Hurley of Sound Defense Alliance. This research was funded by the UW Population Health Initiative.

For more information, contact Jacuzzi at gioj@uw.edu.��

�IJ��� researchers created and tested a prototype browser extension called Viblio, which lets viewers and creators add Wikipedia-like citations to YouTube videos.

While Google has long been synonymous with search, people are increasingly seeking information directly through video platforms such as YouTube. Videos can be dense with information: text, audio, and image after image. Yet each of these layers presents a potential source of error or deceit. And when people search for videos directly on a site like YouTube, sussing out which videos are credible sources can be tricky.

To help people vet videos, �IJ��� researchers created and tested Viblio, a browser extension that lets viewers and creators add Wikipedia-like citations to YouTube videos. The prototype offers users an alternate timeline, studded with notes and links to sources that support, refute or expand on the information presented in the video. Those links also appear in a list view, like the “” section at the end of Wikipedia articles. In tests, 12 participants found the tool useful for gauging the credibility of videos on topics ranging from biology to political news to COVID-19 vaccines.

The team will present May 14 in Honolulu at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Viblio is not available to the public.

“We wanted to come up with a method to encourage people watching videos to do what’s called ‘lateral reading,’ which is that you go look at other places on the web to establish whether something is credible or true, as opposed to diving deep into the thing itself,” said senior author , an assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “In previous research, I’d worked with the people at X’s and with Wikipedia and seen that crowdsourcing citations and judgments can be a useful way to call out misinformation on platforms.”

Viblio offers users an alternate timeline, studded with notes and links to sources that either support or refute the information presented in the video.Hughes et al./CHI 2024

To inform Viblio’s design, the team studied how 12 participants — mostly college students under 30 — gauged the credibility of YouTube videos when searching for them on the platform and while watching them. All said familiarity with the video’s source and the name of the channel were important. But many cited signs of a video’s potentially faulty credibility: the quality of the video, the user’s degree of interest in it, its ranking in search results, its length and the number of views or subscribers.

The team also found that in one case a participant misinterpreted a YouTube information panel as an endorsement of the video from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But these panels are actually links to supplemental information that the site attaches to videos on “topics prone to misinformation.”

“The trouble is that a lot of YouTube videos, especially more educational ones, don’t offer a great way for people to prove they’re presenting good information,” said , a doctoral student at University of Notre Dame who completed this research as a UW undergraduate student in the Information School. “I’ve stumbled across a couple of YouTubers who were coming up with their own ways to cite sources within videos. There’s also not a great way to fight bad information. People can report a whole video, but that’s a pretty extreme measure when someone makes one or two mistakes.”

The researchers designed Viblio so users can better understand videos’ content while also avoiding things like users misinterpreting the additional information. To add a citation, users click a button on the extension. They can then add a link, select the timespan their citation references and add optional comments. They can also select the type of citation, which marks it with a colored dot in the timeline: “refutes the video clip’s claim” (red), “supports the video clip’s claim” (green) or “provides further explanation” (blue dot).

To add citations, users click on a button which presents the options shown here.Hughes et al./CHI 2024

To test the system, the team had the study participants use Viblio for two weeks on a range of videos, including clips from Good Morning America, Fox News and ASAPScience. Participants could add citations as well as watch videos with other participants’ citations. For many, the added citations changed their opinion of certain videos’ credibility. But the participants also highlighted potential difficulties with deploying Viblio at a larger scale, such as the conflicts that arise in highly political videos or those on controversial topics that don’t fall into true-false binaries.

“What happens when people with different value systems add conflicting citations?” said co-author , a UW assistant professor in the Information School. “We of course have the issue with bad actors potentially adding misinformation and incorrect citations, but even when the users are acting in good faith, but have conflicting options, whose citation should be prioritized? Or should we be showing both conflicting citations? These are big challenges at scale.”

The researchers highlight a few areas for further study, such as expanding Viblio to other video platforms such as TikTok or Instagram; studying its useability at a greater scale to see whether users are motivated enough to continue adding citations; and exploring ways to create citations for videos that don’t get as much traffic and thus have fewer citations.

“Once we get past this initial question of how to add citations to videos, then the community vetting question remains very challenging,” Zhang said. “It can work. At X, Community Notes is working on ways to prevent people from ‘gaming’ voting by looking at whether someone always takes the same political side. And Wikipedia has standards for what should be considered a good citation. So it’s possible. It just takes resources.”

Additional co-authors on the paper include , who completed this work as an undergraduate at the UW and is now at Microsoft; , who completed this research as a UW doctoral student in the iSchool and is now an assistant professor at Seattle University; and , who completed this work as a UW graduate student in human centered design and engineering and is now a doctoral student at University of California San Diego. This research was funded by the WikiCred Grants Initiative.

For more information, contact Zhang at axz@cs.uw.edu, Hughes at ehughes8@nd.edu, and Mitra at tmitra@uw.edu.