If you’ve ever helped a parent or family member use the internet to research health symptoms or decipher a prescription, you’ve participated in what Carmen Gonzalez and her research team call a brokering interaction—helping someone bridge a language or skills gap in order to access information and resources. Gonzalez, an assistant professor in the Department of [...]

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Most enter graduate school with a clear vision of their intended path of research. William Streitberger decided to follow his nose. “I loved the look, the feel, the smell—everything,” Streitberger, a professor of English at the University of Washington, says of time spent among sixteenth and seventeenth century tomes as a graduate student at the University of [...]

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The slump of a shoulder; the twitch of a lip; a certain gaze. Some actions say it all without the need for words. But when so much daily human connection and communication occurs on this substratum of silence, what can we learn from what’s left unsaid? It’s a question for Valerie Manusov, a professor in [...]

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Hey hey, my my / Rock and roll can never die / My my, hey hey / Rock and roll is here to stay Any seasoned musician will tell you that it’s one thing to say the lyrics, but another thing to make them ring true. If Neil Young’s famous lines are to be recognized as rock [...]

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For the second day in a row, Julie Kientz blacked out at the sight of blood. When she came to, lifted from the floor of the veterinarian’s office where she was participating in a job-shadowing program, the eleventh grader from Ohio decided it might be time for a change of career plans. “I love computers,” [...]

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Amy Ko’s interest in coding and computer programming started early—six o’clock in the morning early. Growing up in the Portland suburb of West Linn, Oregon, Ko would set her alarm in order to make a 7 a.m. computer science class offered at her high school during “zero period.” While most of her crack-of-dawn classmates used [...]

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On May 17, 1999, nine members of the Makah tribal nation paddled a canoe into the waters off Cape Alava on the Olympic Peninsula in pursuit of a 30-foot gray whale. From the first harpoon strike to a finishing shot delivered by a specialized rifle, the hunt lasted no more than ten minutes, but kicked [...]

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As humans, we leave little room for tragedy in our lives. When tragic events do occur—invading the idyll of the everyday and shattering our confidence in common bonds—we all too often attempt to cope by burying associated memories deep beyond reach: suffering stifled, pain pent up, and the confusion sown by death, disease, and mental [...]

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Luke Tornabene hovers above the abyss, suspended somewhere between fathomless darkness and daylight 800 feet above. A thin layer of condensation has formed on the interior of the five-person submersible—the product of warm air within the cockpit reacting to increasingly cold water without as the research vessel slips ever deeper into the dusk-colored Caribbean waters [...]

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We can learn a lot from the world’s worst villains—that is, if we only spare some sympathy to take a moment to see things their way. If that strikes you as an inflammatory suggestion, it’s supposed to be. For Ellwood Wiggins, assistant professor of Germanics at the University of Washington, it’s an essential exercise in [...]

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Most computer scientists seek to empower machines. Pedro Domingos would rather empower people. “You may not be interested in technology, but technology is interested in you,” he says, using a witting corruption of Leon Trotsky’s famous quip about politics to underscore why he believes it’s increasingly important for people to take an active interest in how artificially intelligent technology is coming to influence everyday life. A professor [...]

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The moment Bruce McCormick was first moved to dance, the dancers hardly moved at all. “I remember just looking up and all the dancers all looked so tall and were smiling and I was completely in awe,” McCormick says, recalling the feeling of standing at the foot of the stage as a 7-year-old during a dress rehearsal [...]

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