Shifting to clean energy sources can provide enormous benefits for public health in the near term while mitigating climate change in the longer term. Danielle Lawry

Eliminating air-pollution emissions from energy-related activities in the United States would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths each year and provide more than $600 billion in benefits annually from avoided illness and death, according to a new UW study.

The study reports the health benefits of removing dangerous fine particulates released into the air by electricity generation, transportation, industrial activities, and building functions like heating and cooking. These are also major sources of carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change, since they predominantly rely on burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas.

“Our work provides a sense of the scale of the air-quality health benefits that could accompany deep decarbonization of the U.S. energy system,” says Nick Mailloux PhDx’24, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “Shifting to clean energy sources can provide enormous benefit for public health in the near term while mitigating climate change in the longer term.”

UW professor Jonathan Patz, senior author of the study, thinks it could motivate more action on climate change.

“My hope is that our research findings might spur decision makers grappling with the necessary move away from fossil fuels to shift their thinking from burdens to benefits,” he says.

“Our brains want our expectations to be supported,” says Cox. Eric Roman Beining Photography

A new UW study shows why letting stereotypes inform our judgments of unfamiliar people can be such a hard habit to break. It found that stereotypes self-perpetuate in our minds, growing stronger with use.

“Think back to when you were in grade school learning your multiplication tables, and you would repeat them in your mind,” says William Cox MS’08, PhD’15, a UW scientist who studies prejudice. “Going through the world making assumptions about other people with stereotypes we’ve learned is another form of mental practice. With more rehearsal, those assumptions get stronger over time, even when we have no real evidence to back them up.”

Cox, Xizhou Xie ’16, and UW–Madison psychology professor Patricia Devine put more than 1,000 people to work on a stereotyping task that involved reading social media profiles (some of them seeded with stereotypical information) and deciding whether the men in the profiles were gay or straight. Some received feedback about whether they were correct or incorrect, and others received no feedback. Then they read more profiles so researchers could see how the previous feedback affected their answers.

When the feedback mostly confirmed stereotypes, people stereotyped even more over time. Meanwhile, people who received feedback countering stereotypes didn’t seem to learn from it, continuing to stereotype at the same rate. Even more distressing, the people who received no feedback showed learning patterns like the people whose stereotypes were confirmed.

For Cox, the results support the theories behind the neuroscience of learning.

When an uncertain prediction is confirmed — like successfully guessing which number will come up on a roll of dice — that confirmation activates reward processes in our brains. The result is a pleasant little chemical release that reinforces the value of the prediction. In Cox’s new studies, this neural-reward process made stereotyping more appealing than accuracy. Participants continued relying on stereotypes even when the feedback said that they were inaccurate.

“Our brains want our expectations to be supported,” says Cox. “Because of that reward engagement, we can start becoming addicted, in a way, to stereotyping. Simply understanding that this happens is an important way to check those assumptions and not let them influence your judgment.”

Atir: “If we fail to use our capacity for learning from others to its full extent, we’re shortchanging ourselves of the full human experience.” Paul L. Newby II

Between working from home, having groceries delivered, and banking online, it’s increasingly possible to conduct life without engaging face-to-face with another human being. The average person can mostly avoid conversation with strangers.

But it turns out that not talking to strangers can lead to poorer decision-making, less creativity, and diminished well-being, according to a study coauthored by Stav Atir, assistant professor of management at the Wisconsin School of Business. The study also suggests that we underestimate the potential for learning from those we casually interact with.

“Failing to accurately anticipate how much someone could teach you is consequential,” says Atir.

The study randomly paired strangers for a 10-minute conversation and compared how much they expected to learn before the conversation with how much they reported learning after the conversation. Participants consistently learned more than they expected, including understanding another’s perspective and acquiring advice or instruction on various topics.

Talking with others communicates norms, creates shared understanding, and conveys morality, among other benefits. “If we fail to use our capacity for learning from others to its full extent,” says Atir, “we’re short-changing ourselves of the full human experience.”

Schweber: “I don’t know a moment that parallels this one for the extremity of the changes in such a short time.”

Over the course of a week last June, the United States Supreme Court made headline-grabbing rulings on abortion, gun rights, climate change, immigration, school prayer, and separation of church and state. The conservative majority flexed its muscle with decisions like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. According to constitutional scholar Howard Schweber, a UW political science professor, that seven-day period was unprecedented in Supreme Court history. “I don’t know a moment that parallels this one,” Schweber says, “for the extremity of the changes in such a short time.”

What’s the historical significance of the Supreme Court’s June decisions?

For a century or more, there was an understanding that the Constitution is an instrument to protect rights that became recognized over history. An enormous range of the rights fall into that category: the idea that the Constitution protects parents’ rights to have a say in how their children are educated; the idea that people have a right to dictate health care decisions for their children. And if this court were to be consistent with Dobbs and its other decisions, a huge range of rights that we’ve taken for granted for generations would be stripped down. I think people have barely begun to realize just how revolutionary the implications of these rulings are.

How do the justices in the current majority differ from their predecessors?

In the past, even justices who had strong ideological convictions would usually back off and say, “Well, we’re not going to do something too upsetting or too radical.” With very few exceptions, justices have tended to be cautious. The current majority is not cautious at all.

Is it conceivable that the Supreme Court would see fundamental changes?

The number of justices — nine — is not magical. There have been as few as six and as many as 10. There’s also nothing in the Constitution that would prohibit [Congress from setting] term limits.

How do you think the court’s recent decisions will affect public trust?

The number of people expressing a great deal of trust in the Supreme Court is down to 25 percent — wildly lower than any court since polling began. And the reason is that, love it or hate it, there was always a sense in the past that the justices were grownups doing something sane and defensible, even if you didn’t like it. If the current court acts in a way that continues to drive their poll numbers down, at a certain point there will be bipartisan distrust. And then the political conditions would be in place for some kind of serious change.

Most nights find Wright, an associate clinical professor at UW Law School, working on his second thriller, a follow-up to his smash debut, The Coyotes of Carthage, a screwball dive into the bleak world of dark-money politics. No less an authority than bestselling legal-thriller writer John Grisham calls Wright “a major new voice.”

Down in his basement, sitting at a wood desk strewn with papers and empty bottles of unsweetened tea, Wright faces the wall with two screens in front of him (one for research, one for writing). Music pounds. Sam Cooke, Aretha, Master KG, Outkast, the Chicks. More often than not, the same song roars over and over and over and over again.

“For me, writing is a loud experience,” says Wright, who also lectures in the UW Program in Creative Writing, where he earned his MFA. “Part of the way I know I’m doing okay is that you sort of zoom out on the music. You’re not really listening to the lyrics. You lose track of time. You’re mesmerized with whatever’s on the screen.”

Author Lorrie Moore, Wright’s former UW writing instructor, is a bit in awe of him. “He works hard and stays up late,” she says. “He laughs and makes you laugh. He is blessed/cursed with a quick, high-energy brain.”

Wright is a towering presence, both intellectually and physically, thanks to his six-foot-two height. Besides his UW degree, he has a bachelor’s in economics and history and a master’s in environmental economics from Duke as well as a law degree from Washington University. He even found time to get a master’s from Johns Hopkins’s writing program while doing a five-year stint as a trial attorney in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. When Wright applied to the UW’s program, he wrote, “I have the perfect job. For someone, but not me.”

His sly wit snakes through every page of The Coyotes of Carthage. When asked to describe himself, he conjures up a cinematic vision, pointing out his freckles, hair that’s a little wild, and his “exceptionally big head,” which requires him to wear “special big-headed glasses.”

Besides teaching in two programs, Wright is the former codirector of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which seeks to exonerate wrongly convicted people. Thanks in part to his efforts, four men were freed.

Wright continues to meet clients in Wisconsin’s maximum-security prisons with law students in his clinic. “I sometimes describe it as being like Scooby-Doo,” he says. “A bunch of students and I get in a van, and we go and try to solve murders around the state.”

Experiences like these inform Wright’s fiction. His Department of Justice work, for example, had him trekking to rural areas to try voting rights cases. While passing time in places like Bolivar County, Mississippi, he befriended local politicians — “masters of their communities,” as he calls them. And the down-and-dirty secrets he learned about small-town elections reveal themselves throughout The Coyotes of Carthage.

Swamp Creature

The novel tells the tale of Dre Ross, a sleazy, 30-something, African American political consultant in Washington, DC. A former small-time drug dealer raised by a bipolar schizophrenic mother, he slept in alleys and did hard time in juvenile prison for a savage assault he didn’t commit.

This down-and-out swamp creature has been given his last chance: Go to backwater Carthage, South Carolina. Dupe its flag-waving voters into approving a ballot initiative that will sell public land to a mining company. Never mind that its toxic runoff will kill tourism, poison the water supply, and basically destroy the place. The dirty trickster whips up websites for phony front groups such as the Council of Christian Commerce and the Society for American Freedom. He runs dishonest ads and polls. He launches nasty online attacks.

Dre, writes Wright, “wonders at what point he lost control.” Whether he means of the campaign, his sanity, his decency, or all three goes unsaid. Lest a reader think Dre only has it in for white people, he is an equal-opportunity abuser who “admits that for his people he might have done more harm than good.”

Sour wisdom from the dark-money world — and Wright’s rural journeys — peppers Dre’s thoughts. “Elections are about getting voters to hate others.” “God bless social media. Good for pictures; terrible for truth.”

“Steve has a real heart to his work,” says novelist Judith Claire Mitchell, who formerly taught in the UW creative writing program. “There’s an emotional openness that balances the cynicism. His main character in Coyotes is very openly wounded. His heart is broken, and that’s not hidden.”

Critics loved the book for the way it combines the alienation of Catch-22’s Joseph Heller with Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo ethos and the wacky imagery of a Coen brothers movie. “Riveting,” with a “tick-tock pace and knockout prose,” cheered the Washington Post. “Darkly funny and bleakly honest,” gushed Salon. “Crackerjack debut,” raved USA Today, which put Wright on its list of “100 Black Novelists You Should Read.”

“Writing,” says Wright, “is the art of keeping people paying attention.”

Like most first-time novelists, he took a long time to finish The Coyotes of Carthage — four and a half years. He came home from work and would “eat something, walk the dogs, and write — and that was my life.” When he gave the supposedly final manuscript to friends to read, they hated it. Too intellectual, too grim, they said.

During those years Wright had started visiting prisons. “The darkness of that world — the horrific crimes, the awfulness of the wrong person going to jail, and the possibility that the real person who did it was out there and causing more harm — entered the novel, and it became very different from what I wanted it to be,” he says. “I don’t know if I was using it as therapy.”

When told he should cut it from 140,000 to 70,000 words, Wright says, “I was pretty sad, but you stand up. You brush yourself off, and then you go at it, and in the end, I’m still quite proud of it. But it’s obviously a very different book than I thought I had finished four years ago.”

First novels are notoriously autobiographical, but Wright’s upbringing bears no resemblance to Dre’s. When asked what traits he has in common with his ruthless, haunted antihero, Wright jokes, “I think in the book I describe him as exceptionally good-looking.” He quickly confesses that he shares Dre’s “cynicism and acerbic responses. I can be a bit of a smart aleck.”

A Family of Eccentrics

The son of a computer scientist mother and a father who was an army doctor, Wright grew up obsessed with storytelling. He loved the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, which allowed preteen readers to control plots by deciding which way stories would turn.

He wrote his own Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and fan fiction and remains an avid devotee of Star Trek and Star Wars. His dog, Ahsoka, a black Lab/Great Pyrenees mix, is named after a Star Wars character mentored by the virtuous young Anakin Skywalker (before he became Darth Vader).

“He tries to show her all the ways in the world to be good, with the irony being he ends up the worst person in the world,” Wright says, adding, “Now that’s not at all my relationship with my dog.”

His two sisters and parents were also Trekkies. “I’ll be honest,” he says, “I come from a family of eccentrics.”

He had a globetrotting childhood, growing up in Nashville, Spokane, Oakland, and on military bases in West Germany and Alaska. “There’s nothing like being an American overseas, especially during the Cold War, to make you love and admire your country.”

Having been in spit-polish schools on military bases, Wright got the shock of his young life in Augusta, Georgia, where he endured his junior and senior high school years. With uncharacteristic understatement, he says, “That experience was formative.” Westside High School introduced him to a community where education was inseparable from race, Christianity, and traditional notions of patriotism.

Once, when he stayed silent for a football game prayer and merely bowed his head, teammates razzed him. A teacher yelled at a student for failing to show respect for the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance. Students isolated themselves by race at lunch, and admission to Advanced Placement classes seemed to Wright to have a cap on Black students.

“Race is one of those things we continue to try to figure out,” he says. “Obviously, over the arc of our country, we’ve made tremendous progress, but especially as a Black civil rights lawyer who represents Black men in the criminal justice system, [I see] we clearly have a long way to go.

“A lot of the conversations we have about even discussing race in our schools deal with people’s discomfort with having conversations about our past and how that implicates our present. My hope is that we can get better at having those conversations. Hopefully, that will lead to better policy in health care, criminal justice, poverty — things I’ve dedicated my life to dealing with.”

Part of the key to Wright’s success is his easygoing nature, which allows him to feel at home in varied settings.

“He has no problem being plunked down in a room with conservatives or liberals, or with people who aren’t interested in politics or who are very interested in politics,” says his former Department of Justice colleague Robert Popper, who is now senior counsel at the right-leaning group Judicial Watch. “He likes to laugh with and, frankly, at them all.”

Back in his days as a rural trial lawyer, Wright became friends with a lot of politicians he would not necessarily vote for. “But I thought they were very good people, and it wasn’t the end of the world,” he says.

This ability to see all sides of people and situations clearly has benefits for Wright’s work as both a novelist and a law school professor.

No Easy Answers

Wright takes his law students behind bars in the Wisconsin towns of Waupun, Stanley, and Green Bay.

He struggles to describe the smell of a maximum-security prison. A “giant antiseptic bleach” scent provides the top note. Underneath lurk odors of men who haven’t showered because of guard shortages. “I think it’s the smell of misery,” Wright says.

Before the students go in, he gives them a talking to.

“This is something you’re going to remember the rest of your life,” he tells them, keeping tabs on their moods. “I’m always mindful of their energy and the tone, because there’s just objectively sadness in a prison, and for some students, it’s scary.

“Prisons are by design intimidating. You walk through one hall. A door closes behind you, the barred door opens in front of you, and you walk down another hall. Just the sound of it. The clicking of bars behind you and the clicking of doors ahead of you. The whole aesthetic. You’re occasionally given a tour, and we’ve been to solitary wings. There are guys in there just screaming for their lives.”

Nevertheless, Wright encourages his students to retain a sense of humor.

“You can still have moments of levity and moments of laughter,” he says. “I want them to learn, but I want them to have fun. I don’t see how you can have fun without laughing every once in a while.”

Most of his students have very strong feelings about the criminal justice system. Some hate police and believe no one should go to jail. Some think police can do no wrong, and there are no innocent people in jail. “They tend to be a little simplistic at both extremes,” says Wright.

“Part of what I hope to do is to create some complexity, to explain to students that oftentimes there aren’t a lot of easy answers, that there are different stakeholders, and that all people — including the police, suspects, and victims — are not all just one thing.”

Spoken like a true novelist. •

This idea inspired Fawaz to write The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, his award-winning 2016 book on how comic-book superheroes of the 1960s and ’70s illustrated new forms of social belonging while wrestling with political questions raised by the civil rights movement, gay liberation, and second-wave feminism. He says mutant superheroes living on society’s margins — and more conventional characters exploring these margins, like those in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City — have helped readers see themselves in people who don’t share their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or cultural background.

“Series like The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men provided readers an exceptionally diverse range of new characters and creative worlds, but most importantly, modeled what it might look like for those characters to bridge divides of race, species, kin, and kind for their mutual flourishing and the good of the world,” he argues in “The Difference a Mutant Makes,” an essay on the Los Angeles Review of Books culture blog.

A quest to promote intergalactic peace and justice fuels the divide-bridging process for many superheroes. It drives them to interact, negotiate differences, and take action together. It’s also one of the things that drew Fawaz to them, first as a reader and later as a scholar.

Origin Stories

Fawaz’s meet-cute with superhero comics involves a teleporting elf, a fighter who extracts her bones to use as weapons, and an acrobat sporting a prehensile tail. They appear on the splashy pink cover of X-Men’s 80th issue, which beckons readers with the promise of “a team reunited … a dream reborn!”

The year was 1998, and the place was Orange County, California. Fawaz was primed for transformation when he spotted that unforgettable scene on a shop shelf.

“Here I am, this gay, Middle Eastern middle-schooler living in a predominantly white area and experiencing a ridiculous amount of bullying,” Fawaz says, recalling his instant kinship with the motley crew of mutants. Though disempowerment shaped his everyday life, he identified intensely with one of the series’ most powerful characters: Storm.

“We didn’t have many obvious similarities — I’m not a woman, I’m not Kenyan, and I can’t control the weather, unfortunately — but I saw tiny pieces of myself in her,” he recalls.

Fawaz and Storm both learned how differences can make a group stronger. As his attachment to X-Men grew, Fawaz noticed how the entire series wrestled with thorny questions about diversity and nonconformity. It also inspired readers to grapple with these questions in their own lives. When Fawaz forged his path into academia, he zeroed in on these transformative processes.

“That ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else — someone in entirely different circumstances — is a fundamental part of being human,” he says. “We each have our own way of exercising this ability, and I think that’s beautiful.”

Students often ask Fawaz to explain the meaning of a story they’re reading. He uses this moment to discuss the power of interpretation: how readers’ experiences of a story influence its meaning in innumerable ways. What we bring to the story also matters, including our values and culture, our memories and personality traits, even what’s happening around us when we’re reading.

The imaginative space where interpretation takes place is Fawaz’s favorite intellectual playground. In his academic life, he examines how people find meaning through the lenses of feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and literary criticism, among others.

Fawaz wants to know how popular culture can help us find alternative ways of expressing who we are, including gender and sexuality. Stories, in other words, are a tool for self-liberation as well as societal transformation.

Our Possible Futures

Fawaz began exploring such ideas during his undergraduate career at the University of California– Berkeley and at George Washington University, where he earned his doctoral degree in American Studies in 2012. He settled at UW–Madison a year later and has been collecting accolades ever since, including the Vilas Faculty Early Career Investigator Award in 2019, the Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence Award in 2020, and the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship and named professorship in 2022.

Fawaz has received numerous honors beyond UW–Madison, too. The New Mutants won an award for best first-book manuscript from the Center for LGBTQ Studies, as well as praise from academics, comics creators, and literary titans. One of those titans is Junot Díaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Díaz appreciates how Fawaz uses comics — a marginalized medium — to discuss marginalized identities.

“For a long time, comics were viewed as disposable and meritless, and it is precisely in these types of cultural creations that one finds a culture’s political unconscious writ large,” he says. “Comics are the funhouse four-color mirror that reveals our society’s true face. To peer into such mirrors and not get lost requires a scholar of uncommon insight, rigor, wit, and generosity.”

Díaz says The New Mutants reveals something essential about Americans’ relationship with difference.

“Fawaz understands that our fantasies of the Other — racial, sexual, physical, gendered — are the secret fuel that powers so much popular culture. To trace these shifting, contested visions in, say, comics is to make visible our strange past and our possible futures.”

The Element of Surprise

Excelling at this kind of close reading is a bit like having x-ray vision: Fawaz sees fascinating things that have remained hidden to other readers. He uses this gift in a novel way in Queer Forms, which hit bookstores in September.

The book shows how America’s understanding of gender and sexuality has expanded to include many types of nonconformity. Fawaz supports his argument with examples from pop culture, including Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a set of stories exploring friendship and LGBTQ life in 1970s San Francisco.

Though Maupin’s stories evolved into nine novels and a ’90s miniseries that stoked a firestorm at PBS, they began as a humble 1976 serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Millions of readers grew curious about LGBTQ culture as they invested in the characters and their soap-opera adventures. Fawaz interviewed nearly 30 of these early fans, discovering how Tales shaped their relationships, actions, and identities.

He found that they were constantly in dialogue with others about what they were reading. Maupin’s narrative surprises were irresistible to nearly everyone, regardless of their station in life, and the conversations opened hearts and minds.

As Fawaz explained in a campus talk last spring, reading and other aesthetic experiences can offer a host of surprises that “catapult us into new and enlarged states of perception.” These effects can radiate through social circles, pushing people to ponder their assumptions about others.

Fawaz points to one interviewee’s account of helping her family make sense of the unfamiliar concepts in Tales of the City.

“This person and her parents had daily phone calls about these stories for two years,” he says. “She described a slow and steady transformation of her parents’ thinking, especially how her dad started out homophobic but changed along the way.”

Coming Out of the Closet

Fawaz says readers who knew little about LGBTQ culture often gravitated toward Tales’ Mary Ann, whose journey from wide-eyed Midwestern transplant to worldly woman about town is a driving force in the story. Through her, many readers learned what “coming out of the closet” meant — and what it could mean to them, no matter what their sexual orientation happened to be.

Coming out in the 1970s was “a revolutionary act performed repeatedly to reproduce and normalize queerness,” according to Fawaz, yet Tales of the City also presents it as a practice straight people could use to “forge bonds across difference.” Characters come out as all sorts of things as the story unfolds: proud gay man, transgender matriarch, and LGBTQ ally, to name a few.

The series even begins with Mary Ann declaring her devotion to something she “shouldn’t” love: San Francisco, the place her parents associate with hippies and murderers. When she announces her decision to stay there instead of returning to Cleveland, she comes out as a free-spirited adult eager to make her own decisions. She embraces how she’s different from the person her parents expect her to be.

At 28 Barbary Lane, where the landlady tapes a psychoactive welcome gift to each new tenant’s door, Mary Ann’s friends challenge her to shed her inhibitions, unleash her imagination, and find the humor in life’s inherent messiness. They also help her see herself in new ways.

Her entry into this chosen family mirrors Fawaz’s first encounter with the X-Men, which he lovingly describes in The New Mutants: “I sat by the family pool, [then] carefully opened the dazzling holographic cover; what I discovered there has kept me dreaming and made life far, far less lonely ever since.” •

“When individuals encounter my sculptures, I’d like them to feel a sense of wonder and inspiration,” Velliquette says. Michael Velliquette

Even if you’ve turned a sheet of paper into an airplane, a snowflake, or an origami swan, you haven’t come close to what Michael Velliquette MA’99, MFA’00 can do with studio art’s most fundamental tool. Velliquette is an assistant professor in the UW School of Education’s art department and a sculptor whose material is sold by the ream.

Yes: Velliquette’s medium is the canvas on which other artists scrawl their epics and smear their paints. But a look at one of Velliquette’s intricate sculptures proves that bare paper can put even the most lifelike paintings or evocative etchings to shame. His technique and tools are simple — scissors, knives, paper, glue, cutting, layering. But they create pieces that reflect the high level of skill and hundreds of hours (around 500 per artwork) that go into each one.

“When individuals encounter my sculptures, I’d like them to feel a sense of wonder and inspiration,” Velliquette told Shoutout HTX in May. “I want to convey the same sense of joy that I experience making them.”

His sculptures are not so much reflections of our world as newly imagined worlds in and of themselves. They are monochromatic, but Velliquette’s color choices are bold and tasteful, purposefully calling attention to the details that seem to emerge infinitely the longer one spends with a piece.

“I like there to be something everywhere that the eye rests [on] that sort of engages you or pushes you to the next thing,” he told Madison Magazine’s Maija Inveiss ’17, MBAx’24 in May.

Velliquette’s work has been featured in collections and galleries around the world. Images of his sculptures can be found on his website.

Boutilier hopes research like his will nudge automated external defibrillators closer to mainstream implementation. Everdrone

As a kid, Justin Boutilier would get roped into helping his dad, a paramedic and firefighter, perform automated external defibrillator (AED) demonstrations. Two decades later, Boutilier, now a UW assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering, is reimagining how AEDs can save more lives.

Boutilier has detailed the framework for designing a network of AED-outfitted, autonomous flying drones, which could allow the life-saving devices to more quickly reach people suffering cardiac arrest. In out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, survival rates drop by as much as 10 percent for each minute that passes without treatment.

“Ambulances are not fast enough for this, especially in nonurban areas, so drones are just such a good fit,” says Boutilier, whose research harnesses optimization and machine-learning techniques to improve health care quality, access, and delivery. “They’re super fast with straight-line flight. And then AEDs are a relatively light payload, so it suits the drone. The best applications for drones in health care are things that are light and where time is of the essence.”

In January, an off-duty doctor used an AED delivered by an autonomous drone to save a 71-year-old man’s life in Sweden — the first such documented successful rescue. Boutilier hopes that research like his will help nudge the technology closer toward mainstream implementation.

A provocative juxtaposition: the Lincoln statue (below) portrays a white man who embodies the United States’ complex racial history, while Abdu’Allah’s sculpture portrays himself in the modest setting of a barbershop. Kent Michael Smith / Courtesy of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

In his sculpture Blu³eprint, UW art professor Faisal Abdu’Allah portrays himself seated in a barber chair. If you’re walking down State Street, you’ll encounter the limestone monument outside the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, which commissioned it for an exhibition of Abdu’Allah’s work.

And if you’ve just come from Bascom Hill, you’ll notice a resemblance to UW–Madison’s iconic Abraham Lincoln statue.

Jeff Miller

Both figures have a commanding presence. Both gaze stoically, arms at rest. But one portrays a white man who embodies the United States’ complex racial history, sitting on what might as well be a throne; the other a Black man in the more modest setting of a barbershop. It’s a provocative juxtaposition, particularly at a time when many public monuments are coming under fire and occasionally even coming off their pedestals.

The country is divided over which statues should stay and which should go, but Abdu’Allah proposes an artistic solution. Rather than removing artworks, he believes in inviting sculptors of color to create what he calls “counter-monuments.” Blu³eprint, for example, engages in dialogue with the Lincoln statue, presenting an alternate approach to commemoration.

Abdu’Allah is a professor of printmaking and associate dean for the arts in the School of Education. Last year, he was named Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art. He’s come a long way since his days in London barbershops.

That’s right — Abdu’Allah’s choice of a barber chair is not random. He hung out in salons during his youth, marveling over patterns the hairdressers made with their scissors. He became a barber himself, attended the Royal College of Art, and began incorporating barbershop imagery into his work.

To him, the barbershop is a place of renewal, with particular resonance in the Black experience. Hair — on the spectrum of kinky to straight — also has political and cultural connotations. And then there’s the fact that hair carries traces of our DNA, the very essence of who we are. Visitors can see how Abdu’Allah treats such rich themes when the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art opens the exhibition Dark Matter in September.

Blu³eprint has been up since spring, demanding attention on State Street. Abdu’Allah made the sculpture in collaboration with artist Martin Foot and Madison’s Quarra Stone Company, and he chose limestone as the medium because of its imperfections.

Those are suggestive of human imperfections, of course. Blu³eprint acknowledges that none of us are perfect, even if we do happen to be up on a pedestal.

“When you’re muted, people don’t expect these apps to collect data,” says Fawaz (left), with Yang.

Kassem Fawaz’s brother was on a videoconference with the microphone muted when he noticed that the microphone light was still on — indicating, inexplicably, that his microphone was being accessed.

Alarmed, the brother asked Fawaz, an expert in online privacy and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW–Madison, to look into the issue.

Fawaz and graduate student Yucheng Yang PhDx’23 investigated whether this “mic-off-light-on” phenomenon was more widespread. They tried out many videoconferencing applications on major operating systems, including iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac, checking to see if the apps still accessed the microphone when it was muted.

“It turns out, in the vast majority of cases, when you mute yourself, these apps do not give up access to the microphone,” says Fawaz. “And that’s a problem. When you’re muted, people don’t expect these apps to collect data.”

Fawaz and Yang, along with colleagues from Loyola University Chicago, used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in popular videoconferencing applications as the audio traveled from the app to the computer audio driver and then to the network while the app was muted. They found that all the apps they tested occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated, with one popular app gathering information and delivering data to its server at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not. The findings raise privacy concerns.

“With a camera, you can turn it off or even put your hand over it, and no matter what you do, no one can see you,” says Fawaz. “I don’t think that exists for microphones.”

Turning off a microphone is possible in most device operating systems, but it usually means navigating through several menus. Instead, the team suggests the solution might lie in developing easily accessible software “switches” or even hardware switches that allow users to manually enable and disable their microphones.