Naturally our visual perception is filtered by the properties of our eyes and the location of our bodies--secured firmly to the ground, perceiving only visible light, and seeing about a 95° field of view. While we are accustomed to dramatic perceptual extensions, our access to this imagery tends to be either guided by very specific needs or obstructed by inaccessibility. Consider x-rays and satellite images as examples. We have a very specific interest in x-rays of broken bones, but bear little motivation to x-ray other subjects (perhaps a cabbage or piano). Conversely, we may possess a moderate interest in elevating our perspective above ground level, but the logistical complications of doing so are likely to limit our success. The perspectives project is designed to address four such disruptions in our visual perception: space, time, filters, and scale. For each variable, the project explores relevant background research, then uses these as a springboard to inform an array of photographically-based visual explorations that disrupt our natural ways of seeing. Subjects in process so far include transitioning materials (specifically steel and wax as they heat, change shape, or melt), extreme up close photography (not yet truly microscopic, yet much closer than what we are used to), and elevated photography (using masts and balloons to examine how viewpoints shift between 20-80 feet above ground). Rather than trying to fill specific perceptual and knowledge voids, the overall goal of the project is designed to challenge our common silent assumption that "If I don't see something, it's not there." My hope is that by introducing dramatically unfamiliar ways of seeing, we might collectively be jolted into engaging our environments with a fresh sense of wonder and curiosity.

The autonomous student-run publication called Ruckus returns to inspire and invigorate the UW campus. First printed from 1997-2005, Ruckus provided an important alternative voice for campus news and events. Campus has since changed, and the Ruckus writing and print collective has been renewed to meet these changes. The new Ruckus provides an in-print nexus for many voices by working to understand and create an influential model of collaborative campus communication. Ruckus encourages and empowers participants to share information, thus establishing itself as a community media learning-space. This project compiles conceptual foundations, useful skills, and necessary resources that make successful student-run publications. Through principles of creative, cooperative, non-hierarchical collective building, Ruckus practices the strong and resilient voice we envision in our media. Ruckus practices a transformative publisher, writer, contributor, and readership relationship, wherein all parties contribute to the large conversation with which we engage. Ruckus's collective organizes the voice and vision of the publication, designing, printing, and distributing each publication as well. The contributors and readership provide news, stories, and feedback which effect the overall purpose and format of the printed issues. Ruckus experiments actively to engage participant goals and implement lessons gleaned from self-memory and archived history. Weaving together news, story, image, and theory, Ruckus uses print as a critical medium to connect the campus's evolving body with larger meaning. Ruckus engages the social, cultural, political, ecological, and psychological dimensions for an integrative and radical platform of health. What matters is that people are talking in new ways - bringing new ideas to each other and doing new things.

The first-person shooter genre represents some of the most popular contemporary video games, often drawing criticism for their violent content. And while violent content exists, it is not the only feature that has large social implications. Games such as Half-Life, Far Cry, Prey, and Mirror's Edge allow players to immerse themselves in complex game worlds where they are given agency to undertake large scale social action. First-person shooters stand apart from many other types of media in that they require active immersion into another character, or subjectivity, whereas most others demand a more passive level of engagement. This project analyzes the work performed by first-person shooters, not from a standpoint of content but of gameplay mechanics and immersion. The way that first-person shooters represent action, agency and presence facilitates a uniquely persuasive sense of virtual embodiment. This virtual embodiment, and the ways that players understand and position their own identity, are situated in a larger history of identity formation and appropriation in America. American identity has been historically bound up in the construction and appropriation of new ethnic identities, such as Philip Deloria's notion of “playing Indian” to facilitate early Americans' relationship to a new continent, and Toni Morrison's “Africanist presence,” or, "surrogate bodies", which were used to play out ideas of deviance in early American literature. These ethnic identities served as vehicles through which new potentials were created for a burgeoning American national identity. The subjectivities that one inhabits in first-person shooters, too, provide players with a similar space for negotiation of new identities and the new vocabularies of action that accompany them. Taken in this historical context, first-person shooters take on a new relevance to our understanding of the continuing negotiation of what it means to be American.

The language the Israeli Defense Force uses to describe the theory behind their current operational practice constructs a captivatingly intellectual and imperative impression of contemporary urban warfare. Military theorists have lately looked to elite architectural academies for guidance in accumulating readings for their private urban research programs, notably including texts by Gilles Deleuze as well as Guy Debord and the Situationist International. These texts, which resonate strongly with the urbanism of 1960s Paris and its politicization of intersubjectivity, aid military commanders in reconceptualizing the urban domain and designing a new form of movement. In this method, often referred to as infestation, soldiers navigate cities through a series of overground tunnels made from holes blasted through walls of private living spaces, developing the idea of a city as not just the site, but the medium of warfare. The relationship between media theory and military practice is productive in theory’s complication of classical or anachronistic military paradigms; in this case, by smoothing the urban space into a pliable, borderless medium that is by nature contingent and in flux. In the redefinition of domestic interiors as thoroughfares, however, the boundary between public and private is obliterated, and what began as communication between enemies suddenly includes the civilian population in a traumatizing, humiliating way. In my research, I will examine the shuffling and rewriting of public and private space that occurs when the city becomes the medium of warfare, and the desire and violence that drives the interaction between the seemingly incompossible worlds of theory and practice. In performing this evaluation, I will illuminate and explore the potential new values necessary to embrace in order to reconcile the ethical bases of media theory and military practice, as well as the constellations of reality that emerge when the two bases collide.

Clinical reasoning is an essential skill to learn in medicine, but multiple-choice exams may not adequately assess student errors. Case-based essay tests can provide useful information on the types of errors physicians make in clinical practice. The University of Washington Family Medicine Department proctored a case-based examination with its third-year clerkship students. This test has been administered to 343 students in family medicine clinical clerkships at 26 community and residency sites across a 5 state region. Case-based questions addressed common medical problems seen in family medicine and asked students to respond using the Subjective Objective Assessment Plan (SOAP) format for writing clinical progress notes. We are examining two SOAP notes from each of the 343 students from Autumn 2005 to Spring 2007 to determine the types of errors third year medical students make in clinical reasoning. We identified categories of error types with qualitative research methods and Atlas TI software. Students’ rationale for their assessment and plans of each patient case scenario was coded for using a template previously developed by the clerkship co-directors. Coded segments from the student SOAP notes are then reviewed by the author and one mentor, (A.K.), in order to identify common patterns in the content of coded sections and the codes usage. Investigators read through subsets of these patterns to identify student reasoning. Based on early analysis, case-based testing of student’s clinical abilities does detect student’s errors in clinical reasoning. Errors tend to be failure to identify features of cases, failure to correctly interpret meaning of those features and errors in hypothesis generation. Further analysis will help in understanding weaknesses in students’ clinical reasoning and inform the design of education interventions to improve their performance.