8 O'Clock Buzz Brian Standing, Haywood Simmons & Michelle Naff, Jan Miyasaki, Tony Castaneda, & Jonathan Zarov

On Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s semi-annual Gallery Night, local artists open up their studios to the public, showcasing a wide variety of styles and media of visual arts, including experimental and avant-garde forms.

But classical forms of art certainly get their due as well. Artists who create portraits or portray the human form in oil and watercolors paintings will also display their work at Atwood Atelier – located on Main Street, not Atwood Avenue. Atwood Atelier provides classes on portraiture and figure drawing and offers space for artists to practice their craft.  Artist Philip Salamone who directs the Atwood Atelier, called in to WORT studios to tell us about his work.

The 2024 Spring Gallery Night will take place on Friday, May 3rd in locations throughout Madison. You can find more information at the MMoCA website.

Photo courtesy of Atwood Atelier.

Web posting by Nicholas Wootton

 

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According to media licensing experts, internet users upload between four and fifteen billion photos a day to various social media sites. And those social media sites are adept at associating and storing in depth information about the people who appear in each and every one of those photos.  As anyone who has seen a prompt asking if you want to share a memory from a decade ago, most of those photos, and the data associated with them, sit on servers forever.

Recent research suggests that social media companies are doing more than just storing such images – they’re using them to find out more about you, your friends, and what you do in your daily life, and keep that information with each pic. Up to 500 different labels might get attached to that vacation photo you just uploaded, indicating where and when it was taken and who is in it.

A pair of UW computer science researchers have been studying the methods that companies like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram use to mine information about you from the images you post, and came to WORT studios to tell us what they learned.

Kassem Fawaz is the Associate Chair for Research at the University of Wisconsin College of Engineering and faculty lead for WI-PI, the Wisconsin Privacy and Security Group.  Jack West is an Engineering PhD candidate and WI-PI member.

 

Photo courtesy of Dr. Kassem Fawaz.

Web posting by Nicholas Wootton

 

 

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Wisconsin voters with disabilities face challenges when exercising their right to vote that most residents do not. If simply making it to the polls is one of those challenges, their options for overcoming them are limited. Wisconsin law requires absentee voters to use a paper ballot. Voters who lack fine motor control or have visual impairments can ask for assistance filling out their ballot, but then sacrifice their right to fill out the ballot in secret.

A group of Wisconsin disabled voters, Disability Rights Wisconsin and the League of Women Voters recently filed a lawsuit seeking to allow for fully electronic absentee ballots.

Alexander Shur, who writes for the nonprofit news outlet Votebeat, has been covering this issue and came into WORT’s studios to tell us more about it.

 

In this photo, Don Natzke is seen in the backyard of his Shorewood, Wis., home on July 31, 2020. Natzke, who is blind, was unable to vote in Wisconsin’s April 2020 election as fear of the COVID-19 pandemic kept him from his in-person polling place and he faced several hurdles casting an absentee ballot.

Photo credit: Will Cioci / Wisconsin Watch

Web posting by Nicholas Wootton

 

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Today on the Not-Too Turnt Up Tuesday 8:00 Buzz with Tara Wilhelmi, no guests and co-hosts, it’s just Tara talking about doing good for the community, arts as business, and whatever else comes up, what’s going around town, and reminiscing on some music!

Today’s Playlist: https://spinitron.com/WORT/pl/18870838/Tuesday-8-O-Clock-Buzz

Listen in Madison at 89.9FM or online anywhere at wortfm.org.  Support your community radio with a donation online at wortfm.org!

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This year marks the 100th anniversary of the presidential run of Robert M. LaFollette — one of the most successful third-party campaigns in U.S. history. Norman Stockwell, Publisher of the Progressive Magazine talks in detail about the history of LaFollette, his progressive ideas of breaking the power of monopolies over politics and economy, denouncing the resurgence of the KKK, and fighting against “any discrimination between races, classes, and creeds.” Stockwell gives some details of the anniversary party events scheduled starting tomorrow, April 25, 2024, and continuing through the weekend.

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Congress requires the Pentagon to submit Unfunded Priorities List (UPL) each year, offering a backdoor of requests of $25.8 billion for 2025 (double from the previous year) to boosting already exorbitant military spending of $895.2 billion in military spending President Biden has already requested. In her recent article “The Pentagon’s Billion-Dollar Wish Lists“, Sofia Guerra from the Friends Committee on National Legislation talks about these unmonitored requests, and new bi-partisan legislation seeking to cut this fat from Defense Department.

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