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July 26, 2018

Top Stories

Food and Drug Administration changes sought to help Wisconsin dairy industry

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WI State Farmer

Harsdorf will be joined by Dr. John Lucey, a food scientist at the UW-Madison who is director of the Center for Dairy Research on the Madison campus. He explained that they want to talk to the Food and Drug Administration about micro-filtration of milk, a process that is widely used in European dairy plants but can’t be used here because of regulations, putting our cheese makers and dairy processors at a distinct disadvantage.

Research

The weirdest things we learned this week: Curing syphilis with malaria, ejecting bears from planes, and discovering new beer yeasts

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Popular Science

In 2009, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, launched a five-continent search for the yeast mama. This portion of the genetics is what gives lager style beer its primary characteristic: the ability to ferment cold. The first hit came from Argentina, a 99.5 percent match from a growth on a beech tree. They named it Saccharomyces eubayanus.

Campus life

Agriculture

Sassy Cow Creamery: a destination

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WI State Farmer

Brothers James and Robert Baerwolf are both UW-Madison Ag School graduates and are rather quiet individuals, not the bombastic, outgoing extroverts one often sees entrepreneurs portrayed as and they do things right on the farm and at the creamery.

Fruit of the vine

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Isthmus

Noted: The second-annual event is organized by the UW-Madison Department of Food Science. Enologist and outreach specialist Nick Smith is running the show with help from the Wisconsin Vintners Association, a Milwaukee-based organization for winemakers and enthusiasts that provided volunteers to serve as wine stewards for the competition. They’re busy backstage opening bottles, pouring flights and making sure that the nearly 500 glasses of wine are properly labeled before they’re delivered to the judges.

Extension

Health

An Advocate’s Perspective on Patient-Centered Care

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Cancer.Net

Attorney Meg Gaines found a calling to be a patient advocate after her own cancer experience. Gaines’ self-advocacy helped her through her extended and difficult diagnosis and treatment process in the 1990s. After her successful treatment, she wanted to empower other people with cancer to advocate for their care. Her first opportunity came unexpectedly, when her oncologist asked her to help cheer up a patient who was feeling down. “I jumped on the bus and really was there in about 25 minutes,” Gaines told me in a recent interview. “[I] sat for most of the afternoon with her—talking about life, and death, and mortality and what it’s like, and family, and fear, and cancer.”

Opinion

America needs independent judges

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The Hill

Rather than enhancing the neutrality of administrative law judges, the executive order diminishes them by making their hiring subject to political considerations. It means that administrative law judges will be more akin to Roger Goodell than a Supreme Court justice, no longer bound by precedent and legal reasoning, but rather incentivized to decide cases to advance political, not legal, objectives. This calls for Congress to protect the continued independence of administrative law judges.

-Steph Tai is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who represents amici in federal court and Supreme Court cases.

Business/Technology

Madison’s connection to Foxconn

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Madison Magazine

For UW–Madison, most conversations with Foxconn have focused on research and recruiting opportunities. From the College of Letters and Science to autonomous vehicles, Foxconn has expressed interest in drawing on some of UW–Madison’s unique assets. … “I think most people think of Foxconn [as] that place in Racine that’s going to manufacture big-screen TVs and large-scale tech screens, and they have a much broader set of interests than that [which] we’re working on,” says Charles Hoslet, vice chancellor of university relations at UW–Madison relations.

UW Experts in the News

A Day Before Laos Dam Failed, Builders Saw Trouble

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New York Times

Quoted: Both South Korean companies mentioned heavy rains in their descriptions of the disaster. But Ian Baird, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who specializes in Laos and has studied the hydropower project, said he believed the problem was either faulty construction, or a decision to store too much water in the dam’s reservoir at a time when heavy rain should have been expected. “When at the end of July do we not get rain in this part of the world?” he asked.

Has Casper put traditional mattress sellers to sleep?

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Marketing Dive

Noted: Long-standing mattress retailer Sleepy’s was founded in 1931, with Mattress Firm coming around in 1986 and Tempur-Pedic in 1992. For many of the more traditional mattress retailers, sales strategies consisted of inflated prices and little innovation, according to Hart Posen, associate professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin. “At store number one, they sold you ‘posturepedic best sleep’ and then the next store, so they wouldn’t have to compete, they had ‘posturepedic good sleep’ — the same mattresses with slightly different colored threads or what have you and a different name to make price comparison more difficult,” Posen told Retail Dive.