Quoted: “Even if a judgment were obtained in France, it would be impossible under American law to enforce it here,” Robert Drechsel, a professor of media law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison told Reuters.
Community colleges were back in the spotlight on Tuesday night, as President Obama plugged his plan to make the institutions free for millions of students.
Noted: Perhaps it was Gloria Ladson-Billings, the University of Wisconsin professor and longtime education advocate, who delivered a stirring keynote address, reminding the audience that King’s message wasn’t just about a dream. It was about acting on the dream.
Even before he spoke, Marine Sgt. Jake Wood drew a standing ovation Tuesday from hundreds of those in attendance at a Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
Sparky!, written by Jenny Offill and illustrated by Chris Appelhans, is the winner of the 18th annual Charlotte Zolotow Award for outstanding writing in a picture book. The award is given by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and will be presented in Madison this spring. In a release, the committee said: “The marvelous humor is never overplayed as Offill skillfully maintains a measured, evenhanded tone and perfect pacing.”
Source: Kenneth R. Mayer, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Quoted: “My colleagues on the Board and the members of the search committee are confident John O’Brien has the right mix of experience, vision and leadership to advance the mission of the association and extend its reach, building on the strong accomplishments Diana and the Educause staff have achieved together during her tenure,” said Bruce Maas, chair of the Educause Board of Directors and vice provost for IT and CIO at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: UW-Madison political expert Barry Burden tells 27 News President Obama may feel like he has nothing to lose heading into this State of the Union address, since the Democrats lost both houses of Congress in November.
Noted: The law, titled ‘the Right to Privacy in the School Setting Act,’ allows school districts and universities to demand the passwords to their students’ social media accounts if they have reasonable cause to believe the student is violating school code both during and after class time. That violates the very privacy the law is named for, according to UW-Madison journalism professor Robert Drechsel.
I did not attend the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas but via Twitter I met John Shutske, Associate Dean for Extension and Outreach Programs in the University of Wisconsin’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences who was attending. John agreed to share some of his observations of the events he attended during last week’s show so that’s what we’re talking about in this week’s program.
Quoted: Caitlin Pepperell of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study, questioned the mutation rate the researchers used, which was based on a recent outbreak in Hamburg. “Generally, what we find to be the most clear-cut and unambiguous estimate for rate over thousands of years is a situation where we use ancient bacterial DNA,” she said. Such an estimate came out in 2014, but since the tuberculosis isolated from ancient humans was unexpectedly of seal origin, the field is still waiting for a robust estimate, Pepperell added. “[Wirth and his colleagues] used reasonable ranges and did reasonable things, but I think to be very definitive about dating and correlating tuberculosis history with historical events will probably have to wait for the next ancient DNA study to emerge.”
Noted: “When I was a kid growing up in northern Wisconsin, there weren’t a lot of choices in the grocery store during wintertime,” said James Leary, the director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Culture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Before shipping produce from Central and South America, you got a lot more pickled vegetables in the winter. So for relish trays, having pickled cucumbers, corn, mushrooms or root crops such as carrots and radishes are conventional.”
When groups of people come together and pool their resources, great things can be accomplished flinging humans onto the Moon comes to mind. In the US, the National Science Foundation is a factory of great things. It guides billions of tax dollars into university research projects each year in 2015, $7.344 billion to be exact. And since science costs money, one unhappy necessity of the academic lifestyle is securing funding to keep the lights on and the lab running. Give a kid a grant-writing kit to go with their chemistry set for Christmas. See if they play with it. NSF grants are the lifeblood of many fields of science.
Quoted: “It was a lot of people losing their jobs and being knocked out of the field,” said Raymond Fonck, an experimental fusion physicist at the University of Wisconsin who did some work on TFTR. “Some people left the field out of disgust.”
Quoted: “What we did was to prove there was a simultaneous decline for wild boar, brown bear and moose in most regions of Russia at the beginning of the 1990s, which was right after the collapse [of the Soviet Union],” explained co-author Eugenia Bragina from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US.
Quoted: “The way to interpret this is as a warning sign,” Steve Carpenter, a professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told VICE News. “We’re running up to the biophysical boundaries that enable human civilization as we know it to exist.”
Interviewed: Michael Xenos has studied the way young people especially engage politically on social media. He’s a professor of Communications Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Gov. Scott Walker acknowledged Monday that his administration is considering granting more autonomy to the University of Wisconsin System.
It didn’t take long for some opponents to line up against a possible decoupling of the state’s universities from the state.
Quoted: Making debt payments will take away money that could have been spent on other important areas, affecting “pretty much everything,” said John Wiley, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in higher education finance.
A three-month-old policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that insulates professors from harassment has been heralded as a welcome protection against bullying – but concerns remain that the new regulation might be used as a general civility policy, which would run afoul of its original intent.
Quoted: UW-Madison economics instructor Richard Shaten points to market speculators for their role in fluctuating oil prices, creating what some call a “crude oil casino.” He says, “You know, I read someplace recently that for every barrel of oil that gets delivered, people buy and sell 30 barrels of oil on paper.” He adds, “Many of these trades are computer programmed. Billions of dollars changing hands over speculation on the price of oil.”
Quoted: Sara Goldrick-Rab is a professor of educational policy studies at UW-Madison. She points to a significant detail Obama mentioned in making his announcement. “President Obama said this is for the young and the young at heart. This is not just directed at people coming out of high school. This is directed at anyone.” Goldrick-Rab points out, “Community colleges serve a wide range of folks. In fact, the average age of a community college student is close to 30.”
As he continues work on his proposed biennial budget, Governor Scott Walker says he’s still looking at possible plans for the future of the University of Wisconsin System and its flagship campus.
Scientists at University of Wisconsin-Madison are reporting a breakthrough in using very small technology to extend the battery life of some electronic devices.
The leaders of Washington University in St. Louis have decided that it has a distinction they no longer want: the nation’s least economically diverse top college.
Before adoring fans called him “The Moose” or “Joe College” or “Frank the Tank,” Frank Kaminsky was known simply as “Frankie” or “Little Frank.”
A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.
The word Russell Wilson kept coming back to Thursday was dedicated. And considering what the University of Wisconsin football program has been through in the last two-plus years, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback’s choice of words was important.
Quoted: “That’s the challenge,” said Noel Radomski, a professor of higher education governance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You have to look at how much support the president has on campus and in the board. If it’s a wide array of those who lack confidence in him, then it might be in the best interest of the university for the board to encourage him to resign.”
It should be a wake-up call to policymakers that “we’re running up to and beyond the biophysical boundaries that enable human civilization as we know it to exist,” Steve Carpenter, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology, said in a statement.
Bud Selig never had to break up any craps games as Major League Baseball’s Commissioner like he did back in the days as fraternity president in Wisconsin.
Quoted: Joel Rogers, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of COWS formerly the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a progressive public policy think tank, agrees that states will step up their preemption efforts, given the results of the 2014 elections.
Madison’s celebration kicks off this month. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Cinematheque will present Welles’ first film, Citizen Kane, in a free screening on Jan. 24.
Homebrewing is so popular that the Badger Brewing Association, the UW-Madison club devoted to the topic, attracts several hundred students a year, according to faculty adviser Jim Steele. It’s an impressive number, since the club can’t even brew beer, due to the participation of underage students.
For Jake Anderson, life changed in just one moment in the dark waters of Lake Mendota on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Noted: For instance, one study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared children who talked and instant-messaged with their mothers after a stressful situation. The researchers measured cortisol, known as the stress hormone, and oxytocin, a hormone noticed in positive relationships. The children who talked to their mothers showed decreased stress and increased positive feelings, while those who instant-messaged remained stressed.
Quoted: Dr. Noelle LoConte, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said because the HPV virus is known to cause cancer, getting the vaccine is one of the surest ways to prevent cancer.
Quoted: “There is strong Muslim cultural discomfort with images of any divinely connected creatures; these would include any of the prophets, as well as God and the angels,” said Asifa Quraishi-Landes, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in comparative Islamic and American constitutional law.
Quoted: “It would mean within a year or two there could be fiber optic service to the home, which no company does now in Madison,” University of Wisconsin telecommunications professor Barry Orton said.
Gov. Scott Walker is expected to paint a grim picture when he delivers his plan in a few weeks for balancing the state budget, which would stand in sharp contrast to his upbeat State of the State speech.
Quoted: “[W]e now have a framework for understanding how the disease functions within a bat,” Michelle Verant, a study author and researcher at the University of Wisconsin and USGS National Wildlife Health Center scientist, says in a statement. With that understanding, researchers can figure out how to help the bats survive.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin law professor Brad Snyder, the author of a book about the Homestead Grays called “Beyond the Shadow of the Senators,” called the MacPhail report a “historically important document.”
A lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild in the fall of 2011 against five HathiTrust Digital Library institutions, including the University, formally concluded Jan. 6.
Noted: “Considering the popularity of Washington’s performance funding model, we are surprised the impacts on associate’s degree productivity are so modest,” wrote the study’s co-authors, who are Nicholas Hillman of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, David Tandberg of Florida State University and Alisa Hicklin Fryar of the University Oklahoma.
The lawsuit brought by UW-Milwaukee student leaders is now a federal case.
While the early plans focused on long-term goals like graduation rates, the new versions, which the reformers have dubbed “Performance 2.0,” give colleges credit for intermediate measures such as student retention or transfer rates, or the numbers of students completing remedial mathematics or earning their first 15 college credits, said the report’s lead author, Nicholas W. Hillman, who discusses the findings here. He is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His co-authors are David A. Tandberg, an assistant professor of higher education at Florida State University, and Alisa Hicklin Fryar, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma.
Each year, as a state law requires, the Wisconsin Department of Administration produces a Contractual Services Purchasing Report. It tracks spending by state agencies and the University of Wisconsin to outsource tasks ranging from information technology to janitorial work. State workers have long argued that they could be doing many of these jobs for less.
Quoted: “A lot of these apps talk about anonymity, and there are some things that you can remain anonymous with,” says Marc Lovicott, a public information officer at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “But a lot of these apps, we’re able to track down individuals through different means.”
Lead researcher Nicholas W. Hillman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison cautioned against over-interpretation of his study that compares Washington state college outcomes to similar states without performance funding systems for community colleges.
Noted: Emory’s mobile app strategy is similar to one that’s taken off at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The UW–Madison Mobile Learning Incubator team develops apps alongside faculty and students to blend mobile technology with classroom lessons.
It’s increasingly apparent that schools can do exceptional things when you give them 3D printers. Need proof? The University of Wisconsin’s Mechanical Engineering department is using its advanced selective laser sintering printer to make a wide range of intricate projects, including 3D music scores for the blind.
A former Fort Benning soldier convicted with his wife of crushing their three-day-old infant’s skull in June 2008 is set to have a mid-July hearing on a new-trial motion, with his defense aided by new medical evidence and an attorney from the Wisconsin Innocence Project.
More than a dozen of the nation’s top research universities have declined an offer by the Association of American Universities to anonymously survey their students about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus.
Other universities are trying free online courses as a way to engage alumni. Harvard University began offering such courses to graduates last year. The University of Wisconsin at Madison plans to offer six courses with shared themes of human choices and the changing environment, said Lika Balenovich, a spokeswoman for educational innovation.
Noted: There’s other good news. While researchers study the tough little holdouts here in Vermont, a wildlife veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin has been cracking the code on how exactly white-nose syndrome kills these animals. The study’s lead author, Michelle Verant, says the fungus causes bats’ bodies to overheat, burning energy too quickly.
A laboratory designed to host classified cybersecurity research has been built at the University Research Park on the West Side.
As Governor Walker prepares his State of the State speech for tomorrow night, he’s also likely feeling a lot of pressure to announce whether he’ll get in next year’s presidential race. UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer says the governor would be in the running for the Republican nomination.
