Smallpox. Anthrax. An especially lethal form of bird flu. The list of diseases caused by pathogens that appear to have been handled carelessly by federal laboratories is chill-inducing.
Danny Jones doesn?t like to live in the past.
There is a quiet crisis growing in rural America.
There are a lot of opinions about where you should go to college. A lot of those opinions are probably wrong — at least the ones based on myths about what makes a good school to get a degree from.
Quoted: ?I think Michael Crow says a lot about broadening access, but I don?t think he?s saying that from a goodwill standpoint,? said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Online education is largely untested, she said, and numerous studies have shown that nontraditional students struggle in many online courses compared with in-person and even hybrid classes.
The recently documented mistakes at federal laboratories involving anthrax, flu and smallpox have incited public outrage at the government?s handling of dangerous pathogens. But the episodes were just a tiny fraction of the hundreds that have occurred in recent years across a sprawling web of academic, commercial and government labs that operate without clear national standards or oversight, federal reports show.
Noted: “There are clashes all the time between the reality of what goes on in a classroom and what researchers would like to see happen in a classroom,” said Paul Olson, an outreach specialist at the Games Learning Society, or GLS, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who taught seventh grade for more than three decades. He said that a lot of his time these days is spent explaining to researchers what life is like “in the trenches” and encouraging teachers to experiment with GLS games to motivate those students who “really don?t respond to a lecture or a chapter in a book but are all over programming something.”
Quoted: International relations expert and University of Wisconsin professor Jon Pevehouse said it is likely the U.S. gets further involved in the region, but not likely an escalation leads to war.
Quoted: “This is one of the things that people put out there saying there must be a Higgs boson,” says Matthew Herndon at the University of Wisconsin Madison, who works on similar problems with another LHC experiment called CMS. It also makes W scattering one of the best places to look for physics beyond the standard model ? which does not take gravity into account and cannot explain mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy.
Quoted: ?What most of us don?t realize is that all of us are what psychology in the mid-?90s started calling ?cognitive misers,?? said Dietram Scheufele, a professor of science communication at the University of Wisconsin ? Madison. That is, ?we all use as little information as possible to make any given decision,? relying on cognitive shortcuts or social cues or other not-particularly-intellectual factors to do so.
Daniel Blocq, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been a lecturer in international law at the Netherlands Naval College and a military observer with the U.N. mission in Sudan.
Quoted: Susan Paskewitz, entomologist with the UW-Madison Cooperative Extension, studies mosquitos for a living. She just returned from a northern Wisconsin field trip, in which she and six other researchers traveled from Phillips to Minocqua to Crandon and Antigo.
MADISON (WITI) ? A bomb blast at Camp Randall Stadium at the University of Wisconsin sends hundreds of first responders, investigators and other emergency crews to the scene. Before you get alarmed, this was only a massive training exercise.
MADISON, Wis. ?Last year?s bombing at the Boston Marathon is still causing law enforcement to make changes in security at major events.
Research into why families with firstborn daughters are slightly more likely to divorce than those with firstborn sons has disproved the long-held reasoning that men simply prefer sons.
Hanover, N.H. ? As a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, the one thing Laura Dunn knew about staying safe was to not walk alone at night. So when she wanted to go from one party to another, she asked two men on her crew team to escort her. Instead, they took her to an apartment one block off campus and raped her, she recounted Tuesday at the Dartmouth Summit on Sexual Assault.
MADISON – There?s a new invasive species in Wisconsin: the Asian crazy worm. It?s called the crazy worm because it?s very active.
Laura Dunn was a college freshman living on the University of Wisconsin?s pastoral campus in Madison when she was raped. Her assailants, she said, were two males from the crew team. She filed a complaint with the school and law enforcement. No one was charged, no one was even suspended.
The latest jewel to be added to the University of Wisconsin?s charm bracelet of athletic facilities is a lot like all the others we?ve seen displayed in the past two decades.
Quoted: Combining the two would also eliminate a major buyer of sports programming, which may raise concerns at the U.S. Justice Department when it reviews a deal, said Peter Carstensen, who teaches antitrust at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
MADISON ? Former state Commerce Department Secretary Aaron Olver has been named managing director of the University of Wisconsin Research Park in Madison.
MADISON ? A frequent University of Wisconsin System protester?s antics clearly crossed the line into harassment but an injunction banning him from UW property or contacting UW personnel is too broad and must be rewritten, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
Susan Horwitz was born on 6 January 1955 in Berkeley, California, but spent most of her childhood in Syracuse, New York. Although her first degree at Wesleyan University was in ethnomusicology (1977), she soon developed an interest in computer programming, which she was able to pursue in the then recently created Computing Center.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will simulate a terrorist bombing at Camp Randall Stadium early Thursday ? complete with explosive sound effects, billowing smoke and pretend victims ? to test its emergency preparedness plan involving everyone from police and fire squads to hospital emergency departments and the FBI.
Noted: Baylor University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison have also created special housing options to help student entrepreneurs collaborate. Schools are ?marketing the housing inventory to attract and keep students. They?re doing it in a number of different ways, including adding academic space to the housing,? says Arthur Lidsky, president of the college campus planning firm Dober Lidsky Mathey.
Several recent articles appearing online have pointed to a couple of burning questions about book-reading in this overstuffed era: Why do people buy books they have no intention of reading? And, how can one ever find the time to read a book at all?
Noted: But various researchers and tech companies?including Google?have been playing around with large asynchronous systems for years now, and inside Adam, Microsoft is taking advantage of this work using a technology developed at the University of Wisconsin called, of all things, ?HOGWILD!?
MADISON, Wis. ? A foreign worm with a big appetite has burrowed into the soil of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, officials said Tuesday.
Noted: According to David Canon, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin ? Madison, this dysfunction dates back at least a decade. At first it affected budget issues, and programs like the Highway Trust Fund, which funnel money into both Democratic and Republican districts, were safe. But times have changed.
Activists working to put an end to sexual assault on campus want colleges to publicly release any surveys they conduct that gauge the scope of the problem at their schools.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison?s La Follette School of Public Affairs has placed fourth worldwide for its academic research, according to a new comprehensive higher education ranking.
In a long-running affirmative-action case, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Tuesday upheld the University of Texas at Austin?s consideration of race as one of many factors in admissions.
The UW-Madison dean discusses research findings that suggest financial concerns for young adults.
Noted: It?s an approach that?s also being pushed by University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist and higher-education policy expert Sara Goldrick-Rab and a colleague, Nancy Kendall, who urge in a new report that the billions of dollars in existing federal financial aid and some state money be redirected to make tuition, fees, books, and supplies free for the first two years of any two- or four-year public university or college and that students be given stipends and jobs to help them pay their living expenses.
The mother of a UW-Madison student arrested in connection with an April hate crime against an African American family in Stoughton defends her son?s integrity.
Quoted: ?It?s very clear it?s a different quality of mental engagement when you?re playing games of skill than when you?re reading a book,? said Ozioma Okonkwo, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and senior author of the study. ?To win a card game, you have to judge, you have to plan, you have to do something, you have to remember what the last player played.?
Noted: However, the chicken-or-egg question remains, said lead researcher Stephanie Schultz. “The cause-and-effect here is unclear,” said Schultz, a research specialist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
We?ve all done it – bought an important timely book with great intentions of tearing through it. But then reality sets in. We find ourselves less and less motivated to make it to the end. Author and mathematician Jordan Ellenberg wanted to quantify this phenomenon and has come up with a way to measure when exactly a reader gives up.
ATLANTA ? Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spent much of Wednesday completing a report that would let the public see, in embarrassing detail, how the sloppy handling of anthrax by scientists at its headquarters here had potentially exposed dozens of employees to the deadly bacteria.
Noted: This makes comparing Obama?s use of unilateral action to other presidents? difficult, said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A new way of combating invasive smelt is meeting with mixed success ? literally ? at the end of a two-year study. The Crystal Lake Mixing Project was able to get rid of most of the smelt in Crystal Lake?but not all of it.
Quoted: In the past, U.S. butter exports have gone primarily to the Middle East and North Africa. But Brian Gould, an agricultural economist and dairy marketing specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the growing global middle class, especially in Asia, has helped spark new demand for more dairy products. That includes butter, as the popularity of pizza, ice cream and other U.S. food staples increases overseas.
Noted: A University of Wisconsin-Madison instructor, Rick Brooks, liked the idea, and, working with Bol they built a website with blueprints and instructions for people to build their own Little Free Library. Average cost is $75.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is funding a project involving the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Farmers? Market Coalition to better track sales at farmers? markets and collect other information that could be useful to vendors and communities.
University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross calls it the ?broadband imperative.? He explains at a broadband symposium in Madison, ?Big transformation coming. Highly dependent on the ability to move data between different sources ? fast.?
Noted: The three are identified as Alison Alter of Austin, Texas, her son Zack Suri, and a relative, Thomas Alter of Highland Park, Illinois. Alter is a former Madison resident whose husband, Jeremi Suri, was a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving to Austin. Alter had worked at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters as well as at the UW-Madison Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE).
Authorities plan to simulate a bomb attack in or around Camp Randall stadium next week as part of the largest emergency-response simulation the state has ever seen.
Alice Goffman, a University of Wisconsin sociologist, has gained much praise for her new book On the Run. For her research, Goffman spent a great deal of time on the inner-city stoop, where young black men usually only gain arrest records. From all the attention, it would appear that she has produced a revelatory piece of scholarship. But that?s wrong. By any measure, On the Run does not merit the laudatory reviews and notice it has received.
Quoted: Hart Posen, a professor of management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Lyft?s tactics in New York are part of a familiar playbook for app-driven services trying to shake up the industry. He predicted Lyft will eventually strike an agreement with regulators.
Noted: Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wis., recounted a chapter in North Carolina history after the Civil War in which black men had been granted the right to vote and did so in large numbers. With that increase in participation came a push by white legislators to change the law to make it more difficult for blacks to vote, Burden said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is returning to Coursera for seconds next year when it undertakes delivery of six new massive open online courses on the MOOC platform during 2015-2016. Whereas the institution?s original experiment involved four disparate classes, this time the theme will be relationships: among people, among communities and between humans and the natural world. The original four-course pilot drew 135,600 registrants from every state and 141 countries.
The tiny library started out innocently enough. Built outside a church in Lincoln, Neb., it was one of about 25 free, barely-bigger-than-a-birdhouse-size book dispensaries that have sprung up in this Great Plains city. But that was before public officials said this particular library was a public hazard that violated a city ordinance. The city?s verdict: get rid of the library or we?ll do it for you.
I have stopped using New York Times data visualizations in my training presentations to educators and students. Don?t get me wrong. They?re spectacular. This one setting winter Olympic event finishes to music completely changed my understanding of timed events. I learned about the nightmare of balancing the federal budget. And I figured out why World Cup soccer confuses me.
It is becoming vividly clear that global warming and climate change pose unprecedented threats to humanity. The scientific evidence that these fundamental changes are due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels is rigorous, extensive, and conclusive.
Latino youth activists from around Wisconsin have re-launched their campaign for what they call ?tuition equity? in Wisconsin.
Can feminism improve science? The organizers of University of Wisconsin-Madison?s new post-doctorate in ?feminist biology? ? alleged to be the first of its kind in the nation and probably the world ? would answer with an emphatic ?Yes!?
Noted: But there can be no doubt that recreating the virus from scratch would be hugely controversial ? scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently provoked a storm of criticism when they recreated the deadly Spanish influenza virus that killed millions in the aftermath of the first world war, using fragments of avian flu viruses found in wild ducks. The researchers claimed the virus could inform influenza vaccine development.
More than 40 percent of colleges have not conducted a single sexual-assault investigation in the past five years, according to the results of a national survey released on Wednesday by Sen. Claire McCaskill. The on-the-ground details of campus sexual assault and the capacity of officials there to respond to it should serve as a “wake-up call” for colleges, said Ms. McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who recently held three roundtable discussions on the issue.
WASHINGTON — More than a fifth of colleges nationwide allow their athletic departments to oversee sexual assault cases involving student-athletes, according to the results of a survey released Wednesday by Senator Claire McCaskill.
?Most Americans want to live independently in the community for as long as possible and avoid being a burden on their families when their health declines,? Michal Engelman told Reuters Health in an email. Engelman is a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was not part of the new study.
