When Bob Dylan showed up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar and a full backing band, many fans decried he had turned his back on folk music. It turns out this debate over what exactly is “folk” has been happening for a long time.We speak to a UW-Madison student who was recently awarded a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution to zero in on how people in 20th century America defined “folk?”
Patterns of brain activity associated with anxiety in monkeys are passed from parent to child, researchers report today (July 30) in the Journal of Neuroscience. The results could give clues to the heritability of severe anxiety in humans and how to treat it. In the study, Ned Kalin of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and colleagues studied the stress response and cortisol levels of 378 young monkeys after an intruder entered the animal cage. The researchers also took scans of the monkeys’ brains while the animals were anesthetized and found that the monkeys with greater stress responses had differences in brain activity in the extended amygdala compared with those that were less stressed.
Wisconsin and other battleground states were targeted by a sophisticated social media campaign, according to a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study headed by journalism professor Young Mie Kim. This campaign tapped into divisive issues such as race, gun control and gay and transgender rights.
Move-out day for Edgewood College and University of Wisconsin-Madison students and primary election day both fall on Aug. 14 this year.
Noted: “What they’re showing through some fairly sophisticated modeling is that the temperature increase over next 100 years will be fairly significant if we continue business as usual,” said Benjamin Zuckerberg, associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. “I think its concerning because this is a species we’d expect to be relatively resilient. But even a resilient and fairly widespread species is going to be impacted in this increasing temperature.”
Success for the Wisconsin Badgers is about as ho-hum as their leader’s personality.All Wisconsin does is win under no-nonsense, coach-next-door Paul Chryst. The Badgers finished a school-best 13-1 last year, missing the playoffs following a loss to Ohio State in the Big Ten title game but beating Miami in the Orange Bowl.
As trade tensions between Washington and Beijing escalate, the chairman of Foxconn Technology Group, Terry Gou, has managed to make the assembler of iPhones seem immune from the bitter tariff war — and he even has become a notable job creator in the U.S. despite the fact that his hardware empire faces mounting challenges at a critical stage.
Trevor Matich chats and breaks down film with the Wisconsin Badgers’ offensive line while fishing. (Video.)
Omar Poler’s slender frame is easy to follow as he leads people up Bascom Hill on a historical tour. The sea of students rushing downhill makes participants aware they are on a college campus. Amid this commotion, Poler, a Sokaogon Chippewa and interim coordinator of American Indian Curriculum Services at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, shares stories of the ancient effigy mounds that can be found around campus and in the Madison area.
Noted: The panelists included Allan Brandt, professor of the history of science at Harvard University; Dominique Brossard, chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: “We need to be as accurate as possible because we are providing information for students and parents who are making decisions on what career to follow,” said Matias Scaglione. He’s an associate researcher with Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Starting a cable news network from scratch is a daunting task — especially one that could compete with a behemoth like Fox News. But Lewis Friedland, who directs the Center for Communication and Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the acquisition of Tribune would have given Sinclair an unprecedented array of assets.
Noted: The researchers in Madison wanted to study the impact of childhood stress on genetic chemistry. Seltzer said the biological impact of trauma can put markers on specific genes that act as an on-off switch, which in turn determine whether the natural function of those specific genes are activated or repressed.
Quoted: “Sesame Workshop probably can be trusted to do this in an ethical way, but the door opens for other companies to do it in a less ethical way,” said Heather Kirkorian, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies the effects of media in young children.
It’s a hallmark of modern apocalypse movies: Someone tries their cellphone, and when they (gasp!) have no reception, they try the internet. That’s when the real horror hits, because the internet isn’t working, and not even memes can save them now. All joking aside, though, climate change does pose a real threat to the internet, according to a new study. The report suggests that underground fiber optic cables that provide internet to heavily populated areas along the West and East Coasts of the U.S. may be underwater within the next 15 years.
Noted: The training and education of the committee. Committee members should receive training and educational resources that increase their knowledge of the impact of evaluation biases and ways to overcome them. Workshops of this sort have been offered to search committee members at Florida International University; Northeastern University; the University of California, Davis; the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin, among others.
WASHINGTON — Team Rubicon founder Jake Wood received the Pat Tillman Award for Service at Wednesday’s ESPY awards and used the forum to call on all Americans to follow military members’ example of teamwork, unity and compassion.
Noted: But recently, neuroscientists have started to explore other states of consciousness. In research published in the journal Nature in 2017, Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin and colleagues looked at what happens when we dream. They measured brain activity as people slept, waking them up at regular intervals to ask whether they had been dreaming. Then the scientists looked at what the brain had been doing just before the sleepers woke up. When people reported dreaming, parts of the back of the brain were much more active—much like the brain areas that are active in babies. The prefrontal area, on the other hand, shuts down during sleep.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s PEOPLE (Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence) program will recognize 121 PEOPLE high school scholars for their outstanding accomplishments on Friday, July 20, at the Marriott West Conference Center in Middleton. The annual R.I.S.E. (Reflect. Inspire. Succeed. Evolve.) Recognition Luncheon will begin at 11:30 a.m.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison is the largest and best known of Wisconsin’s 13 public universities, but over the past decade it has earned a reputation among some Wisconsinites for being expensive, liberal and hard to get into. The Wisconsin Alumni Association, equipped with a refurbished dairy van and gallons of ice cream, is trying to change that.
Some of the key internet infrastructure in the U.S. will likely be underwater in as little as 15 years because of rising seas, scientists say.
Parts of the infrastructure that forms the backbone of the Internet — from fiber optic cables to colocation facilities — is at risk of being flooded and knocked offline during the next few decades as a result of climate change-related sea level rise, according to a new study.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are working to expand newborn genetic screening for Wisconsin’s Amish and Old Order Mennonite, collectively known as Plain sect communities.
Noted: Karen Oberhauser, who directs the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and is the former head of the Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota, says the loss of breeding habitat also is a huge problem in the Upper Midwest where milkweed used to grow between rows of crops like corn and soybeans.
Noted: Rural manufacturers often stay in their original location because of historic roots, according to Steven Deller, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in economic growth and development patterns.
Like most people in the state, I am following Foxconn with great interest.
Noted: On the other hand, the nature of Putin’s regime makes it hard to say with certainty that he would have known, said Yoshiko Herrera, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist with a specialty on Russia.
When the Internet goes down, life as the modern American knows it grinds to a halt. Gone are the cute kitten photos and the Facebook status updates—but also gone are the signals telling stoplights to change from green to red, and doctors’ access to online patient records.
Interviewed: Yoshiko Herrera, professor of political science specializing in Russia and the former Soviet states at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Heather Abercrombie, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison who heads the school’s Mood and Memory Laboratory, says scientists tend to capture data from groups of people rather than looking at them as individuals. But since people are bound to have different physiological reactions to different situations, Mohsenvand’s one-person life logging could be useful.
Critical portions of America’s internet infrastructure, particularly in New York City, Miami, and Seattle, may be submerged and damaged by rising sea levels—possibly within the next 15 years, according to research presented Monday at a meeting of internet researchers.
You probably didn’t give much thought to how exactly you loaded this webpage. Maybe you clicked a link from Twitter or Facebook and presto, this article popped up on your screen. The internet seems magical and intangible sometimes. But the reality is, you rely on physical, concrete objects — like giant data centers and miles of underground cables — to stay connected.
Noted: Anna Kaatz, a computational data scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who studies diversity in the scientific workforce, agrees that the overall picture painted by the paper is encouraging. Yet the study glosses over the systemic pressures that discourage women from applying for grants and renewals at the same rate as men, she says
The fiber optic cables that carry internet and are buried along the coastal United States may be threatened by rising sea levels, a new study has found.
The University of California opened its doors to a record number of Californians for fall 2018, led by growth in transfer students from across the state, according to preliminary data released Wednesday.
Most political discussion of higher education these days focuses on the return on investment to individuals, rather than on the contributions that colleges and universities make to society broadly. So it wouldn’t be surprising to find that many Americans don’t put much stock in the “public good” arguments on which much government funding of higher education was premised.
A woman has filed a federal lawsuit against Lawrence University alleging the school failed to respond to reported sexual assaults on campus, making the plaintiff “more vulnerable to sexual assault.”
Noted: Robert Drechsel, who taught media law at the University of Wisconsin, said if he were Tesla’s attorney, he would advise the CEO to stop tweeting.
If anyone thinks he can keep the moderates and the Trumpians together, it’s Jake Lubenow. The 22-year-old just spent his senior year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as chair of the College Republicans — a serious job in a serious political state. Lubenow disapproves of Trump’s rhetoric, his tariffs and his wall. But he has always dreamed of a career in politics, and he’s not ready to give it up. “I think there’s a middle ground between the Never Trumpers and the Trumpians,” he told me.
ric W. Kaler, the University of Minnesota’s president and leader of the university system, will resign in July 2019, at the end of his eighth year in office, he announced on Friday, and will then serve as president emeritus for a year to continue raising funds.
The power of financial education has made a huge difference in Martinez White’s life. It has helped him to escape poverty and to pursue his dreams. White’s mission, he says, is to get people talking about the principles of financial empowerment and to inspire intergenerational wealth in emerging communities.
If you’ve heard it’s next to impossible for Wisconsin kids to get into the University of Wisconsin-Madison, here’s the scoop.
Three years ago, Rebecca M. Blank, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote a blog post to the university community outlining, in detail, the workload of professors at a major research university.
Noted: But Patricia G. Devine, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who runs a research laboratory on prejudice, said she was troubled by the spread of such training in the absence of probing, objective research. She said more study of officers’ unintentional biases is necessary to evaluate how training can impact their behaviors. Additional data is needed, she said, to determine if officers retain what they are taught and if civilians are benefiting from fairer policing.
As many as 1,000 additional people each year along the Eastern U.S. could die from complications due to higher levels of air pollution from increased air conditioning use, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in a new study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine.
Quoted: Dr. Catalina Toma, Associate Professor of Communication Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that according to her 2016 study on choice overload, there IS a thing as too many options. Here’s how she knows: participants in her study were each given the same six matches to choose from, but some were also given an additional 18 matches. It turns out, having more matches isn’t necessarily a positive.
Noted: Karen Strier knew something was wrong as soon as she entered the patch of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais where she has been studying primates for 35 years. Instead of the usual deafening roar of howler monkeys, some of the most common monkeys in the region, there was an “eerie silence, like when something is wrong,” says the University of Wisconsin–Madison anthropologist. “It was stunning.” The animals had been silenced by the yellow fever virus, which had wiped out most of the local population of 500 howler monkeys.
The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire is one of nine Wisconsin campuses teaming up with the state’s top economic development agency to lure recent graduates back to Wisconsin.
An obstacle that has kept dozens of students each year from finishing bachelor’s degrees in nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will be removed this fall through a new partnership with Milwaukee Area Technical College.
Noted: While there is a surplus of milk nationwide, Kentucky and the Southeast face a net deficit of 41 billion pounds of milk annually, according to Mark Stephenson, a University of Wisconsin dairy economist. That means that even as dairy farmers in these states struggle, grocery stores there are importing milk in refrigerated trucks from the Midwest.
Some welcome news came regarding the University of Wisconsin System late last week.
Rep. Jim Jordan, the powerful Republican congressman from Ohio, is being accused by former wrestlers he coached more than two decades ago at Ohio State University of failing to stop the team doctor from molesting them and other students.
Noted: One way of tackling this problem is to roll out more air conditioning systems, but according to Professor Jonathan Patz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this means trading one problem for another.
Noted: Colleges are beginning to see gains from programs that centralize advising across campuses, as in the California system and at Virginia Tech, or ones that better coordinate efforts among career counselors, financial-aid officers, and advisers, such as at the University of Wisconsin.
The Higher Learning Commission has approved University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross’ plan to merge the system’s two-year and four-year schools.
After the Higher Learning Commission approved a University of Wisconsin System restructuring proposal, Both the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and UW-Oshkosh welcome new campus communities.
UW-Barron County faculty and staff were caught off guard last fall when it was announced that the Rice Lake campus might become part of UW-Eau Claire.
Iva Ugrcic moved to the United States because, as a musician, she was frustrated with gender inequality on her home continent.
Noted: In 2005, she won a scholarship to study in Paris, earning a master’s in solo flute performance. She taught in Belgrade and Paris before moving to pursue a doctorate at the UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music on a fellowship in 2014. She’s performed internationally and regionally with orchestras and as a soloist, and with jazz, blues and alternative ensembles, including Madison’s Sound Out Loud collective. She’s recorded two CDs — one classical and one by a contemporary female composer from Romania — and won awards for her performances and leadership.
Noted: The University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison is taking things further. Press releases about animal research at other universities usually skate over sensitive information, but UW’s describe injecting monkeys with Ebola virus and performing heart surgery on pigs, for example, and its web pages detail its animal research program. UW also posts its USDA inspection reports online, even after the agency began scrubbing them from its own website in a controversial move last year (Science, 26 May 2017, p. 790).
