Author: jplucas

UW-Madison professor Janet Hyde discusses her new paper on gender as it relates to math. (Video.)

The notion that boys are better than girls at math simply doesn’t add up, according to a study published today in the journal Science.

An analysis of standardized test scores from more than 7.2 million students in grades 2 through 11 found no difference in math scores for girls and boys, contradicting the pervasive belief that most women aren’t hard-wired for careers in science and technology.

Given the grim economic climate and even grimmer forecasts for the future, itâ??s not hard to predict that the U.S. will lose its status as the worldâ??s preeminent superpower. But will we fall behind in science as well? J. Rogers Hollingsworth, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks so. He and a group of historians and sociologists think that the countryâ??s diminishing lead over other nations in science investment and research output mirrors the downfall of preceding science juggernauts like France, Germany and Britain. History, they say, is primed to repeat itself.

Girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests, but boys more often excelled or failed, researchers reported.

The fresh research adds to the debate about gender difference in aptitude for mathematics, including efforts to explain the relative scarcity of women among professors of science, math and engineering.

In the 1970s and 1980s, studies regularly found that high- school boys tended to outperform girls. But a number of recent studies have found little difference.

The latest study, in this week’s journal Science, examined scores from seven million students who took statewide mathematics tests from grades two through 11 in 10 states between 2005 and 2007.

The researchers, from the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley, didn’t find a significant overall difference between girls’ and boys’ scores. But the study also found that boys’ scores were more variable than those of girls. More boys scored extremely well — or extremely poorly — than girls, who were more likely to earn scores closer to the average for all students.

A new report by researchers at University of Wisconsin and University of California, Berkeley, aims to overturn the long-held belief that girls aren’t as good at math as boys. According to new data, the researchers say, that gender gap has become a myth â?? a finding they hope will help shift the very real gender gap in math, science and technology professions, which are currently dominated by men.

Fifteen years ago, the gender gap was an issue that filled the headlines: By high school, girls were falling 50 points behind boys on the math section of the SAT, the leading college-entrance exam.
A new study rejects the notion that boys are better than girls in math.

But a new study, published in this week’s edition of the journal Science, shows the gap has disappeared. Researchers looked at standardized test scores of more than 7 million students, ranging from the second grade to high school junior. Whatever gender differences there once existed between girls and boys in terms of math performance are gone.

“The differences are now trivial,” said Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin, who led the research.

WASHINGTON — Sixteen years after Barbie dolls declared, “Math class is tough!” girls are proving that when it comes to math they are just as tough as boys.

In the largest study of its kind, girls measured up to boys in every grade, from second through 11th. The research was released Thursday in the journal Science.

Parents and teachers persist in thinking boys are simply better at math, said Janet Hyde, the University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who led the study. And girls who grow up believing it wind up avoiding harder math classes.

Over the last three weeks, every bat in Major League Baseball that has shattered, chipped, cracked or smashed during a game has been collected so that it can be analyzed, part of a continuing heightened effort to deal with the safety concerns caused by the proliferation of broken bats.

In addition, Major League Baseball has also enlisted some eclectic new consultants â?? a wood research institute at the University of Wisconsin and a statistician at Harvard â?? as it tries to develop a better understanding of why so many bats are breaking and what can be done about it.

Major League Baseball has now worked out a consulting agreement with Forest Products Laboratory, an institute at the University of Wisconsin that was established nearly a century ago by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche Holdings is continuing its Madison buying spree by acquiring Madison-based Mirus Bio for $125 million. Mirus, a privately held company, develops therapies based on nucleic acids.

Mirus was established in 1995 based on the gene therapy work of UW-Madison scientists who were the first to show that native DNA can be directly taken up by muscles and other tissues. This provides a new way to deliver nucleic acid-type therapies. Building on this pioneering research, Mirus now markets novel research reagents and is developing gene therapy tools.

They were the most successful animals on the planet â?? and the most ferocious. They ruled the world for 100 million years. Some grew to a gigantic size: stegosaurus, diplodocus, Tyrannosaurus rex. Others became fearsome underwater predators, like icthyosaurus and plesiosaurus, while pteradons, with their vast wing-spans, dominated the skies. And then they died and left the way clear for shrew-like mammals to evolve into lions, lemurs and lemmings.

The debate about what killed the dinosaurs has been equally fearsome. Depending on who you believe, it was an asteroid impact, a supervolcano, or a gamma ray. They were starved, poisoned, frozen, boiled, drowned, dried, asphyxiated, irradiated or all of the above. “A colleague of mine said, ‘Paleontologists are responsible for the third law of mass extinctions: for every extinction, there’s an equal and opposite mechanism,'” says Shanan Peters, a professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A new UW study looks into reasons why kids smoke.

The purpose of the study was to look at psychosocial risk factors associated with adolescent smoking in Wisconsin. Karen Palmersheim, UW Carbone Cancer Center, Program Director of the Tobacco Surveillance and Evaluation Program, says they found a number of factors influencing youth smoking.

“Kids who have one or more parents who smoke are twice as likely to be smokers compared to students who do not have a parent who smokes. Another strong factor was having a greater number of close friends that smoke.”

A new Web site is under construction to be a Wisconsin geologic Wikipedia of sorts, with user-generated content about rock exposures, fossils, sinkholes and more across the state.
Called the Wisconsin Geologic Record, the site is being created by geologists at UW-Richland, UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey.
“It’s the first of its kind anywhere as far as we know, in that it’s a community-based geologic Web site that really tries to foster collaboration between professionals, students and the public,” said Patrick McLaughlin, a UW-Extension geologist with the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey.

Given UW-Madison’s standing as a top public research university, and the expertise at facilities like the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Marshfield Clinic, Doyle has maintained that Wisconsin is well positioned to be a player in biotechnology, including embryonic stem cell research. With its agriculture and forests, he believes the state is ideally suited to produce the next generation of alterative energy, cellulosic ethanol. The strategy is to build pillars of the state’s economy on improving people’s health and providing clean energy.