Seven and a half hours of boredom, plus 30 minutes of terror. That’s how Dr. Michael Spierer, a Madison-based psychologist, describes the typical police officer’s shift. Eight hours of paperwork and petty crime, with the knowledge that a high-pressure and dangerous turn of events may be just around the corner. Chronic stress is inherent to the job, he says.
Where are the professors? Nothing annoys academics more than pointing out how little time they actually spend teaching students.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are gathering opinions about drones and other technologies available to journalists, and The Post-Crescent will host two focus groups in October.
Quoted: That discussion is particularly important, says Alta Charo, who studies law and ethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Although scientists and ethicists tend to focus on dealing with serious genetic disorders, the public conversation often wanders into murkier territory, such as augmentation of intelligence. “The laypress tends to do all of these covers about designer babies,” she says. “They tend to focus on the things that are the least likely to be genetically determined, but capture our imaginations the most.”
Quoted: “Research shows a lot of community college students who don’t repay loans only enrolled in about a semester of courses,” said Nicholas Hillman, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor who studies student loan debt. “Dropping out with no degree and debt is a problem. The typology of the student borrowing a whole lot ? say to go to medical school – is not as big of a policy problem as the students who are borrowing because they have no other options. I worry about the small borrowers.”
Quoted: “The strong consensus among economists is that tearing up trade deals, applying high tariffs or other anti-trade measures will not ‘bring back jobs’ — at least, not in large numbers, and not necessarily the kinds of jobs that Americans want, or that will contribute to a more productive and dynamic economy,” Ian Coxhead, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me.
In the fast-changing world of science and technology, if you’re not innovating, you’re falling behind. UW System is No. 13.
The arrangement with Pewaukee-based ProHealth Care means UW Health will establish a Milwaukee-area connection that potentially will compete with the area’s two existing transplant programs at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee and Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa.
There are a lot of reasons I want—no, I need—my Wisconsin Badgers to defeat the No. 4 Michigan Wolverines in football Saturday. The most obvious reason is that I graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, unequivocally regarded as the planet’s finest institution of higher learning and bratwurst (sorry, you Harvard/Stanford losers). A victory in Ann Arbor would make Wisconsin a perfect 5-0, and two weeks later, in Madison, when they crush Ohio State and its tetchy coach, Urban Meyer, the Badgers will have a clear track to a spot in college football’s daffy new playoff system.
Quoted: “The world of intellectual property rights, internationally, it’s a very precarious world,” says John Nimis, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Piracy is rampant everywhere, and there’s a lot of doomsday talk of the end of the recording industry as we know it. But, if there is a ‘music industry apocalypse,’ Congolese musicians are going to be just fine.”
Noted: One of these experts is Don Waller, a UW-Madison professor of botany and environmental studies. “This Driftless Area Project and the transmission corridor is a new approach,” Waller says. “Instead of just focusing on one issue, we are looking at the range of threats now and in the future for a particular region and how those threats can be addressed in an effective and collaborative way.”
David Thomas is looking over his life’s work at the Spooner Agricultural Research Station in northern Wisconsin. After 26 years with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the professor of sheep genetics and management is retiring and the research station’s dairy sheep program is going along with him.
The University of Minnesota’s Office of Technology Commercialization, which has increased the number of businesses born from university research, announced Tuesday a partnership with Wisconsin-based “Gener8tor” the start-up business accelerator.
Noted: Furthermore, repeating a false claim can make it more believable, so real-time fact checks can mitigate that by following false statements with refutations, as Lucas Graves, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of a new book about the rise of fact checking, has said.
Noted: Her view is supported by R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. This technique, as Charo explained, has been closely examined by both the British regulatory authorities and the American National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences.
Stanford University tops the inaugural Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, thanks to its deep pockets, intellectually engaged students and solid student outcomes. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University round out the top three. (Subscription required.)
University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kathy Cramer also found discontent among Wisconsin’s mostly white, rural residents while researching her 2016 book, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.”
Quoted: While Mr. Trump is an unusual candidate, he is not a total departure, said Lucas Graves, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has written a book on political fact checking.
Noted: The University of Wisconsin has endured budget cuts for 10 of the past 12 years, and those cuts have taken their toll, says Rebecca M. Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which ranks 15th among public universities. The liberal-arts program in particular has endured faculty losses, and the school has been unable to invest in high-demand programs like computer science, engineering and nursing, she says. (Subscription required.)
Noted: Those included a UW-Madison police captain who “ran the registration plate of a woman that he thought might be interested in him” and left a card on her car, according to an email sent by a department official to the state. The officer was suspended, the email said.
UW-Madison is eyeing a tuition hike for its students who are from out of the state, but UW-Eau Claire is continuing to keep its price tag the same for those from across the border.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison will limit student workers to a weekly maximum of 29 hours in order to comply with an Affordable Care Act mandate, according to The Capital Times.
University of Wisconsin Colleges are seeing a 12.5 percent decrease in total enrollment this fall. As of Sept. 19, the colleges combined have 10,528 students enrolled. Last fall, that number was 12,044.
OSHKOSH – More than 125 people filed into the Webster Stanley Middle School auditorium Monday night looking for answers regarding the future of public education in Oshkosh and throughout the state.
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinions,” the sociologist and politico Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “but not to his own facts.” He may have been improving upon a similar if less trenchant remark (“ …but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts”) attributed to the financier Bernard Baruch.
Governor Scott Walker says the University of Wisconsin Credit Union’s decision to expand its membership criteria could help more state residents refinance their student loan debt.
He’s played concert halls around the globe, but today, Christopher Taylor, UW-Madison’s superstar pianist, is like a kid who’s unwrapping a new toy.
Noted: As it turns out, fact-checking experts tend to agree with Clinton’s campaign on this one: To have the highest impact, moderators should fact-check the debates live, Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison and author of Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism, tells me.
“You’re making the face,” said a client to Michelle Somes-Booher, business consultant and director of the Wisconsin Small Business Development Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. According to Somes-Booher, it’s the tough love face, the one she puts on when she says something that a client doesn’t want to hear.
With UW-Madison at its epicenter, the UW System appears to be sinking deeper into the intellectual morass known as political correctness. UW-Madison has unveiled a pilot program targeting 1,000 students devoted to improving race relations, largely in response to racial incidents on campus last year. If deemed successful, this program is likely to grow and probably move to other campuses.
As campuses do more to combat discrimination, students and watchdogs are pushing back with free speech concerns.
There’s always a chance Max Loebl won’t see some of his Lawrence University classmates return when they leave for the summer.
Cris Custer is a proud University of Wisconsin graduate, but also a dedicated nurse practitioner at Mile Bluff Clinic.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kathy Cramer also found discontent among Wisconsin’s mostly white, rural residents while researching her 2016 book, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.”
The United States has one big advantage where it still towers over the rest: its world-beating universities. The days of U.S. supremacy in manufacturing are gone, although we still are competitive in certain areas connected to our research universities. Yet when the world is “free to choose,” to paraphrase the late iconic conservative University of Chicago economist, they “choose” the U.S. for education and research.
Daniel O. Bernstine, who was president of Portland State University during its period of exponential growth in the early 2000s, died last week. He was 69. Bernstine was dean of the UW Law School in the 1990s.
Droughts, floods and heat waves are becoming more common in various parts of the world thanks to climate change. As part of our weeklong look at climate change, Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about the public health impacts of global warming.
Crowded into a room in the University of Wisconsin’s palliative care ward, a family held vigil over their elderly relative as doctors said she had just hours to live.
Everyone loves the idea of solar energy, but the reality is that it’s not always efficient enough for our needs.
Noted: This was reiterated by Professor Cameron Currie of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, one of the scientists involved in the ant research.“Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem,” he said last week. “However, pinpointing new antibiotics using the standard technique of sampling soil for bacteria is tricky. On average, only one in a million strains proves promising. By contrast, we have uncovered a promising strain of bacteria for every 15 strains we have sampled from an ant’s nest.”
Many college courses use online materials. But until this fall, the University of Wisconsin-Madison didn’t have an entire academic program that relied only on computers instead of paper.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison student government is asking for the new location for a planned Amazon pickup point in the Red Gym to be moved. Late last month, the UW System Board of Regents approved an agreement allowing students to have items shipped to the pickup point instead of their apartments.
Quoted: The public letter was daring, said Fuxian Yi, a Chinese medical scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a book on Chinese demographics, “Big Country, Empty Nest.”
Most members of the educated public probably think of America’s greatest universities in terms of undergraduate and professional education—in terms of teaching and the transmission of knowledge rather than the creation of new knowledge. This point of view is completely understandable. They are concerned about the education of their children and grandchildren or relate to their own educational experience.
APPLETON – Cameron Murdoch graduated from Lawrence University in June with a degree in music and about $21,000 in debt.
More than a century ago, Wisconsin’s education leaders decided the boundaries of the university should reach the boundaries of the state – and beyond. Today, the Wisconsin Idea is still making Badger State life better.
As Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature consider the request for $42.5 million in new state funds for the University of Wisconsin System in the 2017-19 biennial budget, they should not only accept this proposal but also embrace the teaching and learning functions of Wisconsin’s colleges and universities as the centerpiece of the state’s workforce development strategy.
Noted: Dr. Michael Caldwell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology lecturer who authored that article, found that the recidivism rate among juvenile sex offenders has dropped by 73 percent since 1980. The exact cause of that drop is hard to pinpoint, but it appears that better treatment and interventions with offenders at earlier ages — as opposed to prison sentences — are factors, he said.
Noted: “Right now the bigger states are more sway-able,” said Ken Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But I caution to say that most of the rules that govern political campaigns have this year been broken.”
Noted: In a statement, the shelter said 137 dogs were cleared of distemper after all tests came back negative from the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine. In total, 99 dogs were euthanized during the quarantine period after the shelter was contaminated by a dog at the end of August. Those reasons included: confirmed distemper, suspected, behavior, other.
Winner: Anne Basting, 51, a professor of theater at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, recalled that when she wanted to write her doctoral dissertation about the social performance of aging, her advisers tried to talk her out of it. (Basting is a 1990 graduate of UW-Madison.)
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin have found a way to coax peripheral nerve cells into repairing damaged axons. Peripheral cells extend outside the central nervous system into the arms and legs and are responsible for sensation. They contain long fibers known as axons that transmit impulses from the brain. They can be damaged in diseases such as diabetes, causing pain.
A hypothesis: Go to any two-bit campaign rally in Louisiana, and before there’s any politicking, I bet you’ll hear this: How ‘bout ‘dem Tigers?
While Michigan football fans eagerly await a showdown against No. 11 Wisconsin at Michigan Stadium on Oct. 1, another face-off between the two storied universities is taking place this month.
Quoted: “This wholesale loss is unusual,” study researcher Sean Carroll, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said in a statement. “It’s not just run-of-the-mill, ordinary variation.”
Satellites observe our planet’s weather from space — observations that are the backbone of weather forecasts. Without them, forecasters would not be able to monitor hurricanes, thunderstorms or blizzards. If we are to improve our weather forecasts, we must support our nation’s satellite programs. And there are two bills in Congress that intend to do just that.
A team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Aarhus University in Demark say they have an idea of where climate change will push more species together.
Noted: Mark Craven, a professor of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has used the previous iteration of Poon’s work for research on genes potentially related to breast cancers that are resistant to the most common types of treatments, called triple-negative breast cancer.
Carol May is being recognized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her contributions to health care in Sauk County. The recognition is part of the university’s new ad campaign intended to celebrate the work of Badger alumni across the state.
FORT YATES, N.D. — Darnell “DJ” Kills Small Jr. knows he’s going to play basketball someday.
