Author: jplucas

Noted: But all these factors are exacerbated by common forces, says Judith Kimble, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: competition for grants and positions, and a growing burden of bureaucracy that takes away from time spent doing and designing research. “Everyone is stretched thinner these days,” she says. And the cost extends beyond any particular research project. If graduate students train in labs where senior members have little time for their juniors, they may go on to establish their own labs without having a model of how training and mentoring should work. “They will go off and make it worse,” Kimble says.

Quoted: “It’s already too late,” says Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a critic of Chinese population policies. “China’s population is aging quickly and will start to shrink soon.”

Noted: Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, has explored how the top quintile is pulling away from the rest of society. In an essay published earlier this year, “Gates, Gaps, and Intergenerational Mobility: The Importance of an Even Start,” Smeeding finds that the gap between the average income of households with children in the top quintile and households with children in the middle quintile has grown, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $68,600 to $169,300 — that’s 147 percent.

Gloria Ladson-Billings posed a question to point out a troubling trend in education: “How can we develop culturally competent students if our teachers are culturally incompetent?” Ladson-Billings asked at her “Urban Education and Community Forum” lecture at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Noted: But recent damage isn’t the end of this year’s crop, according to Dr. Amaya Atucha, a University of Wisconsin-Extension fruit specialist and assistant professor of horticulture at UW-Madison. She said the impacts of the frost varied greatly across the state.

Noted: Temperatures dipped below freezing in much of those areas late Saturday and early Sunday, wiping out grape shoots that had emerged early due to a warm spring. The cold turned the water in the shoots cells to ice, killing the tissue, said Amaya Atucha, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant horticulture professor.

“To some extent we know more about some genetically engineered food than we do about other food,” committee member Dominique Brossard of UW-Madison said. “There are limits to what can be known about any food. That’s something we’re not used to hearing as consumers.”

Quoted: “There are situations in dense urban areas where space is highly limited that growing food with artificial lights, stacked vertically, makes sense, especially highly perishable products like sprouts or salad greens where there is an immediate market for them,” said Stephen J. Ventura, a professor of environmental studies and soil science at the University of Wisconsin.