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Author: jplucas

Japanese Priests Collected Almost Seven Centuries of Climate Data

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Smithsonian

Almost every winter, after Lake Suwa in the Japanese Alps freezes, the male Shinto god Takeminakata crosses the ice to visit the female god Yasakatome at her shrine, causing a ridge known as the omiwatari to form. At least, that’s what the priests living on the shores of the lake believed. When the water froze, they would conduct a purification ritual and celebration in honor of the ridge, using its direction and starting location to forecast the harvest and rainfall for the coming year.

Yellow Fever’s Comeback Was Utterly Avoidable, But We Blew It

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Wired

Noted: The outbreak comes couldn’t have come at a worse time for vaccine makers: Only four places make the yellow fever vaccine, and the government-run facility in Dakar, Senegal is shutting down soon for renovations. “That is incredibly bad timing,” says Thomas Yuill, an emerging viruses researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison. And ramping up production elsewhere will be slow due to the intensive egg-based process for making the vaccine.

Heinen: The power of remembering

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Madison Magazine

One of the responsibilities of a writer is to remember. It is simply part of what we do. We collect stories, images, experiences and ideas, and we put them into words to, among other things, save them. I was reminded of this responsibility as I reflected on the loss, the deaths, of Jim Harrison and Jim Baughman, two people I respected and learned from in very different ways for very different reasons.

State official impressed with Reach Out & Read

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WHBY-AM, Fox Cities

Professor Dipesh Navsaria of UW-Madison is the state medical director for the program. He says there’s more to it for doctors and nurses than just handing over books. He says they have to give advice to parents, on how to interact with their kids in a loving and nurturing way.

Steinke slams UW-Madison faculty ‘hissy fit’

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Wisconsin Radio Network

A state legislative leader is critical of UW-Madison faculty members who want a vote of no confidence on UW System leadership. “This faculty group seems to be having a hissy fit over some pretty minor charges, which bring us in line with most of the nation’s universities, and do very little to chang the overall idea of tenure,” said Assembly Majority Leader, Representative Jim Steineke (R-Kaukauna)

How the Other Fifth Lives

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New York Times

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.

Plant Protein Behaves like a Prion

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Scientific American

Noted: Other plant scientists whom Nature contacted consider this idea to be extremely speculative. But, “it would be really cool to find that prion-like behaviour is playing a role in some normal aspect of plant development”, says Richard Amasino, a plant biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Wonkblog: The sinister, secret history of a food that everybody loves

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Washington Post

Noted: Increasingly, anthropologists say that the key to understanding the rise of civilization is to study political and religious institutions. Many now believe that societies took up farming not out of necessity but for cultural reasons — to please a king or to satisfy their religion. T. Douglas Price, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the origins of agriculture, argues that farming was a conscious choice made by societies with pre-existing levels of political sophistication.

Hyperloop and UW-Madison’s BadgerLoop Team

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WORT 89.9 FM

Hyperloop is the name of a potential transport system, with the idea of shooting people in pods through a tube at speeds of over 700 mph. Does this sound like a pipe dream straight out of science fiction? Not for Elon Musk. You know him – he’s the owner and innovator of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. But for Hyperloop, he invited over 100 teams from around the world to a competition to present their ideas on how to make Hyperloop work. Well, a team from UW-Madison made the cut.

The ‘nasty effect,’ and why Donald Trump supporters mistrust the media

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The Washington Post

People are less receptive to new information when they are offended. That was one of the key findings of a 2013 study by communication scientists at the University of Wisconsin. Researchers tested the effect of “uncivil” reader comments appended to online articles — remarks like, “You must be dumb if you think X.””The results were both surprising and disturbing,” study co-authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a summary published by the New York Times. “Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.”They called this phenomenon the “nasty effect.”

Some UW-Milwaukee Layoff Notices Expected Soon, Dean Says

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Media Milwaukee

The dean of UW-Milwaukee’s College of Letters and Science, Rodney Swain, says layoff notices for some contractual instructors could start going out in a month. Students should expect to see fewer course offerings, especially electives, as the university struggles to accommodate recent budget cuts, he said in an interview with Media Milwaukee.

Adults need to stop excusing bad behavior

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In February of 1940, students at small Young Harris College in Georgia staged an uprising. Among their demands of the Methodist institution were the right to hold school dances, to liberalize campus dating practices and for each student to be given an additional sandwich on the Sunday menu.

Wisconsin Madison Senate to Consider No-Confidence Resolution in System President, Board

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Inside Higher Education

The University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Faculty Senate will vote on a resolution expressing no confidence in UW System President Ray Cross and the system’s Board of Regents on May 2. Among numerous alleged missteps by Cross and the board, the resolution criticizes them for supporting a new systemwide layoff policy for tenured professors that many faculty members said fell short of providing real tenure protections in the event of program closures for budgetary and academic concerns. The board also approved changes to a Madison-specific policy that many professors said watered down tenure protections. The new policies stem from the Wisconsin Legislature’s elimination of tenure from state statute last year.

Yu: White Poets Want Chinese Culture Without Chinese People

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New Republic

It’s become a routine feature of the Asian American poet’s life: waking up to your inbox full of messages asking, “Have you seen this?” And it’s never good. A few months ago, it was the news that a white poet had published a poem in The Best American Poetry while masquerading under the name “Yi-Fen Chou.” This week, it was a poem in The New Yorker by Calvin Trillin titled “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?”, a bit of light verse ostensibly poking fun at foodies chasing the latest Chinese regional cuisine. But when I read the poem, I got a sick feeling—the feeling you get when you are the butt of a joke. Trillin’s poem comes out of a long tradition of white writers praising Chinese culture while ignoring Chinese people.

If you’re a distracted media multitasker, take a few deep breaths to get your focus back

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South China Morning Post

Do you text while watching TV, or listen to music while reading? Media multitasking is known to distract people not only when they are doing it, but when they aren’t consuming media – which is detrimental to performance at school or work, for maintaining relationships and for general well-being. A new study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States shows that a short meditation exercise involving counting one’s breath – inhaling and exhaling nine times – can sharpen one’s focus, and especially so for heavy media multitaskers.

Delayed gratification

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The Economist

So are the soaring costs of college keeping millennials from starting households of their own? Not according to a new paper from Jason Houle of Dartmouth and Lawrence Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Using longitudinal data on college-going Americans who were aged between 12 and 17 in 1997, the authors found that student-loan debtors were in fact more likely than non-debtors to own a house by the age of 30. But this was mostly because debtors tended to be older, employed, married and with children, and the debt was largely irrelevant.

A radical protest

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Isthmus

UW-Madison students of color are channeling their frustration over racism on campus into a multimedia visual and performing arts showcase at the Chazen Museum.

Scientists design fast, flexible transistor for wearables

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Engadget

A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have devised a cheap method to make impressively fast and flexible silicon-based transistors. Their technique involves using beams of electrons to create reusable molds of the patterns they want, as well as a very, very tiny knife to etch minuscule trenches into those patterns. The result is a small, bendy transistor — though not as small as a the Navy’s single-molecule design — that can transmit data wirelessly and has the potential to operate at a whopping 110 gigahertz. In other words, it’s capable of some extremely fast computing and could lead to wearables a lot more powerful than those available today.

Dealing with epidemics

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Isthmus

When the United States took the global lead in combating the world’s deadliest Ebola epidemic in 2014, the White House and public and private organizations sent out an all-call for assistance in equipping health care workers on the front lines with better weapons to battle the disease.

Spring Forward? Get Tips To Avoid Sore Muscles As Outdoor Activities Pick Up

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Noted: According to Jill Thein-Nissenbaum, an associate professor in the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a staff physical therapist for UW Athletics and Badger Sportsmedicine, said that even people who regularly exercise have this problem. She said she knows someone who was in great shape — playing indoor soccer three times a week during the winter — but on his first day back on the golf course, he was left feeling stiff and sore.

Jessica Weeks: How to Get Tenure (If You’re a Woman)

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Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy contributor Stephen Walt recently published an article on how to get tenure. His 10 very reasonable points are rooted in more than 30 years of experience at top departments in the field of political science. He offers practical suggestions in a number of areas, advising those pursuing tenure to publish and take advantage of networking opportunities. But his article overlooks a critical issue for about half of the junior faculty out there — the fact that they are women.