Dr. Ronak Mehta combined her passion for medicine and her love for plush toys to create something she hopes will spread some joy to hospital patients going through a rough patch in their lives. Nerdbugs – a line of stuffed cartoon-like characters representing various organs of the human body, including the heart, gall bladder, neuron, uterus and breasts – are also designed to teach people about anatomy.
Quoted: But the tens of thousands of Native Americans who served in the military were largely unable to access the education and mortgage benefits guaranteed by the GI Bill. “Employees of [Veterans Affairs] quite frequently directed American Indian veterans to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to access relocation rather than provide American Indian veterans with the GI Bill benefits,” says Kasey Keeler, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A nine-member search and screen committee plans to meet in December to begin the nationwide search for the University of Wisconsin System’s eighth president.
University of Wisconsin officials have taken the next step in their effort to convince the NCAA to declare transfer Micah Potter immediately eligible.
Quoted: Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, warned that “every newsroom should be having discussions in advance about how they will handle all kinds of issues involving personal privacy and leaked information. This certainly isn’t the last time we’re going to see this kind of question.”
Noted: Bresciani was born on August 24, 1948 in New York City. He received his BA in Philosophy from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970, his law degree from the University of California Hastings College of the Law in 1975, and then went on to start a practice in San Francisco.
Noted: Larry Shapiro is a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Quoted: “The Taliesin influence is strong here,” notes Anna Andrzejewski, a professor of art history at UW-Madison. Andrzejewski sees Madison’s mid-century building boom as a unique laboratory for a regionally specific form of modernism under Frank Lloyd Wright’s long shadow. She calls this process “Wrightification.”
Quoted: “My first thought is: this is the Department of Corrections concerned about its image and concerned about controversy that comes up with placing sex offenders back into communities,” UW-Madison Journalism and Mass Communication Professor Robert Dreschel said. “They are using this as a strategy. They hope to make people more comfortable and give people more confidence that they really are keeping an eye out.”
Quoted: Dan Veroff is a demographic specialist for the Applied Population Lab (APL) at the UW-Madison and UW-Extension who supports planning and programming in counties and communities.
“Usually around this time of the decade, I’m going around doing presentations,” says Veroff. “We have an official role with the U.S. Census Bureau — it’s not funded but we do it for the public good, in partnership with the state.”
Quoted: Given the influence “fake news” had on the 2016 elections, UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner, thinks it could have similar consequences during the next election.
“I think people like to try what worked and try it again,” he said. “So I wouldn’t be surprised to see more coordinated efforts at disinformation from other countries seeking particular advantages. We only know what to prepare for based on what happened last time, so if people who provided disinformation have gotten better at it or have new strategies, media companies and people who use different kinds of media will have to learn how to react to them in real time.”
“I think it’s going to play a very similar, but equally or possibly even more pernicious relationship,” said Lewis Friedland, a Distinguished Achievement professor at UW-Madison. “After three years, with this term being actively propagated throughout the entire public sphere, now, many more people are expressing doubt about what’s true.”
Noted: The Nature Conservancy hired Alex Rosenflanz, a senior studying forest science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to get its drone work off the ground.
It was a lot of trial and error at first, Rosenflanz said, but he eventually wound up with raw images to produce video, still photos and highly detailed maps.
Quoted: “There’s an innate survival system in humans,” said retired University of Wisconsin communications professor Joanne Cantor. “It’s sort of like driving by a car wreck — you don’t want to see it, but you can’t help looking at it.
“Then there are others who like to play with those emotions and take risks,” said Cantor, who has spent 30 years researching the emotional reactions of adults and children to mass media, including fright.
The phone’s ringing, your email is pinging and there are only 10 precious minutes until your next meeting. Is it any wonder that you can’t come up with even a small coherent thought–much less a big creative idea?
Maybe it’s time for an intervention. That’s why I’d like you spend the next few moments listening to Lynda Barry. Last month Barry was one of 26 people chosen as a 2019 fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. As The New York Times reported, “Known colloquially as the ‘genius’ grant (to the annoyance of the foundation), the fellowship honors ‘extraordinary originality’ and comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $625,000, to be distributed over five years.”
Noted: Ray Cross, president of the University of Wisconsin system since 2014, plans to retire.
“How to pay for her version of ‘Medicare for all’ is complicating things for Warren at the moment, just as other aspects of her campaign appears to be thriving,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden. “In keeping with her identity as having a ‘plan’ for most everything, there is an extra incentive to nail the broad parameters of how her healthcare expansion will work.”
Quoted: John Orrock, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the virus, which is “relatively rare on San Clemente Island,” has been found only among the island’s deer mice — just one of several rodent species on the island.
“We’ve done limited rodent sampling on San Clemente Island, but historical data and our data suggest (Sin Nombre virus) is at a very low prevalence” on the island, Orrock said during a phone interview Wednesday. “On San Clemente, the mice that (potentially) have the virus aren’t the only mice on the island.”
Noted: Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, pieces together birth estimates from other available data, such as the number of childbearing women and school enrollment. Using this method, he has arrived at estimates of only around 10 million births last year and a belief that the population is dropping.
Quoted: Joe Lauer, agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he started advising farmers to start buying propane over the summer after wet weather caused major planting delays across the state.
“Whenever that occurs, we typically have some fairly wet corn,” Lauer said. “We just haven’t gotten a break this year in terms of the weather. It’s been really cold and wet through most of the season.”
Wisconsin lawmakers are working on a proposal that would allow college athletes to use their fame in amateur sports to make money.
Noted: The problem lies in a behavioral economics problem that differentiates this industry from solar power, electric cars and other profitable tech sectors, said Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Namely: There’s not really any reason to pay for CCS other than combating climate change. Turns out that saving the world, on its own, isn’t necessarily a good enough reason to save the world.
With his team’s season-opener barely more than a week away, Wisconsin men’s basketball coach Greg Gard made it clear UW officials will not stop fighting on behalf of Micah Potter.
Quoted: “This isn’t a one and done with 24GHz. We could be having similar discussions about a few other important bands,” says Jordan Gerth, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. That’s because satellites use other high-frequency bands to study things like clouds and air temperature.
Quoted: “It is always challenging for universities from countries such as the UK, US and Australia to open campuses overseas, particularly in countries with more authoritarian systems,” said Kris Olds, an expert in the globalisation of higher education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: To learn more, we sat down with slime mold aficionado Anne Pringle of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Check out the video above to learn everything you’ll ever need to know about the strangest blob on Earth.
Years ago as an undergraduate student, Tomiko Jones learned from a Navajo potter that there was no word for “art” in his native language, suggesting instead that “art is how you walk into the room. It is how you move through the world.”
Now an assistant professor of art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Jones plans to actualize that idea. She learned in June of the approval of a $75,000 grant from the UW–Madison School of Education to have a high-tech and environmentally sustainable mobile research and photography studio built by students in the College of Engineering’s Makerspace fabrication facility. While the grant won’t cover the cost of a vehicle to transport the studio, Jones says she will procure one and expects to be touring national parks with the studio in three to four years.
Noted: This past spring, she earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies. In the fall she will be taking a one-year position as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Davis. Next fall, she will be an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Geography and American Indian Studies Program.
A group of friends sees people drowning in a river. They immediately dive in to help — however, people continue to appear, drowning. One friend swims upstream to see what is pushing people into the river. This story is how we, as future physicians, are introduced to the social determinants of health.
University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross is leaving his job after five years overseeing public universities and colleges across the state — stepping away from a career in education spanning more than four decades.
Interview with clinical nutritionist Cassandra Vanderwall.
Quoted: “The theory here is that repetitive activity, performing these repetitive sport-specific tasks over and over again, will stress the tissue … and then eventually lead to a breakdown in that tissue overtime,” Dr. David Bell, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who led one of the studies, said in a press conference.
Noted: Some of the drop may be due to a stricter voter ID law, signed into law by former Republican governor Scott Walker, that researchers at the University of Wisconsin founddeterred about 17,000 eligible voters in Milwaukee County and Dane County, which contains Madison. And activists here warn the party has been too quick to take Milwaukee’s black voters for granted.
Noted: Balachandran, who earned a PhD in economics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin and enjoyed a distinguished academic career in India, married a Mexican woman and had a daughter. His younger sister Sarala, a retired obstetrician who lives outside the coastal city of Chennai, never married. The youngest, Mahalakshmi, an information scientist who worked for the government in Ontario, Canada, had an arranged marriage but bore no children.
Quoted: “I’m not trying to dumb it down too much here,” says Jeffrey Sindelar, professor of meat science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “but a truly uncured hot dog is just loose ground meat in a casing.”
Quoted: Tony Goldberg is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a veterinarian from the university of Wisconsin, Madison Veterinary School. “We’re at ‘ground zero.’ This, the Clinch River is the best studied example of this. But throughout the world there are muscle populations that are experiencing what we’re calling mass mortality events where you’ll walk out onto the river and you’ll see unusually large numbers of fresh dead mussels.”
Quoted: “One out of three bites you take you can thank an insect for,” said Christelle Guedot, assistant professor in the entomology department at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: The production increase comes after several months of declines from 2018 levels. Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he was surprised by the change.
“(There were) fewer cows than we’ve had in all of our earlier months of the year, so a continued decline there, but milk production per cow had a strong growth,” Stephenson said. “That usually doesn’t happen unless we have pretty good quality feed and a real strong incentive to produce milk.”
Noted: Since these programs often don’t pay much (or sometimes at all), many low-income students cannot afford to take an internship, said Matthew Hora, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Liz Binversie, agricultural educator for University of Wisconsin-Extension in Brown County, said she has heard farmers describe silage as like pickling vegetables.
“You’re kind of pickling the feed, right? You’re preserving it long term. And what’s doing that is the microbial population,” Binversie said.
Not long after Foxconn Technology Group announced plans to build a massive manufacturing facility in southeast Wisconsin, the tech giant began making promises to share its model for economic development across the entire state. But 18 months after purchasing its first building in downtown Milwaukee, there is little evidence that what Foxconn calls its innovation centers are moving forward.
Noted: The study, titled “Impact of Real Estate on Wisconsin’s Economy,” was authored by Mark Eppli of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graaskamp Center for Real Estate and uses wage data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the 2001 to 2017 period.
Quoted: Judi Bartfeld, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies food security and policy, said she doesn’t think society will ever be able to eliminate food insecurity, but we can ease it.
“As long as there are families who are struggling with poverty and limited resources, I think we’re going to have struggles with food insecurity. I think we can certainly reduce it if we focus on tackling the root causes,” she said.
Quoted: “This is an incredibly stressful time to be a teenager,” says pediatrician Megan Moreno, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health has announced a $1 million Community Impact Grant awarded to Centro Hispano of Dane County and its academic and community partners that will advance the quality of accessible linguistically and culturally competent services that support the mental health of the Latino community in Dane County.
Quoted: “The concern is that the flu season in Australia was very intense and a month and a half to two months earlier than usual,” said Jonathan Temte, associate dean for public health and community engagement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
Noted: UW Health in Madison does about 250 tests a week that use Tc-99m, said Scott Knishka, manager of nuclear pharmacy services at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Its Mo-99 comes from nuclear reactors in Europe.
Quoted: While some research points to lower numbers of people of color seeking treatment, Steve Quintana — professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — says those communities are showing up to appointments, not getting what they need and dropping out.
“The treatment that’s provided tends to be culturally loaded with white, middle-class culture and social norms, as well as people,” Quintana said.
Noted: McKinney, meanwhile, headed west days after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to, in a sense, take advantage of her situation. Having just earned her environmental science degree, her next moves were unclear. She knew her obligations were minimal. She didn’t immediately want to start her career — the general to-do list society has a way of pressuring people into was instead going to be put on hold.
UW-Madison’s new Hamel Music Center has been in the works for well over a decade and the project kicked into gear in 2009, when the university announced plans to knock down a college bar called Brothers and build much-needed practice and performance spaces for music students and faculty. The result, at the corner of University Avenue and Lake Street, comprises a 660-seat concert hall, a smaller 300-seat recital hall, and a rehearsal space specifically designed for large ensembles. It’s a big, glitzy undertaking completed entirely with private funds, but something had to give—performance spaces in the Humanities Building, like Morphy Hall and Mills Concert Hall, are well past their prime in terms of acoustics and creature comforts. That said, music students have criticized UW for not including more rehearsal space in the new building, The Badger Herald reported in September.
Oconomowoc native Steven Sievert moved out to Los Angeles in 2016 with dreams of making it big.
Along with him went about $80,000 of student loan debt from his time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Corey Pompey stood at the top of a red ladder as hundreds of University of Wisconsin band members, their hats turned backward to signify a victory, twirled, cavorted, danced, hopped and acted crazy.
Noted: The DPI provided two new analyses, one involving researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and one researcher from UW-Madison, that found positive results for schools using the current approach to teacher effectiveness. One found that schools following the practices were seeing student gains equal to several extra weeks a year of instruction in math and language arts.
Quoted: UW-Madison food science professor Bradley Bolling says it’s not true.
“A microwave is a perfectly find way to warm up food,” he said. Bolling says the microwave’s heating speed is actually better.
“The short amount of time that it takes to heat up the product can actually preserve a little bit of the nutrition.”
Poverty continues to dog Wisconsin despite a lower unemployment rate since the Great Recession.
Tim Smeeding is the former director of the UW-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty. He spoke Tuesday in Delavan about why poverty is still an issue a decade after the recession.
“I’m trying to give people who’ve got nothing at the end of the month something at the end of the month,” said Smeeding, who supports a higher minimum wage.
Quoted: Even though most Kurds are Muslims, the ethnic group includes a subset of Christians and other religious groups. Today, conservative and politically engaged evangelicals remember the critical role America’s Kurdish allies have played in the region since 2003, including helping in the fight against the Islamic State, according to Daniel Hummel, a historian of U.S. religion and diplomacy at a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Insofar as many evangelicals see the major confrontation of this age as American power vs. Islamic radicalism, the Kurds are a small but valiant ally,” Hummel said.
A new study finds Wisconsin ranks second in the United States in binge drinking.
The report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Population Health Institute looks at both federal and state health data.
Noted: In Wisconsin, for example, where the bill stalled in the state Senate, the University of Wisconsin board of regents nonetheless approved its own Goldwateresque policies that mandate that students who disrupt speakers twice be suspended and those who disrupt three times be expelled. The US House and Senate have also introduced similar bills, which would apply to all public universities and colleges.
Noted: The legislation applies to municipalities, Marquette University and University of Wisconsin campuses. Families of special agents employed by the Department of Revenue and State Fair Park police officers also are eligible for the continued benefits.
Noted: The state could focus on attracting more people from other states or countries. Our research has shown more people have moved away from Wisconsin than into the state every year for more than a decade. One option to try to reverse this trend would be for the University of Wisconsin System to continue to increase enrollment of non-resident students at its institutions, which it has already been doing in recent years.
Noted: She said she did not even know about the field until she enrolled in her first class through her medical technology undergraduate program — now called medical laboratory science — at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An enthusiastic teacher inspired her, she said.
