Noted: Soloway went on to attend Lane Tech College Prep, then University of Wisconsin-Madison. They worked as a production assistant, while creating plays with their sister Faith for Chicago’s Annoyance Theatre. Moving to Los Angeles, Soloway was soon writing for “The Steve Harvey Show,” “Six Feet Under” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Noted: A 2006 University of Wisconsin study revealed that viewers of local news in the Midwest got 2.5 times more information about local elections from paid advertisements than from local news. A 2004 study of 11 media markets by USC Annenberg found that only 8 percent of the 4,333 broadcasts during the month before the election had stories that even mentioned local races. The new shows featured eight times more coverage on accidental injuries than on local races.
Quoted: Even glimmers of good news come these days with a sobering twist. Milk prices have rebounded a little, but partly because enough farmers have quit that it has reduced milk production, said Matt Lippert, a University of Wisconsin-Extension agricultural agent in Wood County.
“Some of them are supportive of the president and say, ‘We just have to be patient. We’ve not been (treated) fair and the president is going to fix it.’ Then some of them are like, ‘We’ve given him enough time already.’ And there are others who are like, ‘No this wasn’t the way ever to do it.’ But they all uniformly think that loss of markets and the tariff thing is hurting them.”
Noted: Focusing on increasing shareholder value has not benefited society overall, said Joel Rogers, director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The theory itself was wrong,” said Rogers, who also is a professor of law, political science, public affairs and sociology.
“Markets drive firms to be short-sighted and make insufficient investments in their workers and communities,” he added. “We know that. Unfettered markets are not the recipe for a happy society. That was the great Freidman lie.”
Quoted: “I would not be surprised at all if I woke up tomorrow to hear that the measles outbreak had reached Wisconsin. Not surprised at all,” said Malia Jones, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Applied Population Laboratory.
“I would say that if a child was given the facts themselves and told what these diseases would be like to go through, they would choose to be given something that would not make them have to go through that disease,” said James H. Conway, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Another BIG announcement from the Wisconsin Leadership Summit: Madison Common Council president Shiva Bidar will moderate the panel titled “Together We Stand: Building Community Across Ethnic Lines.”
In her role as the first Chief Diversity Officer for UW Health, Shiva provides vision, coordination and strategic leadership for the design and implementation of UW Health’s initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Noted: Natasha Oladokun is a poet and essayist. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Jackson Center for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Harvard Review Online, Pleiades, Kenyon Review Online and elsewhere. She is associate poetry editor at story South, and is the inaugural First Wave Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “Europe, the United Nations and other U.S. allies opposed the invasion and annexation,” said Yoshiko Herrera, a University of Wisconsin political scientist. “It wasn’t just Obama who opposed it.”
Following public outcry, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has removed an advertisement featuring an African American woman with crime-scene tape wrapped around her neck.
Noted: Sure, sometimes people do get in the way. They’re curious. What’s this thing for, anyway? They’ll follow the robots to see what they do or tap their buttons to see what happens. “People want to explore them, and they don’t know how to do that,” says Bilge Mutlu, who runs the University of Wisconsin’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Rarely do the interventions cause damage.
Quoted: “One of the biggest things that impressed me about this paper was the cleverness of that circuit design,” says Michael Arnold, a materials scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison not involved in the work.
Our guests are Stan Temple, professor emeritus of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Leah Horowitz, professor of civil society and community studies in the School of Human Ecology at UW–Madison.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is teaming up to help one of the state’s smallest counties.
An information session was held in Durand for people to learn more about the “UniverCity Year” program, which is three-year partnership between UW- Madison and Pepin County.
Noted: Chijioke Agwoeme has been in the program for three years. He returns to the University of Wisconsin-Madison with three internships under his belt as a junior. The experiences he has gained are invaluable, he said.
“I am really a life learner. I am not really a good school learner. I really like talking to people, learning from their mistakes, learning from their experiences. That is the way I learn best. Getting the chance to have internships has really been a big boost for me,” said Agwoeme.
Quoted: “Each institution determines minimum full-time enrollment requirements. This is what is also known as a full course load requirement for international students,” says Roopa Rawjee, international student services director and assistant dean of students at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
A preternatural silence has surrounded the departure of one of the highest paid executives on the UW-Madison campus. It’s one more sign of the big changes rocking the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, UW’s independent patenting and licensing operation.
A construction worker is taking off the bolts that secure “Nails’ Tales” to its pedestal. The surgical unmounting of the 48-foot obelisk has begun. The crane in the parking lot behind it roars to life; it’s cold metal jib moves into position. Today, Aug. 21, is the last morning the work by renowned sculptor Donald Lipski will cast its controversial shadow outside Camp Randall Stadium along Regent Street.
Quoted: “When I grew up, my mom poured a glass of milk at every meal and you were expected to drink it,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at UW-Madison. “My mother would say, ‘Drink your milk because it is good for you,’ and scientists said ‘It’s good for you’ and you believed them.”
Noted: An innovation of a different sort happened in 1890 when Stephen M. Babcock perfected the first reliable butterfat-content milk test, providing an easy way for creameries and farmers to check milk quality.
Noted: Sam was the youngest of three children raised by Charles and Laura Waisbren. He attended Milwaukee Jewish Day School, Nicolet High School and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then moved to New York City, where he worked in software sales for CB Insights.
Lawyers for the two women who accused fellow University of Wisconsin-Madison student Quintez Cephus of sexual assault — charges of which he was acquitted by a jury — are calling on the university to further explain its decision to reinstate Cephus.
Noted: “I really surprised myself with each obstacle I made,” said Amann, a 2014 Arrowhead High School graduate and 2018 alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “When I found out I was the top female from city finals, I was just so excited to see what I could do at the next stage.”
Noted: Keith A. Findley, Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, University of Wisconsin Law School
Easiest reforms:
If forensic science wants to claim the mantle of “science,” it must follow fundamental scientific principles, like double-blind testing. Systems should be created to at least shield analysts from domain-irrelevant but contextually biasing information. This can be complicated at times, but it can be done without disclosing the vast array of information that analysts routinely receive today. Proper case management and intake systems can ensure that analysts receive only the information they need, and only when they need it.
Noted: As political scientist and University of Wisconsin professor David Canon points out, athletes garner more media coverage than traditional candidates, which is especially advantageous when running against an incumbent, according to the Dallas Morning News. Typically incumbents dominate the media coverage, as one July 2004 study concluded, so a background in professional athletics can be a major boost for a challenger.
According to new research from Ohio State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, racial and ethnic gaps in criminal sentencing have declined significantly since the mid-1990s.
Quoted: Despite the publicity of CTE, doctors cannot predict whether a child will have it later on, says Julie Stamm, Ph.D., LAT, ATC, who researched the issue at the Boston University CTE Center. “We do not understand why one person gets it and the other does not get it,” adds Dr. Stamm, also a clinical assistant professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: A coastal economic specialist, Harrison has worked at other universities that have paid parental leave programs, including The Ohio State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Think back to what you still remember from science class. No, there’s no need to strain your brain recalling the particulars of cellular mitosis or the periodic table. Instead, consider the idea that spanned any science class from biology to physics: the scientific method, the five-step process for analyzing problems, collecting data and coming to a well-supported conclusion.
But what if the scientific method is actually inaccurate—or at best reductive? What if spending so much time on this framework is giving students the wrong idea about how rigorous work is done by scientists?
That’s the unusual hypothesis being made by John Rudolph, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “How We Teach Science: What’s Changed, and Why It Matters.”
Noted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison, said while Duffy’s district heavily leans Republican, it’s not impossible for Democrats to win it in a special election.
He said before the 2011 map making that redrew the district in Republicans’ favor, former President Barack Obama won the district by 13 points in 2008 when he won Wisconsin by 14 points. In 2012 — after the new maps were drawn — Obama lost the district by 3 points, Burden said.
Deborah Blum is a science writer and the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. Prior to that, she was a professor of journalism at UW–Madison from 1997 to 2015. She is the author of many books, including The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (Penguin, 2010) and The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2018).
Kaptur was born in Toledo in 1946, the granddaughter of Polish immigrants. Her father ran the family grocery store and her mother worked for auto-parts maker Champion Spark Plug, a company that helped build Toledo but dissolved its last operations there in 2010. The first person in her family to go to college, Kaptur graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1968 and returned to Toledo to work in city planning.
In 1926, the University of Wisconsin published a brochure advertising its new men’s dormitories. “Here … the man from the well-to-do home and the man who tends furnaces to buy his text-books will learn respect for each other across a common table,” the booklet read, “and the son of banker and farmer will find mutual understanding, of a winter’s evening, in give and take to the crackling of logs in a wide fireplace.”
Noted: In 2010 and 2011, the labs of Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands separately announced that they had succeeded in making the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus more transmissible through genetic engineering. Since it first spilled over from poultry to human beings in Hong Kong in 1997, H5N1 has infected and killed hundreds of people in sporadic outbreaks, mostly in Asia. The virus has a roughly 60 percent fatality rate among confirmed cases, but fortunately, H5N1 almost never spreads from person to person. Nearly every infection is due to close contact with infected poultry.
Brenda Mayrack never intended to become an unclaimed-property czar. Even among legal specialties, the field is particularly obscure: During law school at the University of Wisconsin, she remembers hearing only a 10-minute lecture introducing the topic at the end of her trusts-and-estates class. But as the director of Delaware’s unclaimed-property office, Mayrack now oversees a fund of $540 million a year, forgotten by people from Paris to San Francisco and then held temporarily by the state.
Quoted: If a new sixth-grader has no one to sit with in the lunchroom one day or bombs a test, “they may start to question whether they fit in socially or can succeed academically,” notes Geoffrey Borman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Borman and Rozek conducted research to see whether it was possible to bolster kids’ sense of belonging by underscoring that all students have difficulty at the start of middle school but eventually feel better.
Quoted: “Optimism is one important psychological dimension that has emerged as showing some really interesting associations with health,” said neuroscientist Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the district tends to favor Republicans.
“It really is a combination of the drawing of the district lines in a way that was intentional to favor Duffy and Republicans who were in charge of that process, but also just really migration of that district in the Republican direction,” he said.
Noted: Régner suggests that a “habit-breaking intervention,” such as that described by the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Patricia Devine and colleagues, might help to facilitate gender equity at academic institutions. In these sessions, participants are made aware of their implicit biases and learn strategies to counter them. This year, the CNRS began offering training sessions on gender stereotypes to evaluation committee members and each committee has appointed a reference person in charge of gender equality issues. Raymond tells The Scientist this self-evaluation and corrective action should take place at all academic institutions, but may be a long time coming.
New pencils, notebooks and backpacks may be on the checklist as the summer winds down and kids gear up for a new school year, but Dr. Shilagh Mirgain says it’s also an important time of year to check in with kids on how they’re feeling about heading back to school.
“We spend a lot of time preparing our kids for school by buying them school supplies or back-to-school clothes, but our families should equally spend time preparing kids mentally for the start of the school year and pre-school jitters and anxiety,” said Mirgain, a clinical psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: “Deforestation was a well-known problem in the classical world,” said Dr. Paul Robbins, Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “For example, the historian Strabo wrote in the 1st century B.C.E. that the lowland areas of the island of Cyprus were once covered with forests that prevented cultivation, but these had all given way to farming and other activities.”
Noted: A study published by researchers at the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at fiber optic cables in low-lying regions, and how they’d hold up as sea levels start to rise. Based on the prediction that ocean levels would rise by a foot in the next 15 years, they said at least 6,400 km of fiber optic cable in just the US would be permanently submerged, affecting network connections from New York to New Mexico. Which means your precious Instagram scrolling hours could very well have a deadline.
Quoted: “We know that most cities on average are warmer than rural areas. Trees tend to humidify the air,” said Ankur Desai, UW professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.
Prof. Steve Wright talks about the Wisconsin Innocence Project.
“When you meet the exonerees…someone who lost 20 yrs like Robert Lee Stinson, whose life is forever changed & destabilized…we all should work hard to ensure wrongful convictions don’t happen”
Quoted: Throughout the country, 10-year storms, which have a 1 in 10 chance of happening in any given year, are occurring about 40% more often than in the 1950s, said Daniel Wright, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the eastern half of the U.S., 100-year storms are happening 85% more often.
It’s very clear that climate change is increasing the number of storms we’re seeing, Wright said. “If we continue to ignore these problems, the cost of ignoring these problems is going to increase as the planet continues to warm.”
Another football season is upon us and the Wisconsin Badgers will open this week in a stadium that sports hand rails for the fans in the seats.
Each year the sunburst chairs crop up on UW Madison’s Memorial Union Terrace to add a pop of color after a long winter.
80 years ago today, the Wizard of Oz premiered, cementing its place in cinematic history. But did you know a Watertown native and UW-Madison grad played a pivotal role in that movie?
A Madison company that makes software approved to gauge treatment response in breast and prostate cancer patients plans to submit a second product, for blood cancers, for approval by early next year.
AIQ Solutions, which is based on technology developed at UW Carbone Cancer Center, raised $3.2 million in equity financing, the company announced this month. Capital Midwest Fund led the round, which also involved Rock River Capital Partners, 30Ventures and Wisconsin Investment Partners.
Noted: Other elements of the campaign include specific outreach to University of Wisconsin System schools alumni and military veterans. Those initiatives, which include print advertising in alumni magazines and face-to-face outreach at military bases, are also expected to continue.
Pete Lien of Edgerton is this week’s You Toon winner. His caption about Madison removing a controversial sculpture and being named the top college town in America beat out more than 50 entries.
Noted: Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin are professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.
Noted: Spencer Black served for 26 years in the state Legislature. He was chair of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee and the Assembly Democratic leader. Since leaving the Legislature, Black has been vice president for conservation for the national Sierra Club and adjunct professor of planning at UW-Madison.
The meeting was intended to be brief — a hello, a handshake, a group photo, some words of encouragement — but Collin Wilder lingered after others had left.
There was something about Aubrey Wayman that made Wilder, in the early stages of his first season with the University of Wisconsin football program after transferring from Houston, want to stick around a little longer.
It’s a common misconception that immigrants to the United States automatically gain citizenship status when they marry a U.S. citizen, said Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the UW Law School. Barbato said the process to citizenship even after marriage is time-consuming, expensive and complicated.
“The process of obtaining (lawful permanent residence) is often expensive, costing thousands of dollars in government and attorney fees, is stressful on the entire family, and is a demanding process for many couples who are still in the first stages of their marriage, all while they are simply attempting to build their lives in the U.S.,” Barbato said.
Noted: Madison’s public high schools do not have master plans, while UW-Madison does. In its federal complaint, Edgewood lists 11 facilities that it says UW-Madison uses for activities not specified in its master plan.
The facilities listed include the Near West Fields, the Near East Fields, the Natatorium and the Goodman Softball Complex, which the complaint maintains are all used for competitions without that use being specified in UW’s master plan.
Noted: In more recent years, the house, at 130 E. Gilman St. in Madison’s Mansion Hill District, was home to UW-Madison students in the Knapp Memorial Graduate program.
The house — where guest rooms are named after Bull, Kohler, La Follette, Thorp and others connected to the property over the years — was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and a year later was designated as a city landmark. It was placed on the State Register of Historic Places in 1989. Students left the Knapp House in 2012 and since then the house, just up the hill from the UW Lifesaving Station, had been empty.
Noted: Waisbren graduated from UW-Madison in 2012. He was working as an account executive at CB Insights, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Noted: Friday’s announcement included the creation of a “PFAS Coordinating Council” that officials say will allow the DNR to target high-priority problem areas and better collaborate with other agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection and the University of Wisconsin System.
Noted: Clark was one of seven astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. She died when the spacecraft disintegrated on re-entry just 16 minutes before it was due to land in Florida on Feb. 1, 2003. Clark was 41.
Clark grew up in Racine, graduating from Horlick High School in 1979 before heading to Madison, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1983 at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in medicine in 1987.
President Donald Trump’s offer to purchase Greenland from Denmark earlier this week bewildered many, Assistant professor of Scandinavian studies Claus E. Andersen spoke to BBC radio about the impact on relations between the U.S and Denmark. Cue to the 17 minute mark to hear his thoughts.
