When The Times reported that the number of Advanced Placement exams taken in the Los Angeles Unified School District had hit an all-time high, I couldn?t help but wonder: Is that a good thing? AP courses help high school students gain admission to prestigious colleges, but not necessarily because of the course work. What matters is getting the AP course on the transcript.
To be honest, I never cared about birds. Then, almost nine years ago, Hurricane Katrina swallowed half the city of New Orleans, and something began to change.
Quoted: “I wouldn?t call it a hostile environment, but it?s definitely chilly,” said Nadya Fouad, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, who presented the report.
All rights come with limits and responsibilities. For example, US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously noted that the right to free speech does not mean that one can falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theatre.
Noted: A study of adolescents in the Midwest by Tally Moses of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found 46 percent of participants experience ?stigmatization by family members, which often took the form of unwarranted assumptions, distrust, avoidance, pity and gossip.?
Noted: While in Madison, Professor R. Bruce Allison of the University of Wisconsin-Madison spoke to us about the relationship between humans and trees throughout history. He used his most recent book, ?If Trees Could Talk,? as a reference to guide us through Wisconsin?s tree history.
Research that deprives monkeys of their mothers is scientifically vacuous and morally repugnant.That?s why Ned Kalin?s resurrection of maternal deprivation research at UW-Madison is so controversial and wrong.
Noted: A graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, Hines is now one of three justices who have law degrees from an institution other than Harvard.
Noted: John Hoffmire is director of the Impact Bond Fund at Saïd Business School at Oxford University and directs the School of Business and Poverty at the Wisconsin School of Business at UW-Madison.
There is an increasing amount of scrutiny on the use of animals in research and testing, and for good reason. In addition to causing harm to millions of animals every year, animal research is slow, expensive and often does not accurately predict what will happen in humans. We can, and must, do better.
We all came to Madison for jobs at UW and found each other through our activism and volunteer work at WORT, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, Wisconsin Books to Prisoners and Groundwork. Just a little over a year ago, we started getting together to talk about the social landscape of our adopted town and to share our observations about the activism that grew out of the protests against Gov. Scott Walker.
I recently had the chance to visit the site of the Lower Sesan 2 Dam (LS2), which is in an early stage of construction on the Sesan River in Stung Treng province?s Sesan district. LS2 would be the first large hydropower dam built in the Mekong River Basin in Cambodia. The project is being developed by Chinese state-owned enterprise Hydrolancang, along with the Royal Group of Cambodia.
Our world is in chaos, with the slaughter of innocent people everywhere, and here in our own backyard, another kind of travesty is happening, funded by our tax dollars ? rhesus monkey research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Veterinary School….
The week after the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Act 10, which all but eliminated collective bargaining by most public employees and raised their co-pays for health insurance and pensions, it?s a good time for a follow-up question: Three years later, how much more do state employees pay for health care and pension benefits?
Researchers at UW-Madison are poised to begin a study that involves depriving newborn rhesus monkeys of their mothers and then comparing their brains with the brains of rhesus monkeys who were not deprived of their mothers. The idea is to see how early deprivation ? in this case, the lack of motherly love ? affects brain growth and may contribute to the development of anxiety and depression.
The opportunity to qualify for a bar examination by ?reading law? as an apprentice provides an experiential approach that may be attractive to some potential lawyers, especially those who gravitate to the field late in life. It could help those who are put off by the high cost of law school, who prefer learning by direct experience, and who need to study locally if a willing lawyer or judge mentor is available.
When a student nicknamed Cookie took his life in 2009, his name and picture were left out of the yearbook at Milwaukee?s High School of the Arts.
Given the avalanche of world-shaking news since last week, the shrug greeting the latest chapter in the long-running affirmative action saga at the University of Texas is understandable. Even the usually lively constitutional law blogosphere has had little to say about the July 15 ruling by which the federal appeals court in New Orleans once again upheld the flagship Austin school?s admissions plan.
Sadly, as I enter my senior of college, I?m watching my current school, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, become Whitefish Bay High ? a great public school that promises success after graduation but whose access is determined less and less by a student?s hard work and innate ability and more than ever before by a student?s capacity to pay for school.
There is a quiet crisis growing in rural America.
Daniel Blocq, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been a lecturer in international law at the Netherlands Naval College and a military observer with the U.N. mission in Sudan.
Indiana started sending letters to students detailing what their loan totals and eventual monthly payments would be after graduation. That led to a $31 million reduction in federal undergraduate Stafford loan disbursements at Indiana universities.
More controversial will be the possible sale of 32 heating and cooling plants, an idea that was previously debated and dropped. One of the plants is UW-Madison?s Charter Street facility. Is selling the plants and contracting for their operation a good deal for taxpayers in the long run? That will require more convincing.
I have stopped using New York Times data visualizations in my training presentations to educators and students. Don?t get me wrong. They?re spectacular. This one setting winter Olympic event finishes to music completely changed my understanding of timed events. I learned about the nightmare of balancing the federal budget. And I figured out why World Cup soccer confuses me.
It is becoming vividly clear that global warming and climate change pose unprecedented threats to humanity. The scientific evidence that these fundamental changes are due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels is rigorous, extensive, and conclusive.
A June 25 editorial in the journal Nature should give Madisonians pause. The editors voiced serious concern over influenza research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Free-speech controversy is riveting higher education again. Major schools recently dis-invited graduation speakers whom activists deemed ?improper? to their notions of justice. And many institutions have begun formally to institute?or consider instituting??trigger warnings.?
For-profit colleges seek to fill their coffers with the benefits our veterans have earned from their service and sacrifice.
I have more than 25 years of research experience with swine, avian and human influenza, and I appreciate and support the pioneering research of Yoshihiro Kawaoka and his colleagues.
In a world filled with advanced medical devices, cutting-edge research and innovative medications, it may seem surprising that one of the most useful tools in pediatrics is a children?s book. Why would colorful pictures and simple words on a dog-eared page be so important to pediatric medicine today?
The warnings mount: Without drastic action, we face a future in which antibiotics often will fail, with much unnecessary suffering and death. The usually measured British Prime Minister David Cameron warns of the coming medical “dark ages.”
At UW-Madison, we do not take lightly our responsibility for its safe and secure conduct. The Influenza Research Institute is a high-level biosafety facility designated Biosafety Level 3 Agriculture, the highest in the Level 3 category. It operates under conditions very different from most other Biosafety Level 3 labs and was constructed expressly for the influenza work performed there.
Noted: David Wallinga, M.D., is director of Healthy Food Action, a network of 15,000 health professionals trying to make health the future of food and farming. Gerald Ryan, M.D., is medical director of University Health Services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Reading Sunday?s article “Biosafety expert: Work ?scary,?” about UW-Madison?s Yoshihiro Kawaoka?s research with deadly flu viruses, reminds me of old-fashioned vampire movies.
Emily Stanley, a UW-Madison limnologist and zoologist, acknowledged that it can feel like we?re merely treading water in the Yahara chain of lakes, not making the water clean enough to tread in the first place. She said it could take from three to 10 years to start seeing results from the county?s renewed push for lake health. But the alternative is far worse.
The writer, professor emeritus at UW-Eau Claire and a protege of the late UW primate researcher Harry Harlow, defends Harlow’s research techniques.
Menzie Chinn, a professor of Public Affairs and Economics at UW-Madison, recently looked into whether Governor Walker?s pro-business policies spurred employment growth. As we all remember, Walker claimed that his tax cuts and his dismantling of public sector unions would lead to an employment boom for Wisconsin. But as Chinn?s data shows, Walker?s policies have done nothing to improve job growth. The rate of growth when Walker took office in 2011 was 1.3%, and now after three years of his policies being in effect, the rate is still at 1.3% and weaker than the country?s growth as a whole.
The news last week of an accident involving live anthrax bacteria at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, is troubling. Some 84 workers were potentially exposed to the deadly Ames strain at three CDC labs. But the incident will cause much wider ripples: it highlights the risks of the current proliferation of biocontainment labs and work on dangerous pathogens. If an accident can happen at the CDC, then it can happen anywhere.
Heralded as ?the mother of all pandemics,? in 1918, the Spanish flu killed some 50 million people. This was the deadliest event in recorded history, which started when an influenza virus that was prominent in birds (known as ?avian flu?) was passed to humans. And now, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have created an even deadlier influenza virus that is similar to the 1918 strain.
Federal officials have started paying close attention to sexual assault on college campuses. A White House task force last month issued recommendations on how to combat the problem, and this month the Department of Education published draft rules clarifying how universities can meet federal requirements on campus safety.
I strongly concur with the epidemiologists from Harvard and Yale who warned about the potential release of a possible virulent virus in the June 12 article about UW-Madison flu research.
Noted: Other supposedly secure laboratories are conducting research on even more frightening pathogens that, unlike anthrax, might spread easily and quickly through the air from human to human. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, recently reported that they had produced a new avian influenza virus with some characteristics of the 1918 influenza virus that killed tens of millions of people around the world. They did this work in a laboratory with the same safety rating as the bioterror lab at the C.D.C. A small careless error in these experiments could be devastating.
Wisconsin manufacturers are hustling to stay ahead of global competition. This week?s $25 million grant to the UW-Madison College of Engineering will help the cause.
We are three University of Wisconsin-Madison students soon to be graduating who face entering the workforce with negative worth. Collectively, we hold over $60,000 in student debt and we are currently without the ability to refinance our debt at lower interest rates.
“Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” The idea that anyone could affect the weather seemed ludicrous 20 years ago. It seems less comical now that we know that each of us does affect our weather, locally and globally, every day. We here in the Midwest produce some 5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. So we should think twice about what we do to the weather and, increasingly, what the weather is doing to us.
Camps will be held Friday and Sunday, and some sources say the Badgers will get to at least 10 commitments by Monday. Below are the committed and unoffered recruits that are expected to visit Madison this weekend. We’ll break down the offered prospects the Badgers have been chasing and their chances at landing them.
Houston in the 1980s was a city of vacant office towers. Even as the oil boom turned to glut and the economy sank, real estate developers doubled the size of the office market from 1980 to 1986, according to commercial real estate performance tracker Reis.
Cited: UW-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research.
A tuition freeze at a time when higher education is too costly is at best a Band-Aid, not a cure. If elected officials and UW System administrators are serious, they must address the onerous burden created by student loan debt, as President Obama and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., are attempting to do at the federal level.
The writer opposes research on depression and anxiety that involves the use of monkeys.
The writer, who wrote a previous column critical of the research of Ned Kalin, professor of psychiatry, responds to a column by Robert Golden, dean of the School of Medicine and Public Health, which defends the research.
The writer salutes track coaches Mick Byrne and (outgoing) distance coach Jim Stintzi following UW’s win at the Big Ten outdoor championships.
The writer agrees with Doug Moe’s Wednesday column, “Maybe sculpture was just a mistake,” about “Nails’ Tales,” the football-related sculpture on Breeze Terrace and Regent Street.
The writer opposes “maternal deprivation experiments” by Ned Kalin, professor of psychiatry.
In Sunday?s Business section, Tom Still?s column, ?Higher education still pays for itself,? cites studies that conclude ?going to college … still makes economic sense for many.” Still recommends college leaders remain publicly accountable and transparent. These leaders have been anything but accountable and transparent on one issue that causes many students to gain a degree yet fail to gain a good education. That issue involves the ability to write, speak and think.
Noted: Donald Moynihan is a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the National Academy of Public Administration. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
Dear Editor: The University of Wisconsin has exhibited a well-coordinated desperate backlash of attacks against Dr. Murry Cohen, who recently wrote against the cruel and regurgitated Harlow-type experiments of maternal deprivation being resurrected at the UW?s Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, with federal funding.
As a psychiatrist and academic medical leader, I feel compelled to respond to the distortions and misleading claims in the May 21 column in the Cap Times by Dr. Murry Cohen.
Wisconsin continues to boost exports, which opens opportunity. So will fast and reliable Internet service in rural communities. Wisconsin?s universities are stressing an entrepreneurial spirit in all fields.
When I was a child, I was a “genius”?the kind you sometimes see profiled on the local news. I started reading at 2. I could multiply two-digit numbers in my head when I was 5. One of my earliest memories is working out a way to generate Pythagorean triples. In third grade, I commuted to the local junior high to take geometry. Kids on the playground would sometimes test me by asking what a million times a million was?and were delighted when I knew the answer.
