National health experts are calling for changes to America?s health care system in a new report, warning it has become too wasteful to continue in its present state and could hurt the nation?s economic stability.
National business leaders who understand the importance of research universities to our economic future are telling Wisconsin lawmakers that they need to put more state money into the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?America is driven by innovation ? advances in ideas, products and processes that create new industries and jobs,? the report says. ?In the past half-century, innovation itself has been increasingly driven by educated people and the knowledge they produce. Our nation?s primary source of both new knowledge and graduates with advanced skills continues to be our research universities.
The study of economics has been derisively called the ?dismal science? since the mid-19th century. But no one would describe labor economist Laura Dresser, associate director of the UW-Madison?s Center on Wisconsin Strategy, as dismal ? even if the statistics she produces these days aren?t particularly cheerful. Dresser?s work at COWS focuses not just on the numbers but on providing policy ideas to help close the ever-widening wealth gap in the U.S.
“This column avoids politics, but we are equipped to speak about science….Climate change is a serious issue, and policymakers would do well to plan for the challenges it poses to our way of life.
A: The first known scientific use of hurricane naming arose in the Pacific during World War II. It was an easy and effective way to distinguish one tropical cyclone from another on the weather maps, said Steve Ackerman, a UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and director of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. The system was simple and alphabetical: The name of the first storm of the season would begin with A; the second, B; the third, C; and so on.
Add it all up, and it seems clear that K-12 education in Wisconsin ? like in most parts of the country ? has taken a financial hit in recent years. And as UW-Madison researcher Carolyn Kelley notes, these state-level cuts hit hardest the districts that need the most help.
Quoted: Pamela E. Oliver, a sociologist who studies crime at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says it isn?t clear how to combine data from prison surveys and from national surveys that exclude prisoners. “There are a lot of complex assumptions necessary to do adjustments, and reasonable people will disagree about the best way to proceed,” she says.
Noted: Scientists are looking to a natural cause for the river?s change in color. Emily Stanley, who researches limnology (the study of inland waters) at the University of Wisconsin, believes it is possible microorganisms could be behind the sudden change, but that it is probable there is a much better explanation for it.
Quoted: While the study does not indicate when the symptoms of depression began for the women or for how long the symptoms persisted, it?s likely that in order for the depression to have affected the child, the mother may have been depressed for months, according to Dr. Kenneth Robbins, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, who was not associated with the study.
?As healthier persons opt out of the comprehensive coverage market, the segment with greater needs will put actuarial pressure on the rates for comprehensive coverage and quickly exceed the 150 percent threshold,? says professor Donna Friedsman, director of health policy programs at the UW Population Health Institute, of the likely outcome of the Thompson health care proposal.
Noted: But predicting the future is never easy. Tony Goldberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the ecology and evolution of infectious disease, said the introduction of West Nile into the United States showed how challenging it can be to forecast new public health risks.
Quoted: Brent Hueth, director of the Center for Cooperatives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he?d expected an increasingly crowded landscape of organic purveyors, including from conventional stores, to be tougher on co-ops.
UW-Madison, Madison College and more than two dozen other institutions of higher education are taking part in a pilot project to evaluate digital learning materials as an alternative to the more traditional ? but costly and bulky ? textbooks students have relied on for as long as most can remember. ?By working as part of a community like this where numerous other institutions are involved, this gives us more leverage with the publishers than if we were working alone on examining e-texts,? says Bruce Maas, UW-Madison?s vice provost for information technology.
Noted: John Markley, director of the BMRB and a structural biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hopes to attract other federal funders to support the database.
Quoted: ?There?s a potential for a large variation of outcomes,? said Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?What matters as much as the absolute level of unemployment is the relative level — how people feel about economic uncertainty, the deficit, the middle class.?
MADISON, Wis.-Three businesses in the University Research Park are making changes that reinforce the companies? commitment to Madison, according to the University Research Park director. Epicentre and Aldevron will move operations into the research park?s 80,000-square-foot Accelerator building. Exact Sciences will move into space Aldevron is vacating.
UW-Madison professor Kathy Cramer-Walsh, who has extensively studied political opinions in Wisconsin in recent years, says homosexuality almost never came up in her many political discussions with rural Wisconsinites.
UW-Madison professor Charles Franklin, who conducts political polling and is doing so this year while serving as a visiting professor at Marquette Law School, says one should be skeptical that otherwise committed Democrats would vote differently because of one issue.
Quoted: “Milk production is slowing down,” said Bob Cropp, the University of Wisconsin?s dairy marketing professor emeritus.
Do scarecrows work and, if so, why?
What is the source of energy for hurricanes?
Noted: Shanan Peters, a palaeobiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, isnt so sure the paper is noteworthy. Its primary result, he points out, is to overturn Mayhews own prior finding and bring the long-term diversity results into line with ecological common sense. “Palaeobiologists and climatologists have long referred to warm intervals as climate optima,” he notes, “precisely because it is during such times that palm trees and alligators inhabit the Arctic and life appears to be diverse and flourishing.”
Quoted: “It really does take a bit of getting used to. But once you talk to patients and they understand the theory, they accept it. We have had no trouble recruiting,” said Dr. John Fleming, a professor of neurology at the University of Wisconsin who is testing the drug in patients with multiple sclerosis.
Quoted: “Denisova is a big surprise,” says John Hawks, a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin?Madison who was not involved in the new research.
Noted: About half of the 31 copies came from the girl?s mother and half from her father, producing a genome “of equivalent quality to a recent human genome,” says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not part of the team.
The story of the Catonsville Nine ? a group of Catholic activists who entered a draft board office in Maryland in 1968 and burned some of their records ? may seem like an event mostly lost to the mists of history. There are no active draft boards deciding which young men should be compelled to enter the military. The kind of Catholic activism that dominates the news these days is bishops speaking out on abortion or gay marriage or birth control mandates. Yet in his compelling retelling of this dramatic event from the Vietnam era, author Shawn Peters has not only brought into sharp relief issues around the ethical limits of protest, he also has provided a thoughtful look at the religious roots of protests as current as this summer?s headlines.
?He?s not even the most conservative in the Wisconsin delegation,? said Ken Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?That would be (Rep. James) Sensenbrenner.? An analysis of all roll call votes throughout each term shows Ryan typically ranks on the far but not extreme right, according to Mayer. Ryan typically ranks ?around 380 or 390? among the members of the House of Representatives, with 435 being the most conservative. Mayer also cautioned that ?extreme? is a politically charged term, used by both sides to define their opponents? views in a way that repels the people in the middle.
UW-Madison, thanks to its partnership with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, remained among the national leaders in commercializing its academic research during the 2011 fiscal year, according to an annual survey of the Association of University Technology Managers released earlier in the week. Only one Big Ten Conference institution had more licensing income than UW-Madison?s $57.7 million, with Northwestern University bringing in a whopping $191.5 million -? tops among all colleges and universities.
?The list changes year-to-year, but the thing about WARF is we have remained consistently strong because UW-Madison is a world class university,? says Carl Gulbrandsen, the managing director of WARF. ?We wouldn?t be able to do any of this without a great university.?
Noted: ?His speech will be his real introduction to a lot of people who don?t know anything more about him than the fact that he?s a vice presidential nominee,? said Kenneth Mayer, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?It?s not what Obama and Biden will have to do, because they?re incumbents and people know who they are.?
Noted: In short, it?s just not as simple as Santorum?s statement suggests. There are many factors outside a given person, from the job market to the size of wages to the quality of K-12 education that determine whether one can follow the three simple rules of graduating high school, getting a job and waiting to have kids. ?That?s a wonderful dream world,? Timothy Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin-Madison concludes. ?But it?s really hard to get from here to there.?
Quoted: “Higher temperatures foster faster reproduction of both the mosquito and the virus,” said Tony Goldberg, professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied urban outbreaks of West Nile since shortly after the virus arrived in the Midwest.
Quoted: “The officials who know this are quite aware that in this era of 24 hours news, access is king,” Stephen Ward, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told DW. “This is just a game of access – its as old as journalism.”
Also unlike previous years, most buildings have air conditioning, which is the most important thing for people to have during a heat wave, according to Richard C. Keller, a medical history and bioethics professor at UW-Madison. Keller is currently compiling an account of the heat wave that spread across France and central Europe in 2003. An estimated 70,000 people in Europe ? 15,000 in France alone ? died in early August from temperatures reaching 104 degrees. There is no death toll for this summer?s heat wave in the United States. ?There wasn?t an epidemic of heat wave deaths this summer,? said Keller. ?There is much more air conditioning in the U.S. and it is more widespread.?
University of Wisconsin-Madison College Republicans Chair Jeff Snow credited the success of the three fresh-faced Wisconsinites to their willingness to risk their political careers to make bold moves…UW-Madison Political Science Professor Ken Mayer said while you cannot deny the national prominence of the three Wisconsin conservatives, it does not necessarily signal a shift in the electorate in the state. ?I don?t think the emergence of Ryan, Walker and Priebus signifies an enduring shift in the Republican direction,? Mayer said. ?That might happen, but I don?t think that this is a sign that that has happened or a cause that it has happened.?
Quoted: John Kaminski, founder of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said many Americans create in their minds their own version of what they think the Constitution should say.
If, after all that?s happened, you still can?t understand the appeal of Gov. Scott Walker and his arch-conservative allies, you might consider the roles of race and rural identity in Wisconsin. They seem to be crucial drivers in the anti-government tidal wave that has washed over our political landscape. That is a central finding of a major paper by Katherine Cramer Walsh, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist who has been widely applauded for a research style that relies more on personal interaction and group observation than on polling.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. ? It may be small (and shared). But for at least one academic year, for thousands of college students, it?s home. Over generations, the dorm room hasn?t gotten bigger. But the amount of must-have stuff ? including technology ? that needs to squeeze into that space has morphed into a much longer list.
Brian Ward, assistant director of housing at UW-Madison, said dorm rooms vary in size by building, but average 12 by 16 feet for a two-person room ? 192 square feet in all. Including a meal plan, the university estimates living in the dorms will cost students about $8,000 for the coming school year. Ward said rooms come with the basics for each resident: a bed, desk, chair and either a dresser or closet with shelves built in; roommates share a mini-fridge. The challenge is to make that Spartan room feel like home.
Deborah Blum was raised by an entomologist father and a literary mother, she writes on her website, which left her little choice but to grow up and become a science writer. Blum?s 2010 book, ?The Poisoner?s Handbook,? received rave reviews for its melding of science and mystery in the telling of the story of a pair of Jazz Age scientists fighting to catch killers and create the science of forensic detection. Here, Blum chooses three books that speak to the drama science creates.
It struck me as pretty ironic last week that even with Wisconsin?s new looser, alternative path to a teacher?s license, public school teachers probably are more likely to know what they?re doing than the public university teachers many students will get just a couple of years later. Such is the way of the American education system, where K-12 teachers must have years of training and meet multiple state licensing requirements, but the teaching assistants responsible for handling much of the introductory course material in college can know next to squat about teaching. The discrepancy didn?t seem odd to Cheryl Hanley-Maxwell, UW-Madison School of Education associate dean for teacher education, but then, “it?s a system I grew up in. Is it best practice? I doubt it,” she said.
A: On a day with high ice clouds, you are likely to see shiny, colored regions at either side of the sun. These are sundogs, an optical effect caused by refraction and dispersion of the Sun?s light through ice crystals. When the light rays strike the boundary between the air and water, like an ice crystal, several things can happen. Some rays are turned back in the direction from which they came, the familiar process of reflection. Other rays are transmitted into the crystal. Some of the transmitted rays change direction, a process known as refraction.
A. You probably don?t, according to Yaohui ?Gloria? Xu, dermatology professor at UW?Madison. ?You may get a few new freckles, but it?s more likely the ones you have already are just getting darker,? Xu said. Exposure to the sun triggers the release of a brown skin pigment called melanin, the reason people with darker skin have fewer sun-related skin problems. ?It?s a defense mechanism,? Xu said. ?Melanin is a natural photo-protector. It does what the chemicals in sunscreen do, and even better. It disperses the high energy of the sun?s rays.?
UW-Madison will offer a few three-week classes in January, experimenting with a small-scale ?winterim? term that could grow in future years, said Aaron Brower, vice provost for teaching and learning. The idea of offering classes during the typically dormant month on campus arose last school year as part of discussions about ?educational innovation,? a term interim Chancellor David Ward used to describe how the university can operate more efficiently and creatively in a time of diminishing state funds.
Noted: The new research paper contributes to a touchy debate about the role of community colleges, a discussion that too often lacks nuance, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a co-author of the study. She said the sector is too big and complex to draw much from examples of the ?average? student.
Quoted: ?You can?t think about the last time you went to a convention and wondered what would happen. You don?t even wonder if there will be a rules fight or a credentials fight or even a platform fight,? said Byron Shafer, a University of Wisconsin professor. ?The convention is objectively less important.?
Quoted: ?You don?t mess with hunting and fishing because that?s part of who we are,? says Kathy Cramer Walsh, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who specializes in civic engagement. ?A lot of times, talk about regulating guns and ammunition is seen as the outside trying to change who we are.?
But another stem cell pioneer, James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, believes that stem cell solutions will be a long time coming for more complex organs. ?We?re a long way from transplanting cells into a human brain or nervous system,? he said.
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Thad G. Walker, an atomic physicist, uses optical magnetometry to monitor the magnetic fields of the beating heart rather than the brain. Professor Walker and his group have created small magnetometers that are an inexpensive alternative to superconducting devices now used to spot various heart abnormalities in a fetus.
Quoted: William Tishler, a professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has traced some of the earliest cordwood structures back to the hardscrabble settlements of the mid- to late-19th century.
Quoted: Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor specializing in income inequality.
Scratch the surface of just about any branch of science and you?ll find chemistry. Yet it remains in some ways the invisible science as its practitioners toil away ? too often unnoticed and underappreciated ? figuring out the chemical underpinnings of the natural world and chemical solutions to some of our thorniest problems.
On the UW-Madison campus, for example, chemistry is showing us a way to better understand and fight one of the most dangerous of the many bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics. The bacterium is called Acinetobacter baumanni, or A. baumanni, and it proved a terror in front-line hospitals in Iraq, earning the nickname “Iraquibacter.” But in her laboratory at UW-Madison, chemist Helen Blackwell and her colleagues have spent a decade unlocking some of the chemical secrets of A. baumanni and may be on the verge of finding a new weapon against the stubborn pathogen. Chemistry, it turns out, underlies that bacterium’s ability to become deadly.
Noted: ACS president Bassam Shakhashiri, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin?Madison, has been a strong supporter of the Innocence Project, and he appeared with many of the speakers for the Innocence Project at a press conference on Monday. He told Nature that before the society could lobby Congress in favour of the bill, the board would need to approve a policy statement on the matter, but that he planned to speak to several of the governance committees that oversee the topics involved.
Quoted: Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, cautions against putting too much weight on Ryan?s small business ties as an election issue. He has followed Ryan since his first congressional election campaign.
Quoted: One is the move into what University of Wisconsin astronomer Jay Gallagher as well as others have called the era of “big science.”
Quoted: ?It?s as elegant as any speech in the top 100,? said Stephen Lucas, a professor in the department of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin and co-editor of the book, which polled 137 scholars of rhetoric to establish the list.
The official state bird of Wisconsin is being called the primary culprit in spreading a deadly virus across the Northeast and Midwest. The American robin is being called the West Nile “super spreader,” based on research conducted by a team headed by UW-Madison infectious disease expert Tony Goldberg. “Robins are in the sweet spot,” Goldberg said in a news release from UW-Madison. “They are abundant, mosquitoes like to feed on them and they happen to support virus infection better than other species.”
Quoted: Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor told the Associated Press that the middle class has been hurt by rises in healthcare costs and college tuition, as well as disappearing mid-wage jobs.
Quoted: “The job market is changing, our living standards are falling in the middle, and middle-income parents are now afraid that their children will be worse off than they are,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor specializing in income inequality.
Quoted: ?It makes sense that his addition to the ticket would have more effect in Wisconsin given that he represents one-eighth of the state in Congress, has connections to the state?s largest university, and is generally visible in the state,? said Barry Burden, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: “This is absolutely fascinating. I?ve seen probably at least three patients in the last 10 years or so” who might have had this, said Dr. Dennis Maki, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Quoted: Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, cautions against putting too much weight on Ryan?s small business ties as an election issue. He has followed Ryan since his first congressional election campaign.
Quoted: ?The job market is changing, our living standards are falling in the middle, and middle-income parents are now afraid that their children will be worse off than they are,? said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor who specializes in income inequality.
