Noted: The rises foreshadow expected price hikes in coming months for other food staples, such as meat, says Bruce Jones, a professor of agricultural economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dairy is affected quickly because cows immediately make less milk.
The dean of UW-Madison?s School of Pharmacy is stepping down in September 2013 to pursue other interests, the university announced in this news release. Jeanette Roberts has led the UW System?s only pharmacy school for the past decade, but said in a statement that she wants to turn her attention to the public policy and political sides of health care at a time when this topic is at the center of the national political debate.
The dean of UW-Madison?s pharmacy school will leave after the coming school year to pursue work in national health care policy, the university announced Tuesday. Jeanette Roberts has been dean of the School of Pharmacy since June 2003, arriving after 15 years as an administrator and professor at the University of Utah College of Pharmacy.
Mentions that University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer estimated more than 301,000 do not have a driver?s license or state ID card. That?s 9.3% of registered voters.
Charles Franklin, a political-science professor who directs the Marquette polls, said the depth of support around the state for Milwaukee?s economy took him by surprise.
Quoted: Bruce Jones, an agricultural economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Is your lawn crunchy? Mine is….?We?re in a serious situation right now,? says Tom Schwab, superintendent of the O.J. Noer Turfgrass Research and Education Facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Schwab told me Monday that the Madison area was closing in on 50 days without significant rainfall and that turf grass can remain dormant for 60 to 75 days and recover the following growing season. At least that?s what the textbooks say.
With the Natural Resources Board scheduled to vote on the final version of a fall wolf hunt Tuesday, a UW-Madison expert on wolf management says the agency?s plan to allow hunting with dogs is unsafe and that the 201-wolf quota set for the proposed hunt is too high. Adrian Treves, a UW-Madison expert on predators and prey, said in a letter to the board that “wolves and hounds will die in savage ways modern society abhors,” if the DNR allows hunters to use dogs to hunt wolves.
Nearly two-thirds of Wisconsin students who took the state reading test last fall scored below proficient, and less than half were proficient in math, according to recalibrated results released Tuesday by the Department of Public Instruction. In previous reporting of the same results, about 80 percent of students scored proficient on the reading and math tests. The difference is a change in the yardstick used to measure “proficiency” ? what students in a certain grade level should know and be able to do ? rather than a change in how students performed on the tests.
Still, the new results should be a “smack in the face” for Wisconsin, said Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at UW-Madison. “It?s going to be a wake-up call,” Gamoran said. “It?s a more honest reckoning of where Wisconsin students stand relative to other students across the nation and relative to the goals we want for all of our students.”
The thorny, long-running dispute between the UW-Madison and Adidas over the apparel giant?s labor practices in Indonesia landed in Dane County Circuit Court Friday. The university alleged in a lawsuit that Adidas ? which outfits UW-Madison athletes and coaches ? must pay Indonesian workers up to nearly $2 million still owed for back wages and benefits to honor a code of conduct provision in its contract. The chairwoman of a university committee charged with ensuring ethical conduct by contractors criticized the lawsuit as ineffective.
“It’s disappointing,” said Lydia Zepeda, a professor of consumer science and chairwoman of the Labor Licensing Policy Committee. “I believe it’s a way to continue the relationship with Adidas.” She said that, with claims and appeals, the legal process could drag on for months or years as UW-Madison athletes and coaches continue to sport apparel bearing the tri-stripe Adidas logo.
Those white-, blue- and yellow-flowered plants popping up amid the dormant Kentucky bluegrass in parks and medians, for example, include Queen Anne?s lace, chicory and bird?s-foot trefoil, according to UW-Madison plant pathologist and turf specialist Jim Kerns and outreach specialist Eileen Nelson, who were nice enough to listen to my inexpert descriptions and play ?name that plant? with me. UW Extension turf specialist Doug Soldat said ?prairie-type plantings will remain greener longer than lawns,? but warned they require a lot of maintenance, don?t allow for the same types of human recreation, and ?should not be considered replacements for lawns.?
A: With another wave of dangerous heat upon us, it is of interest to consider how the last heat wave rates alongside other memorable heat waves. First of all, each day from July 4-6, Madison?s high temperature was more than 100 degrees with the 104 on July 5 ranking as third highest of all time. Moreover, we set record high temperatures for five consecutive days from July 2-6.
A: Depending on the ingredients, sunscreen works like a mirror or by sacrificing itself to the marauding rays of the sun. According to Yaohui “Gloria” Xu, dermatology professor at UW?Madison, the compounds in sunscreen come in two types: physical and chemical.
Two independent teams of physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland made a surprising announcement early on the morning of July 4. The announcement: They had discovered a new particle, and it might help explain why things have mass….The University of Wisconsin-Madison played an important role as two Wisconsin scientists have been right on the front lines. Professors Sau Lan Wu and Wesley Smith, both in the UW-Madison physics department, played critical roles in designing the experiments and analyzing the data that led to the July 4 announcement.
Physicians Plus will save up to $30 million a year by shifting much of its UW Hospital outpatient services to Meriter Hospital, the health insurance company?s president said last week. About 9,000 health plan members who have primary care doctors at clinics owned by UW Hospital will have to switch to Meriter network doctors, Linda Hoff said. Some members who see UW Hospital specialists also will be told to go to Meriter, Hoff said.
Quoted: Mark Stephenson, a dairy policy analyst at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “Sports of all types, college and professional, play a larger role in American life,” says Harry Peterson, a retired president of Western State College of Colorado and a former chief of staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Is our hot, drought stricken summer due to climate change? A group of legislators and scientists are calling for policy actions, to reduce the risks associated with heat waves and drought ? events they maintain are likely to increase due to climate change. Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the UW-Madison Global Health Institute, said while scientists can?t conclusively show our hot spell is the result of climate change, trends are clear going forward.
Quoted: Dr. Ken Robbins, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: Tim Van Deelen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison wildlife ecologist.
Parents can play a key role in swelling the ranks of students pursuing careers in science, math, engineering and technology (STEM) fields, according to a new UW study published in Psychological Science. Increasing interest in STEM fields is crucial to developing a strong 21st century U.S. workforce, but interest in science and math begins to wane in high school when students choose not to take advanced courses in those subjects, according to the study.
Lead author and UW-Madison psychology professor Judith Harackiewicz said the study shows schools can encourage more participation in STEM courses by directly communicating options to parents.
The poll, conducted by UW-Madison professor Charles Franklin for Marquette University Law School, stands in stark contrast to a poll released Tuesday by Public Policy Polling, a North Carolina-based firm that frequently works with Democratic candidates, as well as a recent poll conducted for the campaign of Democratic candidate Tammy Baldwin, who will take on the GOP nominee in the general election. PPP showed Hovde ahead of Thompson by two points, 31 percent to 29 percent, whereas the Marquette poll has Thompson leading Hovde 35 to 23 percent. Franklin says he is puzzled by the gap between the two polls.
UW-Madison will host a corporate open house on Thursday to show how university-industry partnerships can strengthen corporate competitiveness.
With the assistance of Bill Buckingham, a health geographer with the Applied Population Laboratory at UW-Madison, food deserts (areas of Madison without access to a grocery store within one mile) and food swamps (areas with no grocery but one or more fast-food and convenience stores within a mile) were plotted. Some campus areas where few people live or where students may use meal plans in dormitories show up as deserts, as well as areas along the city boundaries where the plotting of grocery stores stopped, Buckingham notes. Future mapping may eventually include all of Dane County.
Meditation and exercise can reduce the incidence, duration and severity of colds and the flu by about 30 percent to 60 percent, according to a UW-Madison study. A larger version of the study will start at the university this fall. If the benefits of meditation and exercise are confirmed, “this could be more powerful than flu shots,” said Dr. Bruce Barrett, a UW Health family physician heading up the research.
Quoted: “This is a compelling study that adds to the existing research and leads us to one unequivocal conclusion, and that is that smoking in movies should result in an R rating,” says Dr. Michael C. Fiore, director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research, in Madison. Fiore was not involved in the study.
Gov. Scott Walker declared a drought emergency for 42 Wisconsin counties on Monday.
This declaration will speed up the permit process for farmers who want to use streams or lakes for irrigation. The Department of Natural Resources must inspect the stream or lake within three days of the request to ensure aquatic life will not be harmed.
James Danky, a faculty associate in journalism at UW-Madison and an expert on minority communities and the press, said Our Lives has several things going for it despite the sour publishing climate. It is a free-distribution, niche publication at a time when subscription-based, general-interest magazines such as Newsweek are foundering. Its target audience has considerable discretionary income, a draw for advertisers.
A study of UW-Madison students found no link between Facebook use and depression, calling into question a warning by a national doctor group last year that the popular social media site could cause depression. “We?re not really sure ?Facebook depression? is something parents or patients really need to be advised about yet,” said Lauren Jelenchick, a UW School of Medicine and Public Health researcher who led the study.
A: A derecho (pronounced deh-RAY-cho, a Spanish word meaning “straight ahead”) is an hours-long windstorm associated with a line of severe thunderstorms. It is a result of straight-line winds, not the rotary winds of a tornado ? hence its name. Derechos in the United States are most common in the late spring and summer (May through August). The extreme winds of a derecho ? up to 150 mph in the strongest storms ? are often associated with a quasi-stationary front in mid-summer.
A: There are many similarities, said Douglas DeBoer, a professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UW-Madison. “The most common environmental allergen in dogs is house dust, especially dust mites. Next comes grass, weed and tree pollens, followed by mold spores. “Cats have about the same list of allergens, said DeBoer, a specialist in dermatology and allergy.
Noted: Mark Browne, a professor of risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, says people with middle-class incomes or better should chip in more against the risk that they?ll require long-term care someday. ?If something doesn?t change it?s going to be a huge issue for the states and federal government,? says Browne.
Quoted: Jerome Dempsey, who studies breathing problems at the University of Wisconsin and wasn?t involved in the study, said it makes sense that airway infections and weather could have an effect on sleep apnea, but that the changes across the seasons were small.
Quoted: Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist in the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that while more research needs to be done, unusual conditions — including last winter?s ranking as the fourth-warmest in the U.S.; spring turning out to be the warmest since record-keeping began in 1895; and April marking the end of the warmest 12-month period in U.S. history — are harbingers of what?s to come if greenhouse warming persists.
Quoted: “It is a dangerous plant for several reasons, and probably human health is at the top of the list,” says Mark Renz, an authority on invasive plants at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: ?This is always the million-dollar question, but unfortunately, there?s no definitive way to answer it,? says Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist in the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?We?ve experienced extreme heat, drought, floods, wildfires and windstorms throughout history, so in a sense this is nothing unusual. We need time to assess whether this year?s set of extreme weather events falls outside of normal variations.?
Quoted: Still, Robert Cropp, a dairy marketing specialist and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, doubted most people would pay more for milk or other products to support family farms.
Quoted: Charles H. Franklin, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and co-founder of Pollster.com
Wisconsin?s application for flexibility under the federal No Child Left Behind law has been approved, the U.S. Education Department is set to announce Friday.
The hot, humid weather has been taking its toll across the area this week, with one death attributable to the record-breaking temperatures. Dozens of others have been seeking medical treatment for heat-related health problems.
At a moment in science history that many are hailing as one of the most important in a century, UW-Madison researchers were front and center, playing lead roles in a discovery that takes modern physics to the very edge of human understanding. Scientists from UW-Madison were deeply involved in figuring out the physics and building and operating the $10 billion machine used to discover a particle believed to be the so-called ?God particle,? responsible for giving matter mass and shaping the very early universe.
Quoted: Still, Robert Cropp, a dairy marketing specialist and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, doubted most people would pay more for milk or other products to support family farms.
Quoted: “Especially at high risk is an infant wrapped up in a blanket,” who is unable to tend to himself or tell an adult how he feels, said Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
When you get all choked up watching Fourth of July fireworks, save a little of that ooh-ahh emotion for chemistry and other scientific disciplines. Bassam Z. Shakhashiri knows all about this: He?s a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and is the president of the American Chemical Society. Shakhashiri is also an entertainer by choice, giving lectures and programs around the world that help better connect people with the often obtuse world of science.
The summer after Paul Rowe joined the faculty at UW-Madison?s School of Music, something felt amiss. ?In July, the building was totally lit, the air conditioning was on, and nothing was going on,? he said. For a building meant for music-making, the whole place was eerily silent. Why not fill it, he thought, with musicians who shared his passion for early music? Rowe?s wife, singer Cheryl Bensman-Rowe, and music professor Chelcy Bowles, UW-Madison?s director of continuing education in music, agreed. By 2000, the three had founded the Madison Early Music Festival, filling early July with sound.
Wesley Smith, a UW-Madison physicist, has spent much of his career doing the physics and helping design the machinery that went into the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, the giant European particle smasher that will make headlines around the world this week. Very early Wednesday morning, scientists from the collider are expected to announce that they have confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle that physicists say will fill a crucial and mystifying gap in our understanding of how the world is put together.
Leave it to Wisconsin’s controversial governor to turn one of the least sexy topics in government ? public pensions ? into a nail-biter. There are plenty of things in state government in need of reforming, but Wisconsin?s pension system ain?t one of them. But even if you?re not particularly concerned about getting the best returns for WRS beneficiaries, you should know that the system?s administrative costs are low, according to UW-Madison public affairs and consumer science professor emerita Karen Holden.
Quoted: ?Chinese pottery appeared long before animal domestication and has no obvious connection to the origins of agriculture or sedentary living,? remarks archaeologist T. Douglas Price of the University of Wisconsin ? Madison.
Noted: Madison has not seen a June this dry since 1988, says Chris Kucharik, associate professor of agronomy and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That year, he explains, “people would categorize as the last real catastrophic drought that happened in the Midwest, but it was much more widespread than what we?re seeing this year.”
Quoted: Stephen Ward, former head of the University of B.C. journalism pro-gram, is trying to help us figure out an answer. He?s doing so for the sake of democracy, truth and maybe planetary survival.Much depends upon how we resolve the mind-boggling issues that people like Ward, a veteran war correspondent who is now director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are trying to wrestle into some semblance of coherence.
Noted: Which is why policy makers should flag a recent study that found more than three-quarters of patents from America?s top ten patent-producing universities, including MIT, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were the result of breakthroughs by immigrants. Those universities produced 1,466 patents?a fraction of the total awarded?but many were in such cutting-edge fields as information technology and molecular biology.
Quoted: Lin Yu-sheng, an academician and professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the current university assessment mechanism in Taiwan is disorderly and going in the wrong direction, leading to universities expending an excessive amount of effort and resources in striving to meet the assessment?s requirements.
Quoted: Todd Szymkowski, deputy director of the Wisconsin Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there are various ways to enforce speed limits in work zones. Illinois, for example, uses photo enforcement in which cameras automatically capture the image of a speeding motorist?s license plate.
On a Wednesday in May in a courtroom in San Francisco, Jim Gray, a legendary figure in the technology industry, was declared legally dead. Few in Madison likely noticed, but maybe they should have, for part of Gray?s considerable legacy exists here. It was in 2004 that Gray, a Microsoft scientist and world-renowned database expert ? recipient of the Turing Award, his field?s highest honor ? first suggested to his friend David DeWitt, a celebrated UW-Madison computer science professor, that Microsoft and UW should collaborate on a Microsoft lab in Madison that DeWitt would run.
A: The answer to the first part of the question is yes and no, according to Scott Craven, UW-Madison professor emeritus of forest and wildlife ecology. “Crows are territorial during the nesting season from March into May. During nesting they are much less conspicuous than during the rest of the year. “For most of the year crows are gregarious. They spend the night in large communal roosts consisting of hundreds to sometimes thousands of birds. Roosts are usually located in woodlots, parks or quiet places with large trees.
A: Recently, the Duluth-Superior metro area had devastating flooding a result of rainfall totals of 10 inches or more in some locations. You may have seen photographs of the damage wrought by the flood waters ? washed-out roads, flooded homes, ruined crops, etc. Even in the face of such dramatic damage it is easy to overlook the enormous amount of energy that is involved in simply processing the water involved in such enormous amounts of precipitation.
Sangtae ?Sang? Kim, the first executive director of the Morgridge Institute for Research, is leaving the organization at the end of the month ?to pursue new career interests and opportunities,? according to this UW-Madison news release posted Thursday. Nobody seems keen to elaborate beyond that, though. The main focus of the UW-Madison news release put out Thursday was to announce that James Dahlberg, emeritus professor of biomolecular chemistry at UW?Madison and a co-founder of Third Wave Technologies, has been named interim executive director of the Morgridge Institute by its board of trustees.
Noted: And your milk was not spoiled this morning because of work done at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant law professor Andrew Coan said that, based on the initial reporting of the decision, he believes the high court may have made significant decisions regarding some of the key constitutional questions in the case.
The Morgridge Institute for Research at UW-Madison has a new executive director. James Dahlberg, emeritus professor of biomolecular chemistry has been named the interim executive director, taking over for Sangtae “Sang” Kim, the institute?s first executive director, who is leaving the position at the end of June.
