After months of handwringing and heated debate between scientists and biosecurity experts, UW-Madison bird flu expert Yoshihiro Kawaoka finally had his controversial H5N1 influenza virus research published in full Tuesday by the journal Nature.
Quoted: ?I think it?s overreacting and being overly secretive,? said Stephen Ward, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. ?You [journalists] shouldn?t be following the wishes of the White House unless there is a clear, present danger to the president in reporting it. I?m not a security expert, but I?d have to be persuaded that simply you reporting that he?s on his way, or even has landed, would jeopardize his safety.?
Katherine Walsh is an associate professor of political science at UW-Madison. Since 2007 she has gathered information about how the state perceives the university. Walsh?s research, published in her paper ?The Distance from Public Institutions of Higher Education,? has exposed a rift between Wisconsinites and the university and the university?s failure to live up to the high expectations of the Wisconsin idea. By taking an innovative approach to the problems Walsh has highlighted, Wisconsin could join the forefront of the national conversation on how to restructure higher education.
So what is the secret of Promega?s success? How has it blossomed from its beginnings as a small enzyme business in 1978 to become “the granddaddy of biotechnology” in the Madison area, as Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, has termed it? Good timing “Bill Linton had the idea of starting a research products company in the right place at the right time,” said Richard Burgess, emeritus professor of oncology at UW-Madison. “He?s done a marvelous job of guiding this company through the ups and downs of the economy and everything else.”
I asked three UW-Madison educators who know a lot more about alcohol abuse and teenage behavior than I do what they thought of social host ordinances. In general, they were fans, although they were not able to point me to any research on their effect on teen drinking and its consequences. Social host ordinances are aimed at “adults who allow a very large group of underage people to consume alcohol typically with no supervision at all, just no questions asked,” said Nina Emerson, director of the Law School?s Resource Center on Impaired Driving. Brad Brown, a professor of educational psychology, thought it was “naive to believe that an adult can adequately monitor the behavior of any more than a small group of teens at an event where the teens are drinking.”
Noted: As director of the bioethics program at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Norman Fost regularly deplores our national pastime of wasteful and unnecessary medical testing. Yet as a patient, he writes, he has personally benefited enormously from just such testing, with not one, not two but three separate serious illnesses diagnosed with entirely unwarranted tests, leaving him with a bad case of what he calls ?hypocrite?s guilt.?
Noted: Tim McGuine, a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told the Lower Extremity Review that his ongoing study saw no difference in the incidence of knee injuries between players who wore ankle braces?high-tops taken to the extreme?and those who didn?t.
Quoted: Another researcher who advised the newspaper, James Wollack, director of testing and evaluation services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said many schools credit their instructional strategies for overnight success. But no changes in teaching methods, he said, are enough to account for ?ridiculous, nonsensical gains.?
Noted: Steve Hahn, HEUG?s executive vice president for external relations, recently attended a conference of Oracle user groups that included a series of committees dealing with issues such as contracts, code-sharing among customers, and nondisclosure agreements. One question that came up: Is code developed under Oracle licenses the work product of Oracle or of universities? “We would like to get clarity on issues like that,” says Hahn, who doubles as assistant dean for admissions and academic services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In general, there is a desire on the part of users for greater flexibility, so they could make changes around licensing without renegotiating the entire package.”
Quoted: Charles Franklin, pollster and visiting professor at Marquette University
If UW-Madison Dean of Students Lori Berquam didn?t know it last week, she sure knows it now: Presentation matters to people raised in an era of image management, “strategic communication” and social media posturing.
A: Many times after a rain, there is a distinctive odor in the air ? a sort of musky smell. This pleasant fragrance is most common in rains that follow a dry spell. If you are a gardener, you may find this smell similar to the smell you sense when you turn over your soil.
Noted: UW-Madison doesn?t keep track of placement rates for La Crosse graduates specifically, but about 85 percent of total program graduates find jobs within six months of graduation, said Mary Russell, the student service coordinator for the UW-Madison School of Nursing.
Who could have predicted at this time last year that Wisconsin would experience the nation?s largest percentage decrease in employment over this 12-month period? Um … actually, UW-Madison economist Steven Deller could have. And did. Last March, Deller, a professor of applied economics, studied the ripple effects of Gov. Scott Walker?s budget-repair bill and two-year budget proposal.
Wisconsin is doing a good job of providing a safety net for the state?s most vulnerable people, according to the fourth annual Wisconsin Poverty Report released this week. The study, conducted by UW-Madison?s Institute for Research on Poverty, is designed to measure poverty rates more accurately than the official federal numbers that are compiled using only pretax cash income figures.
?There?s no doubt we?d all like to see more people working and less dependent on government to help them not be poor,? says Tim Smeeding, the lead investigator for the study and the director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. ?And if the economy recovers and employment picks up, that is what we?ll see. But for now we?re doing a real good job of holding the line at the bottom end and Wisconsinites should be very proud about these results. These programs work. Government works.?
Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden says such sentiments are a real concern for Democrats, who will have just one month between the May 8 primary and June 5 recall election to marshal forces to defeat Walker. “After many months of unity among Democratic activists, union members and other opponents of Scott Walker?s agenda, there is now some splintering as the Democratic primary heats up,” he says.
Noted: Carlos Sanchez, an Associate Veterinarian at the Chicago Zoological Society?s Brookfield Zoo and Randy Drees, a veterinary radiological oncologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have teamed up to answer these very questions.
Noted: In addition to looking at the live animals, the study will see Dr. Sanchez and Dr. Randi Drees, a veterinarian from the University of Wisconsin, put the preserved skulls of 175 Mexican gray wolves under the CAT scan as they are shipped to Brookfield in coming months.
Quoted: Nasia Safdar, infectious disease physician for the University of Wisconsin Hospital, says that molecular texts on neural tissue can distinguish between BSE cases caused by bovine cannibalism and those that arose spontaneously.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin.
The main institution focused on environmental issues on the University of Wisconsin campus will have a new director in the fall.
When UW-Madison?s James Thomson in 1998 became the first scientist to grow human embryonic stem cells in a lab, it generated tremendous excitement about the medical possibilities. Thomson tried to downplay the breakthrough but talk spread about cures for Alzheimer?s or Parkinson?s disease, growing livers for cirrhosis suffers or producing healthy heart cells for cardiac patients. The miracle cures have been slow in coming, however.
….This notion of a disconnect between Wisconsinites and the state’s flagship institution of higher education may surprise some within the campus community, but those sentiments are broad-based and very real, according to a study released last month by UW-Madison political scientist Kathy Cramer Walsh. The paper gives an eye-opening account of state residents’ “pervasive sense of distance from UW-Madison,” and reveals a “widespread sense that the state’s flagship university is inattentive to the concerns of members of the public at large.”
The release of Walsh’s report is especially timely today, as UW-Madison is in the midst of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wisconsin Idea ? the principle that the teaching and research taking place at the university should be felt beyond the borders of campus. “That’s the big, sad story of the paper ? we are putting so much effort on campus into promoting the Wisconsin Idea and reviving it and aligning it with our work, and yet it’s kind of invisible to a lot of people in this state,” says Walsh.
Quoted: “Breaking bad habits successfully depends on your readiness to act,” says Heidi Beckman, clinical health psychologist at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics and speaker on financial behavior change.
Several months ago, attorneys general from 49 states settled with five of the country?s largest banks in regarding to allegations of foreclosure abuse.
You’ve got an idea for a new business, but what steps do you need to take to bring that idea to fruition? “It is always a good idea to do some research about the industry and the market to determine if there are barriers to entering the industry, if there is a need for the business and to explore what it really means to become a business owner,” says Michelle Somes-Booher, business coach at the UW-Madison Small Business Development Center.
Quoted: “Any Chinese lawyer would be extremely cautious in handling such a high-profile case,” says Sida Liu, a professor of sociology and law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is researching Chinese criminal law and procedure. Courts in China are subservient to the party, and lawyers regarded as politically suspect often face persecution, disbarment, or even imprisonment. China also lacks clear evidentiary rules, and criminal defense lawyers in particular are vulnerable to charges that they have elicited false testimony from their clients.
Quoted: Bruce Maas, chief information officer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Pollster and political scientist Charles Franklin
Hugh Ambrose describes the seven-year production process for ?The Pacific? as ?a personal journey,? which he will relate in Madison on May 3 as keynote speaker for the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Foundation?s annual gala at the Monona Terrace and Convention Center.
John Hall, a graduate of Palmyra-Eagle High School and West Point who holds the military history chair at UW-Madison that was endowed by Stephen Ambrose shortly before his death, said both versions of ?The Pacific? do a good job of not sanitizing ?the theater of The Good War that starts to test and strain the word ?good?? due to the tactics of mutual annihilation.
A. The recent tornado outbreak in the Plains States was predicted by forecasters at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., as far as seven days in advance. This kind of forecast undoubtedly contributed to a vigilance that resulted in only six lives being lost in this first major outbreak of the year.
A. “There?s been a considerable amount of debate over the cause of the extinction of the Ice Age giants ? the so-called megafauna ? with disagreement over whether human hunters or climate change were the cause of their demise,” said Jacquelyn Gill, a UW-Madison graduate student and Ice Age expert.
Quoted: “A surprising finding is that when participants are asked to find a visual item among distractors, hearing its name immediately prior to searching… improves speed and efficiency of searching for the named object,” says the report from Gary Lupyan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Daniel Swingley of the University of Pennsylvania. “For example, when participants searched for the numeral 2 among 5s, actually hearing the word ?two? or, in a separate experiment, hearing ?ignore fives? immediately prior to searching improved overall search response times.”
Quoted: ?In the short attention span of an election cycle, voters sometimes expect results quicker,? said Gary Radloff, an expert on Midwest energy policy at the University of Wisconsin. ?And I just don?t know that?s fair. You have to be patient with new technologies, particularly in energy.?
Noted: ?Emanuel and Thomas can do the top 1 percent better than anyone,? Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin?s La Follette School of Public Affairs, wrote in an e-mail to The Times. Similarly, Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan?s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, wrote: ?Only the I.R.S. data have large enough samples to focus on the very rich.? The other major source of income data, the Current Population Survey (conducted by the Census Bureau), ?is too small to examine the top 1 percent,? Danziger wrote.
Quoted: Andy Feldman, who also teaches public management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s La Follette School of Public Affairs.
Quoted: The associate dean of teacher preparation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cheryl R. Hanley-Maxwell
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a political scientist who runs the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee.
Two University of Wisconsin faculty members were awarded Guggenheim Fellowship Awards for ?past work and exceptional promise? for future creative scholarship.
Gilles Bousquet, UW-Madison?s dean of international studies and vice provost for globalization, will serve as UW-Eau Claire?s interim chancellor, according to an announcement by UW System President Kevin Reilly.UW-Eau Claire will be without a chancellor after May 1 when Brian Levin-Stankevich leaves to become president of Westminster College in Utah.
University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly has chosen an international expert to serve as UW-Eau Claire?s interim chancellor. Gilles Bousquet (zheel boo-SKAY) currently serves as dean of UW-Madison?s Division of International Studies and International Institute director.
It took mere seconds for a bull to kill Avoca farmer Alfred Albrecht….Unpredictable and lethally powerful, dairy and beef bulls have been killing farmers for centuries. Since 2000, bulls have killed at least 19 people in Wisconsin, according to a report by UW-Madison agriculture safety expert Cheryl Skjolaas. No other kind of animal has killed more than four people in the state during that span, the report said.
Noted: TV critic Myles McNutt, who blogs at cultural-learnings.com, coined the term in his “Game of Thrones” reviews last year. It?s not about too much sex in TV shows, he says, but instead about sex scenes being employed as distraction while story points are crammed into the mix. “On a personal level, I wish they?d use it less often,” says McNutt, 26, a doctoral student of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin, fresh off teaching undergraduates about “Jersey Shore” and “Extreme Couponing.”
Noted: Saks said testimony from University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer will show that hundreds of thousands of voters don?t have the required ID necessary to vote.
When Pa Her first started at UW-Madison, her parents didn?t come with her to freshman orientation. They picked her up from campus but never saw the inside of a classroom. They didn?t know what she meant when she said she was stressed out by final exams. “My parents, they don?t speak English,” she said. “They had no idea what this university means. They know it?s a great university.” Her?s experience is common among Hmong students, a campus research team has found.
“It became very clear to us from this research project that we needed to bring Hmong parents onto campus for them to be able to see what buildings were, to see what the resources were, to find out about their son or daughter’s educational experiences first-hand,” said Alberta Gloria, a professor of counseling psychology who leads the Hmong Research Team.
The United States may be one of the richest nations on the planet, but we aren?t the happiest. Neither are Britain, Japan, Germany or many other wealthy countries, according to a new “World Happiness Report” commissioned by the United Nations. The United States ranks 11th in the report. Not surprisingly, the world?s poorest countries are far less happy than their well-to-do counterparts.
(Gregg Mitman is interim director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison.)
A: Let?s agree ? like a jury did in Texas ? that it?s not Michael Doyle, a Chicago biologist who pressed into the courts a claim for his 1993 patent for an “interactive web.” Doyle lost his suit against Google, Playboy, Office Depot, Amazon and other companies in February. To be as straightforward as possible, according to Lawrence Landweber, a UW?Madison professor emeritus of computer science, one has to read back through academic publications.
“I’ve seen a lot of science museums, and I think this could be a model for the country, maybe the world,” said Jonathan Martin, chairman of the UW-Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. “I was just struck by how inspiring this is going to be to someone who is thinking about the science of the environment instead of the politics of the environment.”
Wisconsin Film Festival organizers say they can?t predict which movie will be this year?s breakout film. But with 160 titles showing in eight Madison theaters Wednesday through Sunday, thousands of people will get a chance to find their favorite.
A: There were northerly winds over North Atlantic in the months before the RMS Titanic left port. These winds likely played a role in pushing icebergs farther south than normal and into the Titanic?s path. When the Titanic left port in Queenstown, Ireland, on Thursday, April 11, 1912, it sailed under brisk winds from the north-northwest at 15-20 knots and a temperature of about 50 degrees.
Noted: And what of taxpayers whose refunds end up being larger than expected? They are more likely to open savings accounts or certificates of deposit or to buy U.S. savings bonds, according to an ongoing study of low- to moderate-income taxpayers by J. Michael Collins and Nilton Porto at the University of Wisconsin.
Noted: As rankings have been released publicly over the past few years, says Patrick Remington, co-director of the program and associate dean for public health at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, media coverage of poor rankings “has gotten people to think about the health of their community not just by whether it has a high death rate or short life expectancy but maybe a place where the quality of life is not as good as it could be.”
Four UW-Madison faculty members have been ranked among the country?s top 300 teachers by The Princeton Review and RateMyProfessors.com.
With a gubernatorial recall election still two months away, the campaign for Gov. Scott Walker released two attack advertisements Thursday focusing on the job records of Democratic gubernatorial candidates Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk.
The American Chemical Society?s president was justifiably proud when four UW-Madison chemistry professors won awards during the ACS spring meeting in San Diego in March. The ACS president is Bassam Shakhashiri, a UW-Madison chemistry professor. “The selections are done by anonymous peer review,” Shakhashiri said in a UW-Madison news release on Thursday. “I had nothing to do with it except to sign the awards.”
The ink on Madison School superintendent Dan Nerad?s resignation letter is barely dry and already the hand-wringing over finding his replacement has begun. The applicant market is tight, the job is tough, other places offer more attractive terms, warn the school administrators professional association and executive search firms, who arguably have something of a vested interest in tight markets that drive up school administrators? salaries and require executive search firms to navigate.
….District leadership is correlated with student achievement, according to a 2006 summary of research forwarded to me by the director of UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research, Adam Gamoran, but that’s not the same as saying good superintendents cause higher student achievement.
Quoted: “If you break the numbers down between undergraduate and graduate, you find 40 percent of our international undergraduate population are Chinese, and 29 percent of our international graduate population are Chinese,” said Emilie Dickson, International Admissions Manager at the Office of Admissions and Recruitment.
Noted: One is that colder, drier air allows the virus particles to remain in the air for longer periods of time, and travel longer distances, said Christopher Olsen, a professor of public health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Pauline Ohigau is from Nigeria and has been studying journalism and communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She will return to her position as a lecturer in communications at the University of Port Harcourt.
Following a recent hiatus of further discussion, a committee of scientists that advises the federal government decided to allow researchers to publish two controversial scientific papers that explain how to modify the H5N1 virus, known as the avian flu, to be transmissible through the air.
