Quoted: John Santarius, a plasma physicist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who has known Roth for two decades says that he always found Roth to be patriotic and careful. â??It is so out of character for him to do something like this on purpose,â? he says, â??My inclination is to believe he made an honest mistake.â?
Quoted: â??Most schools are just really struggling to be able to provide meals that meet these guidelines with the amount of money they have to work with,â? said Susan Nitzke, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “Prices have stabilized a bit now, but after a period of incredible instability,” said Jean-Paul Chavas, professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison. “It has been quite a roller coaster.”
Playing the stock market can be a crap shoot. And the first step is the hardest: when do you actually take the leap and buy stocks?
“Things are cheap, so I should get in there now and buy. The fallacy of that is, we don’t really know where the bottom is and we don’t really know where the top is,” says University of Wisconsin financial specialist Michael Collins.
Quoted: “We want to be there and ready,” says Dr. Michael Fiore, the Director of the UW’s Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention. “We want to be ready with the quitline. We want to be ready with providing a two-week supply of nicotine medicine.”
The UW CTRI runs the Quitline and other smoking cessation programs. Dr. Fiore is worried their funding will be reduced, because Governor Doyle and the legislature severely cut the Tobacco Control Grants that pay the bills. “The money going back to help smokers to quit has decreased from $15 million to $6.8 million per year. It really to me is a disappointment. In my view we’re not doing enough to help smokers to quit.”
Quoted: Dr. Michael Fiore with the UW Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention says those factors will likely encourage many people to quit for good, so they can save money or don’t have to deal with the inconvenience of not being able to smoke in a tavern.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said governors across the country, including Doyle, are seeing their popularity levels fall as they face difficult budgets during the country’s steep recession.
Quoted: You wonder if the mosquito population is worse.
Itâ??s not, according to Phil Pellitteri, UW-Madison entomologist.
â??Most of last year and this year are what I consider normal. I have seen nothing to indicate an outrageous population,â? he said.
Quoted: “You have more capital to invest, and at the same time, you have more to lose,” cautions Dan Olszewski, director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship at the business school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Allan R. Odden, a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said having a deficit-ridden city and school district is no reason to overlook mayoral control. In Boston, New York and Chicago, mayors analyzed the budget and re-allocated resources to focus on teaching and learning. He argues mayoral control has helped student achievement in places like Chicago.
Quoted: Shawn Peters, a University of Wisconsin-Madison lecturer and author of “When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children and the Law.”
Quoted: Susan Paskewitz, a UW-Madison entomology professor, has been monitoring mosquito larvae at Warner Park and said the Madison area can expect plenty of adult mosquitoes for the weekend, just in time for the cityâ??s Rhythm & Booms fireworks display, which has been delayed until Sunday, also at Warner Park.
And also: Mosquitoes generally live up to four weeks, and UW-Madison entomologist Phil Pellitteri said future weather will determine whether new generations spring up to take their place.
Noted: An added element to the camp is the Mazomanie Outreach Outpost, recently established in an unused science lab at Mazomanie Elementary School. The outpost will provide an off-campus site that will connect UW-Madison personnel and resources to K-12 teachers, students and community members in southwestern Wisconsin.
Many of the outpostâ??s initiatives will be geared toward increasing the use of inquiry-based science education by public school teachers.
â??The idea is the (outpost) will provide a place where teachers can gather again for workshops, to take additional classes (and) to meet with each other to talk about how theyâ??re going to implement inquiry into their own classroom,â? said Michelle Harris, a biology instructor at UW-Madison and one of the camp organizers.
Q: How does the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) work?
A: The FDIC was started during the Great Depression to restore public confidence in banks â?? and avert runs on banks â?? by insuring deposits, says James Johannes, business professor and director of the Puelicher Center for Banking Education at UW-Madison.
Health experts want to eliminate tobacco use within 40 years.
If people don’t buy cigarettes, that means less revenue for the state and federal governments. Dr. Michael Fiore, Director of the UW Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, says that’s not a problem. He says when people give up their smokes, the high cost of tobacco-related health care will disappear, as will the high cost of lost productivity.
Quoted: A key to making it work is recruiting active support from neighborhood elders, clergy and other leaders to help police persuade parents to permit searches, said Michael Scott, director of the UW-Madison Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.
Quoted: Phil Pellitteri, of the University of Wisconsin-Extension in Madison, predicts this year may be worse than the last few summers, during which the mosquito count was unusually low.
“It’s normal to be chased into your house at dusk in June,” Pellitteri said.
Quoted: “Anyone can go to that Web site and see which transplant centers transplant quicker than others,” said Dr. Anthony Dâ??Alessandro, liver transplant chief at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “When you pull back far enough, you can’t help but be in dismay over the gross inequity and the gross inefficiency of the system,” said Thomas R. Oliver, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “Even those of us who have pretty good health-care coverage still find it extremely difficult and confusing to navigate. It’s very, very bad.”
Quoted: “If anything the collection again shows the level of mistrust in that White House,” said Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin professor who sued the federal government for release of all Nixon White House tapes and other presidential documents.
Quoted: But outside experts were skeptical. An antibody test specific enough to identify only the new flu strain â??would take months to develop, at a minimum, and would require considerable R & D expertise and technology,â? said Dr. Christopher W. Olsen, a swine flu expert at the University of Wisconsinâ??s veterinary medical school.
Quoted: In one recent molecular analysis, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin reported that eight genes involved in shaping the human ear appear to have undergone significant changes over the past 40,000 years, some as recently as the dawn of the Roman Empire.
Noted: To do this in the ocean itself is trickyâ??the sea is vast and there are lots of variables to contend with. What is required, then, is a model to aid understanding. Steven Carpenter and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have found one: lakes. A lake is a good place to study ecological changes because it is small, as ecosystems go, and has clear boundaries. Since mid-2008, therefore, Dr Carpenterâ??s team have been monitoring the health of six lakes in Missouri in order to try to understand how ecosystems suddenly flip from one state to another.
The troubled U.S. economy hit its first turning point in January, when the stock market began to inch back up, but it will be early 2010 before unemployment eases much, Michael Knetter, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, told a conference on Monday.
Because so many news sites are incorporating live blogging into their daily dose of content and conversation with readers, Katy Culver, a faculty member in the journalism school at University of Wisconsin at Madison, had her students learn how to use CoveritLive, which can be embedded within a site.
Quoted: Police can use the Web sites as a two-way street to put out information to the public and get tips, anonymous and otherwise, in exchange, said Michael Scott, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
â??The sites have â??proven to be pretty effective in finding missing people or wanted people,â? Scott said.
Quoted: Judith Leavitt, a professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looked back at the show’s groundbreaking pregnancy series in her new book “Make Room for Daddy: The Journey From Waiting Room to Birthing Room,” to illustrate that like “real-life men in this period,” Ricky was left in the waiting room.
Quoted: Once the domain of hippies and purists, locally grown and organic foods now are considered mainstream by many.
“That’s not really a niche anymore,” said Michelle Miller, assistant director for the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: â??Nuclear is the only large baseload source of energy that is not a fossil fuel, and the Obama administration has wisely decided to invest in nuclear along with other non-carbon sources,â? said Michael Corradini, who chairs the UW-Madison Department of Engineering Physics. Baseload sources such as nuclear run around the clock, while solar and wind operate intermittently.
What is the origin of the saying, “Red sky at morning, sailorâ??s warning; red sky at night, sailorâ??s delight”? Does a red sky in the morning actually foretell a storm?
“Long before computers and the Weather Channel, humans needed weather forecasts,” says Steve Ackerman, a UW-Madison professor of oceanic and atmospheric sciences. “Farmers and sailors in particular needed to know if storms were approaching.”
Quoted: Dr. Alta Charo, an ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, said that much of the Bush councilâ??s work â??seemed more like a public debating societyâ? and that a new commission should focus on helping the government form ethically defensible policy.
A commission of this kind, Dr. Charo said, â??lets the president react judiciously to rapid and often startling changes in the scientific landscape.â?
Quoted: “The most common treatable cause of male factor infertility is called varicocele,” said Dr. Dan Williams, director of male reproductive medicine and surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: America is behind the rest of the world when it comes to bilingualism, with only 9 percent of the population reporting fluency in a second language, compared with 52 percent of Europeans, according to a research review by University of Wisconsin professor Francois Victor Tochon.
English is spoken by about 15 percent of the world’s population, but its “postulated ubiquity” is a “myth,” writes Tochon. “On average, bilinguals earn more in the United States and, more recently, in the United Kingdom.”
Quoted: “People are turning to things that remind them of simpler times,” said Ron Kean, a poultry specialist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If you’re smart, you can save money doing this.”
The nation could see a much needed housing recovery sometime in 2010, but unemployment and foreclosure rates will likely worsen between now and then as the economy struggles to get on track, according to experts at a housing conference Thursday at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Just try to hang on for another year,” keynote speaker Richard Green told an audience of about 100 bankers, developers, real estate agents and other housing professionals gathered at the Fluno Center.
Q: Why do cats seem compelled to eat some plants, like my poor aloe, and ignore others?
A: Cats may devour some plants but ignore others as a simple matter of taste, says Sandra Sawchuk, a clinical instructor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UW-Madison. “Itâ??s each to his own. I like romaine lettuce over iceberg; cats can have their own desires.”
Quoted: Joanne Cantor, a professor emerita at the UW-Madison who studies the psychology of media and communications, leads seminars with titles like “You’ve Got (Too Much) Mail! – Preserving Productivity under Information Overload” and “This is Your Mind on Media: Staying Sane in a Crazy Culture.”
Quoted: Gerald Kulcinski, a nuclear engineer and director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison, has been researching the possibility of mining the moon’s helium-3 for decades. He is, along with Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the concept’s most prominent advocates. (Schmitt wrote an article for Popular Mechanics in 2004 that describes a harvesting operation much like the one Bell manages at Sarang.)
Quoted: Information technology industries appear the most likely to lead the United States out of the recession, said Michael Knetter, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. A Rhinelander native, Knetter said Marathon County is positioned fairly well, with a diverse economic base on the doorstep of what he envisions as a booming tourist destination in years to come.
Q: Why do the blue eyes of babies often turn brown after a year or so?
A: Melanin is the pigment that makes body parts dark, said Burton Kushner, professor of ophthalmology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “Melanin makes freckles brown, hair brown and pigmented races brown, and it can make the iris brown as well. Melanin is not fully developed in newborn babies, so the iris is relatively devoid of whatever melanin pigment it will have, and that gives the eye its baby-blue eye color.”
Quoted: “People pay attention to the stock market whether they’re in it or not. They watch those ups and downs, they hear the press everyday talk about the dow is up, the dow is down,” says University of Wisconsin financial specialist Michael Collins.
Noted: Recent work, notably by economist William Brock of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and colleagues, incorporates adaptive models of agent behaviour to suggest that classical economics might have got things backwards. People participating in markets will quickly copy investment strategies that seem to be working, creating swings in the future price of assets that are actually fundamentally destabilising.
Quoted: Dr. Ben Wedro, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin and a consulting onsite physician at the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, agrees.
Quoted: The tornado was described as F-5 which leaves “nothing but the cement foundation of a building,” according to Jonathan Martin, Chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UW Madison. The categories ranges from F-0, a harmless funnel cloud, to F-6, an “inconceivable” storm which has yet to be observed
Noted: Of course, nobody knows whether these meditators’ brains were different to begin with. And that’s the problem with much of the meditation research so far. Although studies have improved, most still aren’t large and lack good control groups, says Richard Davidson, a pioneering meditation researcher and neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin.
His research shows that even novice meditators have greater activation in a part of the brain tied to well-being. The more activation, the greater their antibody response to a flu vaccine, which makes the vaccine more protective. By changing the brain, meditation could affect many biological processes, he says.
Quoted: “This study does nothing to assuage my concerns about [Avandia],” says James Stein of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He notes that patients and doctors knew which drugs they were on, weakening the result, and that in a subgroup of patients who had established heart disease the risk of heart attack increased by nearly 26%.
QUoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business Associate Dean Deborah Mitchell agreed that now is truly the time when consumers can find great deals on vehicles.
“There are going to be some amazing things going on,” Mitchell said. “The manufacturers are making it easier for the dealers to cut prices, and in fact all of them, manufacturers and retailers, want to move cars — move the metal off the lot.”
The tornado season in Wisconsin is off to a slow start but will it continue this way? Jonathan Martin, Chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UW-Madison can’t give predictions on this summer’s potential tornado activity. He calls the atmosphere “a mystery” and notes forecasting regular weather is only possible about 10 days out. Another difficulty is the nature of twisters which are spontaneous when they appear.
Quoted: It’s previously been argued that chimps chuckle, but their methodâ??”laughing” on both the exhale and inhaleâ??had been deemed too different from the human, exhale-only laugh.
The tickle study, however, found evidence that most ape laughter, especially among gorillas and bonobos, shares key traits with human laughter.
Like humans, for example, gorillas and bonobos laughed only while exhalingâ??leading University of Wisconsin zoologist and psychologist Charles Snowdon, who was not involved in the study, to conclude that, “contrary to current views, the exhalation-only laughter is not uniquely human but is found in our ape ancestors.”
From: Salon.com
Maybe the infamous Barbie doll who announced that “math is hard” was on to something — that is, if she had continued on to say “when you live in a sexist society.” A new study shows that differences between boys’ and girls’ math performance has more to do with gender inequality than hard-wired ability. (Here’s a freebie for all the young’uns in the audience: “But, ma, it’s society’s fault that I failed my math test!”) Not only that, but it pokes a hole in Lawrence Summers hypothesis that men innately show more variability in mathematical ability.
Janet Hyde, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor, said: “It may have to do with the percentage of women in the labor force, inside technology and computers, teaching math and science at the college level” — the list goes on and on. The short of it: The math gap can’t be explained away purely by inherent biological ability.
Quoted: “Can it be bad for you? Without a doubt. We could say that about nearly every chemical,” said Robert Moore, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy.
Quoted: Tom Reason, associate director of admissions for UW-Madison, said while the university â?? and all of the UW System â?? has moved toward a more comprehensive view of applications, class rank â??is still pretty meaningful.â?
Quoted: Sleep deprivation can trigger depression and anxiety, said Dr. Ken Robbins, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. New moms are also at risk for postpartum depression, and both parents will likely feel stretched for time.
Quoted: The key issue is trust, said UW-Madison School of business senior lecturer Deborah Mitchell.
â??Consumers perceive bankruptcy as an off-the-scale risk,â? as far as service, parts and warranties, she said.
Q: Why do the blue eyes of babies often turn brown after a year or so?
A: Melanin is the pigment that makes body parts dark, said Burton Kushner, professor of ophthalmology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “Melanin makes freckles brown, hair brown and pigmented races brown, and it can make the iris brown as well. Melanin is not fully developed in newborn babies, so the iris is relatively devoid of whatever melanin pigment it will have, and that gives the eye its baby-blue eye color.”
Quoted: Steven Deller, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says local governments’ dependence on the state in Wisconsin is the result of continual â?? and mostly unsuccessful â?? efforts to control property taxes.
Quoted: “It’s one thing to say that looking at it from a social science or behavioral perspective, judges’ decisions are seldom completely divorced from the intellectual and moral and experiential things they bring to the table. We’re imperfect creatures,” says Donald Downs, law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: â??We have a work-based safety net without work,â? said Timothy M. Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin. â??Weâ??re really in a pickle.â?
It’s going to get ugly out there, folks. No, I’m not talking about gas prices or Beltline traffic. Rather, it’s the looming fight over a shrinking pie.
As much as you wanted to think Wisconsin was going to cruise through this recession unscathed, signs are pointing to a long and painful road ahead. Government officials at the state and local level are now realizing they are going to have to make do with less, lots less.
Quoted: UW-Madison associate professor of business Jim Seward
“The work represents another important milestone, however, challenges remain,” says University of Wisconsin stem cell biologist James Thomson, by e-mail. “The most important criteria for choosing a particular reprogramming approach will be whether one can derive an (induced pluripotent stem) cell line from an easily obtained clinical sample consistently, and whether the resulting (induced pluripotent) cell line has a normal genetic and epigenetic (gene activation) status. It is not yet clear what approach, or combination of approaches, will most consistently meet these criteria.”
(Second item from beginning.)
