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The 10 Best Universities on Twitter

Universities.com

Ranked No. 10, UW-Madison: This university has pride like none other. While many fail at the art of bragging modestly, UW-Madison proves through retweets from current students and big name publications like TIME, that whether it be their gorgeous sunsets or their outsourcing of the top CEOs, they are proud of their accomplishments.

New UW Director of Community Relations Seeks to Fill Everett Mitchell’s “Beautiful Vision”

Madison365

“I’m having all of these introductory meetings across the city, the county, and campus and all of these people I’m meeting are visionaries,” says Leslie Orrantia. “Whether its leaders of faith communities, leaders on campus, civic leaders … these people are saying that Madison has it. We can make it in Madison. That makes me very excited.”

New rules for small drones set by FAA

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: “The new regulations remove the requirement for a pilot’s license with a new license called the remote pilot command license, which is really just a written exam,” said drone expert Chris Johnson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering professor and pilot. “It’s not actually flight training, which has been the requirement up to now.”

Families grow with ‘snowflake’ adoptions

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: According to Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the idea of embryo adoption is morally acceptable to most people. Even those who consider in vitro fertilization objectionable often consider the leftover embryos as humans deserving dignity and life. The Catholic Church, for example, has been at the forefront condemning in vitro fertilization, but has no official position on embryonic adoption.

Wisconsin’s Veterans Law Center finds a new way to go where it’s needed

Big Ten Network

It was a phone call that Laura Smythe was tired of receiving. Every week, Smythe was fielding numerous calls from veterans or their family members or their friends, all with a similar refrain. While they had heard about the University of Wisconsin’s Veterans Law Center and were in need of its help, they lacked a means of transportation to get to one of the monthly clinics the center held in Madison.

Eyes in the sky

Isthmus

A new generation of satellites is sending back an unheralded amount of data, measuring air pollution, pollen, smoke and much more. But is anyone paying attention? And is the data even available? NASA recently tapped Tracey Holloway, a UW-Madison environmental studies professor, to make sense of the data.

Berquam: UW program benefits all students

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Christian Schneider’s Aug. 12 column dismissing the value of programs promoting cultural understanding at universities read like it was inspired by the sort of touchy-feely “diversity training” lampooned on TV shows like “The Office.”What we’re actually doing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this year is quite different. The issues we’re addressing are real and the new Our Wisconsin program is a rational, evidence-driven response to them.

Inside the epic quest for a more perfect taffy

Washington Post

If you’re hitting the beach this August, you may find yourself indulging in one of those characteristic treats of America’s boardwalks: saltwater taffy, made by a process conventionally known as “pulling” taffy. But if you’re a fluid dynamics professor at the University of Wisconsin, you might prefer to characterize it as “mixing” — mixing air with sugar, essentially. And you might start to get curious about the mesmerizing spirograph patterns traced by the rods on those taffy machines, and wonder, above all else, if there isn’t a more efficient way to achieve that silky result.

D’Amato: Ex-Badger Evan Jager wins steeplechase silver

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The steeplechase has carried the stigma of being a last resort for American distance runners who can’t quite cut it in the faster 1,500 meters or the nobler 5K. Few actually aspire to run the 3,000-meter race, with its 28 leg-sapping barriers and seven water jumps. It’s always tough. It’s seldom pretty.

Fontes: The Demise of a Prison Lord

New York Times

On July 18, Guatemala’s most infamous — and powerful — prisoner, Byron Lima Oliva, was shot to death in the Pavón prison outside Guatemala City. While it was a fellow prisoner who, the authorities said, put two bullets in Mr. Lima’s head, in all likelihood the intellectual authors of the killing hail from the highest echelons of the state and the moneyed elite. In Guatemala, it is often impossible to tell where the state ends and the underworld begins.

How to Ease the Tensions in Milwaukee

Time.com

Noted: Fascinating research by psychologist Patricia Devine from the University of Wisconsin deals with breaking the prejudice habit. She explains how even people who hold beliefs and attitudes that are opposed to prejudice can act in discriminatory ways. This essentially happens because of implicit biases, automatic processes we all hold.

Sotomayor coming to Madison

Isthmus

Sonia Sotomayor grew up in a housing project in New York City. The daughter of native Puerto Ricans, her father died when she was just 9 years old. He never learned English. Her mother, an orphan, raised Sotomayor and her brother in the Bronx, in a neighborhood plagued by poverty and violence. Nevertheless, Sotomayor was always at the top of her class. In 2009, she became the first Latina and the third woman to be confirmed as an associate justice to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A Look At Student Moving Days Past

Wisconsin Public Radio

When it opened on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in 1851, North Hall contained classrooms, offices, and housing; for four years, it was the entire university in a single building. About 30 students lived there with three faculty members and a janitor.

Can curiosity help us make healthier choices?

Toronto Star

Noted: With fortune cookies in hand, American researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University approached 100 people and offered them the choice between the plain cookie and the chocolate-dipped one, at first without the promise of a revealing fortune. In this control group, the less-healthy cookie was far more tempting — with around 80 per cent of participants picking it.

Finding treasures among the discarded

WKOW-TV 27

For those in the midst of moving days in downtown Madison, there is a place where one person’s junk can become another person’s treasure. That place is the UW-Madison We Conserve program’s temporary drop-off donation site located on Lot 45 at 165 N. Mills Street.

Wisconsin ranked 24th all-time among college football programs

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

It’s a good day to be a Badger.The University of Wisconsin-Madison football team was recently ranked 24th in the Associated Press’ all-time Top 100 rankings. The AP has been ranking college football teams since 1936 and determined its top 25 of all time by counting how many times a team appeared on the poll (one point), the number of No. 1 rankings (two points) and AP championships (10 points).

Legal Help for Returning Wisconsin Veterans

Public News Service

Veterans coming home from overseas wars face challenges in adapting to life as a civilian, and many of those challenges involve legal questions. That’s why the UW Law School opened the Veterans Law Center in 2012. Today, at the Appleton Public Library, the Center has a mobile unit staffed with attorneys, paralegals, and volunteers to help veterans with their legal questions.

Search for sterile neutrino goes dark

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

On the frigid central plain of Antarctica, where the sun rises only once a year, a set of 5,160 light sensors encased in a cubic kilometer of crystal clear ice sits poised to register the flash of passing quantum particles.

Merging Medicine and Entrepreneurship: UW Health Docs Share Lessons

Xconomy

By the time Hans Sollinger helped launch a company for the first time, in 2004, he had performed hundreds of pancreas transplants. In the process, he had built a reputation as a prolific surgeon whose experience few of his peers could match. Sollinger, who practices at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, also known as UW Health, said that the high demand for his services over the years made his first foray into entrepreneurship somewhat jarring.

The downside to being prepared for failure

Boston Globe

New research suggests that having a Plan B is not necessarily a good idea. In the study “How backup plans can harm goal pursuit: The unexpected downside of being prepared for failure,” Jihae Shin and Katherine Milkman, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, found that backup plans diminish the desire to achieve the primary goal in the first place.

Laos’ thirst for Mekong River dams imperils fishing, farming

AP

Quoted: “We don’t know what the claims that things will be fine are based upon. This is unacceptable considering the high stakes,” said Ian Baird, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies Mekong fisheries. “If the measures don’t work well, it will be too late to undo the damage and there will be regional implications for food security and biodiversity.”

Keeping your child’s sugar intake in check

NBC15

Many of us are aware of the negative health effects from too much sugar, but what about the effects on kids and their eating habits? How can we better monitor their intake of sugar?Clinical Nutritionist Amy Caulum with UW Health Pediatric Fitness joined NBC15’s John Stofflet to share how to keep an eye on those sugars and added sugars.

Why Voter ID Laws Are Losing Judges’ Support

Governing

Quoted: “I think it’s become clear to policymakers that the courts are going to be pushing back,” said Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Election Research Center, who testified against his state’s voter ID law. “It’s not one rogue judge. It’s a series of district courts and appeals courts that are saying to the states, you’ve gone too far.”