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Wisconsin 101: Our History in Objects

Door County Pulse

Consider the stories a bowling pin from Antigo’s Vulcan Corporation might have to tell. While the average person might think in terms of the confines of a single bowling alley, another might consider its role in Wisconsin’s lumber industry, Milwaukee’s former title as “The Bowling Capital of America,” and Japan’s mid-20th century bowling boom.

Hacker Lexicon: What Is Fuzzing?

Wired

Fuzzing’s method of using random data tweaks to dig up bugs was itself an accident. In 1987, University of Wisconsin at Madison professor Barton Miller was trying to use the desktop VAX computer in his office via a terminal in his home. But he was connecting to that UNIX machine over a phone line using an old-fashioned modem without error correction, and a thunderstorm kept introducing noise into the commands he was typing.

Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate Over Global Fascism

New York Times

Quoted: “It seems to me in developed and semideveloped countries there is emerging a new kind of politics for which maybe the best taxonomic category would be right-wing populist nationalism,” said Stanley Payne, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We are seeing a new kind of phenomenon which is different from what you had” in the 20th century.

Doctors Test Tools to Predict Your Odds of a Disease

Wall Street Journal

Noted: Some resistance to using the predictive model stems from “click fatigue” as doctors deal with a wealth of electronic information, such as best-practice recommendations for treatment, that increasingly pops up on their computer screens, says David Feldstein, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

People dump AI advisors that give bad advice, while they forgive humans for doing the same

Quartz

We accept that to err is human. Not so with machines. When our electronic counterparts fail us—whether its baggage screening software or the latest artificial intelligence—we are quick to shun their advice in the future. That has big implications as machines infiltrate the workplace, offering services once provided by human colleagues.University of Wisconsin researchers recently sought to test how we might get along with our future AI coworkers.

The problem of pain

The Economist

Noted: But paltry prices can work against developing countries, says James Cleary, a palliative-care specialist at the University of Wisconsin: they mean drug firms have little incentive to bring them to new markets. Tariffs, import licences and high costs for small-scale local production mean that morphine can cost twice as much in poor places as rich ones. Some countries, such as Jamaica, subsidise opioid painkillers. Many others do not.

Lending in China Is So Risky That Cows Are Now Collateralized

Bloomberg

Quoted: “The environment just isn’t right for the practice with low interest rates, balance sheets generally in good shape, plenty of heifers and milk prices are low,” said Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin, who said it was more common in the 1990s. “Why would anyone want to lease what they could own?”

NASA and Wisconsin are covering the state with wildlife cameras

Engadget

NASA’s next search for life is headed somewhere close to home: into the woods of Wisconsin, where the space agency is partnering with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to create “one of the richest and most comprehensive caches of wildlife data for any spot on our planet.”

Stem cell scientist says industry poised to boom

WisBusiness

Twenty years after UW-Madison scientist Jamie Thomson began work to isolate human embryonic stems, research has advanced so far that the field is now poised to boom and create Wisconsin companies that could rival Epic, the Verona-based electronic healthcare records company with more than 9,000 employees.That was the optimistic forecast by three panelists who spoke Tuesday at a Wisconsin Innovation Network luncheon in Madison.

Billions at Stake in University Patent Fights

Bloomberg

A powerful and inexpensive technique for rewriting snippets of DNA — known as CRISPR-Cas9 — has two research institutions locked in a bitter patent battle. On one side is UC Berkeley, where faculty first reported using the gene-editing technology in 2012, on the other, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where faculty won a special expedited patent for the technique in 2014.

Atucha: How Wisconsin Fruits Were Hit By A Late Spring Frost

Wisconsin Public Radio

Every year as spring unfolds, fruit growers around Wisconsin start feeling anxious, wondering whether a late frost will harm their crop. Overall, temperatures are warming across the state amidst global climate change, but this pattern is accompanied by unseasonable cold weather events, such as the late spring frost much of the state experienced earlier this month.

Poverty linked to epigenetic changes and mental illness

Nature

Noted: Seth Pollak, a child psychologist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, says that it is unclear whether poverty harms cognition and mental health, or whether a person’s intrinsic biology increases the likelihood that he or she will be poor as adults. But epigenetic research, such as the new study, shows that genetic differences are not the only important factors. “You might have a particular gene — but depending on the experience you have or don’t have, the gene might never be turned on,” Pollak says.

1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility

Nature

Noted: But all these factors are exacerbated by common forces, says Judith Kimble, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: competition for grants and positions, and a growing burden of bureaucracy that takes away from time spent doing and designing research. “Everyone is stretched thinner these days,” she says. And the cost extends beyond any particular research project. If graduate students train in labs where senior members have little time for their juniors, they may go on to establish their own labs without having a model of how training and mentoring should work. “They will go off and make it worse,” Kimble says.

Madison ranked No. 1 college football town

WISC-TV 3

The Bleacher Report put out a list of the top 15 college football towns in the country based on the town’s relationship to its college program, passion in terms of fan support, traditions, culture and entertainment options on football weekends.

How the Other Fifth Lives

New York Times

Noted: Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, has explored how the top quintile is pulling away from the rest of society. In an essay published earlier this year, “Gates, Gaps, and Intergenerational Mobility: The Importance of an Even Start,” Smeeding finds that the gap between the average income of households with children in the top quintile and households with children in the middle quintile has grown, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $68,600 to $169,300 — that’s 147 percent.

Teaching today’s students is more taxing

The Kansas City Star

Gloria Ladson-Billings posed a question to point out a troubling trend in education: “How can we develop culturally competent students if our teachers are culturally incompetent?” Ladson-Billings asked at her “Urban Education and Community Forum” lecture at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The Opening Bell 05-18-16: GMO + TSA = BAD!

WGN Radio, Chicago

On the May 18, 2016 episode of The Opening Bell, Steve Grzanich talked with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Life Science Communication department chair, Dominique Brossard. The two discussed the recent details of a genetically engineered crop study and how it effects the market. Rick Seaney, airline industry expert, stopped by as well to share some more perspective on the TSA line madness.

Taking a ‘snapshot’ of Wisconsin wildlife

Wisconsin Radio Network

Wisconsin is home to numerous species of wild animals, although getting a handle on just how many can often prove quite difficult. A joint effort between University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and the state Department of Natural Resources could take some of the guesswork out of that process, with members of the public also lending a hand.

Cold snap damages wine grape crops in Midwest

AP

Noted: Temperatures dipped below freezing in much of those areas late Saturday and early Sunday, wiping out grape shoots that had emerged early due to a warm spring. The cold turned the water in the shoots cells to ice, killing the tissue, said Amaya Atucha, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant horticulture professor.

Farms That Rise to the Challenge

New York Times

Quoted: “There are situations in dense urban areas where space is highly limited that growing food with artificial lights, stacked vertically, makes sense, especially highly perishable products like sprouts or salad greens where there is an immediate market for them,” said Stephen J. Ventura, a professor of environmental studies and soil science at the University of Wisconsin.