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Author: jplucas

Learning from catastrophe

Isthmus

Noted: Micaela Sullivan-Fowler believes that everything is connected. With a scholar’s acumen, she brings that worldview to Staggering Losses: World War I and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, an artfully constructed historical exhibition at the Ebling Library, located in UW-Madison’s Health Sciences Learning Center, where she serves as its historian and curator.

New Video Game Puts You In The Shoes Of A Refugee

NPR News

Noted: Games where a player takes on another person’s perspective or becomes immersed in a specific environment can be beneficial in building positive interpersonal relationships, according to Tammi Kral, a research assistant at the Center for Healthy Minds at University of Wisconsin-Madison who is not affiliated with Junub Games or Salaam. Kral says that as video game developers explore the potential for games to inspire “prosocial” behavior, they would do well to collaborate with psychologists and behavioral scientists who understand the impact of games on specific brain networks.

Listening comprehension

Isthmus

Noted: The November meeting did draw some reading experts — including UW-Madison cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg and Madison reading advocate Laurie Frost — who have been publicly critical of the district’s teaching approach to reading. When they spoke, Morateck emphasized that the meeting was meant for parents, not the community at large, although she did not ask anyone to leave.

Trump Has Signed Orders on Campus Speech and Anti-Semitism. Some Critics See Potential for Conflict.

Chronicle of Higher Education

President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order designed to crack down on what he sees as rising anti-Semitism on college campuses. The order, which comes less than a year after his administration issued another order aimed at protecting free speech, drew mixed responses, with skeptics seeing the potential for conflict between the two measures.

Tips On How To Shovel Snow Safely And Avoid Injury

Wisconsin Public Radio

Noted: As winter asserts its dominance with a new cover of white over major portions of Wisconsin, Brody and Jill Thein-Nissenbaum offer tips about how to stay safe while shoveling. Thein-Nissenbaum is an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Doctor of Physical Therapy Program.

George Church: The complicated ethics of genetic engineering

60 Minutes

Noted: Not everyone agrees. A 2017 survey at the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked 1,600 members of the general public about their attitudes toward gene editing. The results showed 65 percent of respondents think gene editing is acceptable for therapeutic purposes. But when it comes to whether scientists should use technology for genetic enhancement, only 26 percent agreed.

A Few Cities Have Cornered Innovation Jobs. Can That Be Changed?

The New York Times

There are about a dozen industries at the frontier of innovation. They include software and pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and data processing. Most of their workers have science or tech degrees. They invest heavily in research and development. While they account for only 3 percent of all jobs, they account for 6 percent of the country’s economic output. Madison is noted prominently in the study as an area that could become a major tech hub.

Federally Funded Health Researchers Disclose at Least $188 Million in Conflicts of Interest. Can You Trust Their Findings? — ProPublica

ProPublica

Most of the researchers who reported conflicts of interest work in academia. The University of Wisconsin-Madison filed 1,015 conflict disclosures for its researchers since 2012, the most of any institution. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was second with 358 disclosures, and the University of California, Los Angeles, was next with 294.

Editorial: Food requires more than thanks

WISC-TV 3

MADISON, Wis. – In keeping with the spirit of the holiday we reflect on what’s behind the feast so many of us enjoyed and too many of us take for granted. The availability and sustainability of good food is not guaranteed.

Could your next mobile phone wreck our weather forecasts?

National Geographic

Noted: “It’s like an apartment building of sorts,” explains Jordan Gerth, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “There’s some general expectation that everybody keeps relatively quiet. In the spectrum land, we have our meteorological application, our science applications, and those that require a very quiet environment and [quiet] adjacent environment. But the telecom signals are typically very loud, and are also susceptible to leaking outside their space.

Israel’s Stalagmites Have Climate Stories to Tell

Atlas Obscura

LONG BEFORE THE STALAGMITES SAT on Ian Orland’s desk in Madison, Wisconsin, they jutted up from the floor the Soreq Cave in Israel’s Judean Hills, 18 miles west of Jerusalem. There, in the dripping darkness, the mounds of calcite were standing witness to the world outside.

Getting discovered

Isthmus

Alexander Kain came to UW-Madison from Kenosha in 2018 with dreams of becoming the next up-and-coming hip-hop artist. Walking to class one day, he came across a table promoting LÜM (Live Undiscovered Music) — a streaming and social media app — on East Campus Mall. A year later, he has more than 30,000 followers on the app, connections to Travis Scott’s manager and a performance at Freakfest under his belt.

Welcome to campus

Isthmus

When a fleet of 30 robots began delivering food around the UW-Madison campus earlier this month, one early fear of university officials was vandalism.

The stereotypes we keep

Isthmus

It’s bold, real and wildly uncomfortable — the basic ingredients of a play created to spark debate. The Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning Clybourne Park, playing at UW-Madison’s Mitchell Theatre through Nov. 24, starts on a chipper note, with characters blithely debating origins of ice cream while dropping subtle hints of cultural ignorance. But it erupts into poisonous verbal sparring and screaming matches about racism, prejudice and fear. It’s a heavy performance to watch, let alone perform.

Warning signs of climate change

Madison Magazine

Quoted: Christopher Kucharik, professor and chair of the agronomy department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, citing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and the National Weather Service, says three of the six wettest years ever recorded (since 1869) in Madison have happened in the past several years?—?2013, 2016 and 2018.

Cooper: The Last Time America Turned Away From the World

New York Times

One hundred years ago, on Nov. 19, 1919, Alice Roosevelt Longworth threw a late-night party. Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and wife of Nicholas Longworth, the future speaker of the House, was celebrating the defeat in the Senate that day of the Treaty of Versailles, which encapsulated President Woodrow Wilson’s grand project for world peace, the League of Nations. “We were jubilant,” she recalled later, “too elated to mind the reservationists. And by we, I mean the irreconcilables, who were against any League, no matter how ‘safeguarded’ with reservations.”

The right balance

Isthmus

Espionage, corruption and deceit. We don’t typically associate these words with science, but their use is becoming more common as policymakers and scientists debate how to best protect taxpayer-funded research from foreign influence. The heart of this discussion lies in finding the balance between defending science and preserving international collaboration.

New Hamel Music Center to open

Madison Magazine

When the Overture Center for the Arts opened in 2005, Madison obtained a crown jewel of a performance venue that remains the envy of many a larger city. Meanwhile, the students, faculty and guest artists who are part of the Mead Witter School of Music at the University of Wisconsin–Madison remained trapped in Mills Music Hall, and the other inadequate facilities in the outdated Humanities building.

Students Say They Don’t Trust Campus Title IX Processes. And They Doubt Their Own Reports Would Be Taken Seriously.

Chronicle of Higher Education

When the results of a survey of 180,000 students were published last week, a troubling statistic was circulated: Despite years of effort to stop sexual assault on campuses, more than one in four undergraduate women experience a form of nonconsensual sexual contact while they’re in college, according to the survey, conducted by the Association of American Universities. The results are similar to the last time the AAU studied this problem, in 2015.

Our Civics Duty

Isthmus

Noted: Diana Hess, dean of UW-Madison’s School of Education, is a big fan of the approach used by Middleton’s Legislative Semester, which is a spawn of an innovative civics program developed by a former social studies teacher in a Chicago suburb. “I think it’s hard to teach people how to be engaged without giving people opportunities to be engaged,” says Hess, a national expert on civics education and the author of several books on the topic. “The analogy I often use is we would not teach people how to swim by lecturing them about various strokes. We would have them in the pool.”

Foxconn finally admits its empty Wisconsin ‘innovation centers’ aren’t being developed

The Verge

Electronics manufacturer Foxconn’s promised Wisconsin “innovation centers,” which are to employ hundreds of people in the state if they ever get built, are officially on hold after spending months empty and unused, as the company focuses on meeting revised deadlines on the LCD factory it promised would now open by next year. The news, reported earlier today by Wisconsin Public Radio, is another inexplicable twist in the nearly two-year train wreck that is Foxconn’s US manufacturing plans.