UW-Madison in the Media

A selection of media coverage about the university and its people.

• Explicit teen tweets a clue for parents it may be time to talk sex: study Vancouver Sun May 3, 2010 Time for that dreaded sex talk with your teenager? A new study suggests the writing’s on their Facebook wall.
• David Bordwell, Film Historian, Focuses on Movie Blog New York Times April 26, 2010 Last Sunday the film historian David Bordwell watched movies from Spain, Denmark and Romania at the Wisconsin Film Festival here in Madison, where he has lived if rarely stayed still for four decades. He had just returned from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, after which he drove some 400 miles (and back) from Madison to Bloomington, Ind., to deliver a lecture.
• Will Bison Roam Europe's Mountains? Discovery News April 20, 2010 Quoted: "That’s not a large number, but it’s still a major success story in terms of conservation of wild animals," said Tobias Kuemmerle of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the new study.
• How Tackling Allergies Can Ease Asthma Suffering National Public Radio April 12, 2010 Quoted: "For the vast majority of children with asthma, allergies are a very important, if not the most important factor in causing symptoms and determining risk for hospitalizations and emergency room visits," says asthma expert Dr. William Busse of the University of Wisconsin.
• Underground cash economy thrives in Sacramento Contra Costa Times April 12, 2010 Quoted: As much as $2 trillion in income went unreported nationally in 2008 — about 24 percent of total adjusted gross income in the United States, said Edgar Feige, a University of Wisconsin economist and authority on the topic. That’s the highest level since World War II, he said.
• New questions about Kissinger role in 1970s Latin death plot Los Angeles Times April 12, 2010 Quoted: "I think the document reinforces what we already know -- that Kissinger wanted to downplay Condor," said Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of a 2007 book on Kissinger. "His primary concern was to maintain good and ... productive relationships with Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Condor was seen as an irritant."
• Organ donation isn't what it sounds like Wisconsin State Journal March 19, 2010 Walter Pridham didn’t so much sweep his future wife off her feet as bowl her over.It was 1952, and they were both singing in the choir at Pres House, the Presbyterian student chapel on the UW-Madison campus. He was 21 and in the Air Force, stationed at Truax Field in Madison. She was an 18-year-old nursing student. After practice one night, he came around a blind corner from the coat room and crashed into her. As he picked her up, he invited her to coffee, thus beginning their courtship. Pres House has rarely been far from their thoughts ever since. Now, 58 years later, the Pridhams have donated $72,000 to replace the pipe organ in the chapel. Of the total, $22,000 is an outright gift, and $50,000 is a matching grant, part of an effort to raise $125,000 for the Pres House music program.
• Taking the field for the Milwaukee Brewers Milwaukee Journal Sentinel March 22, 2010 Mike Boettcher grew up on his family’s 100-cow beef farm in Fairchild, so he’s used to working outdoors. As a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Boettcher had intended on a career in animal science. But on a whim, he decided to take a class in horticulture. Today, he is the landscape manager for the Milwaukee Brewers under head groundskeeper Gary Vanden Berg.
• Energy loan programs in state help spread out costs Milwaukee Journal Sentinel March 22, 2010 The idea behind the Milwaukee and Racine initiatives is the work of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy founder Joel Rogers, a MacArthur Fellow who’s also a leader of Emerald Cities Collaborative, a national initiative.
• Are neti pots on the nose? Los Angeles Times March 16, 2010 Quoted: Nasal rinses can be especially helpful for people who suffer from seasonal allergies or lingering sinus infections, says Dr. David Rabago, an assistant professor in the department of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. "People say they feel better right away," he says.
• Grass Roots: Nuts about fruit trees? Get clicking for Madison March 16, 2010 Online voting starts today to win orchards for Madison. A grass roots group, Madison Fruit and Nuts, worked with city officials to get the okay to plant fruit trees in Madison parks and other local supporters of edible landscapes have mobilized to enter five local sites in the running. One is the Eagle Heights Garden on UW Campus.
• Even a 3-year-old knows power of a logo MSNBC.com March 10, 2010 Having the "right" brand of jeans or the latest gadget isn’t just an annoying trait of teenagers (not to mention their parents). New research found that even preschoolers are brand-conscious and can recognize kiddie brand logos and products." Children as young as three are feeling social pressure and understand that consumption of certain brands can help them through life," said lead researcher Anna McAlister of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Findings like this show us that we need to think about materialism developing in very young children."
• Despite what you may have heard, there's no boom in deafness Washington Post March 9, 2010 According to a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in January, the odds of hearing loss are 31 percent lower, overall, for baby boomers than for their parents. "The study shows that the prevalence of hearing loss at any given age is getting lower with different generations -- that we’re retaining good hearing for longer than our parents and grandparents," says University of Wisconsin at Madison professor Karen Cruickshanks, a co-author of the study.
• Scientists Propose a More Efficient Way to Make Ethanol New York Times March 9, 2010 Ronald T. Raines and Joseph B. Binder of the University of Wisconsin are proposing a different way. In a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they describe a process that uses an ionic liquid — a salt with a low melting point — in combination with water and acids at lower concentrations to produce fermentable sugars.
• University rankings smarten up Nature March 5, 2010 Every autumn, politicians, university administrators, funding offices and countless students wait impatiently for the World University Rankings produced by Britain’s Times Higher Education (THE) magazine. A position in the upper echelons of the THE ranking can influence policy-makers’ higher-education investments, determine which institutions attract the best researchers or students, and prompt universities to try to boost their ratings.
• Economy forces some medical schools to shrink classes USA Today March 5, 2010 Edward S. Salsberg, director of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Center for Workforce Studies, says he has seen some evidence of medical schools taking in fewer first-year students or slowing their planned growth rates. "It’s up to the individual schools to make decisions that work for them," he says. Public medical schools "have to go to their state legislatures to get support and we know state budgets aren’t in good condition in most states. "For the medical establishment, tight budgets and enrollment cuts couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Council on Graduate Medical Education estimated in 2005 that the United States would face a shortage of 85,000 to 96,000 physicians by 2020 unless medical schools were able to increase the number of new M.D.’s they graduate each year by several thousand. Other groups, too, project a physician shortage or at least the need to draw physicians to underserved regions and toward practicing high-demand specialties such as internal medicine and geriatrics.
• Why so fewer dead in Chile? Wisconsin Radio Network March 1, 2010 The devastation in Haiti from January’s earthquake was still fresh in our minds when another massive quake rocked Chile this weekend with an 8.8 magnitude.  UW-Madison Geophysics professor Clifford Thurber says in terms of size, Haiti was a “run-of-the-mill” 7.0 quake and Chile’s is among the top ten in the last century.
• Should We Clone Neanderthals? (Archaeology Magazine) Archaeology Magazine Feb. 23, 2010 Quoted: "There are humans today who are more different from each other in phenotype [physical characteristics]," says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin. He has studied differences in the DNA of modern human populations to understand the rate of evolutionary change in Homo sapiens. Many of the differences between a Neanderthal clone and a modern human would be due to genetic changes our species has undergone since Neanderthals became extinct. "In the last 30,000 years we count about 2,500 to 3,000 events that resulted in positive functional changes [in the human genome]," says Hawks. Modern humans, he says, are as different from Homo sapiens who lived in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, as Neolithic people would have been from Neanderthals.
• Highlighting E-Readers Inside Higher Education Feb. 23, 2010 Even before Apple announced the iPad, higher-education technologists predicted that e-book readers were on the brink of becoming a common accessory among college students; last fall, two-thirds of campus CIOs said they believed e-readers would become an “important platform for instructional resources” within five years, according to the Campus Computing Project.
• Magazine Ranks Most Bike-Friendly Cities New York Times Feb. 24, 2010 Noted: Bicycle tourism is good for local economies, according to a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.  The study found that nonresident bicyclists generated over $535 million in annual revenue for Wisconsin.
• Why Minority Students Don't Graduate From College Newsweek Feb. 24, 2010 Noted: At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the gap has been roughly halved over the last three years. The university has poured resources into peer counseling to help students from inner-city schools adjust to the rigor and faster pace of a university classroom—and also to help minority students overcome the stereotype that they are less qualified. Wisconsin has a "laserlike focus" on building up student skills in the first three months, according to vice provost Damon Williams.
• Where you live may play role in your health St. Louis Post-Dispatch Feb. 18, 2010 Residents of St. Charles County have the best opportunities in Missouri to be healthy, while people who live in St. Louis city have the worst, according to a new report. The counties and independent cities in each state were ranked by various factors that can affect health — smoking, obesity, poverty rates, binge drinking, violent crime, education levels and birth weights among others — for the national County Health Rankings report from the University of Wisconsin and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
• Hype proves to be inescapable part of pop culture Feb. 19, 2010 ....Whether it’s the official multimillion dollar marketing campaign or an unexpected wave of Internet buzz, so much information is out there that it’s almost impossible to walk into a movie theater or turn on your television without knowing at least something about what you’re about to see. UW-Madison communication arts associate professor Jonathan Gray tackles the hype machine in his new book "Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and other Media Paratexts." ($22, NYU Press). Through a mix of analysis and interviews, including with the creators of "Lost" and "Heroes," Gray’s book looks at how hype has changed the way pop culture entertainment is produced and consumed.
• How Botox May Really Keep Us From Feeling Sad Newsweek Feb. 9, 2010 It’s a version of the classic finding in psychology that facial expressions can produce the very emotion they usually reflect. Called the facial feedback hypothesis, it implies that forcing your lips and cheeks into a smile can make you feel happy and scowling can make you feel annoyed, at least a little. Building on that research, graduate student David Havas of the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to study people who had received Botox treatments that paralyzed one pair of their corrugator muscles, which cause the forehead to constrict into a frown.
• Wisconsin has played key role in U.S. medal haul - JSOnline Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Feb. 9, 2010 The many contributions of Wisconsin athletes to the Winter Games is one of the great untold stories of the U.S. Olympic movement. At the XXI Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, 30 of America’s 216 Olympians (13.9%) will have strong ties to Wisconsin. Three members of the men’s hockey team played at the University of Wisconsin; a fourth is a Madison native, and seven of the 21 members of the women’s hockey team - one-third the roster - who play or played for the Badgers (three are natives of the state). Their coach is Johnson, a Madison Memorial High School graduate who played for his father, legendary coach Bob Johnson, at UW.
• Changing History Boston Globe Feb. 8, 2010 With the growth of environmentalism as a political movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the natural world also began to find its way into scholarship. The realization of all the ways that modern man was shaping nature, intentionally and unintentionally, drove historians to look at the ways earlier societies had changed their environments as well. Among the pioneers of the field was William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin. His best-known work focused on the ways that different attitudes about land ownership between Native Americans and European settlers altered the New England landscape, and on how 19th-century Chicago, as it grew up into one of the nation’s great cities and trading hubs, reshaped the vast fertile plains around it - reshaping, as well, American attitudes about food and farming.
• Private, public research under one roof at UW Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Feb. 8, 2010 When it opens in December, the $205 million Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery will be a showcase of high-tech design and model of collaboration. The public/private research center under construction in the heart of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus features a circular auditorium for as many as 300 people, with walls that can be lifted into the ceiling, modular research neighborhoods with "plug-and-play" fume hoods and lab sinks, and clusters of casual seating beneath four-story high skylights.
• Private Giving to Colleges Dropped Sharply in 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education Feb. 3, 2010 With a battered economy and volatile financial markets taking their tolls on donors’ pocketbooks, private giving to American colleges dropped sharply in 2009, according to findings of the annual Voluntary Support of Education survey, which were released on Wednesday. Donations were down $3.75-billion from the previous year—a decline of 11.9 percent, the steepest in the survey’s 50-year history.
• Blum: Will Science Take the Field? New York Times Feb. 5, 2010 THE warning in The Journal of the American Medical Association is not ambiguous: “There is a very definite brain injury due to single or repeated blows on the head or jaw which cause multiple concussion hemorrhages. ... The condition can no longer be ignored by the medical profession or the public.”
• Report shows $1.5 billion annual impact of bicycling in Wisconsin Wisconsin State Journal Feb. 2, 2010 Recreational cycling generates $1.5 billion in economic activity a year in Wisconsin, according to a first-of-its-kind study by graduate students in UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.