UW-Madison in the Media

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

• 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.
• Are the Polar Ice Caps Melting? (The New American) Feb. 3, 2010 Noted: The head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, Anastasios Tsonis, supports Latif’s findings with further evidence showing that global temperatures depend largely on oceanic “multi-decadal oscillations,” or MDOs. Tsonis does not deny human activities can contribute to rising temperatures, but he disagrees they can affect climate in any significant way. In an interview with the U.K.’s Daily Mail, Tsonis explained that the latest MDO warm mode has brought on the global-warming hysteria of the past few years. Recalling ice-age predictions made in the 1970s, he said, “Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.”
• Domino's Comes Clean With New Pizza Ads (AP) New York Times Jan. 13, 2010 Quoted: Deborah Mitchell, executive fellow at the Center for Brand and Product Management at Wisconsin School of Business, said the campaign may cause confusion in the market place because people have known Domino’s for having a quick, 30-minute delivery, not for flavor.
• Database shows UW's reach Wausau Daily Herald Jan. 8, 2010 There are 71 different University of Wisconsin-Madison projects tied to Marathon County, and university officials want you to know about all of them. University officials this year will spread the word about an online database that includes more than 1,000 examples of school programs benefiting the state.
• The real Rain Man dies of heart attack aged 58 Guardian (UK) Dec. 23, 2009 Quoted: "His legacy can be summed up in one word: inspiration," said Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin medical school who advised the makers of Rain Man and who was close to Peek for the past 20 years.
• Lost Giants: Did Mammoths Vanish Before, During and After Humans Arrived? Scientific American Dec. 15, 2009 Noted: To pin down when the megafauna vanished, paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and her colleagues analyzed fossil dung, pollen and charcoal from ancient lake sediments in Indiana.
• The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas: Music For Monkeys New York Times Dec. 14, 2009 When David Teie, a cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra, wanted to test his ideas about where our emotional response to music originates, he decided to try them out on monkeys. He figured that if his theories were right — namely, that our response to the "emotional vocalizations," pulses and heartbeats that we first hear in the womb establishes our sense of music — then he should "be able to write music for another species that’s effective for that species." He contacted Charles Snowdon, a psychology professor who ran a colony of cotton-top tamarins in Madison at the University of Wisconsin, who sent him recordings of tamarin calls that demonstrated fear and calm.
• Retailers take notice as record numbers turn to food stamps Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Dec. 4, 2009 Quoted: "The fact that food stamp usage is up leads us to say the stigma once associated with food stamps is down," said John Karl Scholz, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the book "Changing Poverty, Changing Policies," published by the Russell Sage Foundation, which studies problems facing the poor.
• As jobs remain elusive, foreclosures rise again Boston Globe Nov. 23, 2009 Quoted: Morris A. Davis, an assistant professor in the Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, said the government needs to act quickly before the foreclosure crisis worsens.
• Palin's way of talkin' dissected, you betcha (AP) Madison.com Nov. 16, 2009 When Sarah Palin burst onto the national political stage there was a lot of talk about her distinctive way of talkin', you betcha. Three University of Wisconsin-Madison linguists tackled the conundrum in a research article to be published in the Journal of English Linguistics next month. The answer lies in something that happened in the 1930s. The UW researchers said people living in Alaska's Matanuska and Susitna valleys, where Wasilla is located, are largely descendants of farmers who moved there in the 1930s from the Upper Midwest.
• Lake Superior Stirs Up Wind as Waters Warm, Ice Cover Recedes Bloomberg News Nov. 16, 2009 Lake Superior, the world’s largest body of fresh water, is getting windier as the inland sea warms, increasing the danger to shipping and sailing interests.Winds above the lake, which straddles the U.S.-Canada border, have increased 5 percent a year since 1985, according to a study by Ankur Desai, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• Housing numbers up, but will they last? Minnesota Public Radio Nov. 12, 2009 Quoted: Morris Davis, a real estate economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• Popping pills is no quick fix for boosting your body's immune system Chicago Tribune Oct. 27, 2009 Quoted: "The immune system is made up of scouts -- or white blood cells -- that look for invaders or anyone who might harm the host," said family physician David Rakel, director of integrative medicine at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "If the scouts find something, they blow the whistle and recruit a number of other cells ... to immobilize and destroy the invading organism."
• Autumn’s Bounty - Pumpkins and Winter Squashes Star on Porches and Tables New York Times Oct. 26, 2009 Noted: Straight butternut is working for anyone who consumes it, too: The deep orange flesh is packed with beta carotene, vitamin C, potassium, magnesium, manganese, calcium and fiber. Dr. Molly Jahn, the dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the founder of the plant breeding department at Cornell University, helped to develop a better butternut that is resistant to pesky powdery mildew; the plant holds its foliage longer and generates sugar right up to the first killing frost. “Most of us like our squash sweet, and disease resistance allows it to really sweeten up,” said Dr. Jahn, who has taste-tested more than her share of squash. “We also selected for maximum color intensity, for the genetic potential to produce more beta carotene.” Which means the more orange, the better.
• Evolution a natural story of adventure Lexington Herald-Leader Oct. 26, 2009 For early naturalists such as Charles Darwin, cataloging new species wasn't just extraordinary because of its effects on science, but also because of the amazing stories of danger and discovery their travels produced. Many of those accounts have been overshadowed by the impressive science that lives on. Darwin's theory of evolution that he famously laid out in his 1859 Origin of Species still is a source of controversy. But how these groundbreaking naturalists gathered their research is as historic as their contributions to modern biology, said Sean B. Carroll, professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• The Sex-Housework Link Wall Street Journal Oct. 21, 2009 Quoted: Other research supports the "work hard, play hard" thesis. Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has found that it doesn’t lead to less intimacy in marriage when wives hold paid jobs.
• Darwin's contribution to geology overlooked (Cosmos Magazine) Oct. 20, 2009 Quoted: This was a "remarkable achievement for his early years," said Robert Dott, a sedimentary geologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "He was always making observations of that sort, which contributed to his most famous theories about evolution."
• How we're evolving (Cosmic Log) MSNBC.com Oct. 20, 2009 Our skulls and our genes show that we’re still evolving, but not always in the ways you might expect.For example, the typical human head has actually been getting smaller over the past few thousand years, reversing the earlier evolutionary trend. Meanwhile, East Asians are becoming lighter-skinned - and appear to have more sensitive hearing than their ancestors did 10,000 years ago. John Hawks, an anthropologist and blogger at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, points to such trends as evidence that "recent evolution is real."
• Fed chief warns greenback's global status at risk Globe and Mail (Canada) Oct. 2, 2009 Quoted: Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, said the United States would have to adopt “calamitously bad policies” to see it cede its reserve status to the euro, yen, yuan or the IMF’s special drawing rights (or SDRs).
• Throat infection may have brought down T. rex Los Angeles Times Sept. 30, 2009 Did Sue the dinosaur die of a really bad sore throat? An international team of scientists thinks so after studying holes in the jaw of the 13-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.