News & Notes

Chancellor’s undergraduate initiative gains support from board of regents.

As students battled spring fever this year, the campus community was drawn into extensive conversations about the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates. First proposed in March by Chancellor Biddy Martin PhD’85, the plan triggered talk in more than 140 campus meetings, Wisconsin Alumni Association-sponsored cookie giveaways, and spirited discussions.

The initiative, which, Martin says, “will ensure that our quality remains at the top and our students’ degrees retain their value,” won enthusiastic approval by the board of regents in early May. It calls for a supplemental UW-Madison tuition charge that grows by $250 a year for the next four years for in-state students, to an extra $1,000 by 2012–13. For non-residents, it grows by $750 a year, to an extra $3,000. Students who have demonstrated need and whose families earn $80,000 or less will receive grants to offset the additional tuition charge.

Regent Thomas Loftus MA’72 congratulated Martin on a “magnificent political and public campaign” to explain the need for the initiative. “We’re making an investment here — in tough times,” he added.

The additional funding will add more teachers in highly sought courses and majors, helping to eliminate course bottlenecks in areas such as economics, chemistry, biology, and Spanish. Funds also have been designated to improve critical student support services, such as career and academic advising, peer mentoring, and first-year interest groups.

Finally, the initiative, which was backed by the student government, will significantly increase need-based financial aid. The university will equal or exceed that revenue through a campaign to increase private support.

“Our commitment to quality and affordability will keep us in the bottom half of the Big Ten in tuition, even after the initiative is fully implemented,” Martin says.


Dennis Chaptman ’80

If your ears are burning, Badgers, don’t be surprised. UW-Madison is one of the most-talked-about American universities, according to a study by the Global Language Monitor. Released in April, the study ranks all American universities by how often their names appear in a broad range of media, including not only print and electronic articles, but also in blogs and on social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. The UW ranked sixth, behind Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Michigan, and Stanford.

Postdoctoral researcher J. David Van Sickle is reaching into the realm of geography to plumb the mysteries of asthma. By attaching GPS devices to a group of asthmatics’ inhalers, Van Sickle plans to track where and when those inhalers are used. Called the “asthmap,” the plan aims to discover previously unknown causes for the lung disease and improve quality of life for those who suffer from it.

The UW has a new partner in an ancient region: Iraq’s Tikrit University. In March, Chancellor Biddy Martin PhD’85 signed a memorandum of understanding with Tikrit’s president, Maher Saleh Allawi, offering to explore opportunities for educational and scientific cooperation. Brett Bruen ’02, public diplomacy officer for the American embassy in Baghdad, helped arrange
the deal.

Digital pictures may soon be a little clearer, thanks to the work of Zheniang (Jack) Ma. The assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering led a team that developed a flexible material that reduces the distortion that affects many digital photos. The material could be a boon, especially for inexpensive cameras such as those found in cell phones.

The UW’s art department received a new home on campus with the opening of the university’s new Art Lofts in May. Formerly a warehouse near the Kohl Center, the lofts house studios and a variety of the department’s creative facilities, including the glass lab, metal sculpture foundry, ceramics, and papermaking area. The building brings together art programs that had previously been scattered across campus.

Dictionary of regional dialects nears completion.

Meandering its merry way through new submissions such as whiffle-minded, whistle punk, and williwags, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) project is nearing completion on a mission more than four decades in the making.

DARE, hailed as a pinnacle of American lexicography, received a two-year, $295,000 boost from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this year that will help close the book on its fifth volume — covering Si through Z — and lead the project into a second life as a digital, online resource.

In DARE parlance, you might say the project is “over the dog and will get over the tail, too.”

“It’s very exciting, but it doesn’t feel like the end,” says Joan Hall, chief editor of DARE, part of the Department of English. Hall notes that a sixth volume
of supplementary data is in the offing, and the online version of DARE will provide a platform for continual expansion.

DARE is a reference tool meant to capture not the homogenous whole of English found in conventional dictionaries, but the rich, regional variety spoken across America. One NSF reviewer put it this way: “From its inception, this project took seriously the principle that a language is, in fact, the sum of its parts, and its parts are dialects.”

The project began in 1965 as the brainchild of Frederic Cassidy, who served as chief editor of DARE until his death in 2000. Cassidy led extensive fieldwork from 1965 to 1970 across the country, capturing through surveys and audio recordings a vast wealth of first-person detail on language variation. Those field findings have always been supported by print materials, but are now hugely supplemented by
digital collections.

The dictionary has attracted some high-profile friends over the years, including nationally syndicated columnists William Safire and James J. Kilpatrick. During a financially tough period for the dictionary, Hall recalls that one of Kilpatrick’s “Writer’s Art” columns about DARE concluded with this: “For any person who loves the English language and revels in its richness of idiom and word origin, [DARE] offers a cause worth supporting. … If you can’t send a million, send something.”

More astonishing is DARE’s use in solving crime. Forensic linguist Roger Shuy, working on the Unabomber case in the 1990s, employed DARE to develop a complete cultural, religious, and educational profile of the suspect, based on his voluminous manifesto. The profile proved to closely resemble the man eventually convicted, Ted Kaczynski.

In another case, Shuy helped solve a kidnapping and extortion case by using DARE. A child was abducted from her home, and a scrawled ransom note was left behind demanding $10,000. The letter read, in part: “Put (the money) in the green trash kan on the devil strip at the corner of 18th and Carlson. Don’t bring anybody along. No kops!”

Hall says that Shuy discerned a lot from the note, including that the “c” words were deliberately spelled with a “k” to suggest a lack of education. But the real kicker was “devil strip.” According to DARE, that phrase describes “the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street,” known in Madison as a terrace. Hall says “devil strip” is used almost exclusively in a well-defined triangle in Ohio between Youngstown, Cleveland, and Akron. This piece of evidence helped build a case against one suspect, who later confessed to the crime.

The new NSF grant now represents more than two decades of continuous support from the federal agency. DARE also relies upon core funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, gifts from private foundations, and donations from individuals.

For regional English buffs, here’s more on the first three terms in this story. “Whiffle-minded” is a Maine term for vacillating; a “whistle punk” is a Pacific Northwest logging term for a person who controls the whistle on a donkey engine; and “williwags” is a New England term for tangled underbrush.

Brian Mattmiller ’86

Weights and Measures

An unprecedented study of childhood seeks answers to health problems
Babies born during the coming years in certain neighborhoods of Wisconsin’s Waukesha County will be part of the biggest ever checkup on the health of the American child.

The National Children’s Study began this spring and will follow 100,000 kids — starting before conception and continuing to their twenty-first birthdays — in an effort to pinpoint the origins of a range of health problems. Samples of blood and umbilical cords will be saved at birth, and the children will have regular checkups as they grow. Waukesha County is one of 105 sites nationwide participating in the study, a collaborative project of the UW’s Waisman Center, the School of Medicine and Public Health, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and other agencies.

UW-Madison professor Maureen Durkin is co-principal investigator for the Waukesha study, which in time will include 1,250 children and their families. Researchers hope to learn how genes and the environment
interact to influence health. One facet, for example, will explore whether dust mites in a mother-to-be’s mattress during pregnancy increase the likelihood that her baby will eventually develop asthma.

“Large-scale studies like this have the potential to yield insight into the development of conditions ranging from asthma to autism,” Durkin says.

Durkin’s university department, population health sciences, has conducted several long-range epidemiological studies. One looked at 253,347 children born during 1994 and found a link between older parents and children who developed autism, a pattern not apparent in smaller studies. Another, the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort, is a nationally renowned project that has followed the sleep patterns of hundreds of volunteers for twenty years; its research recently found that people who have sleep apnea, a condition in which they have breathing pauses during sleep, are dying at a much higher rate than those who don’t. The Beaver Dam Eye Study has monitored vision and hearing in generations of Wisconsin families.

This year, as Wisconsin babies come into the world and begin yielding lessons about our health, the department celebrates its own fiftieth birthday.


Susan Lampert Smith ’82

Our ability to understand another’s feelings may be genetic.

If you have pets or have worked around animals, you know that they can pick up on the emotional states of those around them. A new study of mice has shown that this ability to feel empathy is coded in the genes.

“Mice are capable of a more complex form of empathy than we ever believed possible,” says Garet Lahvis, now a professor of behavioral neuroscience at Oregon Health and Science University, who conducted the study while at the UW. “We believe there’s a genetic contribution to the ability for empathy that has broad implications for autism research and other psychosocial disorders.”

Lahvis and then-graduate student Jules Panksepp PhD’09 found that mice from a highly social strain learned to associate a specific sound and cage with something negative simply by hearing a distress squeak from a mouse in that cage. A less social, genetically different strain failed to learn any connection between the cues and the other mouse’s distress.

The differences between the two strains reveal a genetic component to the ability to perceive and act on another’s emotional state.

Animal models of complex social behaviors like empathy should help analyze what causes social interaction deficits, such as those seen in human psychosocial disorders including autism, schizophrenia, depression, and addiction, the researchers say.

“The core of empathy is being able to have an emotional experience and share that experience with another,” says Panksepp. “A simplified model of it in a mouse may help us get closer to modeling symptoms of human disorders.”

Jill Sakai PhD’06M

The latest UW stem-cell breakthrough creates beating heart muscle.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, two Wisconsin scientists produced pulsating proof of an advance in stem-cell research.

Jianhua Zhang and Tim Kamp, of the UW-Madison Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center, showed that pluripotent stem cells (iPS), made from skin cells, could be induced to grow into working heart-muscle cells.

The finding helps sidestep the moral debate over using stem cells made from human embryos. These iPS cells begin their scientific odyssey as skin cells, are genetically reprogrammed back to their original state, and then are transformed again into heart cells. The achievement heralds a day when scientists can mend broken hearts by growing repair cells from skin.

Kamp, who treats heart failure patients as a UW Health cardiologist, sees the real-life need firsthand. “If we have a heart-failure patient who is in dire straits — and there are never enough donor hearts for transplantation — we may be able to make heart cells from the patient’s skin cells, and use them to repair heart muscle,” he says. “That’s pretty exciting.”

That day isn’t quite here, as researchers continue to explore ways to reprogram the cells without using potentially harmful viruses. But the accelerating rate of stem-cell discoveries offers hope. Seventeen years passed from the creation of mouse embryonic stem cells to 1998, when UW researcher Jamie Thomson created the first human embryonic stem cells. In contrast, the first mouse iPS stem cells were created in 2006, and Thomson and UW scientist Junying Yu announced in November 2007 they had created human iPS stem cells. A year later, UW researcher Clive Svendsen turned iPS cells made from a patient’s skin into motor neurons. Two months later came the Kamp team’s success in turning iPS cells into heart-muscle cells.

Susan Lampert Smith ’82

The Why Files, the witty Web site that brings us the science behind the news, is bucking trends once again by going from online to print. The Why Files book, published in April by Penguin for readers who “love accurate science served up with humor,” tackles topics ranging from how poker can make you sick to why racehorses have big butts. An online science magazine launched by University Communications in 1996 with support from the National Science Foundation, The Why Files features new stories each week at whyfiles.org.

Virologists sequence the genome of the common cold.
Working with a team of researchers at the University of Maryland, UW biochemistry professor Ann Palmenberg has penetrated one of the most confounding mysteries that plague the human sinus: the common cold.

In February, the scientists announced that they had successfully sequenced the genome for all known varieties of the human rhinovirus (HRV), which causes the upper respiratory infection commonly called a cold.

While common, the cold itself presents something of a mystery. Although the virus was identified decades ago, little progress has been made in understanding its inner workings — which has left doctors in the dark about a disease that affects almost everyone.

“The lack of whole-genome sequence data for the full cohort of HRVs has made it difficult to understand basic molecular and evolutionary characteristics of the viruses and has hampered investigations for the epidemiology of upper respiratory tract infections and asthma epidemics,” Palmenberg and her colleagues reported.

The common cold, they argue, is more than an irritant. Americans, they note, spend some $6 billion on cold medication each year. Further, colds cause approximately half of all asthma attacks, and the virus can cause infants to develop asthma.

What makes HRV so difficult to deal with is its variety. There are some ninety-nine known strains of the virus, categorized as falling into two distinct species: seventy-four strains of the species called HRV-A and twenty-five of HRV-B. By sequencing these viruses, the researchers hope that scientists will be able to understand what makes them so pathogenic.

Further, increasing knowledge of HRV-A and HRV-B may help improve understanding of a newly discovered species called HRV-C, a virus that appears to cause far more serious infections deeper in the respiratory tract.

Palmenberg notes that the gene-sequencing project doesn’t mean that a cure for the cold will appear anytime soon.

“Nobody cares about curing HRV-A and HRV-B,” she says. “They don’t cause particularly dangerous disease, and the safety issues involved in even testing a vaccine take that option off the table.”

But she notes that the project may lead to antiviral agents or vaccines against HRV-C. “Type C is the real deal,” she says. “It produces flulike symptoms that often develop into dangerous viral pneumonia.”

John Allen

The future could look bleak for cold-blooded creatures such as this Australian heath monitor, reports UW zoology professor Warren Porter. If global temperatures rise as much as many scientists predict, the monitor could be driven from its habitat. Porter has developed a tool he calls the Niche Mapper to determine how various animal species would be affected by changes to their environment. Earlier this year, he published a study with two Australian scientists that looked at how cold-blooded animals — particularly the heath monitor — would deal with a global rise in temperature of three degrees Celsius. Such an increase, they predict, would make much of the lizards’ current range uninhabitable. “We wanted to examine the common paradigm that says that cold-blooded animals spend most of their time seeking to keep warm,” Porter says. “What we found is just the opposite. Especially in the tropics, where most of the world’s biodiversity is, cold-blooded species are more concerned with keeping cool.” Rising temperatures could force the heath monitor to spend much of its day in the shade or underground, depriving it of the time it needs to forage for food.

After a ten-year hiatus, competitive forensics is returning to campus, thanks to the efforts of a solitary Badger — and a few friends, who even dug into their own pockets for funding in 2001.

“From the ’80s until about 1991, we were one of the best teams in the country,” says Sarah Dowd, team co-captain. “In 2001, Chris Klundt [’05] moved here from Milwaukee and discovered we didn’t have a forensics team, so he started ours. For a student to start a successful forensics team is a huge accomplishment and essentially unheard of.”

During the past two years, the team has nearly doubled in size to eighteen active members, recruiting by word of mouth and e-mails, and holding weekly meetings. Steady communication is key to finding committed members, Dowd says, noting that the team is still rebuilding, hoping to eventually match college teams that are three times larger.

That said, six members represented the UW at the National Forensics Association tournament held in Springfield, Missouri, this spring. The team placed seventh in Division 2 competition, and Lucas Moench made the semifinals in extemporaneous speaking.

Beyond the thrill of competition, participating in forensics helps students hone their skills at writing papers and giving speeches. “A ten-minute speech is a five-page paper,” says Dowd. “My ability to write papers has increased tenfold.”

Heather Gjerde ’09