Newsmakers

(Every week faculty and staff from across campus are featured or cited in newspapers, magazines, broadcasts and other media from around the country. The listings that follow represent a small selection of the many stories that spotlight UW–Madison and its people. More newsmaker listings)

Parasitic wasps: The farmer’s friend
Parasitic wasps are handy allies of some farmers, who rely on them to feed on flies in chicken coops and other barn areas. But many wasps don’t survive the cold of winter. Insect researchers are now finding the secrets of those that do, discovering that wasps siphon off antifreeze from their hosts, allowing them to survive the deep freeze. It isn’t known yet if this is common behavior among parasitic insects. “We don’t know if it’s the rule or the exception,” Michael Strand, professor of entomology, tells New Scientist (Jan. 8). But applications could be useful to help farmers breed wasps for year-round insect protection.

Blame the cold weather?
The blame for Robert Falcon Scott’s failed 1912 expedition to the South Pole has traditionally been laid on Scott’s poor planning. But Science News (Jan. 1) reports that meteorological data are causing scientists to have some new compassion for what Scott faced, which was apparently uncommonly cold weather, even for Antarctica. “They were just absolutely freezing to death,” says Charles Stearns, a UW–Madison meteorologist, of the team led by Scott, who died trying to return from the polar region. “I think if it had been warmer, they’d have made it back.” Work by scientists has confirmed that temperatures at the time stayed below -30 degrees Fahrenheit for more than a month, an exceedingly cold spell during the South Pole’s mildest season.

Internet 2: A worldwide classroom
During the fall semester, computer science professor Lawrence Landweber used the subject of his lectures – the Internet – to link students in Madison to colleagues at a university in Japan. The course linked the two groups of students over high-speed lines across the new Internet 2, a network being developed for research and education. “We could communicate as if we were in the same classroom,” Landweber tells the New York Times (Dec. 30). Students had to be flexible to make the joint course, co-taught by a Japanese professor, a reality – American students showed up at 7:30 p.m. for a morning lecture in Japan, and Japanese students tuned in late at night for Madison lecture times. But Landweber considers the experiment an important step. “To me the Internet is not just about going and getting files from web servers,” he says. “I want to get students talking to each other.”

Government: Not all bad
A study shows that the government doesn’t fare nearly as badly in dealing with customers as its reputation might suggest. In fact, most consumers list their interactions with agencies of the federal government as only slightly less favorable than similar interactions with private companies, reports the Washington Post (Dec. 14). Still, professors asked to respond to the survey cautioned against reading too much into the data, partly because agencies selected the customer segments they wished to hear from, rather than surveying the public at large. Donald Kettl, a professor of political science who has studied government reform, says that regardless of what the survey says, the government should be doing more to improve its relations with the public. “The government has a choice in how it structures relationships with citizens, and other things being equal, these relationships ought to be the easy way, not the hard way,” he says.