Join us for lunch during the summer on the Memorial Union Terrace at noon each Tuesday, starting May 12th!
Abstracts:
January 20, 2015
The passenger pigeon: Why it went extinct, and can we resurrect it?
Stan Temple, Nelson Institute
The passenger pigeon declined from billions to none in
the span of 50 years. Stan Temple analyses how this incredible
collapse could have happened. And now, 100 years after the
species' extinction, advances in biotechnology have led to visions
of resurrecting the species. Could we? Should we?
January 27, 2015
Madison Science Museum: from chaos to complexity
Olga Trubetskoy and Dave Nelson, Madison Science Museum
We will start from ongoing story of starting up a science museum in Madison describing how from initial turmoil, obstacles and defeats the museum is now emerging being shaped by inspiration, visions and public involvement. We will resume the saga by revealing a few curious stories from Madison science history scene that will be a part of a future museum exhibits.
February 3, 2015
Re-conceptualizing visuospatial memory development as an increase
in dynamic stability
Vanessa Simmering, UW Department of Psychology
For over a century, developmental psychologists have documented
how visuospatial memory improves from infancy through early
childhood. A variety of theories have been proposed to account for
these improvements, with most addressing only a small
developmental period and/or single behavioral task, making these
theories difficult to generalize. For example, Piaget attributed
changes between 8 and 12 months in infants' errors in a search
task to the acquisition of object permanence, but infants between
4 and 16 months show other improvements in the durability and
capacity of memory, in both search and looking tasks, that cannot
be explained by this theory. The goal of my research program is to
advance a comprehensive theory of visuospatial memory development
to explain multiple improvements across tasks and age groups. My
colleagues and I have proposed a dynamic systems account of memory
development which emphasizes the processes that underlie the
formation, maintenance, and use of memory representations across
behavioral contexts. By formalizing this theory in a dynamic
neural field model, my research shows that a host of developmental
improvements in memory can emerge through a common change in the
dynamic stability of the memory system. I will present empirical
evidence that memory capacity is not fixed but varies with task
contexts. Furthermore, my model simulations predicted that
different task structures will yield inconsistent capacity
estimates within the same group of participants while still
showing correlations in performance across these tasks. These
results suggest that a full explanation of visuospatial memory
development will require understanding how memory functions in the
moment of the task at hand.
February 10, 2015
Energy and ecosystems: Howard Odum's seminal 1973 paper, "Energy, ecology, and economics," 42 years later
Bill Fischer, Agronomy, Business, Law, and Psychiatry
ECOLOGICAL ENERGETICS AS BIOPHYSICAL ECONOMICS: All economic
value, development, and growth depend on energy flow. In
Energy, Ecology, and Economics (1974), Howard T. Odum extended his
analysis of energetics in natural ecosystems to the human economy.
His basic proposals continue to be developed and applied to
economics, but mainstream economics continues to neglect
energetics. ENERGY COST AND VALUE: Economic production has
correlated with energy use throughout history. Energy is the
predominant factor in economic production and GDP. GROWTH:
Population and production grew only slowly until the 19th century.
Growth accelerated with coal in the nineteenth century and even
more with oil in the twentieth. THE CURRENT QUANDARY: Growth
has slowed in the past 40 years. Per capita economic growth
may have stopped or be negative. ENERGY ACCOUNTING:
Energy cost, insignificant compared to capital and labor costs for
almost all human history, is now substantial. Current price
cannot account true energy costs and value. NET ENERGY
OR EROI: net energy, or Energy Returned on Energy Invested
(EROI) is key to energetics accounting. EROI declines
prevent growth. We have little idea of today’s economy’s net
energy or of alternatives. DEBT historically presumes
growth. We don’t know how to manage debt without growth. And
the just-in-time economy increases our vulnerability to shocks in
the debt system.
This talk is available as a PowerPoint
Presentation.
February 17, 2015
The limits to growth or the limits to models?
Jim Blair, Milton and Edgewood College
Outline:
Thomas Malthus and the Malthusian Trap
The Limits to Growth in 3 iterations (Club of Rome)
The Limits to the Limits to Growth (Ben Bova)
The Bet: Paul Ehrlich vs Julian Simon
2020 Vision (1970), and at the Midway (1995)
This talk is available as a PowerPoint Presentation.
February 24, 2015
Sweet talks and trade deals in symbiotic associations
Jean-Michel Ané, UW Department of Agronomy
Living organisms, such as plants, animals and humans in
particular, interact constantly with microbes present in their
environment to form symbioses. These symbioses are very dynamic
and can range all along a continuum between mutually beneficial
interactions to parasitic ones. Sometimes, these associations are
necessary for the survival of one or both partners, but they can
also be facultative. These associations can be lost or acquired
over time depending on environmental constraints. We will discuss
how plants and microbes communicate (sweet talks) to initiate and
maintain symbiotic associations, how these mechanisms evolved or
have been lost sometimes, but also how nutrients exchanges between
partners are regulated with interesting similarities to economic
markets (trade deals).
This talk is available as a Prezi
presentation.
March 3, 2015
Linking dynamics of chemistry, physiology and genetics in
ecosystems through spectroscopy
Phil Townsend, UW Department of Forest &Wildlife Ecology
Contact and imaging spectroscopy show great promise for measurement of the physiology of ecosystems related both to environmental drivers and genetics. Over the last decade, researchers have demonstrated the use of reflectance spectroscopy to rapidly and accurately characterize features of ecosystems that previously entailed considerable monetary expense and effort, and/or were not thought to be mappable. We have discovered that plant spectra provide a record of plant traits and can be exploited to better understand their function in time and space. Though we do not understand all drivers of variation -- at leaf, canopy and ecosystem levels -- here I will provide evidence that we can infer properties ranging from gene expression to photosynthetic capacity to nutrient availability. For example, we have used spectroscopy to characterize forest response to insect herbivores and to track foliar chemistry as it is related to forest productivity and nutrient availability following logging. In agricultural settings, spectroscopy offers the capacity to measure the physiological effects of pests such as aphids and disease on plant physiology and ultimately yield. In aspen forests, we show how traits and genetics co-vary based on inferences from imaging spectroscopy. The potential future applications of these methods are extensive, and adaptation of spectrometers to deploy in a range of settings will enable us to bridge the gaps in spatial and temporal measurement capacity from the leaf/canopy to airborne to spaceborne levels.
March 10, 2015
Characterizing variations in Wisconsin’s extreme weather
Steve Vavrus, Nelson Institute
Anecdotal evidence suggests an increasing occurrence of extreme weather in recent years, but a major impediment to identifying and quantifying trends is the absence of a common measuring stick. Many definitions of extreme weather exist, but they are often haphazard and not comparable to one other for quantifying the aggregate behavior of extremes. To help remedy this problem, I created a simple, non-parametric index of extreme weather based on the combined percentile rankings of temperature and precipitation (at monthly or longer timescales). This integrated index reveals that extreme weather has indeed been unusually pronounced in recent years in Madison and across Wisconsin. However, the reasons for the high index values vary considerably by location. The temporal and spatial variations of extreme weather in Wisconsin and elsewhere are probably a combination of chaotic weather processes and emerging anthropogenic climate change.
March 17, 2015
Chaos for the home electronics lab
Wesley Thio, Ohio State University
Electronic devices that behave chaotically are often considered
to be a nuisance, whether it’s a buzzing air conditioner, a
flickering lightbulb or a phone that just keeps disconnecting from
the internet. However by using some basic electronics tools,
I intend to demonstrate the opposite, that circuits behaving
according to the principles of chaos theory can be beautiful and
have potentially useful functions. I will also show how accessible
these circuits are to the home tinkerer in their basement and give
many visual examples that will even appeal to non-engineers. A
preview of one experiment is given below.
This talk is available as a PowerPoint
Presentation.
March 24, 2015
What is the Internet of Things (IOT) and key trends?
Sandra Bradley, UW Department of Industrial Engineering
The landscape of technology is changing at an ever-increasingly
rapid pace. Broadband connectivity is inexpensive and ubiquitous;
devices are becoming more powerful and smaller with a variety of
on-board sensors. The data in this machine-to-machine world
creates "smart" experiences for everyday consumers and businesses
alike. This highly-charged connected world is what we are calling
the Internet of Things. As Boo-Keun Yoon, president and CEO of
Samsung Electronics Samsung said at a conference recently, "IoT
isn't science fiction anymore. It's science fact." We are already
seeing applications ranging from energy efficiency to logistics to
personal healthcare to smart homes using IoT concepts. In this
session we will give an overview of what IoT is, how it will
change the way we live and work, and will talk about key trends
and challenges in IoT.
This talk is available as a PowerPoint Presentation.
April 7, 2015
Movement of eosinophils into lungs of patients with asthma
Deane Mosher, UW Department of Biomolecular Chemistry
Eosinophils are granular leukocytes (white cells) that are relatively scarce in blood but more common in tissues. Tissue eosinophils contribute to tissue homeostasis in the gut and other organs and are a prominent component of inflammation associated with malignancies, viral and helminthic infections, allergic diseases such as asthma, and orderly tissue repair. Among leukocytes, eosinophils are exceptional in a number of ways—content of eosinophilic granules; complement of receptors and other molecules that control activation and trafficking; complement of mediator-generating enzymes; and polarization upon activation into a granular compartment and a nucleopod, a specialized protrusion occupied by the nucleus. I will describe a series of related processes that target blood eosinophils to the bronchial tree of asthmatic patients.
April 14, 2015
How scale-dependent are ecosystem-atmosphere exchanges?
Ankur Desai, UW Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
Terrestrial
surfaces are a lower boundary condition for exchanges of trace
gases, energy, and momentum with the atmosphere and consist of
biologically-active organisms. In terrestrial ecosystems,
information relevant to these processes scales upwards from gene
to cell to microbe to plant, while for the atmosphere, the
relevant modes of interactions with these processes scale downward
from climate dynamics to synoptic systems to boundary layer
turbulence. Consequently, identifying the appropriate space and
time scale over which ecosystems interact with the atmosphere is
critical for improving theoretical and numerical simulations of
these processes. Further, there is a fundamental spatiotemporal
scale mismatch between the terrestrial observations made about
these process and the spatial scale over which numerical models of
ecosystems, weather systems, and climate operate. I will present a
general overview of this problem, a few examples of work in my lab
addressing this issue from the perspective of 1) modeling spatial
heterogeneity in ecosystem energy balance, 2) data synthesis for
terrestrial carbon cycling, and 3) rectification of eddy
covariance flux tower observation flux footprint bias. The
overview and examples will be used to engage discussion in a
general conceptual framework on ecosystem-atmosphere scaling and
model-data comparison.
April 21, 2015
Towards understanding IceCube high energy neutrinos
Yang Bai, UW Department of Physics
The IceCube collaboration has recently observed high energy
neutrinos in the 30 TeV to 2 PeV range. The flux is much above the
atmospheric neutrino background and requires new sources to
explain its origin. In this talk, I will provide a list of
potential explanations with a focus on decaying dark matter and
point-like sources.
April 28, 2015
Barker frailty, Barker echoes and warped older age mortality dynamics
Hiram Beltran Sanchez, UW Center for Demography and Health of Aging
An association between early childhood and old age mortality in
successive birth cohorts (Barker frailty) generates
conditions under which old age mortality can increase, decrease or
remain constant even though background mortality is declining
(Barker echoes). The stronger the association is, the larger
will be the deviations from background mortality, but,
paradoxically, the less durable this deviant behavior
will be (warped dynamics). Under regimes of strong Barker frailty,
life expectancy at older ages my decrease even though survival
conditions are improving.
Following the tradition begun last year in which we had a
delightful discussion of where we have come and where we might go
with the seminars, this last seminar of the semester will be
devoted to a continuation of that discussion without any formal
speaker. We will also discuss what we want to do during our
informal weekly lunches on the Memorial Union Terrace which begin
on May 12th. This celebration will include expanded refreshments,
to which your own culinary contribution is welcome.