WRITER - JOURNALIST - EDITOR

As the nation continues to lose wilderness area, a national project seeks to identify every state’s remotest locale. Liz Merfeld went looking for Dane County’s distant spot, but found it just a little too crowded. 

Read article and listen to my interview on WORT. 

Ever been stuck in a menial job, frustrated because you knew you were capable of so much more? Then you may have something in common with your Internet router — you know, that thing in the basement you have to reset when you can’t get online?

It’s a metaphor offered by Dale Willis, co-founder of Madison-based start-up Paradrop Labs, which seeks to elevate routers to a more lofty purpose — that of miniature, in-home servers.

​Read my article.

Late nights, surprise expenses, feeling cut off from friends, managing fussy moods, being drained of energy. Also, the thrill that comes from creating something out of nothing. Such is the startup life.

“Parentpreneurs” — that is, parents juggling Mom and Dad duty with starting a business — get a double dose of day-to-day unpredictability and adventure. This year’s Forward Fest is dedicated in part to them.

Read my article. 

Wisconsin Public Radio’s July 3 episode of Central Time on WHSF featured a story on Back to the Future, celebrating the movie’s 30th anniversary.

Movie buffs have noted that the second film in the trilogy, set in the year 2015, features flat-screen TVs, smart glasses and hover boards. But something is missing: radio.

The omission could seem unimportant, until you compare it to the first film. From the opening lines (a radio commercial) to the clock radio that welcomes Marty McFly back to 1985, radio broadcasting gets more screen ti...

Maybe you’ve spotted it in your daily news feed in the last few weeks. Net neutrality — the idea that the Internet should remain an open, democratic, free-market medium for all people, regardless of how much they pay — is getting mainstream attention.

At the UW-Madison, Danny Kimball and Lucas Graves both study issues involving net neutrality. Kimball is an instructor and Ph.D. candidate in UW- Madison’s Communication Arts Department specializing in new media;; net neutrality is the focus of his dissertation. Graves is a former Wired reporter and...

They are Syrian immigrants and Bhutanese refugees. Spouses of visiting professors from Pakistan and au pairs from Ecuador. Studious mothers of 12 from Somalia whose turn it is, finally, to attend class. Some, highly educated in their home country, arrive with advanced degrees. Others have never set foot inside a school and struggle to read and write in their native language.

Step into an English as a Second Language classroom at Madison College’s downtown campus, and you’ll find learners from 10 or 15 countries, and as many stations in life, prac...

For most of us, smartphones make life more convenient and fun. We route trips, game, buy things and share ideas on the go. But for blind users, smartphones can be survival tools. An app or web page that’s not accessible is more than an annoyance — it disconnects and disorients.

Kevin Jones is one such user. Blind since birth and a lifelong Madison-area resident, Jones is a technology evangelist and an emerging force in the local web and app development community. He’s on a mission to help developers understand how to make their content accessible...

The Humanities Hackathon leads the UW’s entry into digital humanities.

If a paperback on your summer reading list was published anonymously, you’d probably notice. But if this article lacked a byline, or tonight’s episode of Wilfred didn’t credit a writer, you might not bat an eyelash.

Mark Vareschi, assistant professor of English at UW-Madison, wants to know why, and also how anonymous publication affects the way we interpret published or performed works. To help him get closer to the answers, he turned to computers.

Read article.

Last May, the girls next door found a baby bunny hopping near their tomato garden, scooped her up and placed her in a box in their garage. “What should we do with her?” they asked me, the neighborhood’s token animal rescuer.

She was the size of my fist, her eyes and ears open, in good health. I had recently learned that at this age, belying their helpless appearance, bunnies are out of the nest and on their own. So we planted her beneath some tangled boscage in their backyard and watched her scamper away.

Bunnies like her often find their way (vi...

If you're an inventor or crafter, perhaps you've used a 3D printer to bring your ideas or artwork to life. For the rest of us, the concept might sound kind of far out. But a world where 3D printing is as commonplace as laser printing is close enough to touch.

3D printers extrude, sinter, glue or deposit a filament, layer by layer, until it produces a finished object - a bracelet, an iPhone case, a wrench or an ant farm - following the instructions of a digital model.

Already 3D printing has advanced science and medicine, among other industries. N...