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August 5, 2019

Top Stories

Research

Why Poor Couples Crave Strong Relationships

KERA

Economists study poverty using hard data – but the numbers don’t always reflect personal experiences. University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor Sarah Halpern-Meekin joins guest host Courtney Collins to talk about how low-income parents struggle for family and community — and how a vacuum of social ties can perpetuate the cycle of hardship. Halpern-Meekin’s new book is called “Social Poverty: Low-Income Parents and the Struggle for Family and Community Ties.”

Alzheimer’s Blood Test Shows 94% Accuracy

Medpage Today

The IPMS method was based on prior work by the Bateman laboratory that immunoprecipitated A? to isolate it from plasma, then used liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry to determine A?42 and A?40 concentrations, wrote Barbara Bendlin, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Henrik Zetterberg, MD, PhD, of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, in an editorial accompanying the study.

Higher Education/System

GOP bill seeks to rein in student fees at UW campuses, but ‘one size fits all’ approach draws concerns

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The bill has yet to be proposed in the Legislature. Murphy’s office said the bill has gathered bipartisan support since it started circulating the Legislature for sponsorship, with Reps. Samantha Kerkman, R-Salem; Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma; Timothy Ramthun, R-Campbellsport; and Shannon Zimmerman, R-River Falls; and Sens. Lena Taylor, D-Milwaukee; and Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville signing on.

Crime and safety

Athletics

Tom Oates: UW-Alabama home-and-home series marks step in right direction for college football

Wisconsin State Journal

Column: Such a series between perennial top-25 teams, a staple on non-conference schedules well into the 1990s, has become all too rare in college football. If you’re looking for a root cause as to why fans aren’t going to games, having to pay increasingly big bucks to watch a steady stream of unattractive opponents is a really good place to start.

UW Experts in the News

How avocados shape Americans’ views on trade policy

Washington Post

Avocados, however, are a different story. They are a good that many Americans purchase regularly, and whose cost, therefore, they know intimately. While consumers can ignore abstract line charts about trade wars, they can’t ignore the price in the supermarket of their favorite fruit. Telling the stories about tariffs through everyday objects allows consumers to understand how such dense policies might impact them, and just might change the political calculus.

Sarah Anne CarterSarah Anne Carter teaches material culture in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is author of “Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World.”

Craving Freedom, Japan’s Women Opt Out of Marriage

The New York Times

Quoted: “The data suggests very few women look at the lay of the land and say ‘I’m not going to marry,’” said James Raymo, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written extensively about marriage in Japan. Rather, he said, they “postpone and postpone and wait for the right circumstances, and then those circumstances never quite align and they drift into lifelong singlehood.”

UW-Madison Related

The Persistence of School Segregation

Progressive

Much was written after Kamala Harris’s and Joe Biden’s spat at the first Democratic debate about how Harris was the benefactor of integration by busing. But no one pointed out how much white students benefited just as much from her presence.

Alexandria Millet is a journalism student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Public School Shakedown intern at The Progressive.