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February 25, 2022

Research

Chicago region grapples with reducing road salt as chloride levels exceed state limits in waterways, continue to rise in Lake Michigan

Posted on
Chicago Tribune

Noted: A December 2021 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the lake’s chloride levels have risen from about 9 milligrams per liter in 1980 to about 15 milligrams per liter today, primarily due to the use of road salt. Chloride levels in Lake Michigan have been rising steadily since the 19th century, when the lake’s chloride levels reached only 2 milligrams per deciliter.

Rob Mooney, a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison who worked on the chloride study, said that although researchers don’t have a definitive answer as to why, it could be because Lake Michigan has a much longer water replacement time — the time it takes for the water in each lake to be completely replaced — than Erie and Ontario.

Warming trends in Wisconsin are upending winter activities and ways of life

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Noted: Scientists say the last two decades have been the warmest on record in Wisconsin. Among them is Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“No season has been immune to the warming trend,” he said. “Winter has warmed the most. That has been true in the past, and it’s expected to be true in the future.”

A new COVID study that examined Wisconsin, Seattle, and San Francisco could help predict where caseloads are likely to be the highest

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: Brian Levy is an assistant professor of sociology at George Mason University. Karl Vachuska is a research assistant in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their study looked at data in Wisconsin, San Francisco and Seattle.

Campus life

Protestors gather on Bascom to protest Russian invasion of Ukraine

Posted on
Daily Cardinal

A group of approximately 12 protestors gathered at the top of Bascom Hill on Thursday to protest the Russian military’s invasion of eastern Ukraine which began earlier this week. Demonstrators carried signs and chanted slogans denouncing the actions of president Vladamir Putin and the Russian military.

State news

Traffic deaths keep rising in Wisconsin amid rash of speeding, reckless driving

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Andrea Bill, assistant director of the Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which analyzes state traffic data, said people in all regions of the state are speeding more.

Researchers first tracked an increase in speeding when the pandemic shutdowns in early 2020 caused dramatic reductions in the number of cars on the road. By mid-2021, Bill said, volume in Wisconsin was nearly back to pre-pandemic levels — but average speeds hadn’t come down.

“What I thought would happen was that when the traffic came back to normal, we would see the speeds go back down to where they were before 2020,” Bill said. “And we did not see that in 2021.”

Crime and safety

Health

UW Health nurses rally for union recognition

Posted on
WKOW-TV 27

UW Health nurses have not had a union since their previous contract expired in 2014. They’ve been trying to change that for two years and rallied Thursday across from American Family Children’s Hospital in support of the effort.

Opinion

How media changes eroded political civility in Wisconsin

Posted on
The Capital Times

The new book “Battleground” is a deeply academic dive into how Wisconsin became such an unwelcoming place for civil discourse during the past dozen years … “The decay of the traditional political communication ecology in our state has accelerated over the past decade,” said Lewis Friedland, an emeritus journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of six co-authors, all professors. Besides Friedland, the authors are Dhavan Shah and Michael Wagner, who teach journalism at UW, Katherine Cramer and Jon Pevehouse, both UW political science professors, and Chris Wells, a former UW journalism professor now at Boston University.

Business/Technology

Experts warn of possible cyber attacks

Posted on
WAOW

Experts said America could see a potential for cyber attacks from the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

A UW Madison professor said though nation-state attacks don’t seem to be Putin’s goal at the moment, now is a good time to take stock and put added security in place.

“I think we have to be careful generally, but I think it wouldn’t be a bad time for companies and individuals to take security precautions seriously,” said Yoshiko Herrera, Professor for the Department of Political Science at UW Madison.

Herrera recommends backing up hard drives and making sure you have secure passwords in place.

UW Experts in the News

Kyiv is critical to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its new government, experts say

Posted on
FOX News

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Yoshiko Herrera agreed with Keane.

“Taking control of the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, is key to [Putin’s] plan,” said Herrera, an expert on U.S.-Russian relations. Given the opposition of the Ukrainian government and people, she said “the prospect of an insurgency or protracted struggle, unfortunately, seems likely.”

The Memo: Biden locks into battle with enigmatic Putin

Posted on
The Hill

Quoted: Putin “has been preparing economically for sanctions for years,” Yoshiko Herrera, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in Russia and U.S.-Russia relations, told this column. Herrera cited Russia’s expansion of its reserves of foreign currency in recent times as one example

Referring to the invasion of Ukraine, Herrera added, “He is willing to pay an economic cost for this. Saying we are making it economically costly? That is not going to do it. He has already factored that in.”

‘Will never give up’: Ukrainians in Wisconsin express shock, resolve at Russian invasion

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Putin’s regime has increasingly been willing to use violence to maintain his power, the result of which has played out over the last week, said Yoshiko Herrera, an expert in Russian-U.S. relations and a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“He is very threatened by the fact that Ukraine has had two successful revolutions kicking out Russia in 2004 and 2014,” she said. “It’s an example to his regime of the people rising up and getting rid of a dictator.”

Despite longstanding disagreements over the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, that debate is a bit of a distraction now, she said.

“Everything changed last week,” she said. “States have disagreements with other states, (but) it’s a complete different matter to invade your neighbor. It takes the discussion of historical grievances and it puts that aside and says, ‘We’re dealing with a state now that is willing to invade another country.'”

UW-Madison Related

‘You can’t legislate morality’: Nearly 60 years after Milwaukee’s first stab at fair housing legislation, the city struggles to enforce it

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: Vel Phillips was already a woman of many firsts, having become the first Black person to graduate from the University of Wisconsin law school and the first Black woman elected to Milwaukee’s Common Council.

In 1962, she introduced a fair housing ordinance that would make housing discrimination on the basis of race and other protected classes illegal and was much stronger than the state law, which exempted much of Milwaukee’s duplex- and triplex-heavy real estate landscape.