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January 18, 2023

Top Stories

113-year experiment at UW-Madison ends this year. It will be crushing

Wisconsin State Journal

For more than 100 years, engineers at UW-Madison have been conducting an experiment pitting ordinary concrete against the test of time. The project, initiated by faculty member Morton O. Withey, began in 1910 as a 10-year test of the strength of concrete in the form of 6-by-12-inch cylinders. Dozens more cylinders were added in 1923, with a third batch in 1937.

Higher Education/System

Agriculture

Some Wisconsin shoppers are paying $8 for a dozen eggs. Here’s why prices have soared.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: Chicken flocks are still down 5% to 6%, said Lou Arrington, an emeritus professor of poultry sciences at University of Wisconsin-Extension who works with the Wisconsin Poultry & Egg Association. That may not seem a lot, but it has an outsized impact because demand for eggs is “inelastic” — it doesn’t vary much as prices rise or fall, he said. Bakeries and other food producers’ need for eggs hasn’t changed, and consumers have sucked it up and continue to pay prices that may make them gasp, Arrington said.

“I don’t think the individual producer has a lot to say about it,” he said of the nationwide forces that have driven up prices.

Community

Indigenous community looks to heal weeks after a “pretendian” is exposed

Madison365

LeClaire was Community Leader in Residence at the University of Wisconsin School of Ecology’s Center for Design and Material Culture from May through December 2022, for which she was paid $4,876.56. Officials there said Indigenous heritage was not required for that residency, but it was a key part of how LeClaire presented herself in her application.

Arts & Humanities

UW film scholar fills in the blanks for ‘Blank Check’ podcast

The Capital Times

Bersch, who recently got his doctorate in film studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the researcher for the popular film podcast “Blank Check with Griffin & David.” Since its debut in 2016, the podcast hosted by actor/comedian Griffin Newman and The Atlantic film critic David Sims has looked at the complete filmographies of directors, from the masterpieces to the misfires.

Opinion

Closing campus is devastating to area — Mark Gill

Wisconsin State Journal

Letter to the editor: This is government at its worst — not honoring its commitments, breaking promises and being indifferent, uncaring and uninterested in how its actions affect a struggling rural county that’s trying to stay afloat.

UW Experts in the News

8 Subtle Ways Parents Create Anxiety Without Realizing It

HuffPost

Alvin Thomas, an assistant professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, also emphasized the importance of talking about your emotions as a parent. This approach prevents your children from making up anxiety-based stories to explain why the adults around them are behaving differently.

“It is OK, for instance, to say to your child that dad is feeling a little sad or a little frustrated,” he explained. “It expands the child’s emotional vocabulary, teaches them to talk through their emotions, and models for them how to do this. Then you could go on to give age-appropriate reasoning. Dad is feeling frustrated because dad was really hoping for something, but it did not happen.”

Single-use coffee pods aren’t as wasteful as you may think

Washington Post

“Sometimes it’s really counterintuitive,” said Andrea Hicks, an environmental engineering expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She conducted a similar analysis comparing different brewing methods, and also found pods had less environmental impact than the conventional drip filter method, and in some cases were better than using a French press.

“Often people assume that something reusable is always better, and sometimes it is,” Hicks said. “But often people really don’t think about the human behavior.”

In defense of “haters” like TikTok’s Talia Lichtstein

Vox

These kinds of “pro-negativity” behaviors, whether ironic or not, have been studied by scholars for decades, notably by University of Wisconsin communications professor Jonathan Gray, who in 2003 argued for the inclusion of “anti-fans” within audience studies, or people who actively dislike specific texts. Anti-fans, many scholars have suggested, subvert the traditional mode of media consumption, wherein we’re supposed to accept and like the thing we’re watching. “As active, engaged viewers, we are not supposed to dislike, and we are meant to treat dislike with suspicion in others because liking has been characterized as a progressive effort to champion the underdog in popular media,” writes Anne Gilbert in the anthology Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age.

Senate advances changes to Wisconsin’s cash bail system

The Capital Times

Allowing a judge to impose bail for reasons beyond ensuring a defendant would appear at their next court hearing would likely result in more poor people being incarcerated, the two legal experts, Jessa Nicholson Goetz, a criminal defense attorney with Nicholson Goetz & Otis in Madison, and University of Wisconsin Law School professor Cecelia Klingele, said.

UW-Madison Related

Colorado College Professor Says, Like Everything, Astrophysics Is ‘Steeped In White Supremacy’

The Root

Columbia College Science Professor Natalie Gosnell is making headlines for an interview she did which addresses how racism plays a strong role in her field. Gosnell, who received her doctorate in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, gave an interview with Colorado College’s student newspaper in which she shared her thoughts.