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February 6, 2023

Top Stories

Research

PETA takes credit for ending sheep experiments, but UW-Madison cites funding lapse

Wisconsin State Journal

Earlier this week, animal activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) put out a statement saying its protests had pushed the Navy to nix the partnership with UW-Madison. But it was lack of funding that prompted the university and the Navy to jointly agree to end the experiments, Michelle Ciucci, UW-Madison Animal Program faculty director said.

Higher Education/System

Take UW free speech survey with a grain of salt

The Capital Times

Letter to the editor: Nowhere in this article is there any information which would lead me to believe that those who responded — a 12.5% response rate, incentivized with a $10 reward — are necessarily representative of the student population as a whole. If there is such information, let us know, and I will reconsider.

Campus life

Community

As suicide rate keeps rising in Wisconsin, concentration in rural areas raises alarm

Green Bay Press-Gazette

Chris Frakes is the group director of the Southwestern Wisconsin Community Action Program, an anti-poverty agency. Every three years, it does a community needs assessment for the five counties it oversees. In 2017, Frakes had heard so many stories of farmers struggling to get by, she expected them to reach out for help. But few did.

The silence and the growing farm crisis led to the program getting creative about upstream prevention. In 2021, it received nearly $1 million from the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health to target farmers’ mental health over a five-year period.

Opinion

Opinion | Why I’m not worried about my students using ChatGPT

The Washington Post

Lawrence Shapiro is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

ChatGPT has many of my university colleagues shaking in their Birkenstocks. This artificial-intelligence tool excels at producing grammatical and even insightful essays — just what we’re hoping to see from our undergraduates.

UW Experts in the News

Northeast U.S. Latest to Experience Polar Vortex Temperatures

The New York Times

“I wish I had a clear answer,” said Steve Vavrus, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin. With Jennifer Francis, now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts, Dr. Vavrus wrote a seminal 2012 paper that presented the idea that Arctic warming was affecting the polar vortex. “Unfortunately the state of things is still ambiguous,” he said.

Why Bad Bunny’s Grammy nominated Un Verano Sin Ti is such a big deal

Vox

“There was a particular audience consuming this and it was divided along generational lines,” said Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a Caribbean historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is penning an article for the Bad Bunny Enigma, an academic journal analyzing the star. “It’s really interesting how Bad Bunny became this global superstar while in conversation with things that were happening in the archipelago. He was basically making music for people in the archipelago, referencing things that only Puerto Ricans would understand.”

The EPA is updating its most important tool for cracking down on carbon emissions

NPR

The EPA uses higher dollar amounts for deaths in higher-income countries and lower dollar amounts for deaths in lower-income countries. Or, as Paul Kelleher, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, puts it…PAUL KELLEHER: The badness of a death from climate change in India is treated as not as bad as exactly the same death if it happened at exactly the same time in the United States.

Our Best Advice For Genuinely Accepting An Apology

Glam

“Forgiveness is a special kind of moral virtue that always and without exception occurs when the other person has been unfair to you,” professor of education psychology at the University of Wisconsin Robert Enright tells Vox. “When that person is unfair to you, and you willingly choose to forgive — it’s not forced upon you — you are basically good to the one who was not good to you. You’re deliberately trying to get rid of the resentment and offer goodness of some kind: respect, kindness, anything that is good for the other person.”

Obituaries

James “Jim” Edward Lawler

Wisconsin State Journal

Jim received a BS in physics (’73) from Missouri University of Science and Technology and a PhD in physics (’78) from UW Madison. In the two years after earning his doctorate, he was a research associate at Stanford University; he then returned to UW Madison, where he was a professor from 1980-2022 when he retired.

UW-Madison Related