Author: gbump

Noted: Wisconsin and other battleground states were targeted by a sophisticated social media campaign, according to a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study headed by journalism professor Young Mie Kim.

Featured: According to the U.S. Census, more than 43 million Americans were living below the poverty line in 2016. But a recent report released from the White House says initiatives to reduce poverty in the United States over the last 50 years have largely been a success. Timothy Smeeding–Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics and former Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty–joins us to talk about the report and what it could mean for social programs in the future.

Featured: In the last installment of our series on the trade-offs of technology and what it means for our kids, Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talked with Dr. Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin who studies how media use affects kids.

Quoted: “It’s hard to know if they were lying now or if they were incompetent before,” said Ian Baird, an expert on Laos at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, referring to Laotian officials. But he said the confusion was to be expected, with a risk-adverse authoritarian government in a poor country that is not accustomed to responding to disasters of this magnitude.

Featured: We’ll discuss what led to the tragedy and how it could’ve been prevented with Ian Baird, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s an expert on Laos and impacts of dams.

Quoted: “Poor people in the project areas are worse off because of these dams, not better off,” said Ian Baird, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “Poor people in the project areas are worse off because of these dams, not better off,” said Ian Baird, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Both South Korean companies mentioned heavy rains in their descriptions of the disaster. But Ian Baird, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who specializes in Laos and has studied the hydropower project, said he believed the problem was either faulty construction, or a decision to store too much water in the dam’s reservoir at a time when heavy rain should have been expected. “When at the end of July do we not get rain in this part of the world?” he asked.

Quoted: “It’s an ingredient derived from the waste of cheese making,” Bradley Bolling, a food scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

Quoted: “It looks like naked partisanship, and that might be permissible,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If it’s merely one party trying to harm the fortunes of the other, the court thus far has given that the green light, and it might continue to.”

Quoted: “The roads are very poor,” Ian Baird, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Laos expert, told Reuters by telephone.

Featured: Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Ian Baird disagrees with calling it a natural disaster and explains why it could have been prevented.

Quartz: “Journalists have obligations to relay information within real contexts. To put fake food—and what appears to be Western food and alcohol at that—in front of these subjects and staging them to cover their faces feels exploitative,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.