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Author: gbump

Tony Evers’s Tax Veto Is a Gift to Illinois

WSJ

According to a University of Wisconsin analysis, the Madison Legislature’s plan would have boosted capital investment by 1.5% and economic output by 1.25%. This would certainly help the Badger State amid a manufacturing slowdown. The Institute for Supply Management reported this week that its manufacturing index dropped to the lowest level since May 2020.

Sexual Violence Has Longer Lasting Health Effects Than You Think

Prevention

A surprisingly wide range of medical conditions are being shown to be linked to sexual violence. Many may not appear until years after the events. Cancer is one such condition. “A history of abuse may increase a woman’s risk of and susceptibility to cancer,” a review article by researchers at the University of Wisconsin concludes. Cervical cancer is the most prevalent type linked to abuse, and some studies find more breast cancer in survivors (other research does not support this finding). One possible mechanism: heightened immune and inflammatory factors brought on by chronic stress that have been tied to cancer growth, the researchers note.

Wisconsin’s Democratic governor guts Republican tax cut, increases school funding for 400 years

Associated Press

Evers was unable to undo the $32 million cut to the University of Wisconsin, which was funding that Republicans said would have gone toward diversity, equity and inclusion — or DEI — programming and staff. The budget Evers signed does allow for the university to get the funding later if it can show it would go toward workforce development and not DEI.

After gutting affirmative action, Republicans target minority scholarships

MSNBC

Vos has also been a vocal opponent of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, referring to such programs within the University of Wisconsin System as “indoctrination” despite a racist incident at the Madison campus making headlines in the spring. Although Wisconsin is operating with a projected $7 billion budget surplus, Vos and Republicans in the state Legislature voted to cut $32 million from the UW System’s budget unless it agrees to use the funds for workforce development rather than DEI efforts. The GOP plan also seeks to cut nearly 200 DEI jobs on UW campuses.

College After Affirmative Action

Wall Street Journal

Supporters of race-based admissions, rather than admit these errors, will contrive to preserve them in a variety of barely concealed forms.—Anika Horowitz, University of Wisconsin-Madison, economics

Greece migrant boat disaster: Mapping a tragedy on coast guard’s watch

Washington Post

Till Wagner, an assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Navid Constantinou, a physical oceanography research fellow at the Australian National University and Ian Eisenman, a professor of climate science and physical oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, used weather and ocean current data obtained from MarineTraffic to estimate the drift velocity using a method described in a 2022 study.

Republicans have a lot to say about UW diversity programs. So do students

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

UW-Madison senior Ciboney Reglos interacts with DEI programming “basically every single day” she’s on campus. She is the senior class diversity, equity and inclusion director and a board member for the Filipinx American Student Organization, one of at least 65 multicultural student groups competing for limited funding and campus programming space.

Opinion | Supreme Court decision to ignore inequality is as unjust as it is dishonest

The Capital Times

Wisconsin’s representatives should back Bowman’s legislation and join him in recognizing that, “All students deserve an equitable opportunity to gain admission to institutions of higher education, but students whose parents didn’t attend or donate to a university are often overlooked in the admissions process due to the historically classist and racist legacy and donor admissions practices at many schools across the country.”

Letting 14-year-olds serve alcohol not a big change, legislators say

The Capital Times

Timothy Smeeding, a labor economist and social welfare policy analyst at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs, said the bill could bring up concerns if young people actually had to serve alcohol at the bar. However, he said that if they’re already serving food at a restaurant, allowing them to carry alcohol shouldn’t make a big difference.

Letter | DEI represents nation’s ideals

The Capital Times

Letter to the editor: Over the years, I worked with farm students who needed classes that started after the morning milking, bilingual Latino students who were the linguistic bridge for their families, returning adult students who supported aging parents, students with disabilities who needed accommodations, refugee students and veterans who had seen too much, LGBTQ students who struggled with families that disowned them, African American students who wanted to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, students who struggled with depression after family trauma, liberal and conservative students, well-to-do and homeless students, and students with many other unique backgrounds. DEI initiatives helped me understand who our students were, and that is a good thing.

Claudia Traisman Ward

Wisconsin State Journal

Working in a UW toxicology lab, she was part of a team that researched the harmful effects of Agent Orange, which was used during the Vietnam War. Their work was cited when the U.S. banned the chemical in 1971 and is still referenced today. She also worked as a lecturer teaching entomology, or the study of insects, to undergraduate students.

Nearly 700,000 Wisconsinites will be impacted by rejected student loan forgiveness

NBC-15

“The median loan payment in Wisconsin is $152 a month. So, it kind of gives a little bit of a sense of how big this is,” Nick Hillman, Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at UW-Madison said. “So, what a quarter, one in four people you see walking down the street are now gonna have to pay probably about 150 a month that they haven’t been paying for the past few years.”

Madison project helps Black women build financial literacy, wealth

Wisconsin State Journal

“As research extensively documents, racial disparities in wealth accumulation are systemic, of which historic public policies and private practices sustain,” said Melody Harvey, UW-Madison assistant professor of consumer science in the School of Human Ecology.

Black communities are likely to be what Harvey called “banking deserts,” meaning there are few, if any, mainstream financial institutions. They are also more likely to have concentrations of high-cost alternative financial services such as payday and auto title lenders, Harvey explained, asking “Where does one begin when even the most basic of financial services may not be readily available and accessible?”

Student Loan Borrowers React to Supreme Court Decision

New York Times

Mr. Reed, who is 74, took out $3,300 in loans in the early 1970s to fund his studies at the University of Wisconsin. He worked for decades as a journalist, musician and fund-raiser for nonprofits, cobbling together a living off what were often low-income jobs. He paid $9,000 on his loans over the years — but interest and fees kept his balances ballooning, preventing him paying off his debt. Now, half a century after his college years, he owes $4,600 — more than he originally borrowed.

A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too

The New York Times

These days there is no shortage of gadgetry for optimizing our lives — diet, sleep, exercise. “We like to attach stuff to ourselves to make it a little easier to get things right,” Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said during a workshop break. A.I. gadgetry might do the same for mathematics, he added: “It’s very clear that the question is, What can machines do for us, not what will machines do to us.”

The air over Madison is clearing, but does the future hold more air quality concerns?

Channel 3000

Dr. Tracey Holloway, a professor at UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, says we likely haven’t seen the last of smoky skies from Canada this year.

“Since usually we have more smoke in July and August, where we’re just getting into that part of the year, it would not be surprising to have more smoky days ahead,” Dr. Holloway said.

John Robert Palmer

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

He was on the faculty at Illinois from 1960 until he received an offer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1966. He was a professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction, Educational Policy Studies, and History. He served as Dean of the School of Education for 17 years and retired from the University in 1995.

‘Extraordinarily ambiguous standard:’ SCOTUS decision on affirmative action leaves many with questions

NBC-15

Professor of Political Science Emeritus at UW-Madison Howard Schweber referred to Thursday’s decision as a ‘sweeping giant statement principle.’ But he says an exception is equally notable.

“The giant loophole comes quite close to the end of the opinion when Chief Justice Roberts says ‘of course, a college or university may still continue race as it applies to a particular student’s individual life story described in their application essay.’ So what really happened here is a shift from one way to think about it is a shift from race consciousness in admissions to race consciousness in application,” Dr. Schweber said.

Assembly sends Tony Evers a state budget that includes tax cuts, an education spending boost and a cut to UW

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Evers previously said he would not sign a state budget that includes tax cuts for wealthy residents or maintains a $32 million cut to defund diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the UW System.

Both measures were included in the budget passed Thursday, but Evers has since softened his position and signaled he could support the UW provision because Republicans on the budget-writing committee included a companion provision that allows UW officials to request for the funding to be restored if the committee approves their plans for it.

Neutrinos from the Milky Way finally detected

Popular Science

In 2013, IceCube detected the first cosmic neutrinos. In the years since, they’ve been able to narrow neutrino sources down to individual galaxies. “We have been detecting extragalactic neutrinos for 10 years now,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the IceCube collaboration.

Astronomers Just Detected An Important High-Energy Particle In the Milky Way for the First Time

Inverse

“We now hope to have established the multi-messenger techniques that will allow us to pinpoint the cosmic ray sources in the galaxy which, arguably, represents one of the oldest problems in astronomy,” Francis Halzen, IceCube principal investigator and physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, tells Inverse.

In a First, Scientists See Neutrinos Emitted by the Milky Way

Scientific American

IceCube had already definitively detected neutrinos streaming in from outside the Milky Way, but it couldn’t be said with certainty that any of them came from within the galaxy, says Francis Halzen, lead investigator of the project and a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This was rather strange, considering the proximity of the Milky Way’s disk (in fact, our solar system is embedded in it) and the high likelihood that neutrinos form there.

Wisconsin Republicans’ spending plan sent to Democratic governor

The Associated Press

Evers previously threatened to veto the entire budget over the University of Wisconsin’s $32 million cut, funding that Republicans identified as going toward diversity, equity, or DEI, programming and staff. But the budget would allow for the university to get the funding later if it could show it would go toward workforce development and not DEI.

A ‘loneliness loop’: How the American culture of busyness can increase isolation

MarketWatch

Christine Whelan, clinical professor of Consumer Science at the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says an individual’s work ethic is at the core of what it means to be an American. You demonstrate to other people you are pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and are busy, indicating a sense of success. “Affluence and busyness seem to go together as status symbols,” Whelan said in a telephone interview. “It is easy to criticize it, but the culture demands it from us. We need to be careful about individual actions versus cultural norms.”

$99 billion Wisconsin budget heads to Tony Evers after Assembly approval

Wisconsin State Journal

Despite Evers’ recent call for the Legislature to make significant changes to the budget to ensure that he signs it into law, neither chamber this week made substantive changes to the document before passing it. He opposed the significant tax cut for the wealthiest Wisconsinites as well as the proposed cuts to the UW System’s diversity programs. Both remain in the proposal.

Many Black residents have been shut out of house market — one realtor is trying to change that

Wisconsin State Journal

Kurt Paulsen, professor of urban planning at UW-Madison, wouldn’t say that Dane County has made true progress in the last decade in terms of how people of color experience mortgage and rent cost burdens compared to their white counterparts.

It’s more like “slightly less bad but measured from a very bad starting point,” he said.

In private email, Devin LeMahieu says Senate has ‘no power’ to dump top election official before reappointment

Wisconsin State Journal

“The Senate’s attempt to initiate a confirmation hearing for Wolfe does seem to rest on very shaky legal ground,” UW-Madison Law School associate professor Robert Yablon said.

“When the commission met earlier this week, only three of members voted to re-appoint Wolfe,” Yablon said. “Notably, after this vote, the commission didn’t take the position that it had successfully reappointed her. It’s odd for the Senate to claim there’s been an appointment that the commission itself didn’t purport to make.”

Letter | Why DEI is important

The Capital Times

Letter to the editor: Since 1988, I have mentored many hundreds of students, had a great scientific and professional career and gotten to know many other Latino Ph.D. graduates in STEM. We know Albert(a) Einstein can be anywhere, if welcomed and given a chance, and diversity at UW is how valuable careers begin.

Affirmative action ruling will affect UW-Madison’s admissions policies

Wisconsin State Journal

Thursday’s ruling struck down the longstanding use of race in admissions practices, as the Supreme Court considered two cases brought by conservative legal action group Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The lawsuits argued the schools discriminated against applicants of Asian heritage, and UNC additionally discriminated against white applicants, as part of its admissions policy.

UW Health Kids encourages supervising kids around fireworks

WKOW-TV 27

Rishelle Eithun, with UW Health Kids, says American Family Children’s Hospital sees fireworks-related injuries every July—  including burns, loss of fingers or limbs, and other serious trauma. She says sparklers are especially dangerous for children younger than five.