Author: jplucas

Noted: Some of the darkness is due to cloud cover, according to William Straka, a weather researcher at the University of Wisconsin who works on Suomi data and helped create these images.

Noted: Katy Culver, director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics, has done research for about five years on drone use in newsgathering.  She said the use of drones in news has exploded since she first started.

Noted: Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin law professor who researches sentencing policy and the consequences of convictions, calls the case a tragedy for everyone involved. The victim suffered serious injury and the other girls clearly needed guidance that they didn’t get, she said.

Noted: Using executive authority this way is not so unusual among modern presidents. As Kenneth R. Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us in a previous fact-check, “Presidents going back to at least Reagan have made unilateral adjustments to immigration law — adding exemptions, extending protection to classes not covered by existing statutes such as children and spouses, making discretionary decisions about what constitutes ‘unlawful presence’ or what categories of people here illegally will be the focus of enforcement action.”

Quoted: “We have no rocks that are older than 4 billion years,” says John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (The Earth itself is 4.543 billion years old.) “[Zircons] are what we study if we want to analyze things that formed that far back.”

Quoted: Julie Underwood, a professor of education law, policy and practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presented a comparison of census data from Unified and the surrounding villages, she said, could create segregation with a district split.

Noted: For all of that, though, Trump has been “unusually aggressive in his use of unilateral powers,” says Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist and expert on presidential powers and executive orders.

Noted: Said University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus of applied economics Andrew Reschovsky, who worked in the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Treasury: “The problem is, economies are complex things. It is really impossible to attribute any change” in the economy to a single tax cut.

Noted: In 2011, only 20 percent of divorced mothers were receiving child support, according to James Raymo, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has published a number of papers on single mothers in Japan.

Noted: Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at University of Wisconsin Law School, said Watson should be subject to tighter regulation because of its role in treating patients. “As an ethical matter, and as a scientific matter, you should have to prove that there’s safety and efficacy before you can just go do this,” she said.

Noted: But focusing on mitigation is a good strategy for communities experiencing recent flash floods, because they’re likely to continue, said Steve Vavrus, senior scientist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research.

Noted: University of Wisconsin, Madison, professor Menzie Chinn’s research also suggests lawmakers in the United States should look to domestic fiscal policy if they want to reduce external imbalances.

Noted: Some scholars focused on the growing sense of geographical—not just cultural—separation between Republicans and Democrats. In a series of in-depth interviews with rural Republicans in Wisconsin, Katherine Cramer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said she had found a sense of “distributive injustice” that ran through their concerns: Rural voters thought political resources flowed disproportionately to those in cities—and vice versa.