Author: jplucas

What can be done about all this confusion in a world where we are bombarded with information – and increasingly hear that we shouldn’t believe much of what we are told? In a post-truth world, are we even more susceptible to exaggerated or untrue stories? We speak to Dominique Brossard, professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Information at the University of Wisconsin.

Quoted: “Trump and the people around him have been quite open about their desire to smash the system,” says Ken Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Quoted: “The area of…Palestine that would have been the Arab state [per the U.N. vote] was largely conquered by Jordan and by Egypt,” Nadav Shelef, Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Israel Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells Teen Vogue.

Noted: Cortland Dahl, who studies the neuroscience of mind wandering and has been meditating for 25 years, told me that he was six months into daily meditation practice when he witnessed a change in the way he related to the present moment. “I noticed I just started to enjoy things I didn’t enjoy before,” like standing in line, or sitting in traffic, he says. “My own mind became interesting, and I had something to do—‘Okay, back to the breath.’” Killingsworth’s findings help explain this, said Dahl, a research scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds.

Noted: Some scientists have suggested that the problem is an educational one. Those who disregard science and scientific consensus as not for them simply don’t have the knowledge – the facts, according to this thinking. And, as Dietram Scheufele, a professor of science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison pointed out in a talk at the AAAS meeting, in the current “fake news panic” that mentality can fuel an impression that “if they just had the correct facts, they could make better decisions.”

Quoted: “Conversely, anything big is bad right now,” said Thomas C. O’Guinn, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s business school. “Anything small is considered differently, since there’s no faceless behemoth.” Customers, he added, are also more apt to know store employees or even the owner.

Noted: “She sort of burst onto the scene,” says Paul Wilson, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Now there’s a circulated quote attributed to her: Students don’t know that things [in the nuclear field] are supposed to go slowly. Let’s not tell them.”

Quoted: “On net, the downsides seem greater than the upsides,” said Barry C. Burden, a political scientist and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: If a supplier steps out of line, the others “can eat your lunch if you don’t cooperate,” said Noted: Peter Carstensen, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer who has researched the industry.

Noted: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee chancellor Mark Mone and Mike Knetter, chief executive officer of the University of Wisconsin Foundation, both said recruitment of students is important at their schools as the number of high school graduates in Wisconsin declines.

Noted: Katherine Magnuson, a social work professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and associate director of the school’s Institute for Poverty Research, said the plan being worked on by state Democrats will help.

Noted: But now two new studies appear to move calorie restriction from the realm of wishful thinking to the brink of practical, and perhaps even tolerable, reality. Writing in Nature Communications, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the National Institute on Aging reported last month chronic calorie restriction produces significant health benefits in rhesus monkeys—a primate with humanlike aging patterns—indicating “that CR mechanisms are likely translatable to human health.” The researchers describe one monkey they started on a 30 percent calorie restriction diet when he was 16 years old, late middle age for this type of animal. He is now 43, a longevity record for the species, according to the study, and the equivalent of a human living to 130.