Author: jplucas

Noted: One study in Wisconsin suggests that caretakers, for example, took home over $12 an hour by last year, so were only just getting back to their (real) average earnings achieved in 2010. Expansion at the bottom of the labour market “is finally pulling some wages up. But it’s certainly been much slower in this boom than any other,” argues Tim Smeeding, a poverty expert at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. He describes “capital winning over labour” for several decades, and expects the trend to continue, given weak unions, more automation and other trends.

Noted: On a run, you experience a reactional force every time your foot hits the ground, says Bryan Heiderscheit, P.T., Ph.D., physical therapist and director of the University of Wisconsin Runners Clinic.

Noted: It remains to be seen whether the working group’s findings will translate into policy, given the political challenges the NIH may face as it implements reforms, says Juan Pablo Ruiz, a stem-cell biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. But “regardless of whether they decide to make some action or not, they’ve recognized that this is a movement that’s going to continue going forward and they want to be on the right side of history”, he says.

Noted: Jordan Gerth, a research meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been studying this issue as part of a group at the American Meteorological Society. He says that while the FCC can switch which regions of the spectrum it allocates to phone companies, forecasters are stuck.

Quoted: Tracey Holloway, a professor in UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, is one of the researchers who favors the plan and is lending her expertise.

Noted: American high schools, also small for much of their history, have probably been reading names at graduation since they were founded, too. “The reason why it was perfectly reasonable to imagine you could read everyone’s name is that so few students actually graduated,” says William Reese, a professor of educational-policy studies and history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. According to Reese, only 6 percent of American adolescents in 1890 are estimated to have attended high school, and only a quarter of attendees actually graduated. Given how rare it was get a high-school diploma, the least schools could do was read people’s names.

Noted: “It’s not an issue of, ‘Can we move slightly away so 5G can get in there,’ ” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Jordan Gerth. “Physics can’t be reaccommodated.”

Noted: “I’m really psyched about this,” says Leigh Orf, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who developed the simulation that predicts this cool air current. TORUS is a “big first step toward looking the right way in the right part of the storm”, for these smaller structures, he says.

Noted: “Just the sheer number of people is helping to drive this rate of extinction,” said Stanley Temple, a professor emeritus of conservation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

Noted: Julia Sherman, coordinator of the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said alcohol is associated with things like summertime, sports and college campuses just about everywhere, but she believes Wisconsin is different.

Noted: “Of course that’s going to nullify some of the intended effect Trump is aiming for, which is to shift American producers and consumers away from Chinese goods,” says Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

UW Madison Professor Travis Wright says very young children should be shielded from media reports about school shootings. Wright says it’s also important to reassure kids there are many people working to keep them safe.

Noted: Mirva Johnson is a graduate student at UW-Madison doing research on the Finnish spoken in northern Wisconsin. She says she’s heard a lot of strong feelings about it, but that ultimately there isn’t really a “right” way to say sauna. Basically, one is the Finnish pronunciation and the other is how the word evolved in the English language. Since the U.P. has such a huge population of Finnish ancestry though, in parts of the U.P., the pronunciation never evolved.

Noted: And Yoshiko Herrera, a University of Wisconsin professor who previously headed the university’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia, said Hunter Biden’s hiring echoes the strategy common within Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, in which powerful interests try to secure influence on foreign policy by leveraging family members and associates of key leaders.

Noted: “The rationale that I saw was that he believed that (pardons were) a matter for the judiciary and that he wasn’t going to become involved in that, which is a philosophical  position. It happens to be one that’s not consistent with the constitutional structure that we have in this state,” said Keith Findley, an associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Stan Temple, professor emeritus of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Wisconsin is unique because it’s close to the edges of major ecosystems, including the eastern edge of the prairies and southern end of the northern coniferous forest.

Interviewed: William Brangham talks to USA Today’s Christine Brennan and former Olympian Madeleine Pape, who once raced against Semenya and is now earning a sociology PhD in gender at UW-Madison.

Noted: “The more we lose, the greater the impact will be,” states meteorologist Jordan Gerth, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the current issue of Nature. “This is a global problem.”

Noted: Dr. Erik Tarula, a neurosurgery professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says there are two kinds of strokes – one with similarities to the pipes in a house that get clogged, and another where they spring a leak.

Noted: Plants’ ability to capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a crucial piece of our continued survival. The fastest, cheapest, most efficient way to bring down greenhouse gases and mitigate some of the effects of climate change is to grow more trees around the world and preserve the ones we have, said Donald Waller, a botany and environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “We could essentially be absorbing more carbon than generated by all the cars and trucks on our highways.”

Noted: But many scientists are concerned about a growing “national attention deficit.” “Our attention is being captured by devices rather than being voluntarily regulated,” Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin Madison, told Vox late last year. “We are like a sailor without a rudder on the ocean — pushed and pulled by the digital stimuli to which we are exposed rather than by the intentional direction of our own mind.”