UW-Madison students and researchers find automation apps ripe for hacking and abuse. Then, we talk about the drop off in drinking by Americans. Then, we talk about the recent flooding in Milwaukee with the Weather Guys.
As more companies realize that they can’t keep absorbing the cost of import taxes, the impact on inflation could eventually start to snowball, said Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“If everybody’s facing the same game, they know they all can’t keep prices low forever and take a hit to their profit margins, they’re going to start raising them more rapidly,” Chinn said.
“It’s an absolutely gorgeous church (with) great historic distinction,” said Barbara Copeland Buenger, a member of the church’s roof committee and a professor of art history emerita at UW-Madison. “To have something of such beauty and historical value is really magnificent given the modern character of the city.”
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently discovered a flaw in how NASA and other space agencies design and test rovers for exploring the moon and beyond.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that automation apps, like iPhone’s ‘shortcuts’, can be a vehicle potential abusers use to control their partner’s activities on their mobile device.
Rahul Chatterjee, an assistant professor of computer science at UW and founder of the Madison Tech Clinic, said Madison Tech Clinic helps individuals who have been virtually stalked or harassed by their partners.
According to the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Green County, where Monroe is located, has experienced a 229% increase in Latinos from 2000 to 2019. That growth has not been accompanied by a surge in murders, robberies, pet-eatings or any other crimes that the current administration has leveled against migrants. Instead Monroe has seen a rise in the number of Mexican restaurants and bilingual masses at the local Catholic church, as well as hardworking community members hoping to make a better life for themselves.
Dane Demo Farms, a collaboration between local farmers, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Dane County Land & Water Resources Department, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, provides opportunities for farmers to directly research local impacts of conservation practices.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that automation apps, like iPhone’s ‘shortcuts’, can be a vehicle potential abusers use to control their partner’s activities on their mobile device.
Rahul Chatterjee, an assistant professor of computer science at UW and founder of the Madison Tech Clinic, said Madison Tech Clinic helps individuals who have been virtually stalked or harassed by their partners.
“The labor market has cooled and so companies now are starting to feel they have more leeway, more leverage with their employees,” said Barry Gerhart, a professor of management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In the U.S., about 1.5% of natural gas is converted into chemicals that are used to make plastics and other consumer products, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dietram Scheufele is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in misinformation, social media and AI. He told WPR the rise of artificial intelligence models has opened numerous legal and ethical questions that courts are left to grapple with.
On the technical side, Sheufele said, the question is how AI models are able to create lifelike images of child pornography. Another question is whether people or businesses that create the algorithm to assist the AI models that ultimately create the images would be liable.
“The same logic that applies to child pornography will apply to a whole bunch of other things — not in the sense of obscenity, but in the sense of responsibility and copyright, and all the other things that come that come along with that,” Scheufele said.
There is a strong foundation for growth. The UW-Madison College of Engineering has one of the nation’s few remaining teaching and research reactors. It ranks No. 2 among all U.S. public universities in undergraduate and graduate education in “engineering physics,” a term that captures most nuclear energy programs.
At UW–Madison, Faulkner took a course about computing in medicine that was taught by a pioneering physician, Dr. Warner Slack, one of the first people to recognize the promise of the technology within health care.
Menzie Chinn, a renowned economics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has chronicled a wide array of Antoni’s basic misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and mistakes. In other words, Antoni would probably not get hired as a junior economist at the agency he’s now slated to run.
The top 50 schools for long-term career success:
50. University of Wisconsin-Madison
12. University of Wisconsin System – UW (education).
Tinder may be a surprising place to start looking for a job in wealth management, but it worked for Lillian Turner, who now runs her own firm, Daring Greatly Wealth. While a finance major at the University of Wisconsin, Turner struggled to find anyone who would talk to her about wealth management, so she turned to the online dating app.
Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, reviewed the claims and found them wanting.
“The conclusion that real GDP is lower as of 2024Q2 than it was in 2019Q1 is not backed up by any calculation using defensible deflators a sensible economist would use. Second, other non-deflator sensitive indicators of real economic activity do not exhibit a downward decline from 2022 onward,” Chinn said.
Kurt Paulsen, a UW-Madison professor who studies urban development and housing policy, says the region’s high rents and low vacancy rates spurred developers to build more housing: “We have had a lot of supply come online in the last year, and a lot in the pipeline in the last year. And you see that now in the fact that the vacancy rate has shot up.”
Still, Paulsen cautions that new construction will likely slow down as developers wait for these units to be absorbed into the market. High interest rates and tariffs on construction materials — the U.S. Department of Commerce recently announced it is tripling duties on Canadian lumber to 21% — pushed by the Trump administration are also likely to slow construction. And though rent growth has stagnated, Madison’s high prices are still pricing out many potential residents.
Wisconsin lost thousands of dairy farms in the ‘90s. At one point, farmers received inflation-adjusted milk prices that were 20% lower than in 1960 and about half of the peak price in 1979, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
When Bill Zhu started a computer science major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021, he had no expectation the tech job market would dip, or would dip so soon. Over the previous decade, computer science became one of the most popular majors for new college students.
“Tariffs, either on our part or on the part of our export market destinations, are not helpful for farmers in Wisconsin,” Chuck Nicholson, an agricultural economist at UW-Madison, said. “The longer we keep them in place, the bigger the negative impacts will be.”
Menzie Chinn is professor of public affairs and economics at UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs. He told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that it’s normal for job figures to be revised several times after initial publication.
“The fact that the preceding months were revised down meant that you had a drastic change in the trajectory that you saw,” Chinn said. “… And that is what the markets reacted to.”
“You’ve got a convergence of people who are thinking that they can improve their children — whether it’s their children’s health, or their children’s appearance, or their children’s intelligence, along with people who are comfortable using the newest technologies and people who have the money and the chutzpah — the daring — to try and do this,” said R. Alta Charo, a University of Wisconsin professor emerita, lawyer and bioethicist, who’s now consulting with government agencies and private companies.
“Precipitation for the most part has been maybe a little bit above normal, but not that much,” said Jerry Clark, the regional crops and soils educator at UW-Madison Extension in Chippewa County. “We’ve just had several high humidity, lot of moisture, precipitation days.”
What’s so special about being a college versus a school or even a department, which is how computing programs at UW-Madison were structured up until six years ago? It’s not about bragging rights or status, but being able to build business relationships, raise money and more quickly carry out a mission that’s in step with the times.
Beer is a big part of Wisconsin’s culture. So it’s no surprise that the University of Wisconsin-Madison has an entire class devoted to brewing. We learn more about the science behind brewing and hearing about fermenting yeast, SCOBY and lactose.
Launched this spring, The SoulFolk Collective is the first research lab to be housed in UW-Madison’s Department of African American Studies. The group is made up of about a dozen undergraduate and graduate students and is led by Jessica Lee Stovall.
“As a Black studies professor,” Stovall said, “I’ve been really interested in the ways that we can create learning and research environments that are Black affirming, that center Black joy and Black liberation, Black organizing.”
Michaela Hoffelmeyer, an assistant professor of public engagement in agriculture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recalled interviewing early-career queer farmers who worried that valuable internships and apprenticeships would place them in hostile work environments or unsafe communities.
Queer farmers may also be forgoing good farmland because they want to avoid harassment, Hoffelmeyer said.
New changes from the Trump administration set stricter borrowing limits on students in professional programs like medical school. The head of one of Wisconsin’s medical colleges expects the change will add new barriers for people training to become doctors.
University of Wisconsin football fans have new options to fly nonstop from Madison for two road games in 2025.
American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines have added direct flights from Dane County Regional Airport on the weekends of Badgers games at Alabama and Oregon.
Heads up, Badgers fans! The Dane County Regional Airport has announced the return of nonstop flights to select University of Wisconsin-Madison football games.
These flights, as provided by Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, and United Airlines, offer UW football fans to travel to the University of Alabama and University of Oregon.
Dr. Katie O’Brien, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been leveraging social media to bridge the gap between doctor and patient, fostering a more familiar and approachable relationship.
As one of only two specialty-trained pediatric adolescent gynecologists in Wisconsin, Dr. O’Brien dedicates her career to diagnosing and treating common female pelvic conditions. She practices at the Teenage and Young Adult Clinic in Middleton and the UW Health Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinic in Madison.
In an increasingly tough housing market, a University of Wisconsin program seeks to give renters a leg up in their search for safe, affordable housing by educating them about the process and improving their standing with landlords.
Rent Smart, a free, six-module course developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, covers the essentials of renting — everything from what’s affordable, what to look for during an apartment inspection and what to ask a landlord while applying.
A recent survey by UW-Madison shows that 80% of Americans say they go to a farmers market at least once a year.
In the 1980s, everything changed. President Ronald Reagan slashed funding for renewables and research and development into solar power. “It was really ideological,” said Greg Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “They cut the solar budget by 85 percent within a couple of years.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to create a new administrative unit to collaborate with the business community amid campus-wide budget cuts, led by a new Associate Vice Chancellor for Entrepreneurship who will drive business growth at the university “beyond patents.”
Like the Skobot, most new A.I. technologies developed by Native scientists are designed for a specific language community. Jacqueline Brixey, a computer scientist formerly at the University of Southern California and now joining the University of Wisconsin, created a chatbot called “Masheli” that can communicate in Choctaw. Drawing from a collection of animal stories, the chatbot can listen and respond to users in both English and the target language, helping conversational skills.
David Kreling, an emeritus professor at the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy, said he’s never seen this level of tariffs in his 40-year career.
“We in the U.S. are very dependent on international producers,” Kreling said.
A software program UW-Madison faculty and students use on a daily basis has added artificial intelligence tools to assist with grading and summarizing discussion posts.
But the university says some of the tools could run afoul of guidance it provides instructors against using AI to automate student feedback.
Greg Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, served as a lead author on a United Nations panel report on climate change. He called the move a political change that’s meant to prop up fossil fuels.
“The change seems to be to get rid of that ruling that greenhouse gases are a danger to humans, and there’s certainly no scientific basis for that,” Nemet said. “Over time, there’s just been more and more evidence about how damaging it will be to have a hotter climate.”
Advancements in x-ray lasers have potential for research in many fields. We talk to a UW-Madison physics professor about his work. Then, the Weather Guys are back to explain what we’ve been experiencing climatewise.
ales of previously owned homes in Wisconsin rose 8.1 percent in June compared to the same month last year.
That’s according to the Wisconsin Realtors Association’s latest housing report. Kurt Paulsen, professor of urban planning in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the sales jump a “mixed signal.”
If you are not feeling well and need an urgent care appointment, UW Health has an app letting you know the wait times at each clinic.
Written by James Dahlberg, a professor emeritus in the department of biomolecular chemistry at UW-Madison.
After three successful shows in the last month at Camp Randall — the first in 28 years — Madison is back on the map for the biggest musical acts. The city, its boosters and the university should do everything it can to keep it that way.
“I am concerned that this legislation, and the broad adoption of stablecoins that it will facilitate, may trigger a crisis at the very heart of the banking system,” writes Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Copelovitch is also the author of “The International Monetary Fund in the Global Economy: Banks, Bonds, and Bailouts” and co-author of “Banks on the Bank: Global Capital, Securities Markets, and the Political Roots of Financial Crises.”
“We have these negative associations with waste, particularly smellier waste, that is associated with poverty and disease – other things we don’t like to see or think about,” said Sarah A Moore, a professor in the department of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Henderson brushed off the experience, hoping it was a fluke. But after matching into residency at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, she overheard a medical student lamenting about their housing struggles and something clicked.
“The lightbulb went off in my head,” Henderson said. “I realized I think this is a nationwide issue and then really started to look into it from there.”
Written by Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affair, and director of the Center for European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Emily Callaci’s history of the international feminist movement examines the influence of their intellectual and political victories. The University of Wisconsin–Madison historian describes in “Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor,” that modes of protest were part of an emerging, dynamic wave of left-feminist activism.
Callaci’s book marks a significant contribution to the new Wages for Housework literature and serves as a reminder of the campaign’s true aims. Weaving together capsule biographies of five of its founders, it offers a history that reflects Wages for Housework’s global scope and radical ambitions.
Greg Nemet, a professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, knows this isn’t the first time people have declared the “dawn of the solar age.” People in the 1950s, the 1970s and the early 2000s all declared an imminent solar age, only to see fossil fuels continue to dominate.
Pete Long, an adjunct professor teaching strategic communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed that every aspect of the design, both the graphics and the product, is intentional.
For Kleenex facial tissues, he said limited editions and seasonal graphics are created to help consumers navigate the shelf and ultimately convince them to purchase.
And when it comes to warning people about flash floods in particular, experts still stress the need to get warnings to people via every means possible.
That’s why a “Swiss cheese” approach to warning people can be most effective in overcoming that last mile, Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist and manager of the Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains. (And it’s similar to an ideology used to prevent the spread of disease.)
“You know you got slices of Swiss cheese and they’ve got holes in them. Nothing is ever perfect. But if you layer enough pieces of cheese, it reduces the risk because something might go through one hole, but then it gets blocked,” Vagasky says. “We always want people to have multiple ways of receiving warnings.”
“There are a small number of studies suggesting uptake of PFAS through skin is possible and the concentrations of PFHxA reported in the study are quite high,” said Christina Remucal, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
William Banholzer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been traveling to town meetings arguing research doesn’t support banning the boats. Banholzer, who owns a wakesurfing boat but says that doesn’t affect his conclusions, said studies show about 70% of a wave’s energy is dissipated at around 200 feet.
“If you’re taking my rights away, you better have a preponderance of evidence on your side, and they don’t,” Banholzer said.
“Regulators introduced expanded audit reporting to increase the usefulness of the audit report to investors by requiring the auditor to discuss the most challenging issues. However, Prior research generally finds that key audit matters do not influence investor perceptions of audited companies,” says Dan Lynch, a professor of accounting at the Wisconsin School of Business.
While it’s not unusual to see candidates announce early, this level of spending this early is unprecedented, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
One study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found there are “no official statistics on the number of unauthorized immigrant dairy workers.”
“Estimates range from 46 percent; to as high as 90 percent, with the most used estimate being 70 percent,” the report said on Page 11.
“It’s worth remembering what those [2017] changes were,” said Ross Milton, an assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison. “Those were some tax cuts for middle-income households and pretty large tax cuts for high-income households, and those are being extended permanently as part of this new act.”
