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Category: Business/Technology

Both sides in 2020 election fight are watching farm country for political fallout from Trump tariffs

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Even glimmers of good news come these days with a sobering twist. Milk prices have rebounded a little, but partly because enough farmers have quit that it has reduced milk production, said Matt Lippert, a University of Wisconsin-Extension agricultural agent in Wood County.

“Some of them are supportive of the president and say, ‘We just have to be patient. We’ve not been (treated) fair and the president is going to fix it.’ Then some of them are like, ‘We’ve given him enough time already.’ And there are others who are like, ‘No this wasn’t the way ever to do it.’ But they all uniformly think that loss of markets and the tariff thing is hurting them.”

Hiring more workers, investing in communities — should corporations focus on more than shareholders?

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: Focusing on increasing shareholder value has not benefited society overall, said Joel Rogers, director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The theory itself was wrong,” said Rogers, who also is a professor of law, political science, public affairs and sociology.

“Markets drive firms to be short-sighted and make insufficient investments in their workers and communities,” he added. “We know that. Unfettered markets are not the recipe for a happy society. That was the great Freidman lie.”

Wisconsin Fares Well Comparatively When It Comes To Credit Card Debt

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Financial capability specialist Peggy Olive breaks it down like this: half of all people who have a credit card balance pay it off entirely each month. Another quarter carry a balance a few months of the year, and the rest regularly owe money on their cards.”Definitely, there’s different ways that people handle that credit card debt,” said Olive, who works with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology’s Center for Financial Security and UW-Extension.

Of Course Citizens Should Be Allowed to Kick Robots

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Wired.com

Noted: Sure, sometimes people do get in the way. They’re curious. What’s this thing for, anyway? They’ll follow the robots to see what they do or tap their buttons to see what happens. “People want to explore them, and they don’t know how to do that,” says Bilge Mutlu, who runs the University of Wisconsin’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Rarely do the interventions cause damage.

Palace intrigue

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Isthmus

A preternatural silence has surrounded the departure of one of the highest paid executives on the UW-Madison campus. It’s one more sign of the big changes rocking the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, UW’s independent patenting and licensing operation.

AIQ Solutions of Madison raises $3.2 million for cancer treatment assessment software

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Wisconsin State Journal

A Madison company that makes software approved to gauge treatment response in breast and prostate cancer patients plans to submit a second product, for blood cancers, for approval by early next year.

AIQ Solutions, which is based on technology developed at UW Carbone Cancer Center, raised $3.2 million in equity financing, the company announced this month. Capital Midwest Fund led the round, which also involved Rock River Capital Partners, 30Ventures and Wisconsin Investment Partners.

Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business

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Harvard Business Review

Noted: Research that one of us, Bill, did with Willie Choi of the University of Wisconsin and Gary Hecht of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, suggests that simply talking about strategy with people is not sufficient. In other words you can’t just invite them to boardroom briefings and hang signs around the building promoting the strategy—you need to involve people in its development.

More than 1 million people use this app each month to be rewarded for brand loyalty

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wes Schroll didn’t care where he bought groceries. As a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Schroll shopped where it was convenient depending on if he was walking, taking the bus or driving to the store.

He signed up for loyalty rewards programs at various stores. But looking in his pantry, he bought the same brands each week. Schroll wanted to be rewarded for that loyalty. The frustration led him to develop Fetch Rewards, an app that has shoppers scan in receipts to get points for the brand-name products purchased.

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

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New York Times

Noted: When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it.

Written by Matthew Desmond, a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a UW alumnus.

YouTube Tweaked Algorithm to Appease FTC But Creators are Worried

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Bloomberg News

Quoted: Heather Kirkorian, an early childhood development professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, opened the app this week and found Baby Shark and Lucas the Spider, two global hits. “I wouldn’t consider them educational. I would consider them wholesome,” she said. “The term ‘educational’ is used as an umbrella for ‘non-harmful.’”

Local leaders say African market could invigorate Cedar-Riverside

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Minnesota Daily

Quoted: Alfonso Morales, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and researcher of public marketplaces, said public markets help those with fewer resources to build wealth and carve a place in their community.

But he said community support sours with public markets when they do not meet expectations set forth by those who envision them.

“If you over-promise, right, you’re gonna be in trouble,” Morales said.

Exact Sciences Expanding Through $2.8B Deal

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Dr. Joshua Lang of the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center said he hopes the merger would mean more practical tools for oncologists.

“As we’ve learned more, we’re starting to understand just how many different types of cancers there are,” he said. “We need better tests. And if (I’m) smarter as a clinician, because I have better information, it means I’m going to be able to deliver better care.”

Wisconsin legislators pushing market-based approach to farm pollution say it will work. The evidence isn’t clear.

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Morgan Robertson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison geography professor who studies market-based environmental policy, is less certain. In the past, lawmakers and industry groups across the country have been too optimistic about farmer participation in water quality trading programs, he said.

“To the extent that that’s an attractive strategy at the state level — the 30,000-foot level — for somebody planning a statewide political response, it’s not necessarily an attractive strategy for Joe and Jane Farmer in Kewaunee County who have other kitchen-table concerns,” he said.

Tom Still: People win when collaboration leverages Wisconsin research assets

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Wisconsin State Journal

A few years ago, Melissa Skala and Joe Carroll didn’t know one another. In fact, their areas of expertise as researchers didn’t seem to intersect — at least, not directly. Today, UW-Madison professor Skala and Medical College of Wisconsin professor Carroll are co-investigators on a project with the promise of helping millions of people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired.

Taking Advantage of Aloha

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Hawaii Business Magazine

Financial abuse is often paired with domestic violence. A study by the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison indicated that economic abuse occurs in 99 percent of domestic violence cases. This can take the form of an abuser managing family funds, preventing a victim from working, hiding assets or otherwise asserting financial dominance in the relationship.

On Design in Human-Robot Interaction

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Robohub

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Bilge Mutlu, Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, about design-thinking in human-robot interaction. Professor Mutlu discusses design-thinking at a high-level, how design relates to science, and he speaks about the main areas of his work: the design space, the evaluation space, and how features are used within a context. He also gives advice on how to apply a design-oriented mindset.

Record-low fertility rates linked to decline in stable manufacturing jobs

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Science Codex

New research by University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Nathan Seltzer identifies a link between the long-term decline in manufacturing jobs — accelerated during the Great Recession — and reduced fertility rates. Analyzing every birth in America at the county level across 24 years, Seltzer found that the share of businesses in goods-producing industries better predicted a metropolitan area’s fertility rate than the region’s unemployment rate.

Music streaming app LÜM prepares for launch

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Madison Magazine

LÜM CEO Max Fergus — a University of Wisconsin–Madison alum, as are several other cofounders of the new music platform — says the idea came out of a desire to make a new streaming service profitable while compensating lesser-known artists.

Ag tourism brings locally produced goods to the forefront

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: Will Hsu, president of Hsu’s Ginseng Enterprises in Wausau, grew up on the family farm doing his share of weeding and picking seeds. A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate in finance and Chinese literature who later went on to earn his MBA from Harvard, Hsu joked he’s likely the only farmer out of his 800 MBA classmates. His father started the business in 1974 and today they farm hundreds of acres, all in Marathon County.

Breaking: robot makes breakfast

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Cosmos

The research team led by Daniel Rakita from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, US, set out to find a way to replicate the so-called “gestalt” effect of human two-handed movement, in which arms and hands move together to achieve what each individual limb cannot do alone.

Ask the Experts: How Will China Tariffs Affect Summer Shopping?

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Offers.com

Quoted: “If the past is any guide, consumers, both households and firms, have taken the entire hit from the tariffs,” says Menzie Chinn, professor of Public Affairs and Economics in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Theory says in principle Chinese producers could absorb some of the cost, but, in practice, recent studies have indicated the entire burden has fallen on U.S. purchasers.”

New CEO for Cellular Logistics, Madison heart repair startup

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Wisconsin State Journal

Cellular Logistics’ Tandem HF technology, discovered by chief science officer Eric Schmuck in the research labs of cardiologist Amish Raval at the UW-Madison, is based on combining a framework of proteins derived from cardiac fibroblasts — a certain type of heart cell — with cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle stem cells.

The White House probably won’t be happy with the Fed’s interest-rate decision

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Business Insider

Quoted: “In demanding aggressive cuts in the Fed funds rate, and a resumption in quantitative easing at a time when economic growth remains solid, the administration is only further demonstrating that it has only the political self interest of Mr. Trump at heart,” said Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Tom Still: Idealism or inevitable? Greening of America well underway

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Wisconsin State Journal

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, part of the UW-Madison Energy Institute, launched in 2007 to focus on sustainable production of fuels and chemicals from non-edible plant materials such as corn residue, poplar and switchgrass. It is one of four such labs in the country and was recently renewed – with an increase in federal dollars – by the Trump administration.