Category: Experts Guide

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said removing voters from the rolls because they are believed to have moved would more likely affect Democratic voters because they are more likely to move frequently.

“Mainly because they are younger, supporters of Democratic candidates tend to change their residences more often,” he said by email. “As a result, their voter registrations are more likely to be out of date, and they are more likely to be targets of efforts to clean up the rolls.”

Noted: Jim Leary, emeritus professor of folklore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told PolitiFact that he hasn’t ever encountered evidence of any seasonal tradition like the one described in the Facebook post.

Leary said there are major seasonal traditions, such as the Jewish holy day, Yom Kippur, where atonement and forgiveness figure, but he is only aware of reciprocal practices, rather than one-way traditions regarding forgiveness between couples.

He called “ridiculous” the claim that “‘women’ (what women? since not all women share the same traditions) apologized so abjectly to their husbands, who the implication is had nothing to apologize for” and said it sounded more like a “patriarchal fantasy” than anything based in reality.

Quoted: UW-Madison Professor of Public Affairs and Economics Tim Smeeding says this rule change won’t mean much for Wisconsin, as the State has already taken benefits away from adults without dependents.

“That is not going to affect Wisconsin very much because our former governor, [Scott] Walker, instituted that law of April, 2015,” Smeeding says. “So, we already are telling able-bodied adults without dependents, so-called ABAWDs, that they have to work or lose their benefits after three months on the program.” 

Adrian Treves, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and founder of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab, thinks the DNR has undercounted the number of illegally killed wolves.

Noted: The high water levels are mostly caused by record-setting precipitation in the Great Lakes basin over the last five years, according to Adam Bechle, coastal engineering outreach specialist with the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute.

Quoted: Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said since the news of Dean Foods’ legal woes hit the news, his phone has been ringing off the hook.

“Dean Foods is big in the market, representing at least a third of fluid milk sales (in the U.S.) and 10% of total milk sales, so this is big news in the dairy industry,” Stephenson said.

Noted: The forum was sponsored by a Madison chapter of the liberal American Constitution Society and held at the offices of the Foley & Lardner law firm. Mike Wagner, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor, moderated the debate.

Quoted: Meanwhile, turnout among Republican voters in the county has barely wavered over the years, making Democratic turnout the key to whether a Democrat can win the county and ultimately the state, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden.

“In recent presidential elections, about one of out of every five Democratic votes has come from Milwaukee County, so it is essential that the party perform well there to win the state,” Burden said.

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and sociologist Sarah Helpern-Meekin studies instability in peoples’ lives. This includes the role policy can play in affecting the instability around family members or financial situations.

She said for families working with a more fixed income, including those who are low income, have to make tough choices about where to cut back.

Renters can often face higher rents, but homeowners often must make the tough decision of whether to stay where they are or move.

“The options are often limited,” she said. “You need to pay your property taxes to hold onto your home, so you have to make some decisions about what it’s worth to you to hold onto your home if paying those property taxes is not feasible.”

Quoted: “For us humans, this (weather) can be a problem,” said David Drake, UW-Extension wildlife specialist and University of Wisconsin professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. “For wildlife, the conditions might be out of the ordinary for this time, but they are well adapted to it.”

Quoted: Donald Downs, an emeritus professor of law and political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said a U.S. Supreme Court decision would give the county the ability to restrict the speech of county employees who work directly on water issues.

But the county has less authority to control what other county employees could say about water issues because they would be speaking more as citizens than as county officials, Downs said. He called putting restrictions elected officials “really problematic.”

“It’s clearly a gag order,” he said.

Quoted: “All I can say is: Wow,” University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism instructor Kathleen Bartzen Culver said in an email to the Associated Press. “I am astonished that a local government would find it appropriate, much less legal, to threaten a news organization with prosecution for doing what they are constitutionally protected in doing — representing the public interest by seeking, analyzing and reporting information.

“For the life of me,” Culver further wrote, “I’m struggling to envision under what statute a journalist would be prosecuted for covering water test results released by local government.”

Quoted: UW-Madison education professor Julie Mead, who studies legal issues in the schools, said she was “not aware of research on zero tolerance policies regarding employees or the effectiveness or such policies.” Jirs Meuris, a UW-Madison professor of management and human resources, said “there’s not much research on zero tolerance in workplaces that I know of beyond some work on drug policies,” and “in that case, frequent testing and harsh penalties do deter it.”

“These frequencies are really public resources,” said Barry Orton, a University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor of telecommunications. “So when television stations get paid, or radio stations get paid, to rejigger their frequencies, and then cell phone companies or whoever else gets to pay to use it, there’s a complicated auction system involved, and the public gets some kind of reimbursement.”

Quoted: Jordan Gerth, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said some parts of the state have already seen 20 percent of their normal annual snowfall, which is unusual when compared to a normal November.

“You might get a few inches of snow, and the temperatures will be getting cooler, but it’s certainly nothing like what we’ve seen the last week of October into the beginning of this month,” Gerth said.

Noted: Susan Paskewitz, chairwoman of the entomology department at the University of Wisconsin, said tick numbers throughout the state are equal to or slightly higher than last year. Numbers will increase in an area if there are more hosts, such as mice or deer, or if a region has received a lot of rain or is especially humid.

Quoted: “How trauma and stresses seem to affect people and brain development is to make them more distrustful of others,” said Ryan Herringa, a physician and assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

With smartwatch heart trackers, “if you’re trying to determine if someone’s heart rate is exactly 80 beats versus 90 beats per minute, that’s a really hard thing,” says kinesiology professor Lisa Cadmus-Bertram. “If you’re trying to determine if a heartbeat has ended, in my experience with these devices, they should be able to do that quite easily.”

Quoted: Given the influence “fake news” had on the 2016 elections, UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner, thinks it could have similar consequences during the next election.

“I think people like to try what worked and try it again,” he said. “So I wouldn’t be surprised to see more coordinated efforts at disinformation from other countries seeking particular advantages. We only know what to prepare for based on what happened last time, so if people who provided disinformation have gotten better at it or have new strategies, media companies and people who use different kinds of media will have to learn how to react to them in real time.”

“I think it’s going to play a very similar, but equally or possibly even more pernicious relationship,” said Lewis Friedland, a Distinguished Achievement professor at UW-Madison. “After three years, with this term being actively propagated throughout the entire public sphere, now, many more people are expressing doubt about what’s true.”

Quoted: “There’s an innate survival system in humans,” said retired University of Wisconsin communications professor Joanne Cantor. “It’s sort of like driving by a car wreck — you don’t want to see it, but you can’t help looking at it.

“Then there are others who like to play with those emotions and take risks,” said Cantor, who has spent 30 years researching the emotional reactions of adults and children to mass media, including fright.

“How to pay for her version of ‘Medicare for all’ is complicating things for Warren at the moment, just as other aspects of her campaign appears to be thriving,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden. “In keeping with her identity as having a ‘plan’ for most everything, there is an extra incentive to nail the broad parameters of how her healthcare expansion will work.”

Noted: The problem lies in a behavioral economics problem that differentiates this industry from solar power, electric cars and other profitable tech sectors, said Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Namely: There’s not really any reason to pay for CCS other than combating climate change. Turns out that saving the world, on its own, isn’t necessarily a good enough reason to save the world.

Noted: To learn more, we sat down with slime mold aficionado Anne Pringle of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Check out the video above to learn everything you’ll ever need to know about the strangest blob on Earth.

Quoted: “I’m not trying to dumb it down too much here,” says Jeffrey Sindelar, professor of meat science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “but a truly uncured hot dog is just loose ground meat in a casing.”

Quoted: Tony Goldberg is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a veterinarian from the university of Wisconsin, Madison Veterinary School.  “We’re at ‘ground zero.’ This, the Clinch River is the best studied example of this. But throughout the world there are muscle populations that are experiencing what we’re calling mass mortality events where you’ll walk out onto the river and you’ll see unusually large numbers of fresh dead mussels.”

“What’s so unusual and bold about this arrangement is that they’re taking litigation and day-to-day decisions about litigation, which are usually thought of as quintessential executive power, and giving them to a legislative committee,” said Miriam Seifter, a UW-Madison law professor. “Wisconsin would become an outlier in allowing this.”