Quoted: “It’s so important that we see them as an employee of a school district,” said Katie Eklund, an assistant professor of school psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who’s also been a school psychologist and school social worker. “It’s important for them to think that SROs are here as a resource.”
Quoted: “Scientists buy heavily into this argument that to know us is to love us,” said Sharon Dunwoody, professor of mass communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But that just isn’t backed up by empirical evidence. The problem with scientific literacy surveys, she and Besley told me, is that they’re often being interpreted by people who are starting from a couple of inaccurate premises: That everyone ought to know a wide variety of science facts, even if those facts don’t affect everyday life; and that the more science facts people know, the friendlier they’ll be toward science. Neither are true, they said. And, ironically, pushing those incorrect beliefs — and the resulting conclusion that Americans are scientifically illiterate — could actually make people less science friendly.
Quoted: His attorneys, Charles Glynn and Richard Jones, have probably advised him against pleading guilty, said Keith Findley, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and a former defense attorney.
“It’s highly unusual for anyone to plead guilty at an arraignment,” Findley said.
Quoted: “It’s very much a matter of your perspective,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at University of Wisconsin-Madison and chairman of Dairy Task Force 2.0, a committee of Wisconsin dairy farmers and others that aims to chart a course for the dairy industry’s future.
Quoted: “There are black-white achievement gaps in virtually every school district in the country, but Madison’s gaps have been, historically, among the largest in the country,” said UW-Madison professor Geoffrey Borman, whose research includes testing ways to close them. “I can’t point you to a particular district that has closed gaps.”
Column: Our Communication and Civic Renewal research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked 1,015 Wisconsinites who they thought should control redistricting in our state: the state Legislature or an independent, nonpartisan commission. Fifty-three percent of adults said they preferred the nonpartisan commission while only 13 percent favored the idea of state lawmakers controlling the process themselves.
Noted: The Environmental Law & Policy Center commissioned the study by researchers from several universities, including Daniel Vimont, director of the Nelson Institute Center For Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: With a Madison school board election coming up April 2, and with conversations around charters and vouchers affecting the last several school board races, we feel it’s important that voters be fully informed. So I spoke with Dr. John Witte, an expert on educational policy at the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Witte has studied charter and voucher policies and their effects for more than 30 years.
The guest is Laura Albert, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering
Quoted: “The anonymous nature of even the sponsor of the bill is something that really does fly in the face of democratic accountability,” says UW-Madison political science professor David Canon. Introducing a Motion 999 at the end of the budget process has since become a common way for Wisconsin lawmakers to avoid public scrutiny. “It leads to laws getting passed that don’t have any kind of public vetting.”
University of Wisconsin professor and industrial and systems engineer Laura Albert uses bracketology to make her predictions.
Some things make so much sense they simply demand attention. That’s what we call “common sense.” And when a policy will save Wisconsin millions of dollars, put people and businesses to work, and enhance the dignity of our citizens, policymakers should take heed.
UW-Madison bioethicist Alta Charo and Kris Saha, a UW-Madison biomedical engineer, are quoted.
Quoted: There’s the expense. The costs of implementing small classes are significant, said Beth Graue, professor of early childhood education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Howard Schweber, a constitutional law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, went a step further, saying Hagedorn’s past writings on this issue represent a “radical position and one far outside the mainstream.”
“These are fringe views even among conservatives,” Schweber said.
Quoted: The costs of implementing small classes are significant, said Beth Graue, professor of early childhood education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Class-size reduction is a huge investment. It costs a lot of money, requires a lot of space. In places that have done wholesale class-size reduction, like California, they had unintended consequences because of that, where they ended up having to emergency certify teachers to be able to cover all the classes, and those teachers weren’t well-educated to be able to take advantage of (small class sizes),” she said.
Noted: Van Deelen is the Beers-Bascom professor in Conservation and professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at UW-Madison. Much of his work relates to conservation of wildlife populations in the face of human influences.
Quoted: One major factor is that fewer teens are having babies. Teen births have dropped 60 percent over a decade, said David Egan-Robertson, of the UW-Madison Applied Population Laboratory.
“And in 2017, for the first time, teen births fell below 4 percent of total births,” he said. “So that’s quite a significant change. It’s been a very long-term process, but that’s a noticeable change in that age group.
Quoted: Some words of warning: You may need to shift your mindset (and workouts) if you’re used to training at an intense level. “You may have less strength or endurance during the postpartum period,” says Jill Barnes, Ph.D., an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This is a time to really listen to your body and how it is recovering.”
Quoted: Dr. James Conway of the University of Wisconsin tells the Ideas lab:
“You get the wrong person getting off a plane in the wrong place, and it’s like dropping a match into a can of gasoline.” Conway is director of the Office of Global Health at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
“Generally, the idea is to get the people who are more junior and who are doing the research, to be thinking about ethical issues — and to have some fun with it,” said Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the UW-Madison and the Morgridge Bioethics Program lead.
University of Wisconsin-Madison law and political science professor Donald Downs, who studies free speech issues, said he knows of no exceptions in state law that would allow off-duty National Guard personnel to criticize the government.
But political inaction, factory farms and tariffs are merely the symptoms of a problem that lies at the heart of Litkea’s troubles. Brian Gould, a recently retired University of Wisconsin-Madison agricultural economics professor, summed it up in four words:
Quoted: Dairy farms of all sizes as well as grain, beef and specialty farms across the state experienced bankruptcies, according to Paul Mitchell, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at UW-Madison. “There’s no rhyme or reason” to explain the bankruptcies in Wisconsin, Mitchell said. “It’s just a lot of persistent low prices for a lot of different commodities that we produce.”
Quoted: Dr. Aleksandra Zgierska, a family doctor who practices and researches addiction medicine at UW Health, remains skeptical of CBD. “The research on CBD oil has not been sufficient to say that this is evidence-based treatment for x, y or z,” she says.
Noted: Hagedorn says his daughter’s battle brought home the opioid crisis and how it affects families. The ad ends with images of Hagedorn in his judicial robe, walking next to police officers as he promises to “hold people accountable” as a Supreme Court justice. Such a claim is “largely nonsense” given the types of cases that come before the Supreme Court, said Howard Schweber, a law school and political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is not endorsing anyone in the race.
Quoted: Indeed, Dr. Kathleen Bartzen Culver, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said news organizations should expect to be held accountable by the public.
While Wisconsin waits to reargue a gerrymandering case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, the state should look to examples of better redistricting procedures, like those found in Pennsylvania, California and Iowa, a UW-Madison political science professor argued Wednesday night to an audience of roughly 75 people at the UW-Eau Claire Forum.
Barry Burden, also director of the Elections Research Center, said those three states have each come up with different solutions to the problem of gerrymandering.
Quoted: Jirs Meuris, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, stressed the importance of the loans. According to Meuris’ research, employees who are financially insecure tend to be less productive. This financial insecurity leads to anxiety, making employees unable to focus on work, he explained.
“These interest-free loans are trying to create these safety nets for these workers … providing these safety nets can reduce a lot of the psychological strain that comes along with financial insecurity,” Meuris said.
Quoted: Jirs Meuris, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin at Madison said that while the rest of the country may have moved on, many federal workers, not to mention critical safety programs, have not.
“The first shutdown created very long-term problems,” Meuris said. “It posed threats to our security — and those effects will be felt for a very long time if we have a second shutdown.”
Noted: Jason Fletcher, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research includes child and adolescent health policy, found that when comparing siblings, one who had ADHD and one who did not, the sibling with ADHD earned approximately 33 percent less as an adult.
Quoted “We expected a decrease in mortality as a result. That is not what we have seen,” said Gina Bryan, an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing who worked with the Governor’s Task Force on Opioid Abuse.
This “herd immunity can happen at lower percentages when the disease is less contagious,” according to Tracy Saladar, a UW-Madison nursing professor, but that’s not measles, which she called “the most contagious infectious disease.”
The first time Jim Leary was nominated for a Grammy, it went to Joni Mitchell. This time around, Joni isn’t part of the competition, though an homage to Bob Dylan is probably a crowd-pleasing favorite. Even so, who says there isn’t time to throw some Grammy love at yodelers? That’s the hope of Leary, a folklorist who is up for his second Grammy Award nomination for Best Album Notes for a release of archival music with a Wisconsin connection.
Noted: Noah Williams, an economics professor from the University of Wisconsin at Madison whose fiscal analysis supported the Walker administration’s case for the project, says the state ought to redo the math.
Noted: Answer by John Hawks, paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Noted: Olivarez and Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worked for hours on behalf of detainees. They called ICE to see where the detainees had been taken, started intakes to see who could be eligible for relief and worked with other immigration attorneys to find out who could take cases pro-bono or at a low cost, referring families who could afford it to private attorneys.
Noted: Donna Friedsam, the health policy programs director at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Population Health Institute, spoke on the Jan. 25, 2019, episode of Wisconsin Public Television’s Here & Now about the bill and how it compares to the regulations set out in ACA.
Quoted: Lisa Cadmus-Bertram, a professor of kinesiology at UW-Madison, said it’s important to get out after several days cooped up.
“The combination of cold temperatures and short daylight hours can be really, really challenging,” she said.
Quoted: “The lakes are so sensitive to climate,” says John Magnuson, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied lakes in the region for decades. “Already people notice that ice is getting shorter, and there’s an impact on winter recreation—the skating, the ice fishing.”
Quoted: “Reporters reviewing documents without editors seeing them happens every single day across news media,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Take, for instance, a crime reporter doing a story on filed charges by reviewing the criminal complaint. An editor rarely reviews the document as part of the editing process.”
Quoted: “The word has become appropriated by the popular media,” says Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says the term “polar vortex” is now used in a general way to describe an extreme cold front that migrates southward to latitudes where it doesn’t typically reside.
A sudden warming of the stratosphere 20 miles above the Earth can cause those swirling winds to slow, allowing a “lobe” of cold air to slip down into the middle latitudes — covering places like Wisconsin, said Stephen Vavrus, a senior scientist at UW-Madison’s Center for Climatic Research.
Includes interview with Keith Findley. “False Positive” is a video series by Vox that looks at the structural and cultural factors that have made the U.S. criminal justice system susceptible to unreliable forensic science, and that continue to impede progress toward more reliable methods today.
Noted: “Expanding naloxone access increases opioid abuse and opioid-related crime, and does not reduce opioid-related mortality. In fact, in some areas, particularly the Midwest, expanding naloxone access has increased opioid-related mortality. Opioid-related mortality also appears to have increased in the South and most of the Northeast as a result of expanding naloxone access,” wrote Jennifer Doleac, PhD, Texas A&M University, and co-author Anita Mukherjee, PhD, University of Wisconsin.
Noted: Creativity can benefit from distraction too. Jihae Shin, now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has found that when people played Minesweeper or Solitaire for 5 minutes before coming up with new business ideas, they were more creative than those who didn’t play.
Quoted: “It’s unusual for the lake to freeze and open up, freeze and open up,” said John Magnuson, UW-Madison limnology professor emeritus and director emeritus.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison marketing professor Kevin Chung sees good reason for insurers to keep their names before the public. In a hyper-competitive insurance market in which consumers shop only infrequently, it’s very important for companies to be on consumers’ minds, Chung said by email.
That’s one reason why insurance advertisements — think of Geico — tend to be memorable and interesting, he said.
“With this being said,” Chung added, “there is no study in marketing that I know of that has convincingly shown that sponsorship via stadium naming rights led to increased awareness and ultimately to more sales in insurance products.”
Quoted: Hemant Shah, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s journalism school, said the pattern is part of a larger trend where white people are overrepresented as victims and people of color are overrepresented as criminals in mass media.
Part of the problem is the lack of diversity in newsroom leadership, said Shah, who teaches courses about mass media, race and ethnicity. White journalists may be more likely to latch onto stories of white victims.
“There’s a social psychology at work where you relate more to your in-group than to your out-group,” Shah said. “You may see in a missing white girl something that’s more relatable: It could be my daughter, my neighbor, et cetera. Whereas with a non-white young woman you might not have that same visceral connection.”
Quoted: Adrian Treves, a UW-Madison professor who runs the Carnivore Coexistence Lab, says it’s difficult to say what effect these contests are having on coyote populations, because the state isn’t regulating them.
However, they have the potential to be devastating. “We suspect the worst — that a whole region is getting depleted of coyotes, as in a whole county area or broader.”
“I’m not at all surprised they’re closing their full line stores in cities where there are Walmart, Targets and Kohl’s,” said Jerry O’Brien, executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing at UW-Madison. “I think they had a difficult time differentiating.”
Noted: Hart Posen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, said Shopko couldn’t compete with huge retailers like Target, Wal-Mart and online giant Amazon.
Quoted: Jirs Meuris, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said his research with truck drivers has shown that “financial worry is associated with a higher probability of a preventable accident.” And while “many air traffic controllers suppress their feelings of financial anxiety, this suppression actually makes people more error-prone as well because it takes cognitive effort to do so,” Meuris said.
Jirs Meuris, assistant professor of management and human resources, is the guest.
“It’s the thing we’re all most afraid of,” said UW-Madison clinical nursing professor Pamela McGranahan.
Quoted: Jake Vander Zanden, a fisheries professor at UW-Madison, used to catch an occasional burbot in his youth while fishing on Lake Winnebago.
“It’s a species that people don’t really pay attention to, but it’s really a pretty remarkable fish,” Vander Zanden said.
Noted: Jirs Meuris, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the Wisconsin School of Business, spoke to Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal about the financial stress that many federal workers could be feeling. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Noted: Jirs Meuris, of the University of Wisconsin Business School, explains why this cautious approach is even more important than it may seem. In a research paper last fall, he discussed studies showing that the more worried employees were about their personal finances, the more accident- and error-prone they were in their work.
Quoted: With the recent unseasonably warm temperatures, it’s likely many stink bugs are awakening from their winter slumber. And that means stink bugs are among the top bug complaints now rolling into the inbox and voicemail of University of Wisconsin Extension entomologist P.J. Liesch.
“From their point of view, they want to hunker down in the winter and leave in the spring,” Liesch said in a phone interview Monday afternoon. “It might be 30 outside but if it’s a sunny day, it might get warm enough in some spots for them to get active.”
Noted: While milk prices were bleak to end the year, UW-Madison dairy analysts Bob Cropp and Mark Stephenson are optimistic that 2019 will be better, with only weak increases in milk production forecast and, hopefully, a resolution to trade issues with Mexico and China, which both are big buyers of U.S. dairy products.
