Category: Experts Guide

Guests include Michael Apple, professor of curriculum and instruction, and educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Marcia Slattery, the head of the UW Anxiety Center, talks about how you can help kids with anxiety cope on Halloween.

Quoted: “It’s extraordinarily unlikely that a single product is going to have a positive effect on a whole series of diseases,” said Alta Charo, a UW professor of law and bioethics.

Noah Williams research noted, Barry Burden quoted.

The assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology is an expert on VR.

Quoted: “There is work to be done to boost turnout among black voters in Wisconsin,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.

Quoted: “One of the biggest ways is that it lowers the tax rate,” said Fabio Gaertner, associate professor at the Wisconsin School of Business. A lower tax rate means companies keep more of their money.

Quoted: “I think we have realized as Madison residents just how much Epic has transformed our city in many ways,” said David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches elections and redistricting. “There’s no doubt that if they did participate (in elections) on levels that were equal to the average Dane County voter, they’d have a huge impact.”

State statutes “give a presumption of least restrictive setting for both pre-adjudication and disposition,” according to Kenneth Streit, a clinical professor of law emeritus and expert in juvenile justice at the University of Wisconsin Law School — meaning both before the child has been found guilty of a crime and after guilt has been determined.

“If that holds up through election day that would be a real change from other recent elections,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden, who has studied ticket splitting, the phenomenon of voters supporting candidates from both major parties.

Quoted: “It’s hard to think of another instance like this where even one or two cabinet secretaries would come and speak out against a sitting governor. To have four is unprecedented,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “It’s such a wild card,” said political scientist David Canon of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to turnout trends in the Donald Trump era and the shifting motivation levels of voting groups on each side as they react to events (like the Supreme Court confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh) and the president’s lightning-rod rhetoric.

With heated gubernatorial and senatorial elections at the top of the ticket, UW-Madison’s Elections Research Center director Barry Burden anticipates the 2018 midterms to garner one of the state’s highest youth turnout rates in a generation.

Quoted: “Given the history of Act 10, all the budgets cut to K-12 early in the Walker tenure, and with a somewhat more positive budget now for education and the governor claiming to be the ‘education governor,’ you knew the Democratic challenger was going to talk about (education) no matter what,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist David Canon. “Then, when the Democratic challenger is Tony Evers, the state school superintendent, it’s ready-made to have education be the focus of the campaign.”

Quoted: “If the fungus dies, the ants die,” says Cameron Currie, a microbial ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the fungus-farming ants and their mutually beneficial relationships with other species.

Quoted: Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor and director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the study is consistent with recent work by other scientists, including his own research on heat waves and hospital admissions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, over a 17-year period, he said. Patz and his co-authors found that high temperatures impacted admissions for self-harm, including attempted suicide.

Quoted: Another factor working in the Montana researchers’ favor was the fortuitous and improbable fact that they seemed to have found the very individuals that had been introduced, rather than their offspring, says Jake Vander Zanden, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies aquatic invasive species.

Quoted: Local and state governments can take action to mitigate the effects of climate change, according to Paul Robbins, director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“We need better water management. We need new policies for our lake levels,” said Robbins. “We need to look at our combined sewer overflows coming out of Milwaukee — the sewage system there, as well as how we manage our drainage across the Yahara watershed, plus any other parts of the state.”

Quoted: Ryan Owens, director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said “excessive panic [among liberals about abortion] … is, frankly, overblown.”

Quoted: Connie Flanagan, a UW-Madison professor and expert on youth and politics, notes that the size and diversity of this generation of young voters is unique.

“This generation is huge, and it’s far more demographically diverse than many of its predecessors,” she says. “So the tolerance of diversity in a lot of dimensions is true in part because they are a diverse generation, and because the issues have been ones they’ve grown up thinking about.”

Quoted: “Our global climate has warmed by about a degree Celsius already, so this report looks at what our climate would look like if we were to stop that warming at one and a half degrees Celsius, so about three degrees Fahrenheit global warming,” said Daniel Vimont, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin, and the director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research.

Quoted: Thomas O’Guinn, a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the gas station spots are part of a trend of putting ads anyplace where they might capture people’s attention.

Quoted: “The main reason that DOC administration and guards take a hard line on inappropriate relationships between staff and offenders is fear of loss of secure operations,” said University of Wisconsin Law School professor Kenneth Streit, who studies the state’s prison systems.

Quoted: Shawn Conley, University of Wisconsin Agriculture Associate Professor, says this season is tough. “It’s really not a good place for farmers to be in this fall, this harvest of 2018,” Conley says

Noted: Anna Pidgeon, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, notes it’s not a rare phenomenon.

Quoted: But those factors don’t necessarily translate to a good shot for Democrats to gain control of either legislative chamber, said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political scientist who tracks state legislative races. “Neither chamber looks like an ideal situation for Democrats to get back to a majority,” Burden said.

Quoted: Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at UW-Madison, was with her students at the Dodge County Detention Facility on Friday morning when she learned about the first arrests. She says that day the jail — one of only two immigration facilities in the state — was unusually full, and by the end of the day the 250-bed facility was at capacity. With no room left at the Dodge County jail, she says immigrants arrested from Dane County were taken to the Kenosha County Detention Center. “It’s much more difficult for us to get there, and also for their families and attorneys to talk to them and meet with them,” Barbato says. “That was pretty disappointing.”

UW-Madison School of Business professor Neeraj Arora said Bon-Ton’s success will depend on three factors: “The nature of the merchandise, strong online presence, and price.”

The area drenched by more than 20 inches of rainfall covered more than three times more area in Texas and Louisiana during Harvey than in the Carolinas during Florence, according to an analysis by Dr. Shane Hubbard, a researcher from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin. “They were two quite different storms and really not even comparable in terms of the amount of water that fell, ” Hubbard said in an email to weather.com.

Noted: The findings of Charlie Trevor of University of Wisconsin–Madison and Anthony Nyberg of the University of South Carolina reiterates the negative impact of layoffs and indicates that downsizing a workforce by 1% leads to a 31% increase in voluntary turnover the next year.

Quoted: Jerry O’Brien, the executive director of The Kohl’s Center for Retailing Excellence at UW Madison said it’s rare for a bankrupt company to come back under new ownership, but under the same name. “I’ve never heard of a store doing the Thursday through Sunday thing before so that will be exciting to watch from my point of view,” said O’Brien.

Q&A with Kathleen Bartzen Culver, assistant professor and James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics at University of Wisconsin-Madison, about Poynter’s upcoming workshop, “The World Beyond High School: Covering Education Equity and the Future of Work.”

Quoted: “If this is the best we can do, it isn’t good,” said Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies poverty and economic mobility. “Things really tapered off this year, after a serious drop in previous years,” he said. “In terms of the boom, the party has lasted a long time, a lot longer than we thought, but not everybody is getting invited — people who are working several jobs, taking jobs without benefits, kids who are growing up in poverty. The fruits of the recovery are not being spread around evenly.”

Noted: A study by UW-Madison professor Ken Mayer released in 2017 found that the new law kept almost 17,000 people in Dane and Milwaukee counties from voting in the 2016 presidential election.

Richard Lathrop, a UW-Madison expert on freshwater lakes, said it will be months before analysis is completed to determine how much phosphorus the August storm washed into the water.

Noted: Some insurers could opt to exit the market for health insurance sold directly to individuals and families, said Justin Sydnor, a professor of risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “Governor Walker has indicated that (this year) is going to be a challenging year for his campaign and for his party,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the university’s Elections Research Center. “The headwinds he faces might be why Walker’s style of campaigning is somewhat different in this election cycle.”

Quoted: “I think this perfectly illustrates the fundamental transformation we’re seeing in how we all communicate, and in how researchers study that communication,” University of Wisconsin communications professor Dietram Scheufele told BuzzFeed News. In the past, scholars could study newspaper articles without buying a subscription or asking for a stream of electronic articles, for example, but in an age of social media, access to data has become more fraught.

The number of mosquitoes caught in traps in three different locations in the area is expected to surpass the record of 500 collected in 2016, according to Susan Paskewitz, a UW-Madison entomology professor.

“If you’re a millennial, you came of age during this boom and bust,” said J. Michael Collins, faculty director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ”You saw firsthand that it’s harder to get a job, pay raises, buy a house. It’s just harder to be economically independent when you can’t change jobs or get the kind of income like previous generations could.”

Noted: But a study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research shows this may not be the case. The paper by Justin Sydnor, an associate professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Chenyuan Liu, who is pursuing a doctorate the University of Wisconsin-Madison, finds that at companies offering both a HDHP and a low-deductible plan, selecting the HDHP typically saves more than $500 a year. “High-deductible plans often have much lower employee premiums,” Sydnor said.

Quoted: Emily Stanley, a professor at UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology, says the potential for flooding in the Madison area is nothing new. But she and other scientists warn that climate change could make severe storms — and, by extension, flooding — more common.

“What’s different is double-digit inches of rainfall in such a short period of time,” she says. “When you add the water really, really quickly, it’s like if you eat Thanksgiving dinner in five minutes. It doesn’t feel the same as it would if you ate it over the course of a few hours.”

Noted: Story includes comments from Laura Dresser, associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, Noah Williams, an economics professor, and Tim Smeeding, professor of public affairs and economics.

Interview with Hubbard, a researcher with UW’s Space Science and Engineering Center and expert in disaster response.