Category: Experts Guide

University of Wisconsin experts weighed in on how the last presidential debate could impact candidates, undecided voters and the election.

Quoted: Meta-analyses such Khandaker’s “can be valuable,” said Dr. Charles Raison, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner said the GOP re-definition of “elite” goes all the way back to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Today, talk radio and other conservative outlets have also done such a good job assigning negative connotations to “liberal” that a lot of liberals now prefer to be called “progressives,” he said.

Quoted: Carrie Laboski, a soil scientist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed that digesters don’t remove phosphorus, nitrogen and other nutrients. Instead, a separate system also needs to be in place that splits out solids and liquids in manure, allowing farmers to manage their waste stream and keep excess nutrients from being applied to the soil.

Quoted: Dennis Dresang, a retired political science professor at UW-Madison’s La Follette School for Public Affairs, said what’s unusual about this election cycle is having a governor that is not popular with the majority of residents and is considered a lame duck.

Quoted: UW-Madison political scientist David Canon said polls may be boosting donors’ appetites to get involved in the race. In addition to the Marquette poll, two other recent polls showed Feingold leading by 3 percentage points and Johnson up by 5, respectively. Together, they depict a tighter race than did a string of past polls that showed Feingold leading, often by comfortable margins.

Quoted: Long term, the new structure would make it easier for American Family to expand into other states, said Peter Carstensen, a professor of law at UW-Madison.

Quoted: “Presidents actually have a lot of things that they can do,” said Kenneth Mayer, who studies executive orders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What was once considered to be a low point of presidential activity actually has high levels of presidential activity.”

Quoted: Peter Miller, a professor in educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin, said it can be difficult to treat all people with respect while developing public policy that is appealing to the broader public.

Noted: Peter Miller, an educational leadership and policy analysis professor at UW-Madison, is providing funds connected to his research project that looks at how organizations work together to support children.

Quoted: “It’s another example of the way in which the criminal justice system, as a human system, can produce errors,” Keith Findley,co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, said in a phone interview.

An expert with UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology said a chemical used to eliminate invasive zebra mussel populations in Minnesota wouldn’t work in major Madison lakes infested by the mollusc.

Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said it remains “quite difficult” for Trump to win the state. Burden said over the past two weeks, polling shows the state moving from a situation where Trump was in striking distance to a more lopsided race where Clinton has a wider lead.

Quoted: “Each state has a number of (Electoral College) votes, equal to the number of seats it has in the House of Representatives,” said Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at UW-Madison. States get two additional Electoral College votes for their U.S. senators.

Quoted: “I think Madison is a vibrant economic community,” said James Johannes, director of the Puelicher Center for Banking Education at the UW-Madison School of Business. “It has the lowest unemployment rate and the highest population growth in Wisconsin, based on last year’s data.”

Noted: Research from Anita Mukherjee of the University of Wisconsin, School of Business found no reduction in recidivism rates when using private prisons, indicating that the benefits touted by private prisons, such as higher efficiency and better results is tenuous at best.

Quoted: Cross-selling — in which bankers try to draw customers who had signed up for one account into starting other accounts or products — is part of most banks’ strategies, said Jim Johannes, director of the Puelicher Center for Banking Education at the University of Wisconsin.

Noted: Damon Smith, an assistant professor of field crops pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, comments.

VIDEO: Dr. Barbara Ingham, a professor of food science at UW-Madison, talks about common mistakes people make when canning the fruits of their labor.

Quoted: “Clinton is trying to shore up her weakness, which is young voters,” said UW-Madison political scientist Barry Burden. “Sanders is the best carrier of that message.”

News 3 This Morning talks with Dr. Hart Posen of the Wisconsin School of Business about the search for a new CEO at Lands’ End.

University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kathy Cramer also found discontent among Wisconsin’s mostly white, rural residents while researching her 2016 book, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.”

Quoted: “There’s no doubt in my mind split-ticket voting will be higher in this election than 2012 and 2008,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Dave Canon, who points to the number of voters in both parties who have qualms about their nominees, as well as the potential size of the third party presidential vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Quoted: “But it’s always been my opinion that the more we rely on export markets for taking off our excess supply, the more volatile it is because we are dealing in a marketplace we can’t control a lot,” said Brian Gould, professor of agriculture and applied economics at UW-Madison.

Quoted: “The task she was undertaking was very difficult and I think at best offered mixed results,” said Hart Posen, associate professor of management and human resources at UW-Madison’s School of Business. “She was asked to help Lands’ End stand out among a crowded field of mid-level fashion retailers where everyone already is having a difficult time succeeding.”

Dr. David Canon believes a big reason for that is because liberal Democrats who didn’t vote for Clinton in the spring primary, are still reluctant to support her now.

Voters trying to discover what’s true in the political landscape can have a difficult time of it, especially this year, said UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication Professor Mike Wagner.

Three of University of Wisconsin’s top political and media experts covered the potential implications social media is playing in the current election in an ever-more divided electorate during a panel Tuesday evening.

Noted: Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, are guests on WHA radio (970 AM) at 11:45 a.m. the last Monday of each month.

Quoted: The new law will likely raise the cost of production on farms, said Paul Mitchell, associate professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.“When you have to harvest quickly, you work more than the standard work week,” he said. “Now that’s all of a sudden going to get more expensive.”

Quoted: David Williamson Shaffer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in educational psychology, said if used correctly tablets have proven to boost test scores, help kids learn faster and make school more enjoyable.

Quoted: “The story (in Wisconsin) sounds similar to the national story,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Essentially, we’re not back to where we started (before the recession). We seem to be following a hopeful pattern.”

Quoted: Robert Batt, a University of Wisconsin-Madison business professor, said he liked how CMS included reporting from patients.”Surveys tend to have people with extreme opinions, but even at that, it’s real data of real patients who were there and who can say something,” he said.

Quoted: “If you look at global banking models, no countries have as many banks as we do,” said banking expert James Johannes, a finance professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. “So if you believe in the natural order, the natural order is going to be fewer banks.”

Noted: My friend and colleague Dipesh Navsaria, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, is a pediatrician with a master’s degree in children’s librarianship, and the medical director of Reach Out and Read Wisconsin. He said about Ms. Dewdney: “She really hits the marks beautifully in terms of understanding the challenges of childhood that we as adults have forgotten, that bedtime is a separation, or leaving a child at preschool or being lost in a store.” He added: “And she does it beautifully in rhyme.”

Noted: New gene editing tools, like CRISPR, have “so fundamentally transformed our ability to manipulate genomes that the question has quickly shifted from ‘Can we?’ to ‘Should we?’ to ‘If we do it, how can we minimize the risk of unintended consequences?’ ” Kate O’Connor-Giles, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells The Christian Science Monitor in an email.

Noted: Estimating future migration patterns is dicey. David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the December 2013 report that contains the current state projections, joked a little about the difficulties.

Noted: John Witte, UW-Madison professor emeritus of public affairs and political science, explained the process as when one political entity assumes responsibility and political control over another political entity.

Quoted: Dr. Dipesh Navsaria of the Pediatric Department of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine stresses the importance of having regular conversations with kids about how school is going.

Noted: Dominique Brossard, a professor and chair of UW-Madison’s Life Sciences Communication Department: “People are super confused right now because they hear things about genetically modified foods being controversial and a risk.”

Noted: Neeraj Arora and Thomas O’Guinn from the Wisconsin School of Business are quoted.

Noted: While some economists think a big hike in the federal minimum wage would kill jobs, two UW-Madison economists (Andrew Reschovky of the La Follette School of Public Affairs and Tim Smeeding, past director of the Institute for Research on Poverty) didn’t see much danger in raising county workers’ living wage.