Category: Experts Guide

Quoted: Connie Flanagan, associate dean in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, has seen it on the Madison campus. With new voter ID requirements, there was an urgency to get students registered.”The ’get out the Badger vote’ thing was this message that democracy means you have to do something,” she said. “There was really a sense of agency in the message, and a lot of it was really around how to do it. You can’t just assume you can go.”

The renewed focus on bread-and-butter Democratic principles, especially within organized labor, arrived in step with Sanders’ message, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Barry Burden, director of its Elections Research Center, told CNN.

Quoted: Young Democrats have consistently flocked toward Sanders — and Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center and professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has spent enough of time working alongside college students and studying their voting patterns to have a good grasp on why that is.

Noted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said the embrace of Cruz by the state party establishment was critical for his victory. “It’s probably a lesson for Trump himself,” Burden said. “Coming into a state and taking on the most popular leaders is not the way to win.”

Noted: Barry Burden, a political scientist at UW-Madison, said it’s unprecedented for a presidential front-runner to come into Wisconsin and assail a governor who’s a nationally prominent member of the same party.

Quoted: Even if they’re not making money now, at least they can cover their out-of-pocket costs and generate some cash flow, said Bruce Jones, an agricultural economist at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: “Twenty years ago, if someone had told us that we would all have a tiny little device that tracks our information … we would’ve said, ‘That will never happen,’” said UW-Madison professor Dietram Scheufele. “Twenty years later, we all want to have it.”

Craig Berridge, a neurobiologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that this method only measures dopamine in real time, so wouldn’t help scientists track disorders linked to high or low levels of dopamine over a long period. “It’s probably going to be most useful in animal studies where we’re trying to understand the role of dopamine in various neural processes,” he says.

Quoted: “On the one hand, it seems kind of monumentally foolish that he’s attacking Republicans in this way in Wisconsin,” said Mike Wagner, a political scientist and communications professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “On the other hand, his whole campaign is a repudiation: ‘You can’t trust the elites, you can’t trust the media, you can’t trust the experts.’ That’s propelled him so far … It would be striking if he won the state with that message.”

Noted: Barry Orton, a recently retired University of Wisconsin-Madison telecommunications professor, said he’s not convinced that demand for home broadband service has fallen much.

Quoted: UW-Madison Political Science Professor Barry Burden says the April 5th primary is sort of like the “All Star Break” in the presidential race. It separates two even halves of the primary circuit and comes at a time when no other primaries are going on.

“It has the potential to be a kind of pivot point,” Burden says. “It was sitting there by itself on the calendar right in the middle.”
Also quoted: journalism professor Mike Wagner.

Quoted: UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner says the many visits in the state provide an opportunity for voters to learn more about the candidates, and to press them for details on some of the sweeping plans Republicans in particular have touted on the campaign trail. “One thing that Wisconsin voters are famous for wanting to know are the details, and so an opportunity is before them to demand these details from the folks who want to be the next president,” he says.

Noted: Mike Wagner, a UW-Madison communications professor who studies presidential politics, said Republican candidates may be drawn to Janesville because there’s a concentration of conservative voters in the district of U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who isn’t endorsing in the race.

Quoted: Majid Sarmadi, a color scientist and professor at University of Wisconsin who testified during Wisconsin’s debate over adding pink as an option, found that blaze pink provided a better color contrast to the traditional orange and was more visible to fellow hunters.

Noted: During the debate, Journal Sentinel Editorial Page Editor David D. Haynes will moderate an online panel featuring former Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske; Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor; and Wisconsin Vote reporters Scott Gordon and Gil Halsted. Look for that on JSOnline.

Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Ryan Owens said he doesn’t think it will sway many people’s decisions in the state’s highly partisan landscape, unless comments continue to trickle out in the coming weeks.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor says resentment still lingers among many Wisconsin voters and lawmakers half a decade after Gov. Scott Walker signed Act 10 into law.

Quoted: Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been conducting extended conversations about voter attitudes with people in her politically competitive state since 2007.

“Things have definitely gotten worse in Wisconsin in terms of the overall mood,” she said. “It’s become a different place. People are more on edge, more distrusting of each other and their government.”

Dr. Nasia Safdar, director of infection control at UW Hospital and Clinics and faculty at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, answered a few questions about Elizabethkingia and why it’s leaving investigators puzzled.

Quoted: “The idea is that this is a person who brings something very special to the company, who is critical to the organization,” said Joan Schmit, a professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s business school.

Quoted: “There’s a lot of research to suggest that it matters a lot,” psychologist Ronald May said of a father’s presence in a boy’s life. May taught “The Psychology of Men and Masculinity” for 17 years at UW-Madison, and the university lists “raising emotionally healthy boys” as among his areas of expertise.

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: James M. Johannes, a professor of banking at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Business in Madison, Wis., told Bloomberg BNA consumer debts were not bought and sold when the WCA was enacted more than 40 years ago.

Quoted: But as the race continues and Sanders earns more exposure, his standing may change, said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.

Quoted: “If the document a worker presents ‘reasonably’ appears valid, they have to accept it,” said Stacy Taeuber, a law professor and director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the UW-Madison Law School.

Quoted: “It’s just been a bad decision to associate your fantastic brand with something that was polarizing,” said Neeraj Arora, marketing professor at UW-Madison and executive director of the A.C. Nielsen Center for Marketing Research. “From a marketing standpoint, I think it’s fair to say that there was a misstep.”

Also: But Hart Posen, a UW-Madison professor of management and human resources and a Lands’ End observer, said by email that the Steinem episode suggests “a substantial gap in the top management team’s understanding of the current Lands’ End customer base.”

Quoted: “It’s very difficult to weather a storm like this when you as a key leader of your faculty lose the confidence of the faculty,” said Jerlando Jackson, who specializes in higher education governance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Usually at this stage, campus leadership will do damage control to try to keep faculty from abandoning ship.”

Quoted: James Johannes, a University of Wisconsin-Madison business professor with expertise in banking, said he didn’t know enough about North Milwaukee State to say why it is struggling years after the recession. But speaking generally, he said, “The one thing we can say for sure is that some of the fallout from the Great Recession has been very much localized. Certain banks in certain areas of the country have just not done well. Certain areas of counties have not done well. But most of that has been flushed out of the system by now.”