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.
The UW-Madison law professor who helped free Steven Avery after a wrongful conviction in the 1980s says “Making a Murderer,” the Netflix documentary about his 2007 homicide trial, illustrates problems in the criminal justice system that affect many cases beyond Avery’s.
Quoted: “It’s a limited, unlimited plan. This is an offer that’s going to have so much fine print, you will need a lawyer to understand it,” said Barry Orton, a recently retired telecommunications professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Comment from Joe Glass, UW-Madison assistant social work professor who specializes in addiction, and Julia Sherman, coordinator of the UW-based Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project.
Glass pointed to sobriety checkpoints, alcohol ignition locks, license revocation and suspension laws as among the examples. But it’s also quite possible that someone working on a fourth drunken-driving offense has an addiction. “Repeated use in hazardous situations, including drinking and driving, is a characteristic of alcohol use disorder, as defined by the medical community,” Glass said.
Sherman said she’s not aware of evidence that the threat of tougher penalties alone deters drunken driving. Evidence does show that treatment changes alcohol-related behavior, she said, but “just locking people up isn’t treatment.”
Companies less than a year old accounted for all of Wisconsin’s net new job creation in 2012, according to a new study conducted by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
Quoted: File your patent early or opt for secrecy. Martin Ganco, associate professor of management and human resources at the Wisconsin School of Business, advises, “A small-business owner should consider filing a patent as early as they have a patentable technology. It can be in the early stages. It is a common mistake to think that a fully functioning prototype is needed to apply for a patent. In rare cases, if the patent provides weak protection, it may be better to opt for not patenting and opt instead for secrecy.”
Noted: The documentary format itself is also growing in popularity, according to UW-Madison professor Pat Hastings, an expert in trends in visual storytelling.
(Video) Jeremy Morris, an assistant professor of media and cultural studies in the University of Wisconsin Communication Arts Department, talks about American Idol’s swan song season.
University of Wisconsin-Madison textile expert Majid Sarmadi, who studied fluorescent pink’s visibility for the bill’s authors, backed up that assertion (that pink is more visible than blaze orange). He told the committee pink stands out more than orange in a fall landscape.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison textile expert Majid Sarmadi, who studied fluorescent pink’s visibility for the bill’s authors, backed up that assertion. He told the committee pink stands out more than orange in a fall landscape.”If pink is more visible, shouldn’t it be a good choice? Shouldn’t it be allowed to save lives?” Sarmadi said.
(Video) Ken Mayer, a political science professor at UW-Madison, talks about President Barack Obama’s executive action on gun violence.
Video: Ken Mayer, a political science professor at UW-Madison, talks about President Barack Obama’s executive action on gun violence.
Quoted: The technology behind the robots is mature and reliable, said Bilge Mutlu, associate professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So obstacles to more widespread use are the rate of adoption and infrastructure challenges, like WiFi coverage, he said.
With a simple pen and pad of paper Dr. Toby Campbell [assistant professor of medicine, oncology and palliative care medicine] is prescribing something for patients they need in the long and sometimes difficult battle with cancer: a day off from the disease.
Quoted: UW-Madison law professor Dave Schultz said his recollection was that criminalizing such activity is “based on the idea that selling fake controlled substances while representing they are real can lead to the same sort of violence, use of guns, etc., that may attend ‘regular’ drug transactions.”
Noted: The research first started in chickens. Animal science professor Mark Cook and associate researchers disabled a gene that helps defeat the immune system in sick hens.
From that discovery came ground-breaking work inside Arlington’s UW Beef Nutrition Farm, where researchers have been feeding those hens’ eggs to cattle in an effort to help prevent disease without the use of antibiotics.
CRISPR research has already begun in somatic (non-reproductive) cells. “The earliest ones are going to be somatic interventions with various kinds of blood stem cells,” Pilar Ossorio, professor of law and bioethics at the Morgridge Institute for Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CBS News at the gene editing summit in Washington, DC.
Noted: A quarter of one percent is “very, very small,” said James Johannes, director of the Puelicher Center for Banking Education at the UW School of Business. “If this causes capital flows into U.S. financial markets, the price of U.S. assets will go up and interest rates on U.S. assets will go down,” defeating the purpose of raising the rates, Johannes said…. UW professor Mark Ready, academic director of the Hawk Center for Applied Security Analysis, said the rate increase is the beginning of “a very long path toward what looks to be normal.”
Quoted: “Every detail of this plan is as solid as Jell-O,” said Barry Orton, a telecommunications professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Bob Turner, the UW-Madison’s Chief Information Security Officer, said the formation of the cyber protection team comes at a time when cyber threats continue to evolve.
“Adversaries want to deny service, they want to steal important or critical info, and they want to disrupt whatever they can,” Turner said.
Quoted: Marianne Smukowski, a dairy safety application coordinator at the University of Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research, says that the non-toxigenic E. coli can serve as an “indicator organism” that may show the presence of harmful pathogens in food. She says 95 percent of raw milk cheeses checked in one FDA test did not show them, which is why in part she’s unclear as to why the FDA is using that as a new testing issue.
“I don’t know why the FDA is pushing for it,” Smukowski said. “They decided to implement it based on some of the results they have seen in their assignment.”
Noted: Haley Vlach is a professor in the UW-Madison department of educational psychology and director of the Learning, Cognition & Development Lab.
Quoted: Jon Eckhardt, executive director of the UW-Madison Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship and a co-founder of gener8tor, said he thinks programs like gener8tor are spurring more cooperation between Madison and Milwaukee.
Quoted: “Planning horizons for poor folks are very short — weeks or a month at most — and uncertain, too, so a pass may be too far to go because of both budget and uncertainty,” said Tim Smeeding, a UW-Madison public affairs and economics professor and former director of the university’s Institute for Research on Poverty.
Noted: Once an animal is delisted, the population is monitored. It can be relisted if the population declines, said Kurt Sladky, a UW-Madison professor of zoological medicine and special species.
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: “I know the privilege of being recognized in front of your peers is a big incentive for companies to continuously improve,” said Tom Eggert, who teaches sustainable business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and serves as executive director of the council. “The competitive nature of staying at the front of the pack causes Wisconsin companies to rise above their peers from other states.”
Quoted: Sabine Gross, a professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spoke recently about Hoffmann’s story and the era.Calling Hoffmann one of the “dark Romantics,” she explained that he and many of his literary colleagues had a fascination with folk and fairy tales, as well as stories of the supernatural. The Grimm brothers, who collected and published their versions of such classic folktales as “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty,” also fall under that heading.
Join the Journal Sentinel’s David D. Haynes and Jonathan Martin, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for a live Journal Sentinel program on Wednesday.
“Straight Talk on Climate Change” will begin at noon at JS Online. We’re taking your questions now on Twitter: #MJSclimate
This exclusive show follows a Haynes column last week.
(Video) Quoted: Amy Wendt, professor of electrical and computer engineering; co-director, Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute.
Noted: The Trustees of the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) also reappointed Trustee Terry D. Warfield, PwC Professor in Accounting and chair of the Department of Accounting and Information Systems at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Mr. Warfield’s new term will end on December 31, 2018.
Quoted: “I think clearly the administration had to regain control of the narrative,” said John Hall, the UW-Madison’s Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in U.S. Military History.
Hall said Obama’s record on international affairs is drawing a lot of criticism from Republicans as the 2016 presidential election approaches.
“There are a lot of people ready to jump upon any opportunity to critique the administration’s foreign policy credentials and its conduct on ISIS,” Hall said.
Quoted: The state lacks high-profile symbols, such as melting glaciers and rising seas. In Wisconsin, “you have to be paying attention,” said Stanley Temple, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “The toy culture has contributed a lot to the movie,” said Jonathan Gray, professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Anyone who thinks that the movies were successful just for the movie is forgetting the huge impact that the toys had.”
Quoted: “We’ve taken a definite step downward,” said Tim Smeeding, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Things don’t look good.”
(Video) On World AIDS Day, Dr. Ryan Westergaard talks about what UW is doing in the battle against HIV.
(Video) The Dictionary of American Regional English took researchers at UW 49 years to complete. The five volumes document dialects in all regions of the country. But they thought it would be time to update it. Joan Houston Hall talks about the project.
Noted: Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reviewed the different approaches that countries have taken in trying to regulate gene therapy. She favored a precautionary approach that she said would not suppress innovation, arguing that responsible oversight would allow researchers to take more chances. “We have the chance to back up at the end, and change course,” she said.
Quoted: Jerry O’Brien [executive director, The Kohl’s Center for Retailing Excellence], says this trend of “online and not in-line” has been revving its engine for a while now. Online shopping may not be beating regular old shopping in person, but it’s getting there.
“The growth has been consistent. The past four years it’s had dramatic growth, so there’s obvious a trend where we have more people every year, and this past weekend it looks like more than 20 percent of the people took advantage of it so it’s a growing trend,” explained O’Brien.
Noted: Dr. Ryan Westergaard [assistant professor of medicine and Population Health Sciences] is an HIV doctor and researcher at UW Health. He says now the goal is to find more ways to prevent the spread of the virus, and ultimately find a cure.
Noted: Recently, I heard Richard J. Davidson, a prominent expert on meditation and similar practices, talk to a small group, mostly of educators. Davidson, who founded the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, predicted that in a few years, doing mental fitness exercises will be as respected and widespread for both kids and adults as doing physical fitness exercises is now.
Noted: “More wetlands are being created than are being destroyed (nationally), which is good news until you look at the fine print, which was most of the ones being created are shallow ponds,” said Quentin Carpenter, a senior lecturer at UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “Sedge meadows take millennia to create. There’s no way to hurry that process.”
Funding cuts by the Federal Aviation Administration could compromise the consistency of nearly seven decades of Madison snowfall data, weather experts say. “Anytime you’re doing record keeping where you want to look at long-term trends, you need a continuous data set,” Steven Ackerman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at UW–Madison, said. “Once you stop doing that — even for a year — you’ve lost the statistical significance and the continuation of that. Even though it seems like a small decision, it actually has big impacts on the data set.
Quoted: “The problem is it isn’t working as well as they want it to,” said Jerry O’Brien, executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing at UW-Madison. “The concept of opening on Thanksgiving is a great idea if you’re the only one that does it. The whole point was to grab market share, but when everybody made the move it became a bit moot.”
Quoted: “The toy culture has … contributed a lot to the movie,” said Jonathan Gray, professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Anyone who thinks that the movies were successful just for the movie is forgetting the huge impact that the toys had.”
Column from Andrew Kydd, a political science professor at UW-Madison who studies international security issues including terrorism, nuclear weapons, conflict resolution, and war and peace.
Quoted: “There is this fundamental issue that health care is very expensive,” said Justin Sydnor, an associate professor of actuarial science, risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And therefore insurance is very expensive.”
Noted: Comment from Hart Posen, a UW-Madison associate professor who studies business strategy and innovation.
Quoted: Dr. Michael Xenos warns against limiting Facebook friends to only those you agree with.”Whether online or offline, people benefit from being exposed to political views that are different from their own,” said the University of Wisconsin-Madison communication professor.
By a show of hands in two classes Monday, Andrew Kydd helped illustrate why last week’s terror attacks in Paris have resonated so profoundly across the United States.Kydd, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on terrorism and nuclear arms, is teaching undergraduate classes on each topic this semester.
For the second year in a row, Professor Kydd’s Terrorism 319 class is full.
Once again, more than 60 students and auditors alike are filling up the special political science class at UW Madison.
The emphasis is on the headlines. This week, the Paris Terror Attack is the topic. And this year, Professor Kydd says more than 2/3’ds of his class have ties to the Paris.
Noted: In a sense, this emergency check-in is changing the way we communicate, according to Catalina Toma at the University of Wisconsin communications department.
“International calls can be expensive and difficult to procure, whereas Facebook is readily and widely available to anyone with an internet connection,” explained Toma.
Quoted: “The bigger picture is that these are people fleeing for their lives, right, they’re fleeing a burning building,” countered Stacy Taeuber, an immigration attorney who serves as director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at UW-Madison.
While Taeuber disagrees with Speaker Ryan and several other politicians from a moral perspective, she also believes his plan has a lot of holes.
Noted: Two University of Wisconsin-Madison immigration experts are questioning whether states have the authority under the U.S. Constitution to reject placement of Syrian refugees.
“I think, at this point, there’s a widely held consensus that states do not have the authority to decide they are going to reject a specific nationality of refugees,” said Stacy Taeuber, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the UW Law School.
Sara McKinnon, an assistant professor of communication arts and expert on political refugees and asylum, said it’s also important to note the extensive screening of refugees prior to their admittance into the resettlement program, which can take up to 18 months.
Mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood often hears from children and adults about how they have a math phobia: They’ll profess to hate solving for X, or figuring out how to split the bill or take care of the tip.
Noted: Includes comment from Sara McKinnon, a UW-Madison communication arts professor and an expert on refugee and asylum law. She said governors don’t have veto power in whether refugees come here but they can deny state money and resources to the volunteer agencies that provide job, health care and other assistance to refugees, “which could make the resettlement of refugees in these states much more challenging,” she said.
Do governors have the power to close their state borders to Syrian refugees? A clinical assistant professor at UW-Law said no. Stacy Taeuber is the Director of the Immigration Justice Clinic. She said refugees are protected under the federal Refugee Act of 1980.
“Once you’re lawfully admitted to the U.S. as a refugee, you have the same rights of anybody else that is lawfully in the U.S.,” said Taeuber.
Andrew Irving never imagined so many people would show their support in Madison.
“What’s been nice is the unexpected messages we get from people we barely know just saying we want to reach out and say we’re sorry or we’re thinking of you,” Irving said.
Irving, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison French House, decided the community needed a place to come together to mourn and stand in solidarity.
Quoted: Stacy Tauber, an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Immigrant Justice Clinic, said it’s the federal government, not states, that get to make that call.
Noted: Andrew Irving, Director of the French House in Madison, said the attacks have taken a toll on locals who study and immerse themselves in French culture, as well as on French students currently living here in Madison.
“Emotions were very high Friday and also on Saturday. A lot of people just didn’t know what to think,” Irving said.
Irving said the French House, a private residence hall run by the UW-Madison’s Department of French and Italian, houses both American and French students.
“All of our residents speak French here almost all of the time,” Irving said.
