Category: UW Experts in the News

Quoted: Meanwhile, turnout among Republican voters in the county has barely wavered over the years, making Democratic turnout the key to whether a Democrat can win the county and ultimately the state, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden.

“In recent presidential elections, about one of out of every five Democratic votes has come from Milwaukee County, so it is essential that the party perform well there to win the state,” Burden said.

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and sociologist Sarah Helpern-Meekin studies instability in peoples’ lives. This includes the role policy can play in affecting the instability around family members or financial situations.

She said for families working with a more fixed income, including those who are low income, have to make tough choices about where to cut back.

Renters can often face higher rents, but homeowners often must make the tough decision of whether to stay where they are or move.

“The options are often limited,” she said. “You need to pay your property taxes to hold onto your home, so you have to make some decisions about what it’s worth to you to hold onto your home if paying those property taxes is not feasible.”

Quoted: “For us humans, this (weather) can be a problem,” said David Drake, UW-Extension wildlife specialist and University of Wisconsin professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. “For wildlife, the conditions might be out of the ordinary for this time, but they are well adapted to it.”

Quoted: Donald Downs, an emeritus professor of law and political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said a U.S. Supreme Court decision would give the county the ability to restrict the speech of county employees who work directly on water issues.

But the county has less authority to control what other county employees could say about water issues because they would be speaking more as citizens than as county officials, Downs said. He called putting restrictions elected officials “really problematic.”

“It’s clearly a gag order,” he said.

Quoted: “All I can say is: Wow,” University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism instructor Kathleen Bartzen Culver said in an email to the Associated Press. “I am astonished that a local government would find it appropriate, much less legal, to threaten a news organization with prosecution for doing what they are constitutionally protected in doing — representing the public interest by seeking, analyzing and reporting information.

“For the life of me,” Culver further wrote, “I’m struggling to envision under what statute a journalist would be prosecuted for covering water test results released by local government.”

Quoted: UW-Madison education professor Julie Mead, who studies legal issues in the schools, said she was “not aware of research on zero tolerance policies regarding employees or the effectiveness or such policies.” Jirs Meuris, a UW-Madison professor of management and human resources, said “there’s not much research on zero tolerance in workplaces that I know of beyond some work on drug policies,” and “in that case, frequent testing and harsh penalties do deter it.”

“These frequencies are really public resources,” said Barry Orton, a University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor of telecommunications. “So when television stations get paid, or radio stations get paid, to rejigger their frequencies, and then cell phone companies or whoever else gets to pay to use it, there’s a complicated auction system involved, and the public gets some kind of reimbursement.”

Quoted: Jordan Gerth, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said some parts of the state have already seen 20 percent of their normal annual snowfall, which is unusual when compared to a normal November.

“You might get a few inches of snow, and the temperatures will be getting cooler, but it’s certainly nothing like what we’ve seen the last week of October into the beginning of this month,” Gerth said.

Noted: Susan Paskewitz, chairwoman of the entomology department at the University of Wisconsin, said tick numbers throughout the state are equal to or slightly higher than last year. Numbers will increase in an area if there are more hosts, such as mice or deer, or if a region has received a lot of rain or is especially humid.

Quoted: “How trauma and stresses seem to affect people and brain development is to make them more distrustful of others,” said Ryan Herringa, a physician and assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

With smartwatch heart trackers, “if you’re trying to determine if someone’s heart rate is exactly 80 beats versus 90 beats per minute, that’s a really hard thing,” says kinesiology professor Lisa Cadmus-Bertram. “If you’re trying to determine if a heartbeat has ended, in my experience with these devices, they should be able to do that quite easily.”

Quoted: Given the influence “fake news” had on the 2016 elections, UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner, thinks it could have similar consequences during the next election.

“I think people like to try what worked and try it again,” he said. “So I wouldn’t be surprised to see more coordinated efforts at disinformation from other countries seeking particular advantages. We only know what to prepare for based on what happened last time, so if people who provided disinformation have gotten better at it or have new strategies, media companies and people who use different kinds of media will have to learn how to react to them in real time.”

“I think it’s going to play a very similar, but equally or possibly even more pernicious relationship,” said Lewis Friedland, a Distinguished Achievement professor at UW-Madison. “After three years, with this term being actively propagated throughout the entire public sphere, now, many more people are expressing doubt about what’s true.”