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Category: UW Experts in the News

Harvest Struggles Across Wisconsin Could Impact Supply Of Livestock Feed

Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Liz Binversie, agricultural educator for University of Wisconsin-Extension in Brown County, said she has heard farmers describe silage as like pickling vegetables.

“You’re kind of pickling the feed, right? You’re preserving it long term. And what’s doing that is the microbial population,” Binversie said.

We may not be able to end hunger in Wisconsin but we can reduce it. Here’s what it will take.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Judi Bartfeld, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies food security and policy, said she doesn’t think society will ever be able to eliminate food insecurity, but we can ease it.

“As long as there are families who are struggling with poverty and limited resources, I think we’re going to have struggles with food insecurity. I think we can certainly reduce it if we focus on tackling the root causes,” she said.

Our Civics Duty

Isthmus

Noted: Diana Hess, dean of UW-Madison’s School of Education, is a big fan of the approach used by Middleton’s Legislative Semester, which is a spawn of an innovative civics program developed by a former social studies teacher in a Chicago suburb. “I think it’s hard to teach people how to be engaged without giving people opportunities to be engaged,” says Hess, a national expert on civics education and the author of several books on the topic. “The analogy I often use is we would not teach people how to swim by lecturing them about various strokes. We would have them in the pool.”

People of color have less access to mental health help. Here’s how a new Appleton nonprofit plans to change that.

Appleton Post-Crescent

Quoted: While some research points to lower numbers of people of color seeking treatment, Steve Quintana — professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — says those communities are showing up to appointments, not getting what they need and dropping out.

“The treatment that’s provided tends to be culturally loaded with white, middle-class culture and social norms, as well as people,” Quintana said.

Separation of powers case could set Wisconsin apart

Wisconsin State Journal

“What’s so unusual and bold about this arrangement is that they’re taking litigation and day-to-day decisions about litigation, which are usually thought of as quintessential executive power, and giving them to a legislative committee,” said Miriam Seifter, a UW-Madison law professor. “Wisconsin would become an outlier in allowing this.”

Steroid injections may cause more long-term harm than thought

WISC-TV 3

Quoted: Richard Kijowski, a professor of radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, wrote an editorial accompanying the recent study saying the objective of the journal’s special report was “to educate radiologists that the intra-articular corticosteroid injection they routinely perform with little, if any, thought about long-term safety may cause more harm than benefit.”

Microwave myths: The truth behind microwave safety

CBS 58

Quoted: UW-Madison food science professor Bradley Bolling says it’s not true.

“A microwave is a perfectly find way to warm up food,” he said. Bolling says the microwave’s heating speed is actually better.

“The short amount of time that it takes to heat up the product can actually preserve a little bit of the nutrition.”

UW-Madison expert says poverty remains 10 years after recession

GazetteXtra

Poverty continues to dog Wisconsin despite a lower unemployment rate since the Great Recession.

Tim Smeeding is the former director of the UW-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty. He spoke Tuesday in Delavan about why poverty is still an issue a decade after the recession.

“I’m trying to give people who’ve got nothing at the end of the month something at the end of the month,” said Smeeding, who supports a higher minimum wage.

Why Evangelical Christian Leaders Care So Deeply About Trump Abandoning The Kurds

Huffington Post

Quoted: Even though most Kurds are Muslims, the ethnic group includes a subset of Christians and other religious groups. Today, conservative and politically engaged evangelicals remember the critical role America’s Kurdish allies have played in the region since 2003, including helping in the fight against the Islamic State, according to Daniel Hummel, a historian of U.S. religion and diplomacy at a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Insofar as many evangelicals see the major confrontation of this age as American power vs. Islamic radicalism, the Kurds are a small but valiant ally,” Hummel said.

Illinois’ Automatic Voter Registration Delays Worry Experts

NBC Chicago

Quoted: “It’s helpful to have that come out in a midterm year or odd year where election officials have an opportunity to make fixes without the pressure,” said Barry Burden, a director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center. “The presidential (election) puts the most stress on any system than any other contest.”

Presidential debate sites announced, what it may mean for Wisconsin

CBS 58

Quoted: “Given that there are still a lot of democrats aren’t happy about the fact that Hillary Clinton didn’t never showed up in Wisconsin once during 2016,” said David Canon, a political science professor at UW-Madison. “I think the democrats are trying to make up for that, by not only having the convention here but, yeah, I think they probably will have one of the primary debates here as well.”

Will cursive become a lost art form? Not if these Wisconsin lawmakers can help it

Fon du lac Reporter

Quoted: Sarah Zurawski often debated the topic with teachers and administrators who were on both sides of the cursive issue when she worked as a school-based occupational therapist. She now teaches a clinical doctorate program and conducts research through UW–Madison’s School of Education.

“From a purely clinical perspective I’ve worked with several students who struggled with manuscript writing (reversals, illegible letters, etc.) who seemed to do better with cursive writing,” Zurawski said. “Many of the students I’ve worked with were highly motivated to learn cursive because it seemed almost like a rite of passage as a third grader.”

Evers Administration: More Health Insurance Options On Tap This Fall

Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: “The marketplace has stabilized quite substantially in the last couple years. Insurers are making money,” explained Donna Friedsam, a health policy director for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty. “There were substantial (profit) margins in some cases. In the last year we saw a couple of the insurance carriers giving rebates to consumers.”

New Report Shows Extreme Racial Disparities In Wisconsin, Midwest

WORT FM

Quoted: Laura Dresser is the Associate Director of COWS, a nonprofit, nonpartisan “think-and-do tank” based at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, which partnered with the Iowa Policy Project, Policy Matters Ohio, and the Economic Policy Institute to produce the report. She says that segregationist policies hampered black communities’ ability to rebound from economic downturns.

“This inequality has gotten baked in, in very aggressive ways in the Midwest through segregation and redlining, through school citation policies [or] where people put new schools as communities grew, and where they shut schools,” Dresser argues.

Potential changes to nut milk, plant-based meat labels

NBC-15

Quoted: Steph Tai, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that farmer protection, not consumer confusion, is at the heart of the proposed legislation.

“If a consumer knows that we can use nut-based products in the same way that we’ve been using dairy-based products, then the concern from the dairy industry is that people will be substituting,” Tai said. “The same thing with plant based burgers. If people know that they could use it as an easy substitute and it tastes kind of the same, then they might just replace that, which will lead to undercutting the profits of livestock producers.”

Agronomist earns UW-Madison honorary recognition

Kenosha News

A tomato plant played a huge part in launching the career of Tim Boerner, who will receive Oct. 17 the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Honorary Recognition Award. Boerner was 9 years old when his grandfather gave him a tomato plant. That gift cultivated his lifelong interest in crops and agriculture in general. That interest also has helped innumerable Wisconsin farmers.

Jessie Opoien: Lizzo’s magic let us all shine for a night — especially one twerking UW-Madison assistant professor

Capital Times

“If I’m shinin’, everybody gonna shine.”

When Lizzo sang it, she meant it.

For one magical night last week, she shared that moment with Madison. And in that moment, we all got to shine — but perhaps no one more than Sami Schalk, an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

1.9 million people with diabetes gained insurance coverage through Affordable Care Act, study estimates

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The long-term complications from uncontrolled diabetes include the increased risk of a heart attack or stroke, nerve damage that causes tingling or numbness, kidney failure, blindness, and losing toes and feet to amputation.

Yet an estimated 17% of adults under the age of 65 who had diabetes were without health insurance before the expansion of coverage through the Affordable Care Act, according to a recent study by Rebecca Myerson, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and colleagues at the University of Southern California.

‘Our River Was Like a God’: How Dams and China’s Might Imperil the Mekong

New York Times

Noted: “I have not seen a single case in which people have been compensated fairly for the disruptions to their lives caused by dams,” said Ian Baird, a Southeast Asia expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the social effects of dams. “If governments are arguing that these projects aren’t viable without underpaying compensation, then maybe these projects aren’t right for the country.”

Illinois’ automatic voter registration delays worry experts

AP

Noted: “It’s helpful to have that come out in a midterm year or odd year where election officials have an opportunity to make fixes without the pressure,” said Barry Burden, a director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center. “The presidential (election) puts the most stress on any system than any other contest.”

Overzealous in preventing falls, hospitals are producing an ‘epidemic of immobility’ in elderly patients

The Washington Post

Noted: Barbara King, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing, studied how nurses responded to “intense messaging” from hospitals about preventing falls after the 2008 CMS policy change. She found that pressure to have zero patient falls made some nurses fearful. After a fall happened, some nurses adjusted their behavior and wouldn’t let patients move on their own.

Has corporate feminism come to solve Pakistan’s social problems? Not quite

Dawn.com

Quoted: In her book The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Kathryn Moeller examines why transnational US corporations such as Nike are increasingly investing in philanthropic efforts to promote the prosperity of girls and women in the Global South and finds that these corporate-led campaigns end up benefiting corporations at the expense of women in the Global South.

Fair Pay To Play Hailed As Game-Changer

Diverse Issues in Higher Education

Quoted: Dr. Jerlando F.L. Jackson, Distinguished Professor of Higher Education, Department Chair and Director & Chief Research Scientist in the University of Wisconsin’s Equity & Inclusion Laboratory says that he is watching closely to see the impact of the legislation.

“If other states follow, it does address one of the chief issues in the pay to play dynamic,’’ Jackson says. “That dynamic is student athlete will own their likeness, their name and the ability to put that in the market for themselves. That is probably our best pathway forward to recognizing their contributions.’’

Adjustable Desks: Health Benefit Or Hype?

Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering professor Robert Radwin studies workplace ergonomics. He was not involved in the University of Pittsburg study but he instructs students on the qualities of sit-stand desks which he feels have gotten a lot of hype. He does not have one.

Every Single Living Thing Is Part of an Ecosystem. Here’s How They Work

HowStuffWorks

Quoted: “The ecosystem concept ecologists now use has been refined since it was first introduced by Tansley almost a century ago,” says Stephen Carpenter, a scientist in the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Ecosystem science studies the interactions of all the living and non-living entities in a specified place. This definition is consistent with modern concepts of energy, nutrient flow and biogeochemistry, which barely existed during Tansley’s career.”

Adjustable Desks: Health Benefit Or Hype?

Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering professor Robert Radwin studies workplace ergonomics. He was not involved in the University of Pittsburg study but he instructs students on the qualities of sit-stand desks which he feels have gotten a lot of hype. He does not have one.

“I think they have their place. If people suffer from discomfort from sitting at their desk and they feel standing is beneficial, then such a desk might be helpful but you should be careful not to expect that a sit-stand desk is going to make sedentary work much healthier than if you just got out and exercised,” Radwin said.

Excelling at Endurance Running Has Little to Do With Our Ancestors’ Need for Meat

The Wire

Noted: Henry Bunn, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has said more than once that a person would have to be “incredibly naïve” to believe the persistence hunting theory. Bunn recalls that he first heard discussion of the theory at a conference in South Africa, and he realised almost immediately that if you are going to chase an animal that is much faster than you, at some point it will run out of sight and you will have to track it. Tracking would require earth soft enough to capture footprints and terrain open enough to give prey little place to hide and disappear.

Lake Michigan reached record high levels this summer. Is climate change the cause?

Green Bay Press Gazette

Noted: Wisconsin has experienced warmer temperatures, but is also starting to see an increase in total annual precipitation, according to Jack Williams, a University of Wisconsin-Madison geography professor and climate change expert.

One theory, Williams said, is a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor and is more energetic, and the energy releases bigger storms.

In the Land of Self-Defeat

New York Times

Quoted: In 2016, shortly after Mr. Trump’s victory, Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, summed up the attitudes she observed after years of studying rural Americans: “The way these folks described the world to me, their basic concern was that people like them, in places like theirs, were overlooked and disrespected,” she wrote in Vox, explaining that her subjects considered “racial minorities on welfare” as well as “lazy urban professionals” working desk jobs to be undeserving of state and federal dollars.