For the second consecutive year UW-Madison tops the list of universities for sending the most Peace Corps volunteers abroad. We find out more about the program and the opportunities they offer. We’ll also talk with a former lawmaker before he departs for Senegal next month about his decision to volunteer at the age of 65. Featured: Kate Schacter.
Quoted: Brian Gould, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of agribusiness, expects this degree of excess to be a temporary situation.”The industry … is not alarmed to a large degree, I mean there is some concern of course if these stick around, but I haven’t seen a tremendous drop off in those cheese prices over the last six, seven months,” he said.
Quoted: “We’re gonna freeze,” John Martin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview.
Quoted: “We found that the addition of piperine significantly improved the bioavailability of resveratrol,” says Nihal Ahmad, a professor of dermatology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who has studied the effect piperine has on the body’s absorption of resveratrol.
Forty people, including students from Fox Valley Technical College and New London High School, heard Dr. Laura Hernandez from the Dairy Science Department at UW-Madison about her research on the mammary system of dairy cows.
Noted: A supermoon is when these two cycles match up and we have a full moon that’s near its perigee. The result is that the full “super” moon appears slightly larger and slightly brighter in the sky. This occurs about one in every 14 full moons, Jim Lattis, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin Madison, notes.
Quoted: Adrian Treves, a UW-Madison professor who runs the Carnivore Coexistence Lab, says it’s difficult to say what effect these contests are having on coyote populations, because the state isn’t regulating them.
However, they have the potential to be devastating. “We suspect the worst — that a whole region is getting depleted of coyotes, as in a whole county area or broader.”
“In plant pathology, we talk about the disease triangle,” said Damon Smith, an associate professor of plant pathology at UW-Madison, who led development of apps and models focused on diseases of turf, soybean and corn.
“I’m not at all surprised they’re closing their full line stores in cities where there are Walmart, Targets and Kohl’s,” said Jerry O’Brien, executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing at UW-Madison. “I think they had a difficult time differentiating.”
That could exempt about 1.5 million Wisconsinites from the protection, according to Donna Friedsam, a researcher and health care policy expert at UW-Madison.
Quoted:That means the needs of an untold number of children aren’t being met. It also has serious ramifications for research, because it can skew estimates of autism, says Maureen Durkin, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: “It means that the prevalence of autism is probably even higher than we’re measuring.”
Quoted: A supermoon is when these two cycles match up and we have a full moon that’s near its perigee. The result is that the full “super” moon appears slightly larger and slightly brighter in the sky. This occurs about one in every 14 full moons, Jim Lattis, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin Madison, notes.
Interview with Phil Greenwood, senior lecturer at the Wisconsin School of Business.
Noted: Hart Posen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, said Shopko couldn’t compete with huge retailers like Target, Wal-Mart and online giant Amazon.
Quoted: Jirs Meuris, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said his research with truck drivers has shown that “financial worry is associated with a higher probability of a preventable accident.” And while “many air traffic controllers suppress their feelings of financial anxiety, this suppression actually makes people more error-prone as well because it takes cognitive effort to do so,” Meuris said.
Noted: Claus Andersen, assistant professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests the word’s mainstream appeal reflects the reality that nations have become increasingly focused on themselves in the past few years.
Quoted: While some see telemedicine as the the future of medical care in rural Wisconsin, the director of the Wisconsin Academy for Rural Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health said it won’t replace the need to bring more physicians to rural areas.
“Telemedicine is an important piece of the puzzle, but even more important is that physician or primary care person in the communities,” said Dr. Joseph Holt.
Some scientists can ride out any funding delays. But for those working on projects that are time sensitive, the halt in funding approvals threatens to throw off an entire year of work. Physiologist Hannah Carey is still waiting for this year’s money to come in for her research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on ground squirrel hibernation.
Quoted: Dr James J. Schauer, a senior civil and environmental engineer heading the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that the association of atmospheric particulate matter particles with adverse health effects had been well established and led experts to develop standards on these pollutants and implement control measures.
Noted: Mezrich is an associate professor in the division of multiorgan transplantation at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. He reflects on his experiences as a transplant surgeon and shares stories from the operating room in his book, When Death Becomes Life.
Quoted: “The scientific literature is just beginning to tease that apart,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Matt Hirshberg, who works at the Center for Healthy Minds. “This whole area of research is really quite young.”
Jirs Meuris, assistant professor of management and human resources, is the guest.
“It’s the thing we’re all most afraid of,” said UW-Madison clinical nursing professor Pamela McGranahan.
Quoted: “Stranger abductions, typically they’re acting on some thought or fantasy or plan they’ve developed in their own head, and not necessarily focused on any one particular victim,” said Linnea Burk, director of University of Wisconsin Madison’s Psychology Research and Training Clinic.
Above-average temperature and late-season precipitation were two major players in the outcome of the 2018 growing season, according to UW-Madison Corn Agronomist Joe Lauer. Lauer presented his highlights and summaries of last year’s growing season at eight agronomy update meetings held across the state last week.
The bad news is that they still “won’t be great,” Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the UW-Madison Center for Dairy Profitability, told agricultural bankers attending the 36th annual Western Wisconsin Ag Lenders Conference Jan. 10 in Menomonie.
Noted: Not so, according to new research from the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jihae Shin, assistant professor of management and human resources at the school, together with Katherine L. Milkman of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a series of experiments that challenged the conventional wisdom that holds backup plans in high regard.
Quoted: “What we need to do is to figure out new weaknesses in these bacteria,” said Jason Peters, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.
Quoted: It was part of the post-WWII, Cold War era in which the Soviet Union was viewed as an expansionist threat into western Europe, said John Sharpless, newly retired professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught a class on the period.
Quoted: Jake Vander Zanden, a fisheries professor at UW-Madison, used to catch an occasional burbot in his youth while fishing on Lake Winnebago.
“It’s a species that people don’t really pay attention to, but it’s really a pretty remarkable fish,” Vander Zanden said.
Noted: On the contrary, two new companion pieces from Estanich titled “The Biggest Wail from the Bottom of my Heart” and “What Love Looks Like” enter uncharted territory for this decade-old company. Estanich — who splits his time between Chicago and Stevens Point, Wisc., where he is a professor of dance at the University of Wisconsin — approached this new work with a political bent, which, to my knowledge, he and this company have not done before. So, some of those oft-seen tendencies listed above anchor the evening, bringing some familiarity to the forefront and softening overt references to racial tension in America and, yes, even Donald Trump’s wall.
Noted: Jirs Meuris, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the Wisconsin School of Business, spoke to Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal about the financial stress that many federal workers could be feeling. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Noted: In her analysis of five million paid, issue-based Facebook ads—which covered such hot-button issues as gun rights, abortion, gay rights, immigration, terrorism, and race—during a six-week period of the 2016 Presidential campaign, the University of Wisconsin professor Young Mie Kim discovered that “the most highly targeted states—especially Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—generally overlap with the battleground states with razor thin margins.
Noted: The Nimhans researchers are not alone in their interests. Richard Davidson, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds, is studying Tibetan Buddhist monks to understand how long-term meditation affects the brain.
Quoted: “Products give you a lot of value in different ways,” said Liad Weiss, an assistant professor of marketing and consumer psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There is the practical element but also the emotional attachment.”
Junjie Guo and Noah Williams of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy released their 2019 economic forecast Tuesday. They are predicting Wisconsin’s GDP will grow 2.4 percent but the unemployment rate will rise to 4.2 percent and the labor force will decline by 1 percent.
Quoted: ”A biological method of age verification doesn’t really exist yet, says Craig Atwood, a gerontologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When it comes to identity theft, you could do whole-genome sequencing of someone at birth and at death.
Noted: Jirs Meuris, of the University of Wisconsin Business School, explains why this cautious approach is even more important than it may seem. In a research paper last fall, he discussed studies showing that the more worried employees were about their personal finances, the more accident- and error-prone they were in their work.
Quoted: Charles Raison, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says that exercise can provide a transient “hit” to the immune system that triggers other regulatory cytokines to dampen down the response, which may be one of the reasons exercise is such a powerful tool for improved health.
Quoted: Regarding the use of melatonin with young children, I shared your question with Dipesh Navsaria, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin.
Mark Stevenson, a dairy industry expert, said supply management programs like those in place in Canada and other countries can be effective.”If you restrict the amount of milk that gets to the marketplace, you can keep prices much higher, but if you do that, there has to be a lot of restrictions in place,” said Stevenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Quoted: With the recent unseasonably warm temperatures, it’s likely many stink bugs are awakening from their winter slumber. And that means stink bugs are among the top bug complaints now rolling into the inbox and voicemail of University of Wisconsin Extension entomologist P.J. Liesch.
“From their point of view, they want to hunker down in the winter and leave in the spring,” Liesch said in a phone interview Monday afternoon. “It might be 30 outside but if it’s a sunny day, it might get warm enough in some spots for them to get active.”
Noted: While milk prices were bleak to end the year, UW-Madison dairy analysts Bob Cropp and Mark Stephenson are optimistic that 2019 will be better, with only weak increases in milk production forecast and, hopefully, a resolution to trade issues with Mexico and China, which both are big buyers of U.S. dairy products.
Quoted: Another eminent scholar of forgiveness, Robert Enright, Ph.D., a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of The Forgiving Life, tells Thrive: “Forgiveness does not invalidate the quest for fairness. Justice and forgiveness should grow up together.” By saying he was sorry and modifying his behavior over the last decade, Toussaint says Hart has “balanced the scales of justice.”
Noted: During the ’80s, the difference in the number of women legislators who were Republicans and Democrats wasn’t big, said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden, who serves as director of the of the Elections Research Center. However, a partisan difference began to emerge after the first so-called “Year of the Woman” in 1992. Since then, women in the state Legislature have increasingly been Democrats.
Quoted: “The implications are huge,” Omar Ohrens, a postdoctoral scholar in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and lead author of a study on the findings, said in an interview.
Noted: Interview with Majid Sarmadi, a professor of textile science.
Noted: Nearly 19 percent of those 65 and older are working full time, according to Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor of business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Early retirees have helped Wisconsin’s rural and vacation communities, said Steven Deller, a professor and community development specialist with UW–Madison’s Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics.
Noted: Hart Posen, an associate professor of management and human resources, is the guest.
Quoted: “Everything just grinds to a halt,” said Mike Ballweg, a University of Wisconsin Extension agent in Sheboygan County.
The rules and policies to put the massive piece of legislation in place are largely written by USDA employees at many levels.
“And that’s a mad scramble. They really work hard to get all that in place as quickly as possible,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The shutdown is “coming at a bad time, for sure,” Stephenson said.
USDA isn’t “writing the checks or doing the things to get payments out to dairy farmers, corn and soybean growers. So that’s a problem,” he added.
Quoted: One divide has been evident in the state for years: the rural-urban split. It was most recently studied by Katherine J. Cramer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist and author of “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.”
“There have always been tensions between rural Wisconsin and Madison and Milwaukee,” she said. “What changed is now those tensions are on the surface and very obvious to people. I think Governor Walker, depending on where you stand, he either exacerbated that divide or he drew attention to some of the injustices a lot of people have been feeling for a while in rural Wisconsin.”
Quoted: “It’s always a little tough to tell exactly where rates are going to go in the near future,” said Clifford A. Robb, associate professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I do think 2019 will see a little bit more rate increases.”
Quoted: While there’s no “actual” conflict of interest because Overberg isn’t using his position to influence a personal matter, there could be a “perceived” conflict, said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. “It would be easy for people to assume his activism makes his journalism suspect,” she said.
University of Wisconsin political science professor Barry Burden: “He will be remembered for presiding over the longest stretch of single-party control of state government since the 1950s, and a highly productive stretch at that.”
Noted: University of Wisconsin Madison economics professor Bruce Hansen said the economy could see signs of a slowdown in the coming months based on the last major shutdown the country faced in 2013.
Noted: Authors Yi Fuxian from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Su Jian of Peking University contend that inaccurate census results since the 1990s have skewed Chinese population estimates.
Noted: Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in the South China Morning Post that China’s population crisis would be even worse than Japan’s—and last year told a conference in Beijing China had already passed the mantle of most populous country to India.
“Three…two…one…engine ignited, and we have liftoff of SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket and Dragon.”
On Dec. 15, 2017, Simon Gilroy listened to that countdown as he gazed across a river separating a mass of scientists from the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Titusville, Florida. He was a couple of miles from the site, but as close as you could get without being inside the rocket.
Quoted: Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, called the results “a beautiful gerrymander” because Republicans were protected even in a bad year for their party.
Noted: Mr Yi, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a long-term critic of the one-child policy and his work has previously gained traction among the country’s leadership.
