A UW-Madison professor of Integrative Biology and Environmental Toxicology, who presented Monday morning in Door County, says we risk our overall health if we continue to use pesticides for crop or lawn care.
Wisconsin and other battleground states were targeted by a sophisticated social media campaign, according to a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study headed by journalism professor Young Mie Kim. This campaign tapped into divisive issues such as race, gun control and gay and transgender rights.
Noted: “What they’re showing through some fairly sophisticated modeling is that the temperature increase over next 100 years will be fairly significant if we continue business as usual,” said Benjamin Zuckerberg, associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. “I think its concerning because this is a species we’d expect to be relatively resilient. But even a resilient and fairly widespread species is going to be impacted in this increasing temperature.”
Wisconsin and other battleground states including Pennsylvania were targeted by a sophisticated social media campaign, according to a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study headed by journalism professor Young Mie Kim.
Noted: Wisconsin and other battleground states were targeted by a sophisticated social media campaign, according to a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study headed by journalism professor Young Mie Kim.
Quoted: “It’s all types of water: Frozen water, calm water or more turbulent water. It has an effect on us. It’s one of the basic needs,” said Kirstin Thorleifsdottir, who teaches planning and design in the UW-Madison school of human ecology.
Featured: According to the U.S. Census, more than 43 million Americans were living below the poverty line in 2016. But a recent report released from the White House says initiatives to reduce poverty in the United States over the last 50 years have largely been a success. Timothy Smeeding–Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics and former Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty–joins us to talk about the report and what it could mean for social programs in the future.
Featured: In the last installment of our series on the trade-offs of technology and what it means for our kids, Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talked with Dr. Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin who studies how media use affects kids.
Quoted: “It’s hard to know if they were lying now or if they were incompetent before,” said Ian Baird, an expert on Laos at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, referring to Laotian officials. But he said the confusion was to be expected, with a risk-adverse authoritarian government in a poor country that is not accustomed to responding to disasters of this magnitude.
Featured: We’ll discuss what led to the tragedy and how it could’ve been prevented with Ian Baird, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s an expert on Laos and impacts of dams.
Quoted: “Poor people in the project areas are worse off because of these dams, not better off,” said Ian Baird, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “We know that the rates of local recurrence after BCS are declining, which could be attributable to our improved radiation techniques and the increased use of systemic therapy, including both targeted therapy and endocrine therapy. We also know that there is a variation in the rates of local recurrence by receptor status,” said Heather Neuman, MD, MS, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: “Poor people in the project areas are worse off because of these dams, not better off,” said Ian Baird, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Gwen Drury, an expert on the Wisconsin Idea who articulated the genesis of this guiding philosophy above, said these three events in 1894 pointed to what is at its heart: “truth, trust and transparency.” Although the philosophy “sounds like this very general thing,” she said it actually refers to something very specific.
Attorney Meg Gaines found a calling to be a patient advocate after her own cancer experience. Gaines’ self-advocacy helped her through her extended and difficult diagnosis and treatment process in the 1990s. After her successful treatment, she wanted to empower other people with cancer to advocate for their care. Her first opportunity came unexpectedly, when her oncologist asked her to help cheer up a patient who was feeling down. “I jumped on the bus and really was there in about 25 minutes,” Gaines told me in a recent interview. “[I] sat for most of the afternoon with her—talking about life, and death, and mortality and what it’s like, and family, and fear, and cancer.”
Quoted: Both South Korean companies mentioned heavy rains in their descriptions of the disaster. But Ian Baird, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who specializes in Laos and has studied the hydropower project, said he believed the problem was either faulty construction, or a decision to store too much water in the dam’s reservoir at a time when heavy rain should have been expected. “When at the end of July do we not get rain in this part of the world?” he asked.
Harsdorf will be joined by Dr. John Lucey, a food scientist at the UW-Madison who is director of the Center for Dairy Research on the Madison campus. He explained that they want to talk to the Food and Drug Administration about micro-filtration of milk, a process that is widely used in European dairy plants but can’t be used here because of regulations, putting our cheese makers and dairy processors at a distinct disadvantage.
Quoted: “It’s an ingredient derived from the waste of cheese making,” Bradley Bolling, a food scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.
Quoted: “It looks like naked partisanship, and that might be permissible,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If it’s merely one party trying to harm the fortunes of the other, the court thus far has given that the green light, and it might continue to.”
Noted: The second-annual event is organized by the UW-Madison Department of Food Science. Enologist and outreach specialist Nick Smith is running the show with help from the Wisconsin Vintners Association, a Milwaukee-based organization for winemakers and enthusiasts that provided volunteers to serve as wine stewards for the competition. They’re busy backstage opening bottles, pouring flights and making sure that the nearly 500 glasses of wine are properly labeled before they’re delivered to the judges.
Noted: Long-standing mattress retailer Sleepy’s was founded in 1931, with Mattress Firm coming around in 1986 and Tempur-Pedic in 1992. For many of the more traditional mattress retailers, sales strategies consisted of inflated prices and little innovation, according to Hart Posen, associate professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin. “At store number one, they sold you ‘posturepedic best sleep’ and then the next store, so they wouldn’t have to compete, they had ‘posturepedic good sleep’ — the same mattresses with slightly different colored threads or what have you and a different name to make price comparison more difficult,” Posen told Retail Dive.
Psych Congress cochair Charles Raison, MD, gave attendees a “10,000-foot view” of what depression is at the Psych Congress Regionalsmeeting here, and will explore the idea more at the upcoming Psych Congress 2018 preconference.
“I’m not claiming that this provides a universal understanding of depression or even necessarily that it’s right,” Dr. Raison said in opening his talk. “But it’s good to think about things, sometimes raise our head a little bit above the intense struggle we have on a daily basis in the clinical world and just think about a 10,000-foot view.”
Quoted: “The roads are very poor,” Ian Baird, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Laos expert, told Reuters by telephone.
Featured: Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Ian Baird disagrees with calling it a natural disaster and explains why it could have been prevented.
To better understand the problem, researchers from University of Wisconsin-Madison are using a new tool to measure bluff failures in Sheboygan County.
Noted: While it’s no Nobel substitute, Wired has published a feature on Sau Lan Wu, the Enrico Fermi distinguished professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, whom the magazine argues “might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years” if we lived in a “different world.”
Quoted: Ian Baird, associate professor of geography at University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Laos expert, said the collapse of the subsidiary dam was unlikely to affect others in the project, but added that the dam can’t be fixed until the dry season.
Quartz: “Journalists have obligations to relay information within real contexts. To put fake food—and what appears to be Western food and alcohol at that—in front of these subjects and staging them to cover their faces feels exploitative,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Patrick Iber is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
We work and live in a time when historical knowledge has become intensely politicized. That knowledge is political is hardly new, but the rise of Donald Trump has heightened the polarization. His administration governs with a torrent of disorienting dishonesty, and his cry of “fake news” seems to mean less that the news in question is false than that it tells a story about him that he finds discordant with his self-image. Journalists — writers of the first draft of history, as the cliché goes — have struggled to balance their responsibility to reporting discovered facts with reporting the views of those who reject those facts.
There’s some reassuring news for healthy women taking hormone replacement therapy who are concerned about Alzheimer’s disease: University of Wisconsin-Madison research shows no increased risk for the most common type of dementia. But it also didn’t find any benefits to the brain.
Bryan Jensen, Integrated Pest Management specialist for Cooperative Extension and UW Horticulture professor says he’s been getting plenty of emails and phone calls from farmers who describe damage ranging from moderate damage of leaf tissue to extreme defoliation in corn plants.
Quoted: “What attracted Lincoln is they’re so incredibly interesting,” said Karen Oberhauser, a monarch expert and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.
Quoted: “The technology keeps getting better and better — and, the most important thing, cheaper,” said Gary Radloff, who retired this year as director of energy policy analysis for the Midwest at the Wisconsin Energy Institute, a research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As UW-Madison economics professor Noah Williams wrote in a recent commentary on the impact of hefty minimum wage increases in Minnesota, “The distortions from the minimum wage increases led to higher incomes for some workers, but lower employment particularly among young and low-skilled workers, and higher prices for the products of low-skilled labor.”
Noted: The panelists included Allan Brandt, professor of the history of science at Harvard University; Dominique Brossard, chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: “We need to be as accurate as possible because we are providing information for students and parents who are making decisions on what career to follow,” said Matias Scaglione. He’s an associate researcher with Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Starting a cable news network from scratch is a daunting task — especially one that could compete with a behemoth like Fox News. But Lewis Friedland, who directs the Center for Communication and Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the acquisition of Tribune would have given Sinclair an unprecedented array of assets.
Noted: The researchers in Madison wanted to study the impact of childhood stress on genetic chemistry. Seltzer said the biological impact of trauma can put markers on specific genes that act as an on-off switch, which in turn determine whether the natural function of those specific genes are activated or repressed.
Quoted: “Sesame Workshop probably can be trusted to do this in an ethical way, but the door opens for other companies to do it in a less ethical way,” said Heather Kirkorian, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies the effects of media in young children.
Noted: What would it take to make sure that distance doesn’t prevent students from obtaining a college degree? Making geography a bigger part of the conversation about college fit would be a start, according to Nicholas Hillman, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who has studied education deserts extensively.
The journey to becoming an authentic and effective leader starts by taking a moment to learn about yourself, says Jamie Marsh, director of BBA Career Services at the University of Wisconsin School of Business. “You must know yourself and what you’re made of to be an effective leader,” says Marsh, who addressed CUNA Management School Monday in Madison, Wis.
Noted: Anti-abortion groups in Wisconsin and across the country were greatly aided in their efforts to chip away at access by the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, says Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at UW-Madison … Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at UW-Madison, might not go so far as to call it a mistake. But he does question whether ringing “a five-alarm bell about Roe v. Wade” is the Dems’ “best strategy.”
Lucy Tan’s ambitious debut novel, What We Were Promised, grew out of a short story she penned while she was a part of UW-Madison’s prestigious master’s program in fiction writing … Since graduating from the MFA program in 2016, Tan has split her time between NYC and Shanghai, but she’ll be back in Madison this fall as part of the UW-Madison faculty; she has been selected as this year’s James C. McCreight fiction fellow. She corresponded with Isthmus by email about what it means to her to return to Madison just as the novel that was born here makes its arrival into the world.
Trauma endured early in life can ripple directly into a child’s molecular structure and distort their DNA, according to a new study this week from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: New research out this week shows liver cancer death rates are going in the wrong direction, despite the fact that death rates for all cancers combined is going down. Dr. Sam Lubner with the UW Carbone Cancer Center talks about the trend.
Noted: But recently, neuroscientists have started to explore other states of consciousness. In research published in the journal Nature in 2017, Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin and colleagues looked at what happens when we dream. They measured brain activity as people slept, waking them up at regular intervals to ask whether they had been dreaming. Then the scientists looked at what the brain had been doing just before the sleepers woke up. When people reported dreaming, parts of the back of the brain were much more active—much like the brain areas that are active in babies. The prefrontal area, on the other hand, shuts down during sleep.
Noted: The study was headed by Karen Oberhauser, a former University of Minnesota conservation biologist and currently director of the UW-Madison Arboretum. The findings were published last year in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America.
Noted: Dr. Phil Greenwood, a senior lecturer at the Weinert Center of Entrepreneurship at the UW School of Business, talks about this hot topic in entrepreneurship.
Noted: Karen Oberhauser, who directs the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and is the former head of the Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota, says the loss of breeding habitat also is a huge problem in the Upper Midwest where milkweed used to grow between rows of crops like corn and soybeans.
Noted: Rural manufacturers often stay in their original location because of historic roots, according to Steven Deller, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in economic growth and development patterns.
The presentation, part of the “Courageous Conversation” series hosted by the Coalition for Dismantling Racism, featured research conducted by Dr. Geoffrey Swain of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health on the health effects of Wisconsin’s incarceration policies and practices.
David Drake, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Extension wildlife specialist, says that while he acknowledges the concern about the practice, it’s necessary. And lethal methods are far from the first attempt at controlling the population.
Quoted: “One mistake I made was telling my kids ‘we can’t afford that’ when they asked for something, even if it wasn’t quite true,” said Elizabeth Odders-White, a mom and associate professor of finance at Wisconsin School of Business
Dr. Charles L. Raison speaks with CNN Español about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. (In Spanish)
Noted: On the other hand, the nature of Putin’s regime makes it hard to say with certainty that he would have known, said Yoshiko Herrera, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist with a specialty on Russia.
Interviewed: Yoshiko Herrera, professor of political science specializing in Russia and the former Soviet states at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Heather Abercrombie, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison who heads the school’s Mood and Memory Laboratory, says scientists tend to capture data from groups of people rather than looking at them as individuals. But since people are bound to have different physiological reactions to different situations, Mohsenvand’s one-person life logging could be useful.
Noted: Anna Kaatz, a computational data scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who studies diversity in the scientific workforce, agrees that the overall picture painted by the paper is encouraging. Yet the study glosses over the systemic pressures that discourage women from applying for grants and renewals at the same rate as men, she says
Noted: Robert Drechsel, who taught media law at the University of Wisconsin, said if he were Tesla’s attorney, he would advise the CEO to stop tweeting.
Noted: But Patricia G. Devine, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who runs a research laboratory on prejudice, said she was troubled by the spread of such training in the absence of probing, objective research. She said more study of officers’ unintentional biases is necessary to evaluate how training can impact their behaviors. Additional data is needed, she said, to determine if officers retain what they are taught and if civilians are benefiting from fairer policing.
