Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: Even if students don’t engage directly with policy, simply engaging with each other about public issues takes solid preparation. According to Paula McAvoy, a co-author of The Political Classroom and program director of the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, “the main challenge teachers face is finding resources that are current, present multiple and competing views, and are at the right reading level.”

Noted: “Dairy is a very small part of the total trade with Canada, there’s an awful lot more that happens even within agriculture than just dairy,” said Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So if you’re renegotiating trade agreements like NAFTA, then you’re looking at renegotiating everything.”

Noted: The state once had a thriving manufacturing economy, according to Laura Dresser, a labor analyst at UW-Madison. But, she says the job numbers have dropped dramatically since the beginning of the millennium.

Noted: As President Donald Trump calls for negotiating trade with Mexico through the North American Free Trade Agreement, Bob Cropp from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said Wisconsin is not the only one looking to reinforce trade relationships.

Noted: Now scientists want to turn it into ultra-precise antimicrobial treatments to “specifically kill your bacteria of choice,” says food scientist Jan-Peter Van Pijkeren of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Such displays can play a valuable role in the negotiating dance that nations do. “You don’t really have a seat at the table unless you’re willing to apply force,” said Andrew Kydd, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Asia. “That has not been the case in previous years, and that’s why [Secretary of State John] Kerry’s diplomacy was doomed to fail.”

Noted: Boosting funding to the scholarship would help more low-income kids go to college, according to Nick Hillman, a higher education policy expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “I think Americans consider climate change as an ’over there’ problem or confined to poor countries,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor and director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconson-Madison.

Said Andrew Reschovsky at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: “A growing economy is characterized by rising real per capita GDP and rising real wages. This growth is to be expected, and reflects increased labor productivity over time. Although Wisconsin’s economy is larger now than it was in 2000, the fact that the poverty rate is higher and that there is growing income inequality indicates that the benefits of our growing economy have gone mainly to those with the highest incomes.”

Noted: Chertavian is an “unusually dynamic individual” who is able to convince employers to take a chance on kids without a lot of experience, said Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied anti-poverty programs. Chertavian figured out that training that works isn’t necessarily about teaching people how to do a certain job, Smeeding said, but rather, about how to prepare people to navigate the working world. In addition to hard skills, students in Year Up learn how to solicit and give feedback, how to network, how to make small talk. These skills are often learned through experience: Speakers come to the classrooms every Friday, and students must figure out how to follow up with them afterwards to make a connection. Chertavian “takes a lot of kids who have no role model, ” Smeeding said, adding, “What he gives them are social behavioral skills.”

Quoted: Katy Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the paper probably wrote the story without the expectation that it would be the next “outrage of the day” to go viral. But she also questioned the public interest value of the information provided, and said the way it was initially presented had a blame-the-victim feel.

Noted: After the magazine was released, the cover took on a life of its own when Susan Pitt, an endocrine surgeon at the University of Wisconsin, issued a challenge to her fellow female surgeons: to replicate the image in real life, bringing visibility to the women and other minority groups working in a traditionally white, male-dominated field.

Quoted: “Beekeepers basically have to rebuild their dwindled populations in the early spring,” said Claudio Gratton, an entomology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Historically the rate of loss of bees over the winter used to be around 10-15 percent. So when we’re seeing rates that are twice that high, that’s a cause of concern and clearly there’s something going on.”

Noted: Vanni, of Miami University in Ohio, and his coauthor, Peter McIntyre, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had plunged into the project for their own research. But they soon realized the giant dataset they put together could be a resource for other scientists, too—all that work on animal waste didn’t have to go to waste itself.

Noted: But educational research has found that the number of hours in the classroom matters. “I think it’s a bit counterintuitive based on research we know on instructional time,” Julie Mead, an education policy professor at University of Wisconsin Madison, said. “In these budgetary times, those districts without the means could cut instructional time, which would exacerbate the differences between the haves and the have-nots.”

Quoted: Barry Burden, a UW-Madison professor of political science who focuses on campaigns, elections and public opinion, says Republicans see Baldwin’s seat as a prime take-back opportunity, while Democrats are having a hard time finding a viable candidate to challenge Walker.

Noted: “Our main finding from the study was that any lake that was surrounded by some type of impervious surface — that’s usually roadways or parking lots — was more at risk of having long term salination,” said Hilary Dugan, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the study’s lead author.

Noted: Competitors to Facebook that harnessed the powers of social media only in an effort to make us wiser would probably be niche services, like National Public Radio and PBS. “Most people aren’t that fussy,” says Jack Mitchell, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Listener Supported: The Culture and History of Public Radio. “PBS’s market share is not that high. Public radio is a little higher. It’s a minority taste.”

Noted: Nick Hillman, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has worked with Ellie Bruecker, a graduate student at the university, to track the effects of the tool’s closure with recent data from the Office of Federal Student Aid.

Noted: Mark Stephenson, UW-Madison director of dairy policy analysis, said he doesn’t believe the “handful” of producers who received letters make the scenario symptomatic or a reason for more widespread concern.

The rusty-patched bumblebee recently became the first bumblebee, as well as the first bee overall in the continental United States, to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. We talk with a native plant gardener Susan Carpenter about what can be done to help this bee and other native pollinators and how everyone…

Noted: Science as an institution has, for hundreds of years, been viewed as the best method for producing knowledge. Until recently, science has also been relatively sacred across administrations, across partisan lines, said Dietram Scheufele, a professor of science communication at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “Once we start eroding [science], we get into dangerous territory,” he added. “Think about how important science is for national security, how important it is for business. The very laptops this stuff is being written on wouldn’t be possible if not for the science that’s under attack.”

Noted: Mike Wagner, a professor of political science and journalism at UW-Madison, says the Indivisible movement’s collective strategy will give it a greater chance of being politically effective. The fact that Indivisible isn’t endorsing candidates will help them get more credibility with liberal activists, but at some point they’re going to need to find and support candidates who will help further their agenda, Wagner says.

Quoted: “Money is not a dirty conversation to discuss and shedding light on it is how we get toward equality,” said Professor Christine Whelan, in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison.

Noted: “Senator Warner has access to confidential and classified information through his post on the Intelligence Committee,” said Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin Elections Research Center. “Hopefully a thorough investigation will make some of this information public.”

Noted: Based on the prevalence in Nordfjella—estimated at 1%—Lund guesses that CWD may have been present for only 5 to 7 years, which could mean contamination is minimal. “There’s a good chance they can solve the problem,” says wildlife ecologist Michael Samuel of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Quick response has been shown to work before: In 2005, routine testing revealed CWD on two deer farms in western New York. Strict regulations prevented the disease from spreading. The state has seen no cases since.

Noted: Government regulations and other guidelines for human research generally require that people be allowed to withdraw from experiments. When this happens, it can make it hard to determine whether a treatment is safe, says Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In this case, she says, it is unclear whether the parents received enough information to appreciate how long-term follow-up could benefit their child as well as science.

Noted: Teachers may be censoring themselves more than necessary when deciding what to teach, said Diana Hess, the dean of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Educators should use current events to help students learn about authentic political controversy, said Hess, who co-authored The Political Classroom with Paula McAvoy.

Noted: Thomas O’Guinn, a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on branding and advertising, said using the hashtag could result in a smaller applicant pool or even a loss of liberal customers if the campaign rubs enough people the wrong way.

Noted: Government regulations and other guidelines for human research generally require that people be allowed to withdraw from experiments. When this happens, it can make it hard to determine whether a treatment is safe, says Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In this case, she says, it is unclear whether the parents received enough information to appreciate how long-term follow-up could benefit their child as well as science.

Noted: The Evers campaign told us the statistic came from research conducted by Peter Goff, a UW-Madison professor who is leading a team studying teacher supply and demand in Wisconsin.

Nick Hillman, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies higher-education finance and policy, and his graduate students Ellie Bruecker and Valerie Crespin-Trujillo have been tracking FAFSA completions for several years using federal data. For the latest FAFSA cycle, their graph shows a steep climb in the opening months. After hitting 1 million completed applications by December, the number of new FAFSAs slowed down until another, small surge in late February, as financial-aid deadlines approached.

Noted: “If I throw the ball across the desk, and you are watching through the camera and the tongue, you can catch it, and you can learn it in a matter of a couple of hours,” said Yuri Danilov, a neuroscientist who has worked extensively on that device at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Tactile Communication and Neurorehabilitation Laboratory.

Noted: “These are Americans [who] are dying essentially in the prime of their life,” said Abbey Cofsky, the deputy director of data and science at the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute, which collaborated on the report. “They are dying as young adults” or with young families, she added.

Quoted: “This has been a very dark report,” says Marjory Givens, one of the authors of the 2017 County Health Rankings. She is deputy director of data and science for the project as well as an associate scientist at the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute. “We’re facing a crisis here.”

Noted: Kestell’s champion cow is an extreme example, but the average amount of milk per cow has shot up since 1950. There are fewer than half as many dairy cows in the United States as there were back then, but now they produce almost twice as much milk. One of the reasons for this huge rise in milk production, said dairy expert Mark Stephenson, is the introduction of artificial insemination.

Noted: The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center in Madison works to develop new liquid biofuels. The center’s researchers work closely with farmers on the crops that go into making sustainable fuels, said John Greenler, director of education and outreach for the center.

Noted: One researcher who co-wrote an influential 2012 study suggesting that changes in the Arctic could be driving mid-latitude weather extremes, Stephen Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin, praised the new research in an emailed comment Monday. “This study goes beyond statistical correlations and explores a specific process that can plausibly explain how enhanced high-latitude warming trends may trigger remote weather impacts,” he said.

Noted: Consider the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus, which in 2014 combined its foundation and alumni associations. The impetus for that union involved the growing demand for private philanthropy in an environment of shrinking state support for public higher education, said Mike Knetter, president and CEO of the UW Foundation.

The westernised definition of feminism, and misconceptions that surround Muslim feminists as being in opposition to Shariah, were challenged at a session at Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q). In her session, “How Not to Talk about Muslim Feminism,” distinguished scholar and Islamic and US constitutional law expert, Asifa Quraishi-Landes, spoke about the goal of women’s empowerment within Muslim societies.

Orf, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, uses supercomputers to create 3D simulations of weather patterns.

Quoted: Whether they are trained therapy animals or not, pets can help their owners with physical and psychological conditions, UW-Madison professor Linda Sullivan said.

Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, weigh in.

Noted: “What is interesting is that they found, yes, we have a type. But when we think about the idea of having a type, we think it is internal, only our unique preferences. That is not really true,” said Christine Whelan, clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the study.

Noted: Thomas O’Guinn, a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on branding and advertising, said he didn’t think using the term made sense, but he could understand its application. He said the move could result in a smaller applicant pool or even a loss of liberal customers if the campaign rubs enough people the wrong way.