Noted: Checking for fairness could eventually become a basic aspect of programing, says Samuel Drews, a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison who works on a similar fairness-checking tool.
You might be hoping for warmer temperatures, but that mild weather we experienced a few weeks ago could actually mean problems for your health and the quality of area lakes. “We had about 65 days of lake ice on Mendota this year,” Hilary Dugan, a postdoctoral researcher studying limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.
Ryan Owens, a UW-Madison professor and legal expert, said Roggensack was right to defend the court’s institutional legitimacy. Owens said her remarks draw attention to what he described as the need for collegiality among leaders in various spheres, including judicial and political.
A political science professor and elections expert will discuss the Electoral College during a presentation at 5 p.m. Wednesday in Room 1415 of Centennial Hall at UW-Eau Claire.
Noted: Dr. Katie Antony joined NBC 15 to discuss the latest insights on Zika just in time for spring break travel.
Quoted: “The fact that we share so many diseases with primates tells us about evolution,” explains Tony Goldberg, the UW professor of epidemiology who led the investigation into Mahal’s death. “There are an awful lot of primate pathogens that don’t really care whether they’re in a human or a chimpanzee or an orangutan.”
Noted: Allyson Bennett, a developmental psychobiologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who works primarily with rhesus macaques (which are not covered by the PETA request), argues that if the animals are removed from research, they may end up in zoos or other settings with a lower standard of care and less public oversight and transparency. “That is not a win for the animals,” Bennett says.
Noted: Three of Brady’s fellow political analysts — Edward G. Carmines and Michael J. Ensley, political scientists at Indiana and Kent State universities, along with Michael W. Wagner, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — are taking up this challenge.
Noted: Cecelia Klingele, an assistant law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she cannot imagine how one person could give “fair and full consideration” to the “significant” number of people who are currently parole eligible.
Quoted: “When you buy into a franchise, you are buying a system of operations and you are buying an accepted brand,” says Michael Williams, director of entrepreneurship activities and director of the business and entrepreneur clinic and faculty associate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship. “Franchising ebbs and flows with the economy; when we have a slowdown or recession and people are laid off, there may be an uptick in franchising as people look to replace their incomes.”
Quoted: Russia is a particularly important diplomatic post, explains Yoshiko Herrera, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in Russian politics. From terrorism to NATO, nuclear proliferation to the Arctic, the US and Russia have both serious disagreements and shared interests.
Noted: Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, coined a name for what’s happened in her state’s rural pockets: the politics of resentment.
Quoted: “What you’re dealing with are allegations that would go from the desk of the present county administrative coordinator to the successor,” said Frank Tuerkhiemer, an attorney and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s no reason that the county attorney shouldn’t do his job.”
Noted: Russia is a particularly important diplomatic post, explains Yoshiko Herrera, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in Russian politics. From terrorism to NATO, nuclear proliferation to the Arctic, the US and Russia have both serious disagreements and shared interests.
Quoted: “Probably in other sciences this is where you’d be done. However, in math that’s just the beginning. Now we want to know for sure,” said Melanie Wood, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Beau Burdett and other researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have attempted to elucidate just what happens when a ride around the circle goes pear-shaped. They pored through six years of accident data from 53 Wisconsin roundabouts and found a couple of interesting patterns, which are described in the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board (unfortunately behind a paywall).
Quoted: “It’s the nature of politics today that it has been more efficient for the Democratic Party to focus on urban areas. That’s where their base of support is. In some respects, they have neglected rural places in the state and across the country,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Katherine Cramer, whose recent book on rural politics in Wisconsin (“The Politics of Resentment”) has drawn national attention in the wake of Trump’s rural landslides. Democrats in both the U.S. House and Senate invited Cramer this year to share her insights with them on what happened last fall in the small counties and towns of the battleground Midwest.
As an antidote to a proliferation of “fake facts,” Stephen Carpenter offers repeatable, observable, measurable science that is provably fact-filled.
Noted: Ben Jordan, director of the Transportation Information Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering, said rain, snow, heat and cold all deteriorate pavement, but on the roads where they travel, heavy trucks do the most damage.
What can be done about all this confusion in a world where we are bombarded with information – and increasingly hear that we shouldn’t believe much of what we are told? In a post-truth world, are we even more susceptible to exaggerated or untrue stories? We speak to Dominique Brossard, professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Information at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: “Trump and the people around him have been quite open about their desire to smash the system,” says Ken Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Quoted: “The area of…Palestine that would have been the Arab state [per the U.N. vote] was largely conquered by Jordan and by Egypt,” Nadav Shelef, Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Israel Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells Teen Vogue.
University of Wisconsin students, faculty and community members gathered to discuss agriculture’s most controversial topic: genetically modified organisms and crops.
Quoted: Justin Sydnor, an economist and associate professor in the risk and insurance department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also agreed that the move to self-insuring and having access to claims data could enable the state to make future changes in its health benefits that could encourage competition and help control costs.“You could see this as a move that, down the road, might give the state the ability to bend the cost curve,” he said. “But that won’t come immediately.”
Noted: Cortland Dahl, who studies the neuroscience of mind wandering and has been meditating for 25 years, told me that he was six months into daily meditation practice when he witnessed a change in the way he related to the present moment. “I noticed I just started to enjoy things I didn’t enjoy before,” like standing in line, or sitting in traffic, he says. “My own mind became interesting, and I had something to do—‘Okay, back to the breath.’” Killingsworth’s findings help explain this, said Dahl, a research scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds.
Noted: “The new media environment has allowed this type of information to be disseminated,” Dominique Brossard, PhD, a life sciences communication professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who spoke at the conference, told Healthline.
Quoted: Holly Gibbs, an expert in tropical deforestation and agriculture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the 2030 deadline interpretation devastating. “If we were to wait until 2030,” Ms. Gibbs said, “there would be no forest left.”
Quoted: “You don’t have to take these extravagant vacations to foreign places. A lot of the value that we get from taking time off just doing something that breaks us out of routine,” said Dayana Kupisk, a PhD candidate, studying human development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Those who disregard science and scientific consensus as not for them simply don’t have the knowledge – the facts, according to this thinking. And, as Dietram Scheufele, a professor of science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison pointed out in a talk at the AAAS meeting, in the current “fake news panic” that mentality can fuel an impression that “if they just had the correct facts, they could make better decisions.
Noted: Some scientists have suggested that the problem is an educational one. Those who disregard science and scientific consensus as not for them simply don’t have the knowledge – the facts, according to this thinking. And, as Dietram Scheufele, a professor of science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison pointed out in a talk at the AAAS meeting, in the current “fake news panic” that mentality can fuel an impression that “if they just had the correct facts, they could make better decisions.”
Quoted: “Conversely, anything big is bad right now,” said Thomas C. O’Guinn, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s business school. “Anything small is considered differently, since there’s no faceless behemoth.” Customers, he added, are also more apt to know store employees or even the owner.
Quoted: “What was strained was the relationship between Netanyahu and Obama…in personal terms,” Nadav Shelef, Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Israel Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells Teen Vogue. “There was no strain [between the countries] in any other sense of the word.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is trying to better teach students how to become entrepreneurs. It comes at a time when the state fares poorly in national rankings for its lack of business startups.
Quoted: Entrepreneurship is an important part of the economic engine, said Dan Olszewski, director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship at the Wisconsin School of Business. Almost all net job creation in last 20 years has come from companies five years old or younger, he said.“Job creation is very much driven by startups,” he said.
Noted: Hart Posen, associate professor of management and human resources in the Wisconsin School of Business, was interviewed for a story on Walmart’s quarterly report and its battle with Amazon (at the 1:05 mark).
Kathy Cramer’s journey to the center of the political landscape began with road trips to corners of Wisconsin many people only drive through — if they drive there at all.
Noted: “She sort of burst onto the scene,” says Paul Wilson, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Now there’s a circulated quote attributed to her: Students don’t know that things [in the nuclear field] are supposed to go slowly. Let’s not tell them.”
Quoted: “On net, the downsides seem greater than the upsides,” said Barry C. Burden, a political scientist and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “Those WHO statistics are just from some very specific health outcomes where we have some known working equations and models to do it,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor and director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who participated in the meeting.
A new center dedicated to providing executives, and subsequently their businesses, with the skills and tools they need to be more innovative and excel in an increasingly competitive and fast-changing business climate is now open at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Christine Whelan, a UW-Madison professor in the Department of Consumer Science and director of the School of Human Ecology’s Relationships, Finance and Life Fulfillment Initative, said the idea of boy dolls “isn’t particularly new,” citing “Ken and Barbie back in the day.”
Quoted: It’s “never a sure thing,” said Steve Carpenter, director of the UW-Madison Center for Limnology, but “the odds are better than even that (Lake Mendota) will thaw in February, in my opinion.
Noted: Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, are guests on WHA radio (970 AM) at 11:45 a.m. the last Monday of each month.
Kathy Cramer’s journey to the center of the political landscape began with road trips to corners of Wisconsin many people only drive through — if they drive there at all.
Quoted: As more cooperatives merge, dairy farmers have fewer options for selling their milk, said Peter Carstensen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor and expert in antitrust law and competition policy.
Noted: If a supplier steps out of line, the others “can eat your lunch if you don’t cooperate,” said Noted: Peter Carstensen, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer who has researched the industry.
Noted: The “Deutschlandlied” was written by a poet named Hoffmann von Fallersleben, “a good bourgeois liberal,” according to the German cultural historian Jost Hermand, a retired professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Noted: “Initially, Fauset’s work was dismissed as sentimental and Victorian, primarily because she dealt with ‘women’s issues,’ centering on the marriage plot,” Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, said.
Quoted: Pamela Oliver, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, said divisive political speech has a trickle-down effect, and the 2016 presidential campaign could have contributed to the uptick.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee chancellor Mark Mone and Mike Knetter, chief executive officer of the University of Wisconsin Foundation, both said recruitment of students is important at their schools as the number of high school graduates in Wisconsin declines.
Editing of human cells to alter traits handed down to future generations may one day be ethically permissible, said a committee co-chaired by bioethicist Alta Charo, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Law.
Scientists could be allowed to make modifications in human DNA that can be passed down through subsequent generations, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine say. “It is not ready now, but it might be safe enough to try in the future,” R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who co-chaired the committee, said. “And if certain conditions are met, it might be permissible to try it.”
Noted: Katherine Magnuson, a social work professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and associate director of the school’s Institute for Poverty Research, said the plan being worked on by state Democrats will help.
Noted: But now two new studies appear to move calorie restriction from the realm of wishful thinking to the brink of practical, and perhaps even tolerable, reality. Writing in Nature Communications, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the National Institute on Aging reported last month chronic calorie restriction produces significant health benefits in rhesus monkeys—a primate with humanlike aging patterns—indicating “that CR mechanisms are likely translatable to human health.” The researchers describe one monkey they started on a 30 percent calorie restriction diet when he was 16 years old, late middle age for this type of animal. He is now 43, a longevity record for the species, according to the study, and the equivalent of a human living to 130.
The report Tuesday from the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine was compiled by a 22-member committee with two members from UW-Madison: R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics who co-chaired the NAS panel, and Dietram Scheufele, a professor of life sciences communication.
Quoted: History suggests that lawmakers who outperform their party’s president at the ballot box exercise more independence from the White House, says David Canon, a congressional scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.“For members of Congress where a president runs ahead of them in their districts, there is a tendency to support him more,” says Canon.
Quoted: “Better to err on the long end,” said Matthew Aliota, an assistant scientist who studies viruses at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Chistine Whelan, who teaches consumer science in the university’s School of Human Ecology, said the change is part of a trend toward making toys more gender-neutral, which she said is welcome news.
Noted: “The data on stress reduction is pretty good,” said Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published hundreds of scientific papers about the impact of emotion on the brain and did some of the first MRIs of meditating Buddhist monks.
Noted: Just a bit of radio interference can throw off the calculations used to make accurate weather predictions that are “extremely sensitive” to even small temperature differences, said Jordan Gerth, a researcher at the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
