Quoted: Many, and maybe most, jobs bring rewards that go beyond just earning a living. Most entail making a product or providing a service, notes Barry Gerhart, a professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison Law School professor Frank Tuerkheimer, a former U.S. attorney, said requiring prosecutors to consult with victims throughout the criminal trial process would be a big departure from current practice. “Whoever drafted this was kind of careful not to transfer power from prosecutors to victims, but simply create a rather continuous right of input,” Tuerkheimer said. “I think it would be somewhat onerous for the prosecutor.”
Quoted: “You’re looking for your place as they are looking for their next faculty member,” said Dr. Taucia Gonzalez, an assistant professor of education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Finding the right fit is important.”
Noted: “It’s not just activating the brain, it’s getting the right cells within that area,” said Justin Williams, chair of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is leading one of the teams under the DARPA initiative. “That’s where we think that activating the periphery might have some benefit.”
Noted: “Casinos are trained to make you feel welcome, while you lose your life,” said Sandra Adell, 70, a literature professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who recounted her experiences as a compulsive gambler in the book “Confessions of a Slot Machine Queen.” In an interview, Professor Adell said that advertisements aimed at older adults often show smiling people, dressed up and looking glamorous, “to create an illusion that plays to people’s weaknesses.”
“It’s now about a 20-year period,” Watras said.
The UW Trout Lake Station in Boulder Junction has kept records of lake levels since the 1940s. Those levels followed a consistent cycle for much of that time, but in the 2000s, when levels should have gone up, they continued to go down until the lakes reached their all-time low in 2013.
“We’ve just completed roughly 15 years of declining water levels,” said Watras.
Noted: The discovery of the hobbits themselves was “uncovering something that seems to have a history of a million years that no one had even guessed at,” says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: The United States spends more than any other country on health care and prescription drugs are one reason why, says Kevin Look, a University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy assistant professor.
Netflix’s new talk show, Bill Nye Saves the World, debuted the night before people around the world joined together to demonstrate and March for Science. Many have lauded the timing and relevance of the show, featuring the famous “Science Guy” as its host, because it aims to myth-bust and debunk anti-scientific claims in an alternative-fact era.
Noted: In the age of technology with literally everything at your fingertips, meeting people online has never been more popular but it also comes with risks, according to Jonathan D’Angelo, a University of Wisconsin-Madison communication technology researcher.
Noted: But Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that could be changing.
Noted: University of Wisconsin, Madison paleoanthropologist John Hawks was flummoxed. He told Ars, “I’m not usually at a loss for words, but this one has left me and many of my friends speechless.”
Noted: Echoing this observation, Erika Bullock, an assistant professor of math education at University of Wisconsin-Madison, welcomed the whiteness paper’s framing of racism in institutional terms.
Noted: Parents don’t have to be money experts to talk about the importance of delayed gratification or the difference between wants and needs, says report researcher Elizabeth Odders-White, associate finance professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Noted: “This would have a disastrous effect on people’s lives,” said Dr. Richard Brown, a health policy professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “This will have all sorts of devastating ripples for families that are already stressed and trying to do the best they can with limited resources.”
Quoted: Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, faulted the study for not taking into account people who have jobs that require lots of physical activity nor the growing popularity of winter sports.
Noted: Domestic milk production is outstripping domestic demand, meaning export markets are increasingly important to U.S. dairy producers, according to UW-Madison professor of agricultural and applied economics Brian Gould.
Noted: Blue Sky Science is a collaboration of the Wisconsin State Journal and the Morgridge Institute for Research.
Quoted: “Unfortunately, there isn’t enough public housing for everyone,” said Timothy Smeeding, Lee Rainwater distinguished professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “In the short run, we have got to put the brakes on milk production. Processors are telling farmers, ‘We can work through this … but don’t compound the problem by expanding milk output dramatically,” said Bruce Jones, an agricultural economist at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Gloria Ladson-Billings, the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor in Urban Education and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, called Hoffman’s email “baffling.”
Quoted: Canada has indicated its prices would be competitive with the world market but offered no specifics, according to Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at UW-Madison.
Dear Editor: In his op-ed, “UW doesn’t need state law to ensure free speech,”Tom Loftus raises an important point about the problems that can arise with legislative intervention regarding the internal decisions of higher education. Academic freedom partly entails sufficient institutional autonomy.
Quoted: Susan Carpenter, the Arboretum’s native plant gardener, said queen bees that hibernated over the winter are beginning to emerge.
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.”
Quoted: “The danger is that a true Article 5 convention arguably has no limits,” said UW-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber. “We’re in very uncharted territory here. It’s not at all clear there’s any way to call such a convention and limit its mandate to considering questions of debt. Once such a convention is called, it’s very plausibly argued that it can do anything. The outcome could be quite radical.”
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: Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at UW-Madison, believes it won’t be easy to find a solution because there is an excess of milk and not a big enough market.
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.
Quoted: Hart Posen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and start-up expert, said all rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. “When you look at these rankings, you need to realize there are a variety of ways of measuring entrepreneurial activity,” Posen said.
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: Susan Carpenter, the native plant gardener at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, said while flowering resources or the bee’s habitat is one of the major contributing factors to the bumblebee’s listing. Disease, pathogens, climate change and agricultural pesticides have played a significant role in the insect’s decline.
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.”
Quoted: Throughout history, people sought alone time for religious or personal reasons, said Christine Whelan, clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It was separation from community, for a period of time, as a way to prepare for an emotionally significant event,” she said. “To be alone with your thoughts, to think about what matters to you, to get rid of the background noise.”
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.
As the confirmation hearings for Judge Neil Gorsuch were getting underway, the University of Wisconsin philosopher J. Paul Kelleher explored, in Vox, an important aspect of Gorsuch’s view of the world. Gorsuch has praised the late Justice Scalia’s “originalist” approach to interpreting the Constitution. But he has also been influenced by the concept of “natural law” — and even studied under a famous natural law theorist at Oxford. In this excerpt from that Vox piece, Kelleher explains natural law theory, and why it’s important for the senators voting on Gorsuch to consider its implications:
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: Paula Niedenthal, professor of psychology, quoted
The pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right of all people. The U.S. Declaration of Independence makes that very clear. But as everyone discovers at some point, happiness is not so easy to achieve — unless, perhaps, you’re in a place where it is not only a state of being but also a way of life.
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.
