So what makes the price of milk so variable, and what does that volatility mean for the Dairy State? Bob Cropp is a professor emeritus and dairy marketing policy specialist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He says there are three main factors that impact the price of dairy nationwide.
“Mosquitoes certainly are out in force. I mean this is Wisconsin, after all. We’ve had a lot of rain this year, so it is not surprising the mosquito numbers we’re seeing, but they seem to have really picked up in the last couple of weeks,” said P.J. Liesch, extension entomologist with UW-Madison.
Noted: “It was only three mosquitoes that we’ve been able to detect,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison entomologist Susan Paskewitz. “And we went back out to the same location and have looked and just haven’t been finding them. So at the end of the summer I might say something different after we’ve looked in more places and had longer to see if this represents an opportunity for these mosquitoes to get more of a foothold.”
Noted: “There’s movement around integrating demographic data with how students interact with the online digital classroom. I think higher education institutions are just getting their feet wet in that area,” University of Wisconsin–Madison Chief Data Officer Jason Fishbain tells EdTech. “One thing that is technically possible is that we can start to personalize the student experience.”
Quoted: “The scientific interest in solar eclipses has evolved from pinning down the location of the moon to discovering planets near the sun,” said Jim Lattis, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Place.
Noted: Lee Welhouse is an instrument technician who oversees weather satellites put on the continent by the UW Antarctic Meteorological Research Center.
Noted: The case could ease the “sense of distrust between the parties,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “I don’t think it can get much worse.”
Noted: The article was based on a new book, “Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics,” by Jonathan Renshon, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Quoted: “These Asian earthworms that we have in Wisconsin live in the top layer of the soil,” said UW Arboretum Ecologist Brad Herrick, noting the reddish-colored earthworm can damage the soil they live in. “They decrease nutrients in the soil so that obviously has implications for plant growth.”
A study done by the University of Wisconsin shows that keeping dairy cows ‘udderly’ content can lead to those cows producing more milk. For Five Star Diary in Elk Mound, that’s leading to a few farm upgrades.
“We’ve added sprinklers, we’ve added foggers and a lot of fans,” said Five Star Dairy owner Lee Jensen.
“The last three months have only been about the fourth or fifth wettest, but out of 123 years, that’s a lot of precipitation,” said Ed Hopkins, assistant state climatologist through the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Amasino said some people may be expressing their opposition to monopolies in agriculture by being against the use of GMOs.
“It’s tough being a consumer these days when you’re confronted with all this information and misinformation,” he said. “But there is no question that certain technologies when deployed successfully by a company give that company a greater share of the market.”
Video: University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jonathan Gray talks about the significance of cable and streaming services leading the pack of Emmy nominations on Live at Four.
Noted: “It’s possible there is some classified intelligence report on China and North Korea and U.S. elections, but I have never heard this claim before, nor seen any evidence,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Yoshiko Herrera, who is the former director of the school’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia.
Noted: At Babcock Hall Dairy Plant in Madison, manager Bill Klein said every load of milk that comes into the plant for processing and bottling is tested for temperature, and if it’s above 45 degrees, they send it on its way.
Interviewed: Jonathan Gray, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (@jonathanagray).
We talk to Jake Vander Zanden, an expert about the ongoing efforts to curtail the spread of Zebra mussels in Wisconsin lakes.
A chunk of ice the size of Delaware broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula this week. We’ll learn about why this happened and what it means for climate change around the world and close to home in Wisconsin.
Noted: Live at Four talks to UW meteorologist David Mikolajczyk about the implications of the event.
‘Udder’ happiness is the best way to get more milk from cows, that’s according to a new study by the University of Wisconsin.
It emphasizes the importance of healthy environments for cows and the impact of happiness on milk production.
Noted: Donald Moynihan, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he worries that Republican-dominated legislatures could act on their low regard for public colleges and universities by slashing their funding, resulting in tuition increases that would swell levels of student debt already at record levels.
Quoted: Microsoft has tried using the TV buffer zones, or white space, to provide broadband internet in several countries. But the idea is “still in its infancy,” said Parmesh Ramanathan, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: “The search costs are very high and the rules may be quite restrictive when it comes to determining what constitutes an identical product at a competing store,” says Noah Lim, a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business.
Quoted: “If you look at the promotional materials, the lobbying, it’s the same people who are pushing against Sharia around the country — holding rallies, talking about ‘Sharia creep’ and Muslims taking over,” said Asifa Quraishi-Landes, who teaches constitutional and Islamic law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and serves as president of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers. “They see any acknowledgment of Sharia in American Muslim life as a first step to the Trojan Horse.”
“I think it’s really important that we give them the spa treatment,” said Nigel Cook, who has directed the Dairyland Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine since 2010.
Buzz about a massive Taiwan manufacturer setting up shop in Wisconsin seems to be getting louder. That could have tremendous ripple effect, says University of Wisconsin economist Hart Posen.
Noted: “We do know that people who are healthier are more productive and are more likely to work,” said Barbara Wolfe, a health economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We also know that the people who are most affected by the expansion [of health coverage], and would be most affected by cutbacks, are people with lower incomes.”
Noted: “There are a lot of dimensions to the decision of an individual to vote and the administration of an election,” says Ken Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin studying the voter patterns of the 2016 election. But from his research, some of which documents Americans forgoing the vote if the hurdle is unfair or too high, he is convinced that the “end game is to provide rationale for massive purges, and it’s not going to be Jennifer Andersons but Hector Gonzaleses who are going to face this.”
Often, developers cut down trees to construct their buildings, then wait until the end of the development — when there often isn’t enough space left — to consider where canopy trees should go, said John Harrington, a professor of landscape architecture at UW-Madison who is a member of the task force.
Noted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden grouped Evers in with Soglin and McCabe as unexpected candidates, but added he stands out from the list of 11 names in that he has won statewide office multiple times.
Noted: “We are still struggling with how to manage the dual-use dilemma. How do we get the benefit of the research without the risk of it being turned against us?” said Alta Charo, a law professor and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin who has followed the debate closely.
Noted: After President Trump announced a temporary travel ban in January, academic leaders were swift to condemn it, and to warn that it would shut out some of the world’s most talented scholars.
“Conflating doxing and journalism risks blurring or eliminating the public interest goal of good journalism,” says Andrew Zolides, a digital media scholar who has taught courses about doxing at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: However, an enzyme in rennet clips off the tails. The loss causes the clusters to stick to each other, explained David Montgomery, outreach specialist and assistant coordinator at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Sherry Herwig, director of UW-Madison’s Family Business Center, said the family dynamic can be the most complicated part of succession plans. Some families struggle to communicate, especially when multiple children are involved.
Noted: Dr. Monika Roots is a psychiatrist, a professor at UW and VP of Health Services for Teladoc. She’s found there’s a comfort and convenience with telemedicine for PTSD patients.
Quoted: Tyler Tunney, a fish researcher with the UW-Madison Center for Limnology, was taken aback by the bloom when he saw it biking by the Yahara River.”I looked over and I was shocked,” Tunney tells 27 News. “Instead of this sort of clear, green water you can see plants through, the whole river just looked like someone had dumped a bunch of teal, blue paint.”
Noted: It was Richard Marsh, an affable, intensely curious scientist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who sounded a warning about questionable animal feeding practices more than a decade ago and kept sounding it until his death in 1997, even as critics dismissed him as an alarmist.
Quoted: People typically don’t decide on their own to hunt. Rather, said Thomas Heberlein, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied hunting for decades, they’re most likely to take up a gun or bow if they meet three criteria: They’re male, they grew up in a rural area and their father hunted.
Quoted: Richard Bishop, a UW-Madison economist specializing in natural resources, said the Journal Sentinel poll results are encouraging. “It sounds like people are putting a lot of thought into what kind of risk they are willing to accept,” Bishop said.
Noted: Research by Daniel Phaneuf, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of agricultural and applied and economics, found that anglers were willing to pay the most money to catch a chinook on a Lake Michigan trout and salmon fishing trip.
Noted: The debate over voter ID “has been the most visible point of election reform,” says Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But this registration stuff is just as important but has been happening at a lower level that people aren’t necessarily aware of.”
Noted: The week of June 16 saw the worst outbreak of algal blooms in decades, said Jake Vander Zanden, an aquatic biologist at the UW Center for Limnology, and Stephen Carpenter, limnology center director.
Quoted: In many cases, says Christina Kendziorski, a biostatistician at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the tools used in bulk RNA-seq can be applied to scRNA-seq. But fundamental differences in the data mean that this is not always possible.
Noted: Trump’s policy differs from Obama’s in two main ways, said Martina Kunovic, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and visiting researcher at the Cuban Institute for Cultural Research in Havana.
It’s that time of year again where things tend to go boom! We’ll hear from a UW-Madison chemistry professor about the science behind fireworks.
For more than three decades, the Comparative Ocular Pathology Lab of Wisconsin has quietly helped veterinarians diagnose eye diseases while amassing an archive used by researchers in dozens of countries to study human and animal diseases.
Quoted: “Nobody would use glass anymore,” says Richard Hartel, a professor of food engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Glass is obviously too fragile for industrial operations, and popsicles with shards would be wildly unpopular. Lucky for food manufacturers in the 1920s, there were lots of new materials coming down the pike.
Noted: “It is the responsibility of the news media in this democracy to be running down stories” like the probe into charges that Russia interfered in last year’s presidential election, says Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW–Madison Arboretum ecologist Brad Herrick interviewed on-site about the invasive asian jumping worm
Jonathan Renshon, a professor of international relations at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Renshon studies the psychology of foreign policy — how the way leaders and decision-makers think affects the way states interact. His new book, Fighting for Status, is about why leaders care so much about the way others perceive their countries, to the point that they’re willing to go to war over it.
Noted; Concerns at the time were substantiated in documentation by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, which reported that of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 93 were about black people. (The 2016 figures reflect a jump: Out of 3,400 books received at the center, 286 are about black people.)
Noted: Dipesh Navsaria, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, points out that Medicaid pays for a lot of sick children’s care, so children’s hospitals may lose enough business that they’ll have to close or roll back the services they offer. That affects everyone: children’s hospitals have a valuable role in training new doctors and developing new procedures.
Noted: But Dietram Scheufele, a life sciences communication professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advises that the results should be taken with a grain of salt.
Noted: “That’s an awesome photo. I have not heard of a mole being fed on by bass or any other fish, but I’m not surprised,” Peter Lisi, a post-doctoral scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology, and lead author of the 2013 paper, told me in an email. He noted that bass eat lots of terrestrial and semi-aquatic animals.
Noted: Kathy Cramer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison followed the same groups of voters in Wisconsin from 2007 to 2012 and wrote about her findings in “The Politics of Resentment”. This is how she describes the atmosphere during a heated recall referendum that was won by Governor Scott Walker: “People stole yard signs from each other. They stopped talking to one another. They spat on each other. They even tried to run each other over, even if they were married to one another. I am not kidding.”
There have also been efforts to reduce the amount of phosphorus—mainly in cow manure—from running off of farm fields into the Madison watershed. But things like manure digesters or voluntary management practices aren’t having much of an impact, according to Jake Vander Zanden, an aquatic biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for Limnology.
Noted: Digging deeper into the debt details, Houle and his study co-author Lawrence Berger, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Social Work, found that the type of debt makes a big difference. When parents took on or increased their home or education debt, it seemed to have a positive effect on their children’s well-being. On the other hand, additional unsecured debt – which includes credit card debt, medical debt, payday loans and loans from family and friends – tended to coincide with more behavioral problems.
Quoted: “It becomes really overwhelming and overloading to be thinking about all of these choices,” says Evan Polman, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies decision fatigue.
Noted: “All of a sudden, they could now brew at colder temperatures and get crisper cleaner flavors,” said Chris Todd Hittinger, a University of Wisconsin geneticist who isn’t involved with the bumblebeer project.
