Noted: The 2016 Wisconsin Poverty Report produced by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found despite the creation of thousands of new jobs in Wisconsin, the poverty rate remains essentially the same as the last report at 10.8 percent.
Quoted: Lyn Van Swol, a University of Wisconsin-Madison communications professor who has studied political deception, said Trump in some ways fits the model of those who dissemble — they tend to be verbose, as if concocting a structure of support for their misstatements.
Noted: Much remains unknown about what happened before and after Caston sent the email to Duhe with the geometry test questions, including “how is it this individual has them, who-all did he share them with, what was communicated to those teachers,” University of Wisconsin professor James Wollack said.
Noted: Scientists have since tried to apply the constructs of neuroscience to mindfulness. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson’s research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Buddhist monks identified neurological changes associated with meditation, suggesting that meditation could be learned, like calligraphy or Go. Others found that meditation offset some of the effects of age-related cortical thinning.
Noted: Democratic vulnerability was explored in depth by Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, in a book on voters in that state, “The Politics of Resentment,” which came out in March. In her study, Cramer described the three elements of “rural consciousness”:
UW-Madison Assistant Professor of Finance, Oliver Levine, talks to News 3 This Morning about reports that the Federal Reserve is about to increase interest rates.
Noted: “I think the legacy is in trouble,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied the life and death of government programs. The coalition that passed those — especially the Affordable Care Act and and the Dodd-Frank financial regulations — was a combination of President Obama and a Democratic Congress. And even then it was difficult. That puts those two items from the first two years on the chopping block.”
Justin Sydnor is a UW-Madison business professor specializing in risk management and insurance.
You have to love cats to be Jason Nolen, UW-Madison lecturer and the founder/curator of Instagram’s Cats of Madison. “It makes me seem… maybe a little bit of a cat maniac,” laughs Nolen.
Quoted: “We have so little experience with this kind of data, but the uplift is the biggest seen anywhere on the planet,” said Bradley Singer, a geoscientist from the U.S. University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is leading an international research effort to understand what is happening under the surface.
Chef Lisa and Chef Ellen from UW Health joined NBC15’s Meredith Barack to show off some holiday appetizers that are easy and delicious.
Noted: Losing the popular vote “takes the shine off any Electoral College victory,” political scientist Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told PolitiFact Wisconsin.
In the weeks since Donald Trump’s presidential victory, Wisconsin Democrats reflecting on their losses up and down the ticket have said the party needs to do a better job of conveying its message to rural voters. It’s going to take more than that, said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kathy Cramer on Friday.
Noted: On Friday, the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center held a symposium analyzing the 2016 election. Among the many thoughtful presenters was Katherine Cramer, a political-science professor at the university’s Madison campus.
Noted: Getting schools to focus on Americans’ shared identity won’t be easy. Take the Rust Belt towns that switched parties to elect Trump, becoming one of the biggest election stories. People in these communities tend to see their local schools as a source of local identity; they don’t take well to outside edicts, particularly those that originate in big cities, says Katherine Cramer, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research for the past 10 years has involved chatting with rural Midwest residents. “How do you not make it sound like ‘Oh, yet again urbanites are telling us that we are backward and we need to be brought back in line with urban society?’” she said.
The debate over whether or not to allow house cats outdoors is heated. While some conservationists say they kill songbirds and cause damage to native species, some cat owners argue that the urge to hunt is vital part of how cats are wired. Interviewed: UW’s Stanley Temple.
Quoted: The average scores of companies have risen every year as companies strive each year for improvement, said Tom Eggert, executive director of the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council.”Everybody’s continuing to push each other, and it’s really refreshing that we don’t have the same group all the time,” said Eggert, whose University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students help coordinate the program.
Noted: “That was the transition period where we started getting away from market hunting and we were starting to appreciate more of the natural resources for what they are not just the consumptive side of it,” said David Drake, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a UW-Extension wildlife specialist. “Some really influential people really made birding a cool thing to do.”
Noted: “There’s definitely a link between declining levels of federal funding and public views on the quality of science,” said Dietram Scheufele, John E. Ross Professor in Science Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But it’s much more pernicious than simply assuming that voters make inferences about the value of science from the amounts of money the federal government spends on the scientific enterprise,” he clarified.
Noted: “Surely the governor understands that China is a large export market for U.S. agricultural products and that a trade war with China, which is threatened by the U. S. president-elect, would not be good for Iowa farmers. This might suggest to Chinese leaders that Trump’s threats of a trade war are just a bluff in the hopes of a better trade deal for the U.S. with China,” said Edward Friedman, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on Chinese foreign policy.
Noted: Bas Rokers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says it’s commonly held that motion sickness is caused when your senses provide conflicting information. “Take seasickness: you’re looking at the horizon and the horizon is steady but your balance system tells you that you are moving,” he says.
Religion’s significant role on campus and across the state cannot be underestimated in order to gain a better appreciation for Wisconsin’s culture and climate, according to religious studies professors Corrie Norman, Susan Ridgely and Jordan Rosenblum.
Noted: Katie Krueger uses MobCraft as a business model in the class she teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She plans to add a second part to the class next semester — a warning.
Quoted: Peter Carstensen, professor of law at UW-Madison, said he wasn’t surprised policyholders approved the change, adding that for policyholders it should be business as usual.
Noted: Tom O’Guinn, professor of marketing, appeared on WPR’s Central Time to talk about companies speaking out on political issues and the impact of consumer boycotts.
Quoted: Kathleen Bartzen Culver, the director for the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said some news outlets, including morning network news shows in the United States, seemed to have “suspended skepticism.”
Noted: Political scientist Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us: “There is no evidence that 300,000 people were turned away in the November 2016 election. We will never know the precise impact of the voter ID law on turnout. It is almost certainly not true that all 300,000 or so people who are registered but lack ID tried to vote this year.”
Noted: Children ages 6 to 10 begin to understand stereotypes about racial groups, said John Diamond, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He said the project showed the power of education to help students express themselves and learn from other young people in a diverse classroom.
Noted: “Those areas can really provide vital services to our nation’s people and wildlife,” said Tyler Lark, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, who was not involved with the new report.
Noted: They sometimes packed it into crocks to give to customers as gifts, according to the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Last year, Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor of actuarial science at the University of Wisconsin, studied Mississippi’s prison system, and found that people in private prisons received many more “prison conduct violations” than those in government-run ones. This made it harder for them to get parole, and, on average, they served two to three more months of prison time.
Hemant Shah has served as director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism school since 2014, and has been a member of the faculty since 1990. His research focuses on the role of mass media in social change, including the construction of cultural identities and racial anxieties.
Quoted: “Italy has just done something very interesting. After all, Italy is one of the founding nations of the EU but I don’t think it’s mistaken to look at the results of this vote alongside the Brexit vote earlier this year, as well as, frankly, the Trump vote in the United States,” Patrick Rumble, Italian professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Al Jazeera.
Noted: But regulation may be difficult, admits Christine Whelan, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies the lucrative self-help industry and now sits on the board of SEEK Safely.
Quoted: “Democrats did better this time in places that were already blue , and did worse in places that were already red,” said Barry Burden, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It sort of is a battle of the many versus the few. You add up those smaller rural places, and they were enough to swamp the bigger urban areas, and even suburban counties.”
Noted: In a given school year, 13 percent of full-time teachers at a typical Wisconsin school district are new employees, said Peter Goff, an assistant professor of education leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “For Oregon to get that just among the people who are automatically registered is quite a feat,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of that school’s Elections Research Center.
Quoted: But regulation may be difficult, admits Christine Whelan, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies the lucrative self-help industry and now sits on the board of SEEK Safely. “Do we regulate the physical things someone can do at one of these workshops?” Whelan says of the challenges of regulation. “Are we regulating the speech in terms of what advice people can give? And then who is the judge of what is good and bad advice?”
Noted: “I think there are some norms, some unwritten rules on how Washington works and he doesn’t feel obliged to stick with those,” Dr Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, told The Straits Times.
Noted: “Even if something is consistent with Russian government interests, it doesn’t mean the Russian government did it,” said Yoshiko Herrera, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies Russia and former Soviet states.
Christine Whelan, an expert on self-improvement from the University of Wisconsin School of Human Ecology, talks about ways to reduce holiday stress.
Quoted: “We have a program that now costs us $247 million. All at a time when the state of Wisconsin has been one of the biggest public school cutters in the United States,” said Julie Underwood, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law and education professor and voucher critic. “It concerns me that the solution would be to continue to shift resources from public to private, or to shift the bill to the public schools.”
Noted: The Roman historian Tacitus captures the mood. He records the empire from its beginning, in 509 B.C. (which he says was full of glorious heroes) to his time in about 100 B.C. (which he keeps apologizing for). “He’s constantly saying, ‘I’m sorry for telling you about yet more murders that the autocratic emperors have committed against their own subjects, and more rapes, and more sexual perversion, and more records of excessive dining, eating, and, you know, sumptuary practices,’” says Alex Dressler, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But Romans before Tacitus said basically the same thing, Dressler says. The more money and power the Romans acquired, the more they felt like their nation was getting indulgent and lazy, and therefore the more they looked backwards to a time before they got what they wanted. The wanting, it seems, mattered more than the having.
Quoted: “This is something that has been on everyone’s radar for a long time,” said Melissa Skala of the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved in the study. “We’ve been developing this technology for some time, and hoping it could fill a niche in the clinic. [This study] exploits specific aspects of this technology.”
Noted: “This was predictable,” says Barry Orton, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It is a small and incremental step towards severing the cord and getting rid of time restraints.”
UW-Madison’s Clifton Conrad cautions that Betsy DeVos’ track record of advocacy for charter schools for elementary and high school students may indicate that President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education will push to privatize public higher education too.
Noted: Political scientist Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it would be extremely difficult to complete the recount on time. About twice as many votes were cast in the presidential election as the 2011 Supreme Court race.
Noted: If Trump’s plans are carried out, the United States will be picking fights with its top three trading partners — Canada, Mexico and China — said Ian Coxhead, professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a signer of the Trump letter.
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden said Trump’s position is complicated.
Noted: The Republicans’ counter-argument in the case was that their maps abide by all current rules, said David Canon, the chair of UW-Madison’s political science department, on Capital City Sunday.
Quoted: “The development of the rat [eye and partial face transplant] model, by Kia, is a huge advancement in being able to conduct the complex science needed to successfully transplant a whole eye,” said Rob Nickells, a collaborator with Washington who is a professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at University of Wisconsin. “I would confidently say that given success of the [nerve] questions, she will be the first surgeon to accomplish this feat.”
Noted: Last year, Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor of actuarial science at the University of Wisconsin, studied Mississippi’s prison system, and found that people in private prisons received many more “prison conduct violations” than those in government-run ones. This made it harder for them to get parole, and, on average, they served two to three more months of prison time.
Noted: UW-Madison Political Science Department Chairman David Canon says Trump greatly expanded margins in counties Republican candidate Mitt Romney won in 2012, and also flipped a chunk of rural counties from the democratic column in 2012, to his column by sizable amounts.
Noted: “Part of what is so challenging, ethically, is that this is a candidate who is not behaving by standing norms,” says Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So journalists are trying to figure out what norms apply.”
Quoted: John Hawks, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin—Madison, human evolution expert and co-author of a study which found that 7 percent of human genes have evolved in the recent past (5,000 years), largely in response to environmental change
Noted: UW Health Pediatric Fitness Clinical Nutritionist Nora McCormick joined NBC15’s John Stofflet to share strategies to help us control our calorie intake Thursday.
Noted: Meanwhile, UW-Madison researchers continue to study Zika in rhesus macaque monkeys.Four monkey babies born to mothers infected with Zika during pregnancy had Zika virus in many types of tissue, and their heads may have been slightly smaller than normal, said David O’Connor, a UW-Madison pathology professor.
Noted: The Electoral College has been around for centuries, according to David Canon, political science professor at UW-Madison. He says the nation’s founding fathers set up the system because they didn’t give the electorate much credit.
Noted: David Canon, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, said: “This will go to the supreme court and if it endorses the idea of unlawful gerrymandering it could establish a legal standard that could apply to House districts, not just in Wisconsin.”
Noted: “It does almost exactly what Justice Kennedy said he was looking for back in the ’80s, a clear threshold for deciding what is acceptable,” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
