Quoted: “The lesson from New York is you can have a great plan, but you need to have the right people in charge,” said Peter Miller, a professor at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Some of the programs in New York have become fractured, and that is never good.
Quoted: “We’ve taken a definite step downward,” said Tim Smeeding, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Things don’t look good.”
Quoted: “For those that acquire HIV, there is every reason to come in early to be on treatment to not have this disease have any important part of your life,” said Dr. Bennett Vogelman [Senior Associate Chair for Education for the Department of Medicine]. He’s one of the founding fathers of the UW Health HIV/AIDS Comprehensive Care Program. “It would be like treating high blood pressure or diabetes. We can control this and that’s a big change.”
(Video) On World AIDS Day, Dr. Ryan Westergaard talks about what UW is doing in the battle against HIV.
(Video) The Dictionary of American Regional English took researchers at UW 49 years to complete. The five volumes document dialects in all regions of the country. But they thought it would be time to update it. Joan Houston Hall talks about the project.
Noted: Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reviewed the different approaches that countries have taken in trying to regulate gene therapy. She favored a precautionary approach that she said would not suppress innovation, arguing that responsible oversight would allow researchers to take more chances. “We have the chance to back up at the end, and change course,” she said.
Quoted: Jerry O’Brien [executive director, The Kohl’s Center for Retailing Excellence], says this trend of “online and not in-line” has been revving its engine for a while now. Online shopping may not be beating regular old shopping in person, but it’s getting there.
“The growth has been consistent. The past four years it’s had dramatic growth, so there’s obvious a trend where we have more people every year, and this past weekend it looks like more than 20 percent of the people took advantage of it so it’s a growing trend,” explained O’Brien.
It seems like a simple concept, but more often than not parents are making some big mistakes when buckling kids up in their safety seats.
Just because you hear that “click” of the buckle doesn’t mean your car or booster seat is properly installed. Nicole Vesley, the Safe Kids Coordinator at UW-Children’s Hospital says it’s not that simple.
“Here in Dane Co., about 90% of the car seats that we check have a misuse to them,” said Vesley.
Noted: “What happened to Target’s website this morning, to me, this doesn’t necessarily represent a hacking attempt or a theft of credit card information, but rather people showing they have confidence in the online retailers and Target’s site is just overwhelmed with shoppers,” UW-System Chief Information Security Officer Nicholas Davis explains.
Noted: Dr. Ryan Westergaard [assistant professor of medicine and Population Health Sciences] is an HIV doctor and researcher at UW Health. He says now the goal is to find more ways to prevent the spread of the virus, and ultimately find a cure.
Noted: Dr. Christine Whelan, a thought leader for AARP’s Life Reimagined program and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says it’s a “good psychological trick” to mark a new beginning on a special date — say, your birthday, the new year or even just Monday morning. However, we’ve got to be careful that we’re not using this future date to justify delaying a life change.
Quoted: Even before Heinz bought Kraft, the small-town ways of Oscar Mayer were changing, says Mike Judge, former head of consumer insights and strategy there and now Director of the Center for Brand and Product Management Center at the University of Wisconsin Business School. “It was always part of the fabric of the community,” with a homegrown leader at the helm, he says. That changed about three years ago when Kraft, which had owned Oscar Mayer since 1988, began to feel its own financial pressures and installed corporate executives from the head offices in Illinois.
Quoted: In New York City, University of Wisconsin art professor Laura Anderson Barbata is preparing to perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade a living social justice art piece called “Intervention: Indigo” she came up with with 17 other people, including two others from UW.
“It is a reminder and way of bringing back what the symbolism and protection of the color indigo is all about,” Barbata said.
Noted: Recently, I heard Richard J. Davidson, a prominent expert on meditation and similar practices, talk to a small group, mostly of educators. Davidson, who founded the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, predicted that in a few years, doing mental fitness exercises will be as respected and widespread for both kids and adults as doing physical fitness exercises is now.
Noted: “More wetlands are being created than are being destroyed (nationally), which is good news until you look at the fine print, which was most of the ones being created are shallow ponds,” said Quentin Carpenter, a senior lecturer at UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “Sedge meadows take millennia to create. There’s no way to hurry that process.”
Noted: The actual “sport shopping” classification is new, Joann Peck, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies consumer shopping habits, tells Yahoo Health. But she says there has always been some element of sport shopping for some people — it’s just becoming more common.
Quoted: In recent weeks, scientists and researchers have been speaking up. Adrian Treves, a University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental studies professor, has co-authored a paper in the journal Biological Reviews that says by allowing hunters to shoot and trap wolves, Wisconsin legislators violated the Public Trust Doctrine that says governments must maintain natural resources for the use of current and future generations of the general public.
Noted: To be ostracized from your tribe was a death sentence, says Charles Raison, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who did not work on the study. “Literally they would die. There was no human way to live in isolation,” he says.
Noted: Innovation is not a silver bullet, however. “Neither better technology, nor changing to low-carbon behavior will be sufficient on its own; both will be necessary,” Gregory Nemet, a professor of public affairs and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the New Republic. “It’s hard to imagine that technology alone will enable people in the highest per capita emitting countries (e.g. the U.S.) to reduce their emissions by 90-95 percent without substantial changes to how they travel and what they consume.” But while politicians hash out the political framework by which to curb carbon emissions, scientists have been attacking climate change from all directions. Here’s a rundown of some of the innovative solutions researchers are pursuing.
Quoted: “This essay is, in essence, a plea — let’s not ignore the nonhuman part of the biosphere,” Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin and Henry T. Greely of Stanford University cautioned in an article titled “Crispr Critters and Crispr Cracks,” to be published in The American Journal of Bioethics next month. “Not only is it much larger than the human part, but it is much more susceptible to unobserved or unfettered — but not unimportant — changes.”
Quoted: Wilson, who also nominated an African-American for register of the Treasury (the nomination was withdrawn after Southern Democrats in the Senate raised a furor), did not spearhead those efforts, though he did go along with them, noted John Milton Cooper, a retired historian at the University of Wisconsin and the author of an admiring 2009 biography of Wilson.
University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Jonathan Patz doesn’t focus on looming risks to the planet when he talks about climate change. Patz talks instead about the tremendous health benefits of policies to curb it.
Funding cuts by the Federal Aviation Administration could compromise the consistency of nearly seven decades of Madison snowfall data, weather experts say. “Anytime you’re doing record keeping where you want to look at long-term trends, you need a continuous data set,” Steven Ackerman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at UW–Madison, said. “Once you stop doing that — even for a year — you’ve lost the statistical significance and the continuation of that. Even though it seems like a small decision, it actually has big impacts on the data set.
Noted: Scott Gehlbach is a professor of political science at UW-Madison.
No matter the direction in which relations are trending, new research (ungated) presented at last week’s Association for the Study of East European and Eurasian Studies Annual Meeting by political scientists Timothy Frye, Scott Gehlbach, Kyle L. Marquardt, and Ora John Reuter suggests that the West will be dealing with a leader who is genuinely popular at home.
Noted: Spencer Black represented the 77th Assembly District for 26 years and was chair of the Natural Resources Committee. He currently serves as the vice president of the national Sierra Club and is an adjunct professor of urban and regional planning at UW-Madison.
Video: Associate Professor of Surgery Dr. Nathan Welham on the creation of lab-grown vocal cords.
Quoted: Dr. William E. Cayley, a family medicine professor at the University of Wisconsin who wrote a synopsis of the Cochrane evidence in American Family Physician, said cranberry products should not be recommended to prevent U.T.I.s, but, “If someone says they want to try drinking it, I’m not going to tell them, ‘Don’t do it.’”
Quoted: “The problem is it isn’t working as well as they want it to,” said Jerry O’Brien, executive director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing at UW-Madison. “The concept of opening on Thanksgiving is a great idea if you’re the only one that does it. The whole point was to grab market share, but when everybody made the move it became a bit moot.”
Laura Albert McLay, a professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, has been using her knowledge of math models and sports analytics to predict which teams are most likely to make the four-team tournament crowning college football’s national champion. She posts the weekly rankings on her blog, Badger Bracketology.
Quoted: Dominique Brossard, who studies science and communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said: “People have a tendency to equate the (GMO) technology with something that they may not like — big monopoly from corporations and very modern agriculture.”
Quoted: “The toy culture has … contributed a lot to the movie,” said Jonathan Gray, professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Anyone who thinks that the movies were successful just for the movie is forgetting the huge impact that the toys had.”
Column from Andrew Kydd, a political science professor at UW-Madison who studies international security issues including terrorism, nuclear weapons, conflict resolution, and war and peace.
Quoted: “There is this fundamental issue that health care is very expensive,” said Justin Sydnor, an associate professor of actuarial science, risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And therefore insurance is very expensive.”
Noted: Comment from Hart Posen, a UW-Madison associate professor who studies business strategy and innovation.
Quoted: Dr. Michael Xenos warns against limiting Facebook friends to only those you agree with.”Whether online or offline, people benefit from being exposed to political views that are different from their own,” said the University of Wisconsin-Madison communication professor.
Noted: Front-row filmgoers have a champion in David Bordwell, the esteemed film scholar and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s 68, a notable exception to Marshall’s maxim about youthful inhabitants of the row Bordwell calls the “raccoon lodge.”
Quoted: Allyson Bennett, a developmental psychobiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, questions the decision to move them from research facilities to sanctuaries, which are not subject to the same strict oversight and welfare standards that govern NIH-supported centres. She adds that moving the animals to new facilities may create more stress for them.
Quoted: “El Niño is a naturally occurring phenomenon that involves the tropical ocean and atmosphere working together — it’s a complete rearrangement of heat in the tropical Pacific Ocean,” said Dan Vimont, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Climate change is a forced phenomenon that involves a net increase of energy in the ocean and atmosphere system globally. The anthropogenic change is due to human emissions.”
(Video) The movie “Martian” is based on a novel where an astronaut was mistakenly presumed dead and left behind on a mission to Mars. He fights to survive by growing plants on the red planet, which is a concept UW botanist Simon Gilroy says is based on real science.
By a show of hands in two classes Monday, Andrew Kydd helped illustrate why last week’s terror attacks in Paris have resonated so profoundly across the United States.Kydd, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on terrorism and nuclear arms, is teaching undergraduate classes on each topic this semester.
For the second year in a row, Professor Kydd’s Terrorism 319 class is full.
Once again, more than 60 students and auditors alike are filling up the special political science class at UW Madison.
The emphasis is on the headlines. This week, the Paris Terror Attack is the topic. And this year, Professor Kydd says more than 2/3’ds of his class have ties to the Paris.
Noted: In a sense, this emergency check-in is changing the way we communicate, according to Catalina Toma at the University of Wisconsin communications department.
“International calls can be expensive and difficult to procure, whereas Facebook is readily and widely available to anyone with an internet connection,” explained Toma.
Nestled in the northern Wisconsin woods, Peter Lake once brimmed with golden shiners, fatheads and other minnows, which plucked algae-eating fleas from the murky water. Then, seven years ago, a crew of ecologists began stepping up the lake’s population of predatory largemouth bass. Today, largemouth bass still swim rampant. “Once that top predator is dominant, it’s very hard to dislodge,” said Stephen Carpenter, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the experiment.
Quoted: “The bigger picture is that these are people fleeing for their lives, right, they’re fleeing a burning building,” countered Stacy Taeuber, an immigration attorney who serves as director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at UW-Madison.
While Taeuber disagrees with Speaker Ryan and several other politicians from a moral perspective, she also believes his plan has a lot of holes.
Noted: Two University of Wisconsin-Madison immigration experts are questioning whether states have the authority under the U.S. Constitution to reject placement of Syrian refugees.
“I think, at this point, there’s a widely held consensus that states do not have the authority to decide they are going to reject a specific nationality of refugees,” said Stacy Taeuber, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the UW Law School.
Sara McKinnon, an assistant professor of communication arts and expert on political refugees and asylum, said it’s also important to note the extensive screening of refugees prior to their admittance into the resettlement program, which can take up to 18 months.
Quoted: “People who have Type 2 diabetes are producing insulin, but their cells no longer know how to use it and it becomes a progressive chronic disease,” said Dr. Sandra Kamnetz, a family physician with UW Health [and clinical professor of family medicine]. “Insulin brings to patients with diabetes an increased risk of heart attack; increased risk of a stroke; increased risk of ulcers to the feet leading to potential amputation; and a risk of chronic renal failure even ending up in dialysis.”
Quoted: “The evidence is already very tantalising,” says Francis Halzen, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Usually cosmic ray physics is one puzzle and one explanation. This is one explanation for many puzzles.”
Quoted: Katy Culver, professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and the associate director of the Center for Journalism Ethics, told IBT that it’s a difficult issue to unpack.
Can governors legally block Syrian refugees from entering their states? Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and other governors have said they don’t want any Syrian refugees settled in their states. Don Downs, an emeritus political science professor at UW, says it’s less clear whether they can actually block such settlement.
Mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood often hears from children and adults about how they have a math phobia: They’ll profess to hate solving for X, or figuring out how to split the bill or take care of the tip.
Noted: Includes comment from Sara McKinnon, a UW-Madison communication arts professor and an expert on refugee and asylum law. She said governors don’t have veto power in whether refugees come here but they can deny state money and resources to the volunteer agencies that provide job, health care and other assistance to refugees, “which could make the resettlement of refugees in these states much more challenging,” she said.
Noted: Panelists included Madison Laning, ASM chair; Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of educational policy; Noel Radomski, director of Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE); and Scot Ross, director of One Wisconsin Now (non-UW).
Do governors have the power to close their state borders to Syrian refugees? A clinical assistant professor at UW-Law said no. Stacy Taeuber is the Director of the Immigration Justice Clinic. She said refugees are protected under the federal Refugee Act of 1980.
“Once you’re lawfully admitted to the U.S. as a refugee, you have the same rights of anybody else that is lawfully in the U.S.,” said Taeuber.
Andrew Irving never imagined so many people would show their support in Madison.
“What’s been nice is the unexpected messages we get from people we barely know just saying we want to reach out and say we’re sorry or we’re thinking of you,” Irving said.
Irving, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison French House, decided the community needed a place to come together to mourn and stand in solidarity.
Quoted: Stacy Tauber, an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Immigrant Justice Clinic, said it’s the federal government, not states, that get to make that call.
Noted: Mohammad Sabri, a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s good to see non-Muslims supporting his religion.
This week our guest is UW-Madison bacteriologist Cameron Currie, who discusses not only dangerous bacteria, especially the antibiotic-resistant ones, but also the process of finding and developing new medicines and antibiotics.
Noted: Andrew Irving, Director of the French House in Madison, said the attacks have taken a toll on locals who study and immerse themselves in French culture, as well as on French students currently living here in Madison.
“Emotions were very high Friday and also on Saturday. A lot of people just didn’t know what to think,” Irving said.
Irving said the French House, a private residence hall run by the UW-Madison’s Department of French and Italian, houses both American and French students.
“All of our residents speak French here almost all of the time,” Irving said.
Quoted: “For party leaders especially, it’s more difficult (today) and it’s probably more difficult in the Republican Party than the Democratic Party because of … the hard-liners on spending,” said David Canon, a political scientist and congressional scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “They’re hedging their bets,” said Barry Orton, professor of telecommunications at the University of Wisconsin, and a long-time consultant to local governments on cable TV issues. If cable TV customers do stampede to the video streamers, Charter wants a way to corral them back.
