“Community radio plays a really important role in creating the range of voices … from minority communities who wouldn’t have any voice in mass media at all otherwise,” said Lewis Friedland, an emeritus professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A researcher and clinical psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has made it his mission to focus on the challenges fathers face and rebuke stereotypes around Black fathers. Event co-chair Alvin Thomas told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that it is important to discuss and address the problems fathers face.
“We know that if the parent relationship is not a very strong one or not a very healthy one, that more likely than not, the attachment between the child and the father is going to be compromised,” Thomas said. “Which of course will lead to potential negative outcomes for the child, but also for the dad.”
“If the monarch migration to this part of the world is to continue, both the trees and the monarchs will need to move,” says Karen Oberhauser, a biologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study. According to Oberhauser, who studies monarch butterfly ecology, assisted migration could be a possible solution; however, whether it will work remains to be seen.
A previously elusive ambush predator insect is seen frequently in Wisconsin this year, entomologist PJ Liesch tells us.
Dr. Molly Lepic, an OB-GYN with UW Health who teaches medical students, said pain is a varied response. Also, patients who have previously had a vaginal delivery typically feel less pain during IUD insertion because their cervix has dilated before.
“Everybody’s pain tolerance is different,” she added.
Of the 25 companies, none of the CEOs’ actual salaries exceeded $2 million. Most of the time, the salary makes up a very small portion of a CEO’s pay package.
Many companies instead award their CEOs with shares of the company’s stock and other forms of equity to give CEOs “skin in the game,” said Fabio Gaertner, professor of accounting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on executive compensation.
Although less popular than local television and some other forms of media, local radio generally gains strong trust from those who listen, according to Mike Wagner, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism and mass communication researcher and professor. In Wisconsin, during the 2016 election, radio stations were airing around 200 hours of conservative talk every day, according to one UW-Madison study.
Sykes’ WTMJ show was Walker’s primary connection to a statewide audience, according to Lew Friedland, distinguished journalism and mass communication professor emeritus and researcher at UW-Madison. “Without Charlie Sykes, I don’t think there would have been a Scott Walker,” Friedland said, calling Sykes “one of the top three most important political actors” at the time.
Yes, inflation has gone down, says Menzie Chinn, a UW-Madison economics and public affairs professor. But there’s a catch. He said that, though the rate of prices going up has slowed, it doesn’t mean prices are coming down. “Prices are flattening out,” Chinn said. “They are not going up as fast as they were, but they are still going up.”
J. Michael Collins, UW-Madison professor at La Follette School of Public Affairs and School of Human Ecology, said inflation hits people differently across the state, with one in four saying they’ve had trouble meeting expenses, especially rent, which can be a third to half of a person’s income.
said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “When the elections are this close, it’ (paywall)
The Main Street Agenda is a project done in partnership between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison. La Follette Director Susan Yackee told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” the project aims to get people from different political backgrounds talking with one another.
“We need to be able to talk to each other to get to the mission of the La Follette School, which is evidence-based policymaking,” she said. “That oftentimes takes political compromise and we just can’t get to political compromise if people aren’t talking to each other anymore.”
The Journal Sentinel partnered with the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio on the Main Street Agenda, a 2024 election project designed to focus on the issues Wisconsin voters care about most. Panelists included Menzie Chinn, professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs and Department of Economics at UW-Madison, and . J. Michael Collins, professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs and School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison.
“Very few people these days just smoke cigarettes,” said Megan Piper, a director of research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention. Piper is currently conducting a study of dual users to figure out effective ways to help them quit cigarettes.
Interview with Jessica Calarco, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Interview with Jennifer E. Gaddis, an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of The Labor of Lunch. She is an advisory board member of the National Farm to School Network.
In a new series, student journalists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led by Wisconsin Watch State Bureau Chief Matthew DeFour, explore all of those changes. The students who collaborated on this series include: Benjamin Cadigan, Hallie Claflin, Meryl Hubbard, Ray Kirsch, Frankie Pica, Ashley Rodriguez, Andrew Schneider, Sophia Scolman, Paige Stevenson and Omar Waheed.
To test this idea, Keys and Philip Mulder, now on faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s business school, searched for the prelude to a housing crash: a distinctive “lead-lag” pattern of a spike in unsold homes (“the lead”), followed by falling prices (“the lag”).
Trump regularly invokes anecdotes about immigration and crime. But despite some high-profile individual cases, University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Michael Light says research shows increased immigration is not tied to higher crime rates.
“Criminologists have been studying the issue of immigration and crime for over a century and, generally speaking, what we find is that immigrants tend to have lower crime rates than native-born U.S. citizens,” he said. “It’s a fairly consistent finding.”
This has been an unusual growing season. Garden Talk regulars Lisa Johnson and Brian Hudelson are in to talk about what they’ve seen regarding plant disease, insects and the effects of a wet spring and dry fall. And then we talk to an expert about how to grow ferns – both inside and out – and learn a little of the history of this ancient plant.
Rabbi Andrea Steinberger of Hillel at University of Wisconsin-Madison she set tables for a pre-fast meal Friday and prepared for services that hundreds of students were expected to attend.
Hateful political rhetoric has become commonplace in the 2024 presidential campaign and much of it is directed at migrants coming over the southern U.S. border — UW-Madison political science researcher and author Nathan Kalmoe said that kind of rhetoric can tip into violence.
Written by Denia Garcia, an assistant professor with the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison. Garcia’s work examines the role of space and organizations in shaping how inequalities are experienced and reproduced.
“The number of people who could fit into the Kohl Center would be enough to tip the outcome of the election in Wisconsin, and potentially in the electoral college,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center. “Students, if they choose to vote in Wisconsin, have a lot of power.”
“The quick and dirty answer is that [we] discourage it,” Amy Nichelason, a veterinarian and clinical assistant professor of primary care services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, tells Inverse. She says it’s not difficult to understand why dogs might enjoy riding with their heads out the window. With their keen sense of smell, “it really is just like sensory overload,” Nichelason says. “It’s like me in the candy store.”
If you’re hoping to keep the stink bugs out, your options are slightly limited. The best way is physical exclusion, according to PJ Liesch, the director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab who is aptly referred to as “the Wisconsin Bug Guy.”
Apart from this niche-use case, it’s not clear whether these statistics are even helpful for the people who watch games with the FanDuel app open. When I called up Michael Titelbaum, a philosopher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works on probability, he told me that these statistics are easy to misinterpret. “Decades of cognitive-science experiments tell us that people are really, really bad at making sense of probability percentages,” he said.
Lucas Graves, a journalism and mass communications professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that publicly chafing at fact-checking has become a form of tribalism among some Republicans.
“A big concern for me [is] that the kids who are already poorly served will fall further behind because there won’t be anything that requires states” to use the funding equitably, says Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor emerita of education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The middle class is an amorphous concept that neither candidate has really defined. But one thing is clear, said Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — the days when “middle class” meant “stability” are long gone.
“Now, there’s just so much precarity in terms of people not being sure of whether the jobs that they’re currently in are going to be there in the future,” Cramer said. “They’re not sure of their ability to maintain their standard of living, whether it’s meeting their mortgage payments or rental payments.”
While beef-on-dairy production continues to grow in the U.S., it was a novel concept in 2018 when it came to the attention of Ryan Sterry, regional dairy educator with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.
“A few colleagues and myself were noticing more chatter about this, more farms were experimenting with it,” Sterry recalls.
“There are consistent general eligibility requirements, such as maintenance of valid F-1 status and practical training directly related to the degree program. However, federal regulations on CPT are quite vague, so it is up to each institution to develop its own CPT policy and procedure that match institutional policies and procedures,” says Samantha McCabe, international student services director at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
Co-authored by PhD candidates in sociology, and William T. Evjue Distinguished Chair for the Wisconsin Idea & Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication.
More than 1,000 miles from where Hurricane Milton made landfall on Wednesday night, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are using data from the storm to refine the way they study hurricanes.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is continuing to grow its Wisconet system, which is a statewide network of weather and soil monitoring stations.
The university’s weather network, called Wisconet, is expected to be a game changer for farmers, climate researchers and many other industries in Wisconsin — especially those in remote areas.
The federal government’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, supported by all the congressional Democrats from Wisconsin, and none of the Republicans, has provided billions of dollars to bring faster internet to unserved and underserved areas. So big money is available for companies, communities and co-ops to make upgrades. But that comes through a “very long and convoluted pipeline,” said Barry Orton, a telecommunications professor emeritus with UW-Madison and fierce critic of Frontier.
Almonds and walnuts, in particular, have cancer-fighting powers. “Nuts increase your fiber intake, and they have vitamin E and antioxidants that may help with cancer prevention,” says Bradley Bolling, an associate professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin. Bolling found that eating 28 grams of nuts per day—about a handful of almonds or walnuts—is linked to a lower risk of getting and dying from cancer. Dried fruit without added sugars may have a similar effect, though data are limited, Bolling adds.
“It’s been scientific consensus since 1999 that indiscriminate killing is damaging,” said Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies and director of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“These laws, they do nothing but make it more difficult to vote,” said Kenneth Mayer, a professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has conducted research on the effects of voter ID in his state. “And for every possible case of voter impersonation that you might prevent, you’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands of people who face these burdens.”
Dr. James Conway, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and medical director of UW Health’s immunization program, said the personal convictions exemption tends to be applied loosely.
“It’s been allowed to be interpreted as, basically, if you don’t want it, you don’t have to get it,” he said.
Michael Wagner, director of the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal and professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said voting against the Young/Cotton amendment is not tantamount to supporting “giving stimulus checks” to nonresident immigrants.
“Stimulus checks only went to people with a Social Security number,” Wagner said in an email to PolitiFact Wisconsin. “Some noncitizens legally employed by DHS can get a Social Security number, and a small number of people in the U.S. on legal temporary working visas may also have been eligible for stimulus checks.”
“This issue, it’s economical, it’s social, it’s animal welfare, it’s emotional,” said David Drake, an urban wildlife expert and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s all sorts of different perspectives on this, and that’s what makes it so difficult.”
“It was a very surreal moment,” said Eshan Raul, now a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We were searching specifically for water worlds because it was hypothesized that they could exist. If these are real, it really makes you wonder what else could be out there.”
Average homeowner premiums in Florida rose 57% between 2019 and 2023 according to data from Benjamin Keys of the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Mulder of the University of Wisconsin, a steeper rise than anywhere else in the nation.
Researchers say people with clinical depression could be helped by a treatment involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms. Wisconsin scientists are among those conducting dozens of clinical trials worldwide on the use of the drug in treating depression. They say the evidence shows that, in combination with therapy, it shows great promise.
“It works,” said psychiatrist Charles Raison, a professor of human ecology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “How far (psychedelics) get into the culture, how far they get into the clinical space? That’s a mystery.”
The amount of lightning in Hurricane Milton is “unlike any event” meteorologist Chris Vagasky has ever seen in the Atlantic Basin. Hurricane Milton’s eyewall, where the storm’s strongest winds are, exhibited more than 58,000 lightning events in just 14 hours, according to Vagasky, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That’s more than one lightning event every second, which he described as “astounding.”
The economic relationship between Wisconsin family farms and the rural communities that surround them is changing.
UW-Madison agricultural and applied economics professor Steve Deller said that smaller farms are struggling to generate enough income to support themselves, so families are more often turning to off-farm employment to help pay the bills.
“We successfully increased knowledge of radon in this community, and more importantly, they could not have afforded the radon mitigation without our project’s support. This community had noted higher rates of cancer among their people for many generations and expressed concern that their land was poisoning them. They were correct,” said lead study author and associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Noelle LoConte in a release.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are studying what needs to happen for a person to remotely operate long-haul trucks that are otherwise autonomous.
“The vehicle operates on its own until it needs you,” said lead researcher David Noyce. “And then when it needs you, it calls you and says, ‘Can you get on the joystick here, and have control of the vehicle? Because I don’t understand what to do.’”
UW Health Distinguished Psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain joined WMTV Monday to talk about the issues parents are facing. One change Mirgain said needs to happen is a change in the “culture of comparison,” which she explained is the habit of comparing one’s family to others, especially on social media.
Mike Wagner is a professor and election expert at UW-Madison. He says no one person or individual will change the outcome of the November 5th election, but says it’s groups of people who could have the biggest impact. This means students, specifically out-of-state students.
Trade associations for corn, soybean, potato and vegetable growers in Wisconsin were either unavailable or didn’t respond to requests for comment. Russ Groves, chair of the Department of Entomology at UW-Madison, said detections of pesticides are unfortunately a logical outcome in areas where agriculture is more intense on the landscape.
“Those are the tools that we have relied upon so that we don’t have real significant economic losses for a producer or an industry,” Groves said.
UW-Madison political science professor Benjamin Marquez considers the significance of immigration, borders and deportation as political issues in 2024 for Democratic and Republican candidates.
“I think banning the use of pepper spray in juvenile detention facilities is really not a radical act,” said Zoe Engberg, clinical assistant professor at University of Wisconsin Law School. “In 2018 … 35 states had already done this – they already completely prohibited the use of pepper spray in juvenile facilities.”
At the beginning of September, parts of the state were experiencing highs in the mid- to upper-80s, which are between five and 15 degrees higher than normal. Near Boscobel Airport on Sept. 15, the temperature rose to 92 degrees.
“It was a very weird September,” Steve Vavrus, director of the Center for Climate Research at UW-Madison, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” He added it was also among the 10 driest, with data going back to the 1890s.
Menzie Chinn, a macroeconomist at UW-Madison, said some of the government support to consumers during the pandemic — by both the Trump and Biden administrations — coupled with jammed up supply chains when the American economy reopened helped contribute to inflation.
Earlier this year, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency tightened air quality regulations across the United States.
University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental studies professor Tracey Holloway told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that these regulations are the tightest they’ve ever been. And that means our air is the cleanest it’s ever been.
“Our primary findings reveal structural details that allow us to better understand not only how the protein regulates assembly of viral particles, but also the coordination of proteins that enable the virus to be infectious,” study leader Elizabeth Wright of the University of Wisconsin–Madison said in a statement.
Wealthy donors have turned us into a DIY Society, where people are supposed to take care of themselves rather than be helped by government.
“If the Fifth Circuit accepts the argument that the RNC is making, this would have very broad implications, and could conceivably make it up to the Supreme Court,” said Daniel Tokaji, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Health care providers in Wisconsin require parental consent before gender-affirming care can proceed for children under the age of 18, and gender-affirming surgery for minors, especially genital surgery, is rare, according to Stephanie Budge, an associate professor in counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The appearance is damaging enough, said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, a media ethics expert and director of the journalism school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
“You’ve given the source a really strong incentive to give you not just information but whatever kind of information you want,” she said. “There is a very good reason we don’t pay sources for information. The reason is the source would feel they have to please us in some way.”
