Category: UW Experts in the News

“Turnout is going to be quite uneven across the state, just depending on whether there’s something of interest that’s really got voters’ attention or not. That unevenness is probably going to determine whether these issues end up passing or not,” said Barry Buden, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center. “These are big choices made by a relatively small number of folks.”

Cary Bloodworth, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School professor, told Public Investigator that she hasn’t seen a blanket policy for juvenile records like this one before.

However, she said there are some advantages to such policies, like maintaining a minor’s privacy. The goal of the juvenile justice system is focused on rehabilitation, she said, rather than punishment.

State law provides an exception for news organizations that request law enforcement records about children and youth for “the purpose of reporting the news,” as long as they do not publish their identities.

Almost no one will cast a vote because of a celebrity endorsement alone, according to Michael Wagner, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But he said endorsements serve other purposes, like energizing blocks of voters, earning free media attention and shaping a narrative about the campaign.

“When the stories are about Kamala Harris being Brat and Tim Walz Midwestern dad memes, they aren’t about the things that candidates would rather not answer questions about on the campaign trail,” Wagner said.

When Tracey Holloway studied Madison’s air quality last year under a contract for Madison Gas and Electric, she walked away surprised that “transportation and coal-fired power plants weren’t a bigger part of the pie.”

Holloway is a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of energy analysis and policy, and a science advisor to Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway. The mayor announced the installation of the new monitors on July 22.

Allison Prasch, a political rhetoric scholar from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks Walz’s approach to policy might be refreshing for voters turned off by the extremes.

“Walz has an ability to speak to voters in such a way that it brings the focus back to what we might call kitchen table issues — cost of child care, grocery budget, thinking about health care — and I think that that has a way of connecting with voters who understandably are exhausted by this looming, never-ending cycle of existential crisis,” Prasch said.

“I think Democrats have had a messaging problem,” said UW-Madison political rhetoric scholar Allison Prasch. “There is this narrative that ‘we know what’s best for you,’ and if you vote for (former President) Donald Trump, you’re stupid or you don’t pay attention. And that’s just incorrect, and the more that you communicate that to voters, the more they won’t want to listen to you.”

Richard J. Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, notes that even modest amounts of meditation—under 10 hours of practice in beginners—can change brain plasticity. But he cautions against commercializing the jhanas prematurely. “People saying this benefits them is all well and good, but without real scientific evidence, we have no idea,” he says. “Anyone trying to monetize this should raise red flags.”

“The idea that we’re breaking heat records, having record floods — this is all consistent with what scientists have been projecting for decades. But the terminology is still what we used in the 1900s: ‘natural disasters,'” said Tracey Holloway, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a member of Science Moms. “We’re building terminology that captures the reality of what’s happening.”

Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Walz was “mostly likely to have a positive electoral impact in Wisconsin” out of the final handful of candidates Harris had considered. He said Walz “conveys more of a working-class background” that could appeal to rural voters around the Midwest.

“He is best positioned to relate to Wisconsin voters and will be a familiar figure to people who live in northwest Wisconsin and are within the Twin Cities media market,” said Burden, who is also director of UW’s Elections Research Center.

“There’s very little authority behind these positions,” said Richard C. Keller, a historian of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wrote a book about extreme heat in Europe. “They can issue recommendations, they can help establish policy, but they’re going to have a very hard time enforcing those policies.”

WRN’s Bob Hague spoke with University of Wisconsin Political Science Professor Yoshiko Herrera about the risks for Americans in Russia, and the complex negotiations leading the release of American and European hostages in exchange for Russian criminals.

Though Rust Belt states can be mapped out, Simeon Alder, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s not all about geography.

“It’s a set of industries that happened to be concentrated around the Great Lakes,” Alder said.

When opposing politicians discuss immigration and crime, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Michael T. Light said they often “talk past one another.”

In 1996, Congress added language to include the distribution of child pornography over the internet, not just the mail. This section is important to pay attention to, said Howard Schweber, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Let us assume, in the moment that Donald Trump wins reelection … a Trump Justice Department could choose to enforce the law and make it an actual crime to post on the internet any information about abortion,” Schweber said.

On a sunny fall morning, as he strolled to work along the Howard Temin Lakeshore Path near the Memorial Union, Jake Vander Zanden looked into the water and noticed something you don’t typically see in October: the beginnings of an algae bloom. The director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Limnology was both fascinated and concerned.

“That’s really unusual — even for Lake Mendota, which has a lot of algae blooms — to see significant blooms late in the season,” Vander Zanden says. “We’ve been seeing that more lately.”