“From my perspective, self experimentation is not fundamentally unethical,” said Alta Charo, a professor emerita of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It may be unwise. It may indeed be tainted by an unrealistic set of expectations. … But I don’t see it as fundamentally unethical.”
This is when schools are more likely to see departures from special education teachers, said Kimber Wilkinson, a special education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. New teachers often tell her about their concerns with morale and heavy workloads once they land a role at a school.
Barry Burden, who directs the UW-Madison’s Election Research Center, said Hovde’s decision to not yet concede represents a new but troublesome trend. “It’s been happening in the United States over the last few years, of candidates not conceding immediately or graciously as often as they did in the past,” Burden told the Wisconsin Examiner. Donald Trump’s refusal to concede his reelection loss in 2020 “provided a model for some candidates.”
An explicit concession “is one of the things that shows us that democracy is working,” according to University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Mike Wagner. “Democracy is for the losing side because they get a chance to try again in the next election, and admitting when you lose is a critical factor required for the maintenance of democracies.”
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison are gearing up to administer set levels of delta-8 and delta-9 THC to people in a pilot study, and place them in a driving simulator.
Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School, believes the second Trump administration is more prepared this time and will follow through on its policy promises. That means organizations like the legal clinic are readying themselves and their clients for what’s ahead.
“It is very terrifying, I think, for everybody involved in immigration and especially for some of the most vulnerable people in our country,” Barbato said. “It seems monumental right now, what we are preparing for.”
Some of the neuroscience underpinning Sold a Story was provided by Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (He did not respond to an interview request.) Since the series aired, he has welcomed the move away from Units of Study, but he has also warned that “none of the other major commercial curricula that are currently available were based on the relevant science from the ground up.”
Yi Fuxian, an obstetrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies demographics, cited the “barrel theory,” in which the capacity of a barrel is limited by its shortest plank, to explain the challenge facing Beijing.
After years of studying the deleterious effects of climate change on human health, a Wisconsin professor has come to view his work as less about devastation and more about hope.
“The health benefits of a low-carbon economy are so enormous.” Dr. Jonathan Patz recently told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”
UW-Madison Professor Emerita Karen Holden visited ‘The Larry Meiller Show’ to discuss the current and future solvency of the Social Security program.
Katherine Cramer’s influential book “The Politics of Resentment” was published in March 2016 — just eight months before Donald Trump won the presidential election for the first time and ushered in a new era of American politics.
The book got national attention for the way it homed in on the urban-rural divide. Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, based the book on years of having conversations with people across the state in cafes, pool halls and other community spaces.
Efforts to combat climate change and shift to renewable energy have accelerated under policies and regulations put in place by President Joe Biden’s administration. Even so, it hasn’t been enough to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, according to Greg Nemet, energy expert and public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We’re on track, but we need to really start pushing harder to get the adoption of electric vehicles, solar panels, wind power, heat pumps and all those things at a faster rate,” Nemet said. “I think what we’re looking at now is probably almost definitely slowing down.”
Morgan Edwards, assistant professor of public affairs at UW-Madison, said the slowing of emissions reductions may not be immediately evident in Wisconsin as much as they will in the long run. “We’re locking in long-term climate impacts that we’re going to see for decades to come,” Edwards said. “That’s things like more extreme weather events, warmer winters, more irregular farming seasons, which is a big deal across the country, but (also) in this state where we have a lot of agriculture.”
Stuart Craig, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business who studies health care spending, said hospital’s operating margins are also “a function of their choices.” He points out that most hospitals are nonprofit entities, so they should be motivated to keep patient costs as low as possible and invest any profit back into their facilities.
“Hospitals will often defend high commercial (insurance) reimbursement rates by saying, ‘Well, we lose money on all these Medicare patients,’” Craig said. “But those are choices that they’re making to set their cost structure. Like, if you looked at hospitals that operate in markets that are mostly Medicare patients, they just set a lower cost structure and stay open.”
Kaul’s office also argues the pre-Civil War-era law should not be in effect because it contradicts subsequent state laws that were passed to regulate abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade.
That argument relies on the legal principle of “implied repeal,” said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “This is something that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has explained in prior cases,” Godar said. “An older law becomes unenforceable if there are newer laws that directly conflict with it.”
That’s an unusually rapid shift, said Shaun Marcott, an Earth scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved in the research. “They’re fast enough to make us puzzle about what’s going on.”
Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (archived here), agreed the posts are incorrect while noting reliably Republican states tend to have stricter requirements.
“The Senate candidates are often well known to voters” because they run intense campaigns with a flood of advertisements, said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And because turnout was similar for the presidential and the Senate races in most states, he argued, it is likely that some people are still splitting their ticket between the two parties.“So voters in some places are making real distinctions to say this is not somebody who is aligned with Trump or represents him in the same way, or this is someone who has the state’s interest in mind in a way that other candidates don’t,” he said. “And that really is a different story from one state to the next.”
But some people are biased against female presidential candidates. In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man.
An expert says the new, slimmer majority could create new possibilities for speaker. “With the narrower majority, it’s possible that someone else could throw their hat in the ring, and given how it’s been more difficult for Republicans to enact their legislative agenda under Governor Evers, it may be that Republicans are looking for a change,” said UW-Madison Journalism Professor Mike Wagner.
Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said her direct appeals to working-class voters may not have made much of a difference given the national political climate.
“Anxiety is a natural response to uncertainty,” said Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds. “The most important thing for people to recognize is that whatever anxiety they’re feeling, there’s probably, at least, 150 million other people who are feeling anxiety in a very similar way.”
Milwaukee’s votes can take longer to count for several reasons, Barry Burden, Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center, said.
Another myth is that Social Security won’t be there for younger workers. J. Michael Collins, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs and the leader of the UW Retirement and Disability Research Consortium, said he hears that often from his students at UW.
In the worst case scenario, however, the shortfall would cut benefits to 72 cents on the dollar, he said.
“There’s an undercount in the Latinx population, and, in particular, the undocumented population,” said Armando Ibarra, a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers. “This population of folks is hesitant to interact with folks that represent the federal government or the state government, because of their precarious immigration status.”
“This fall [in precipitation] has been a prime example of flash drought across parts of the U.S.,” Jason Otkin, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in a NASA Earth Observatory post. “These events can take people by surprise because you can quickly go from being drought-free to having severe drought conditions.”
“It can take a few days and sometimes more,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It create “a lot of suspicion and misinformation about what’s happening,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor who runs an elections center on campus. “There were a lot of allegations in 2020 about votes being dumped or something happening maliciously in the middle of the night because it did happen in the middle of the night. That’s when election officials finished their work. It’s really just a product of the state law that requires that they can’t start counting until Election Day.”
Barry Burden, Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center, said, “typically 2 to 2 ½ hours after polls close, we start to get a pretty good picture of the state,” but he noted Milwaukee takes longer.”It’s the biggest city, and it has the most ballots, and it also counts absentee ballots at a central location,” Burden said. “That’ll be after midnight, 1 (a.m.) or 2 a.m.”
Attorney Bryna Godar of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Democracy Research Initiative told WPR the lawsuits are an example of how litigation is focusing more on “those granular issues of election administration.” She said the timing of the suits raises questions about whether attorneys are hoping to preserve legal claims that can be used to challenge Wisconsin’s results depending on who wins.
While the different outbreaks have come in rapid succession, the number of illnesses being reported isn’t out of the ordinary, according to Kathleen Glass, associate director of the Food Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It just happens to be the luck of the draw that we’re seeing it in Wisconsin,” Glass said. “They are also very high profile because they have affected a number of people.”
Many people are disenchanted with how bitter and divisive American politics has become since 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president. But for most college students today, that’s all they’ve ever known, said Allison Prasch, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who teaches political rhetoric.
Yet the fact that it exists in the animal kingdom surely suggests that there’s some evolutionary benefit to it, which is the case Robert Enright, a psychologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, makes: particularly among athletes, short-term grudges have an observable motivational effect.
Yes, but not in the same way that perishable items such as eggs, chicken and produce do. When candy goes bad, it’s “almost always a physical (drying out) or chemical (lipid oxidation, flavor change) change and not microbial,” Richard W. Hartel, a food science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says.
“There is this kind of global innovation system that I think has been one of the primary reasons why we’ve had this miracle of the cost of solar falling so much,” said Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who wrote a book on the solar supply chain. “To put up walls and to put up barriers, I think we’re going to squander some of that.”
“Election Day is just the end of voting now,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “We have many election days and it’s just the final day on which ballots can be cast.”
Dan Tokaji, dean and professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, talked about the voting lawsuits that have been filed across the country ahead of Election Day and the legal battle that’s expected to follow.
Mike Wagner, a journalism professor and political science expert at UW- Madison, believes celebrity influence can amplify engagement, but it doesn’t necessarily determine voting behavior. “Young voters are particularly receptive to ideas when they’re communicated in a relatable way, and that’s what these celebrities are doing,” said Wagner. “[Students] feel more connected to the election process because they’re supported by people whom they may value the most.”
President Donald Trump cast doubt on the integrity of votes cast and returned through drop boxes. It’s a stance that lacks proof, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Emeritus Howard Schweber.
“There is no evidence that anyone has ever tried to stuff drop boxes with fake ballots or multiple ballots or noncitizens’ ballots, and there’s no evidence that improper ballots that get into drop boxes end up being counted as votes,” Schweber said.
Over the weekend, a comedian at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden made racist remarks about Puerto Ricans. Aurora Santiago Ortiz, a UW-Madison professor, discusses Puerto Ricans’ significance in Wisconsin and the U.S. to offer critical context for this political moment.
That election had an unusually high number of absentee ballots because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Milwaukee’s results came out after midnight in 2018 and 2022, too, said Barry Burden, who directs the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“So it’s not just tied to COVID — it’s really the process that’s used in our state and in Milwaukee causes that to happen,” he said. “There’s nothing illegal about it. There’s nothing unexpected about it. Actually, we all know this is going to happen, but nonetheless, there are people who are skeptical about it, and in some cases, will intentionally spread disinformation about it, but it’s just part of the process.”
Barry Burden, professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it is difficult to compare the numbers to the past two presidential elections because of the pandemic and the longer period allowed for early in-person voting in 2016. However, he said the interest in early in-person voting appears widespread and that there is “clearly a new desire among Wisconsin voters to cast their ballots in person early this year.”
“It is happening at higher rates in communities of different sizes and with different partisan tendencies,” he said in an email.
Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center, called the spending “astounding.”
“I think the competitiveness of the state legislature this year is the main driver. This is the first time in 14 years that the Assembly has truly been up for grabs between the two parties,” he said. “And there’s no shortage of people who want to give money to try to flip it in their direction.”
For many veterans, higher education can seem out of reach. However, a special program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is helping change that narrative.
Written by Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics in UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and Department of Economics, and Mark Copelovitch, a professor in UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and Department of Political Science.
Leslie Bow, a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that while many Asian and Asian American women see Hello Kitty as a symbol of defiance, the protective, caretaking instinct aroused by “kawaii” isn’t without power.
“These things can often appear to be disconnected,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin. “It wouldn’t be at all surprising for people to not make a strong link between gerrymandering and the success of the Cleveland Browns.”
New research has found that communities with more women-owned or -operated farms have higher rates of business creation, lower poverty rates and a longer average life expectancy.
University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Steven Deller is a co-author of the research first published in January. Deller and colleagues argue that the reduction in rural poverty is particularly important.
Ebbing price growth might seem novel, but it’s not surprising. Mark Eppli, director of the real estate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, identified three main reasons price hikes are cooling. One is the supply of homes for sale.
According to UW Madison Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Department Professor Jonathan Martin, September to October of 2024 is the second warmest it’s been since 1938. Martin studies the world’s air flow and said climate change is partially caused by warm winds eroding ice in the north and causes warmer temperatures in Wisconsin.
”It’s definitely climate change,” Martin said. ”The problem is you don’t want to keep accumulating these winds all in one direction, that is warmer, warmer and causing problems around the globe. I think we’re in that situation.”
Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, a librarian at UW-Madison’s Ebling Library for Health Services, has culled nearly 30,000 such ads from 1923 to 2007 into the digital Health Advertisements Database from Ebling Sources, or HADES. Former colleague Amanda Lambert and several students helped her compile the database, which continues to grow.
“Celebrity endorsements are not likely to literally change somebody’s mind, but they are likely to get people to pause and say, ‘should I pay attention to this person?’ ‘Can I trust this person in the way that I trust and or admire the celebrity that I’m thinking about?’ And that just gives people another opportunity to find a way into political participation,” said UW Professor Mike Wagner.
“This is a really interesting phenomenon,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, adding that he had not heard of such initiatives elsewhere. He noted similar confusion among students at UW-Madison, where the early voting site is not always the same as the Election Day polling place.
“It’s really 51 separate elections,” Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ABC News. “Every state and the District of Columbia has its own rules for running the election. Then each state awards its electors separately, and it’s up to candidates to win a majority of those electors to be elected president.”
I drove south out of Madison, Wisconsin, along solitary rural roads until I arrived at a secluded home set amid scattered forest and open prairie. Waiting inside for me were two men: Michael Samuel, a retired professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Bryan Richards, the emerging-disease coordinator at the US Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center.
Experts at UW Health are recommending parents and caregivers use Halloween as an opportunity to talk with kids about sugar intake, healthy eating habits and good balances.
It is not uncommon for kids to come home with a big bag full of candy. Camila Martin, a clinical pediatric nutritionist with UW Health Kids, says to help kids plan to have some balance when eating candy.
“If they were registered, Wisconsin would be a no-contest,” said Ben Marquez, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist studying Latino political organization and behavior. “Kamala Harris wouldn’t even have to come here to win. They’d just go out and vote two-to-one for her, and she’d take the state.”
Wisconsin sees dozens of species of small beetles this time of year, including ladybugs, but one is particularly prevalent: the multicolored Asian lady beetle, according to P.J. Liesch, director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab.
“The [Asian lady beetles] are the ones that folks are really seeing a lot of at the moment,” Liesch said. “Those particularly beetles are very active, flying around and coming to structures because they’re looking for sheltered wintering spots.”
Achieving the right balance of crunchy and chewy in nonchocolate candy is tricky because of “moisture migration,” in which water moves between components and can affect the product’s quality, said Rich Hartel, a University of Wisconsin-Madison food scientist.
If Varsity Blues accomplished anything, it affirmed the value of regular colleges, said Nick Hillman, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most students, he said, don’t attend universities with single-digit acceptance rates accused of taking bribes. Two-thirds of undergraduates attend college within 50 miles of home, according to the Institute for College Access & Success. “There’s been this acknowledgment over the last few years that geography really matters,” Hillman said. “The majority of students don’t attend places like USC or the Ivy League.”
“It’s kind of a political joke amongst pundits that it all comes down to Waukesha County, Wisconsin,” Mike Wagner, a professor who focuses on political communication and public opinion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, previously told the Washington Examiner. “There is some truth to that — the turnout is really important for Republicans there. It’s really a place that they need.”
