The subsidy hasn’t been paid since February 2007, but it might pay out this month, said Ed Jesse, dairy economist at UW-Madison. That’s because the new version of the subsidy approved in May takes into account recent higher costs of cattle feed to allow for farmers’ expenses for the first time, making it more likely to pay out.
Many communities are poorly equipped to analyze proposals, said Matthew Mayrl, who in December 2006 penned a 27-page report on TIF practices in the state for UW-Madison’s Center on Wisconsin Strategy.
The classic three-legged stool approach to retirement security of employer pension, Social Security and personal savings is looking wobblier than ever these days.
Traditional pensions are fast disappearing, the long-term outlook for Social Security is cloudy and retirement accounts have been walloped by stocks’ steep decline. The turmoil in financial markets has wiped out some $2 trillion from Americans’ retirement accounts since the middle of 2007, the Congressional Budget Office said earlier this month – more than 20 percent of their value.
“This is certainly the most uncertain time in many decades for people approaching retirement,” said John Nelson, co-author of “What Color Is Your Parachute? For Retirement” with Richard Bolles of the best-selling “What Color Is Your Parachute” career guide.
Nelson, 49, a retirement researcher and lecturer in consumer science at the University of Wisconsin, created a retirement model that has been selected for the retirement readiness program for federal employees. His Retirement Well-Being Model is a research- and philosophically based tool designed to factor in health and happiness, as well as finances, as people plan and set goals for retirement.
Quoted: But one University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business professor said it’s questionable whether a stimulus package would have the desired effect.
“It’s not clear a stimulus package will work. I think what the fed chair is saying is if we want to avoid an unemployment rate of eight percent its worthwhile considering stimulus packages,” said Morris Davis.
Quoted: “Nobody wants to be the education president this year,” said Gloria Ladson-Billings, an education policy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Barry Orton, professor of telecommunications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Comcast is levying the second rate increase throughout the country. It will add a little revenue during an otherwise difficult year, he said.
Quoted: How significant is Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama? It probably won’t sway big numbers of voters, according to UW political scientist David Canon
The second Big Ten Battleground poll leading into the presidential election Nov. 5 will be unveiled Thursday at 3 p.m. on the Big Ten Network (Channel 73 on Charter Cable).
The poll, taken of 600 voters in each of eight states representing the Big Ten Conference, is co-directed by UW-Madison political scientist Charles Franklin, co-developer of Pollster.com, and Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project.
Quoted: John Coleman, political science department chairman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has analyzed McCainâ??s voting record using data compiled by Congressional Quarterly.
Quoted: Michael Rothschild, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison business professor who has extensively studied the issue.
Quoted: Kurt Squire of University of Wisconsin, co-chairman of annual academic conference called â??Game, Learning & Society,â? said the project as described â??is really exciting because itâ??s taking a ubiquitous platform (cell phones) and trying to work in such a unique environment. There havenâ??t been any major successes that Iâ??m aware of, but this kind of application and deployment is really smart and could be a huge success.â?
Quoted: Brent Hueth, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Cooperatives.
Quoted: Dr. Lucille Marchand, the clinical director of integrative oncology services at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, helped Frisch make some important health decisions.
Quoted: Even though Obama has a lead in the polls, Wisconsin isn’t a runaway Democratic state, said Charles Franklin, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-developer of pollster.com.
Quoted: Voter turnout is by far the lowest among the youngest age group, which includes people between 18 and 24 years old, said Charles Franklin, a professor of political science at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the co-developer of Pollster.com, a Web site that offers statistics and commentary about the upcoming election.
A sense of cautious optimism filled the air Tuesday as the fourth annual World Stem Cell Summit drew to a close in Madisonâ??s Alliant Energy Center.
After two days of doctors, patients, advocates, company representatives and lawyers giving talks and hosting panels, almost everyone came away with a renewed sense of wonder at the promise stem cells hold for humanity. But they were also reminded of the obstacles left in the way of fulfilling that promise.
Humankind often looks to the past to understand the future. We look at our own history as a people, using social, political, economic, religious, ethnic and scientific scopes. We look at the history of the biological world, with all of the different organisms that inhabit planet Earth. And we look at the history of the Earth itself, with all of the geological and physical properties that allow for life to occur.
Quoted: Folklorist James P. Leary, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Quoted: UW-Madison political scientist Charles Franklin.
Quoted: Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor who studies voter turnout, said Obama is trying to capitalize on recent polls that show him ahead of McCain by as many as 17 percentage points in Wisconsin and lock in those votes before they have a chance to slip away.
Quoted: Jonathan Temte – a family-medicine doctor at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which made the new recommendation – said immunizing even 40 to 50 percent of children could have “very dramatic effects” on flu-transmission rates.
Quoted: A sour public mood is typical late in presidential campaigns as both sides’ attacks accumulate, said University of Wisconsin political scientist and polling authority Charles Franklin. This year’s disenchantment is probably magnified by worries about how the candidates would handle the economy, he said
Quoted: “Presidential campaigns are about making tough decisions with limited resources,” said University of Wisconsin political scientist Ken Goldstein, who tracks presidential campaign spending on television. “Obama doesn’t need to make tough decisions.”
Quoted: “Ten of the 15 states where both candidates are advertising were won by Bush in the 2004 election,” said University of Wisconsin professor Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project. “The campaign is being played on the Republican side of the field this year.”
Quoted: “These are absolutely astronomical numbers,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Never before have the Democrats been so flush with funds.”
Quoted: â??This is uncharted territory,â? said Kenneth M. Goldstein, the director of the Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin. â??Weâ??ve certainly seen heavy advertising battles before. But weâ??ve never seen in a presidential race one side having such a lopsided advantage.â?
Quoted: â??The bottom line is, in the last two presidential elections, the voter percentages barely moved over the last three weeks,â? said Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political scientist and co-founder of the Web site Pollster.com. â??Thatâ??s very bad news for John McCain.â?
Quoted: David Mladenoff, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of forest ecology, has done computer modeling for the past six years to see how northern Wisconsin forests might change under different climates.
Quoted: â??What you see is itâ??s perfectly possible to hold a negative view of at least one aspect of African-Americans and yet simultaneously prefer Obama,â? said Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. â??Racial feelings are not as cut and dried â?? not as black and white â?? as people often say.â?
Quoted: Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, calculated that 47 per cent of Mr McCain’s advertisements since June had been negative, as had 35 per cent of Mr Obama’s messages.
Quoted: Barry Orton, a professor of telecommunications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said if the TRA were to grant AT&T’s petition, prices for local phone service would go up.
Quoted: Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said third-party ad campaigns can have an effect on voters.
Quoted: Palin is an easy target for some of these efforts, given some of the gaffes she produced early on in her candidacy, said Dietram Scheufele, professor of life sciences communication, journalism and mass communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the American Political Science Association.
With only 16 days until the presidential election, many political analysts are polling and pooling information to predict a probable outcome.
On Friday morning, political science professors Christopher Wlezien and Charles Franklin, from Temple University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gave a seminar in DuSable Hall on political forecasting.
When the candidates spared on the issue of negative campaign ads during Wednesday night’s debate, it was University of Wisconsin research that was cited. Barry Burden is a professor of Political Science at U-W and a member of the Wisconsin Advertising Project. Wisc Ads tracks political ads in over 100 television markets. (Third item, audio.)
Quoted: University of Wisconsin political scientist and polling authority Charles Franklin.
….UW professor Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, the UW project that since 1998 has undertaken research initiatives to document how candidates, political parties and special interest groups communicate with voters, says:
“Analysis from the Wisconsin Advertising Project of Sen. John McCain’s advertising for the week of September 28 to October 4 shows, in fact, that all McCain campaign advertising did have significant negative content…”
In response to dueling claims in the presidential debate over which side has been more negative on TV, the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has weighed in with a reality check.
“Despite his past, most would describe his educational research as pretty mainstream,” Simone Schweber, a UW-Madison education professor, said of Ayers, now a University of Illinois-Chicago education professor.
Quoted: Pam Oliver, a UW-Madison professor of sociology who has long studied the racial disparity in Wisconsin’s criminal justice system.
Q: How do the Chinese alphabetize?
A: The Chinese don’t have anything resembling the Roman alphabet of European languages; instead, their language has been written for centuries in symbols known as Chinese characters.
Man-made reservoirs are contributing to the spread of non-native species in Wisconsin lakes, a study has found.
In a comparison of natural lakes and reservoirs created by damming rivers, the reservoirs were up to 300 times more likely than lakes to harbor invasive aquatic species, according to the study published in September in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Quoted: Professor Jake Vander Zanden of the UW-Madison Center for Limnology
College students become increasingly liberal within their first three years of college, according to a recent study.
The presidential campaign is taking on a growing role in Wisconsin classrooms this fall, as teachers find ways to interest young students in elections while leading older students through potentially divisive discussions of issues such as abortion, the Iraq war and immigration.
“We want kids to talk about it better than adults do, actually,” said Diana Hess, an associate education professor at UW-Madison who organized a recent workshop attended by more than 180 classroom and student teachers from 30 school districts.
Quoted: “The house is like a Honda Accord â?? it deteriorates over time. It’s the land that appreciates,” says Morris Davis, a real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin who has studied land values. During the boom home builders and speculators spent lavishly to accumulate land.
Quoted: “The same factors that are driving non-Latino voters to favor the Democrat right now are driving Latinos in the same way,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Charles Franklin.
Quoted: This was McCain’s big chance to get back in the presidential contest, and it was important for him to come across as a leader, as assertive and someone on the offensive â?? all of which he did, said Dietram Scheufele, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a professor of political science and polling expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says these voters are probably in the same boat they were before the third and final showdown between the senior Arizona senator and the Illinois senator.
Noted: Mr. McCain is currently running all negative ads, according to a study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But he has run a number of positive ads during the campaign.
Quoted: Katherine Cramer Walsh, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of â??Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life.â?
Almost half of Wisconsin’s minority working families are not earning enough to meet their basic needs, according to a new national report.
Overall, 24 percent of working families in Wisconsin were identified as low-income. But among minority working families, that number was nearly double at 47 percent.
“The national economic crisis is not just a problem for Wall Street, it is a problem for Wisconsin’s hard working families,” said Laura Dresser, associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at UW-Madison.
Quoted: UW-Madison comparative biologist Hannah Carey.
Quoted: Jim Seward, UW-Madison School of Business finance professor.
The 2000 US presidential election highlighted one of the most unusual aspects of American politics: the fact that the president is selected, not by popular vote, but via a complicated 18th-century formula known as the Electoral College.
In an interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Professor Franklin explains how the Electoral College works:
Quoted: With three weeks left to the election, the chances of a dramatic shift are slimmer â?? but that doesn’t mean McCain can’t regain some of the ground he appears to have lost, said Charles Franklin, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Maggie Hawkins, a UW-Madison professor of education who specializes in bilingual education.
“The program at Verona is a model program,” Hawkins said. “The universities know it, the state knows it. It has a lot of eyes on it right now looking at the process that you’re going through.”
Quoted: “You can already observe that people do feel the effects of (a plant closure), even when it’s projected a year off,” said Laura Dresser, labor economist at UW-Madison’s Center on Wisconsin Strategy. “That already changes behavior.”
Quoted: In the meantime, modern technology, and the skills it fosters, is evolving even faster than we are. There’s no telling whether future iterations of computer games, online communities and the like will require more or less of the traditional social skills and learning strategies that we’ve spent so many eons cultivating. “Too many people write about this as if kids are in one country and adults are in another,” says James Gee, a linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What the future brain will look like is still anybody’s guess.
Quoted: The survey released by Quinnipiac University has Barack Obama with a 17-point lead over John McCain in Wisconsin. However, UW-Madison political scientist Ken Mayer says we shouldn’t count McCain out just yet with three weeks to go before Election Day. Mayer says something can always change before then.
