The EPA uses higher dollar amounts for deaths in higher-income countries and lower dollar amounts for deaths in lower-income countries. Or, as Paul Kelleher, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, puts it…PAUL KELLEHER: The badness of a death from climate change in India is treated as not as bad as exactly the same death if it happened at exactly the same time in the United States.
“Forgiveness is a special kind of moral virtue that always and without exception occurs when the other person has been unfair to you,” professor of education psychology at the University of Wisconsin Robert Enright tells Vox. “When that person is unfair to you, and you willingly choose to forgive — it’s not forced upon you — you are basically good to the one who was not good to you. You’re deliberately trying to get rid of the resentment and offer goodness of some kind: respect, kindness, anything that is good for the other person.”
“There’s a kind of prima facie appearance of: ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours,’” said Yaron Nili, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in corporate and securities law.
“It’s very odd,” said Hillary Dugan, who studies lake dynamics at the Center for Limnology at UW-Madison, after viewing satellite images of the open area.
“So much of our sense of identity is caught up in the stuff that we could afford to buy,” UW Madison Clinical Professor of Consumer Science Christine Whelan said.
Article 51 cannot credibly apply to Russia’s actions against Ukraine because Ukraine did not carry out an “armed attack,” Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek.
Robert Yablon, a professor and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said Protasiewicz’s comments reflect a campaign practice utilized by Supreme Court candidates in past races and have so far not crossed a legal line.
So why didn’t they report what they knew? McGarr, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks it’s because the people who covered Washington for the wire services and the major dailies had an ideology.
“So literally I could just buy health and wellness,” explained Christine Whalen, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin. “And that sounds very enticing.”
When Biden’s Title IX proposals go into effect, they will “have the force of law behind them, more so than just the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter the Obama administration issued,” said Suzanne Eckes, a former lawyer and schoolteacher, and now a professor of education law, policy, and practice at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The current tension between state laws and some Islamic beliefs may be setting the stage for further legal battles over abortion. Asifa Quraishi-Landes, an Islamic and constitutional law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that abortion bans tread on Muslims’ First Amendment rights.
“There are people who say we shouldn’t touch nature, that we shouldn’t alter anything. But really, there are no pristine natural habitats left,” said Tony Goldberg, a disease ecologist and veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who supports vaccinating wildlife when it’s safe and practical. “People are waking up to the magnitude of the problem and realizing they have to do something.”
While the difference was offset in some years with aid that did not apply to the revenue limit, public school advocate and former University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education dean Julie Underwood said numbers like that justify a major increase in budgets ahead.
She characterized the state of education funding in Wisconsin as “really abysmal,” suggesting that the state is “so far behind” where it should be given the increasing costs of the past decade. “We need a ladder up to where we should have been,” Underwood said.
Christy Remucal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UW-Madison, said addressing PFAS can be “very tricky.” While the chemicals can be tested for and identified, there is not yet a way to conduct large-scale removal and destruction of the contaminant.
That’s Dr. Yi Fuxian. He’s a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And in the last few years, he’s become kind of a demography whistleblower. He believes China’s own data shows the population actually started shrinking in 2018 and that the state willfully inflated its numbers by more than 100 million people.
A pair of longtime tuba players and educators answer a WHYsconsin question about the prominence of the lowest brass instrument both around Wisconsin, and specifically in the University of Wisconsin Marching Band.
Quoted: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center are creating carbon-neutral fuels they hope to power the transportation sector through deconstructed, nonfood plant materials.
“We are producing the basic science knowledge on campus to generate the fuels and chemicals that will allow us to have a decarbonized economy and create environmental and economic benefits for the people of Wisconsin and around the United States,” said Tim Donohue, principal investigator and director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
Quoted: “The election is primarily an opportunity for liberals and a risk for conservatives,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Referendums are increasingly being used by both political parties, particularly with non-partisan spring elections, which sneak up on people after the holidays and don’t typically generate great voter turnout, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“These elections just don’t generate the same level of media coverage or public discussion so these gimmicks are one way to get the attention of the voter,” Burden said. “The effect on overall turnout probably won’t be great, but in Wisconsin, most people assume elections are going to be close, so even a change in the balance of things by a percentage point or two could tip the race and tip the balance of the Supreme Court itself.”
Article co-authored by Tessa Conroy, associate professor in the Agriculture and Applied Economics, College of Agricultural & Life Sciences.
That’s not such a bad thing, said Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin. “To the extent that there’s still many job openings relative to people willing to take those jobs, then we do want to see some reduction in demand for labor,” he said.
Yi Fuxian, an obstetrics and gynaecology researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on China’s population changes, said the marriage requirement related to the previous birth limits, ensuring that there was only one child (or later, two or three children) born to one man and woman.
Quoted: At the 2023 Wisconsin Agricultural Outlook Forum this week, Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said part of the decline is likely from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s move to stop past-due debt collections and farm foreclosures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Quoted: Steven Deller, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said U.S. and global economic activity is expected to decline in 2023. Deller cited the Wall Street Journal’s Monthly Survey of Economic Forecasters, which averages 68 economic forecasts from individuals, organizations and universities, in a recent presentation.
“There’s pretty much consensus that we’re going to go into a slowdown, and that, if we go into a recession, it is going to be a very mild recession,” he said. “There’s actually a significant number of economists that are actually saying, ‘No, we’re not going to go into a recession. We’re going to go into a serious slowdown.'”
Noted: The term was coined by Lisa Ellinger, the outreach director at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as we debriefed our first Main Street Agenda event in September. During that town hall, our panelists were crowded around a table sitting on stiff, uncomfortable plastic chairs. The set-up wasn’t exactly conducive to our goal of having relaxed conversations where people felt comfortable sitting talking about complex and often deeply held convictions about democracy, inflation or climate change.
Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that Baerbock’s use of the term “war” was likely more figurative than literal, shaped by the emotional atmosphere at the Council of Europe.
The statements Protasiewicz made about maps and abortion do not appear to violate the ban on making pledges on issues likely to come before the court, said UW-Madison Law School associate professor Robert Yablon.
“This rule prohibits judicial candidates from promising to rule in particular ways on particular legal questions, but it does not bar them from sharing their values and opinions,” he said.
In an unassuming building off of West Johnson Street, sits the remains of around 750,000 animal specimens for scientific research in the UW Zoological Museum. One of five museum collections on the UW Madison campus, the collection provides hands-on research material for universities across the country.
Noted: In a study published in the journal Ecosphere in December, Alex Latzka, a fisheries biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and Bryan Maitland, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Aquatic Sciences Center, compared annual brook and brown trout population numbers over nearly three decades with climate and weather data from the streams the trout swam in.
In her groundbreaking study of Wisconsin voters, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, prompted a surge of interest in this declining segment of the electorate. She summed up the basis for the discontent among these voters in a single sentence: “First, a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, second, a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources, and third a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”
“It’s kind of a mess, even in the absence of climate change,” said Daniel Wright, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin. Wright helped Madison adopt climate-conscious design guidelines and works with the magically named U.S. Office of Water Prediction. “Almost all of [the models] assume that data varies from year to year, but underlying drivers are not changing over time. Those assumptions just don’t hold.”
And while density and access to public transit are major factors, so is wealth, according to Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin. Her research focuses on the role of technology in addressing the threat of climate change. “It’s not surprising that, all else equal, emissions are higher in more affluent and less densely populated areas, but these averages can also mask a lot of variability,” Edwards said. “Two households in the same neighborhood could have very different emissions.”
“Very intense winter storms can trigger the rare phenomenon of thundersnow,” says Michael Notaro, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Thundersnow events usually bring infrequent lightning flashes and quieter thunder as the heavy snowfall muffles the sound.”
Snapshot Wisconsin has collected more than 2 million images caught on motion-sensor trail cameras. Researchers have looked at many of the photos and found further evidence of animals changing their behavior due to the presence of humans and loss of habitat.
Interview with associate professor Benjamin Zuckerberg, and Jonathan Pauli, a professor of wildlife ecology, both in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology.
Noted: Of the last 25 years, 64% had below-average ice, said Michael Notaro, the director of the Center on Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The steepest declines have been in the north, including Lake Superior, northern Lake Michigan and Huron, and in nearshore areas.
Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that it’s unlikely the mobilized soldiers in question expected to remain in “territorial defense.”
“India is the biggest winner,” tweeted Yi Fuxian, who studies Chinese demographics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Chicken flocks are still down 5% to 6%, said Lou Arrington, an emeritus professor of poultry sciences at University of Wisconsin-Extension who works with the Wisconsin Poultry & Egg Association. That may not seem a lot, but it has an outsized impact because demand for eggs is “inelastic” — it doesn’t vary much as prices rise or fall, he said. Bakeries and other food producers’ need for eggs hasn’t changed, and consumers have sucked it up and continue to pay prices that may make them gasp, Arrington said.
“I don’t think the individual producer has a lot to say about it,” he said of the nationwide forces that have driven up prices.
Alvin Thomas, an assistant professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, also emphasized the importance of talking about your emotions as a parent. This approach prevents your children from making up anxiety-based stories to explain why the adults around them are behaving differently.
“It is OK, for instance, to say to your child that dad is feeling a little sad or a little frustrated,” he explained. “It expands the child’s emotional vocabulary, teaches them to talk through their emotions, and models for them how to do this. Then you could go on to give age-appropriate reasoning. Dad is feeling frustrated because dad was really hoping for something, but it did not happen.”
“Sometimes it’s really counterintuitive,” said Andrea Hicks, an environmental engineering expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She conducted a similar analysis comparing different brewing methods, and also found pods had less environmental impact than the conventional drip filter method, and in some cases were better than using a French press.
“Often people assume that something reusable is always better, and sometimes it is,” Hicks said. “But often people really don’t think about the human behavior.”
These kinds of “pro-negativity” behaviors, whether ironic or not, have been studied by scholars for decades, notably by University of Wisconsin communications professor Jonathan Gray, who in 2003 argued for the inclusion of “anti-fans” within audience studies, or people who actively dislike specific texts. Anti-fans, many scholars have suggested, subvert the traditional mode of media consumption, wherein we’re supposed to accept and like the thing we’re watching. “As active, engaged viewers, we are not supposed to dislike, and we are meant to treat dislike with suspicion in others because liking has been characterized as a progressive effort to champion the underdog in popular media,” writes Anne Gilbert in the anthology Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age.
Allowing a judge to impose bail for reasons beyond ensuring a defendant would appear at their next court hearing would likely result in more poor people being incarcerated, the two legal experts, Jessa Nicholson Goetz, a criminal defense attorney with Nicholson Goetz & Otis in Madison, and University of Wisconsin Law School professor Cecelia Klingele, said.
Quoted: Dr. Daniel Jackson, a professor of pediatrics and medicine in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, helped conduct the study and he noted “pollution exposures” were the culprits in 30% of the asthmatic children tested.
“Ultimately, we’ve known for a long time that children in urban environments are more likely to have asthma attacks,” he said. “Clearly, the exposures there are quite different. (When) compared to other places in the country, there’s far more pollution associated with diesel and auto traffic.”
“People are getting PFAS from so many different places, from their diet and from water,” said Christy Remucal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin who researches forever chemicals but was not involved in the new study.
University of Wisconsin soil scientist Matt Ruark tells Brownfield the state-funded program helps farmers test different nitrogen use practices with less financial risk. “They’re going to cover the cost of time, of land, of yield loss, of soil testing, of you know, anything else that’s going to be connected with the project.”
Economist Paul Mitchell is with the University of Wisconsin. He tells Brownfield, “The earliest planting dates have become earlier now. They used to be April 26th for the whole state of Wisconsin. It’s now April 15th for the southern third, April 20th in the middle chunk, and then the very far north is actually April 30th.”
China’s population has begun to decline nine to 10 years earlier than Chinese officials predicted and the United Nation projected, said Yi Fuxian, a demographer and expert on Chinese population trends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That, combined with India’s growing population and a shift away from China due to geopolitical reasons, may help the South Asian country chip away at China’s dominance as the world’s factory. “A lot of production capacity will be moved to India,” Yi Fuxian, a scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Axios.
According to experts: Money tips for 2023 Christine Whelan, Clinical Professor of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shares ideas for approaching personal finance and family goals. Interview: AP
The best strategy is to always be preparing for recessions, says Cliff Robb, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies financial decision-making. Which means now is as good a time as any to get started.
We spoke with Ben Fisher, a professor at the University Of Wisconsin. He has researched security measures in schools.”You can spend some money and put in metal detectors, or put on a big show of having police dogs some in, but those aren’t the things that make schools safe,” believes Fisher.
The group (Farm Well Wisconsin), founded in 2020, is funded through a five-year grant associated with the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Through trainings, community members work on building empathetic listening skills, connecting people with resources and discussing issues related to farm culture.
Quoted: Andrew Stevens, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said this percentage has been fairly consistent over time and includes forestland, pasture and cropland.
“The analyses that have been done with the data that are currently available really show that foreign ownership of agricultural land in the United States is a pretty miniscule issue, if it’s an issue at all,” he said. “There are no systematic differences across communities with more or less foreign ownership. Land prices don’t seem to systematically differ.”
Noted: Controversy exploded in August, when the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a leading historian of the African diaspora at the University of Wisconsin, published a column in its magazine called “Is History History?,” which lamented a “trend toward presentism” and a troubling politicization of scholarship.
The study of pre-modern history, Sweet wrote, is shrinking, while scholars of all periods increasingly question whether work that doesn’t focus on “contemporary social justice issues” like race, gender and capitalism really matters. “The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media,” he argued, has encouraged “a predictable sameness” that misses the messiness and complexity of the past.
Quoted: Brad Tank, an investment management expert and University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus, thinks federal officials will be successful in limiting inflation in 2023.
Tank explained in a recent UW Now livestream, “Predictions for 2023,” that he expects inflation to remain above 4% up until the middle of 2023. The rate most likely wouldn’t hit 2% until 2024.
Quoted: For roughly a decade, professionals at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been researching the impacts certain psychedelics, including psilocybin, can have on the human brain.
“There are some really encouraging trends that have been noted and encouraging study results that have been published across the country,” said Dr. Chantelle Thomas, a researcher at UW’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. “A lot of people are not aware that this research has been happening for quite some time at the UW.”
There might be a new way to think of one particular species of invasive snail being found in Wisconsin’s water: as a part of a gourmet meal.
At least that’s the approach Minneapolis chef Yia Vang and Titus Sielheimer, a fisheries outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, made this summer, when they filmed themselves harvesting and cooking up Chinese mystery snails in northern Wisconsin.
Noted: Christensen said he chose to open a clinic in Rockford because it would provide a closer option for women in the Madison area than Chicago-area abortion clinics. Rockford is about an hour and a half south of Madison.
He said he also envisioned the yet-to-be-opened surgical clinic as a potential training location for OB-GYN residents in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. The Dobbs decision created new hurdles for OB/GYN residency programs across Wisconsin, because the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education requires them to teach abortion-related procedures or face losing accreditation.
Written by Matthew T. Hora, an associate professor of adult and higher education and co-director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
We talk with LaVar J Charleston, the University’s Chief Diversity Officer, about his job and efforts to promote equity and social justice. We also look at scholarship and service programs designed to increase diversity and foster equity.
