Category: UW Experts in the News

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.

University of Wisconsin economics professor Steven Deller agreed. “Florida is above the national average, but it’s not even close to the most expensive place to live,” he said.

“What’s nice is Mediterranean is relatively user friendly. How it’s structured is similar to the (U.S. Department of Agriculture) healthy eating plan,” Camila Martin, a nutritionist at University of Wisconsin Health in Madison, who wasn’t involved in the rankings, tells TODAY.com. “It’s very modifiable based off what people have access to even with limited resources.”

What’s the goal of this surgery? Ask your surgeon, “How is this surgery going to make things better for me?” said Margaret “Gretchen” Schwarze, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Will it extend your life by removing a fast-growing tumor? Will your quality of life improve by making it easier to walk? Will it prevent you from becoming disabled, akin to a hip replacement?

Weak ties often have different knowledge from those in our immediate social circle, said Stav Atir, an assistant professor of management at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Atir led a study in 2022 that suggested that people underestimate the potential for learning from these interactions. “In our data, we often see strangers giving each other recommendations such as a new restaurant to check out, a new band to listen to and even a potential place of employment,” she said.

“With what we know so far, XBB.1.5 has not acquired any new mutations in the viral protein targeted by Paxlovid. The susceptibility of XBB.1.5 against Paxlovid should not change given the current data,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Peter Halfmann, one of that study’s authors, told CBS News in an email.

Such a comparison is inappropriate because of turnout differences in both elections, Barry Burden, a politics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY in an email.

“Turnout of military and especially non-military voters is far higher in a presidential contest because of the intensity, visibility and national importance of a presidential election,” Burden said. “Military voters in particular tend to be less involved in non-presidential elections because their deployments take them away from the everyday news of state politics.”

Many companies still need to hold on to workers, said Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin.“I think you’d need a much higher ratio of layoffs to hiring in order to be alarmed.”

These firms “have an incentive to raise rents as quickly as they can so that they can get the next buyer to pay more,” said Michael Brennan, chairman of the Brennan Investment Group, a real estate firm, and director of the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Other owners, he said, are “not as maniacally focused on getting the last nickel as quickly as they can.”

“The main key, as in all parenting, is to know your kid,” says Marie-Louise Mares professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Some kids are pretty easily scared, others really love excitement, some adore anything to do with trucks, others are crazy about puppies.”

If traveling by vehicle, pack a winter survival kit, and in the event of getting stranded in the snow, stay with the vehicle. Laura Albert, an industrial engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies emergency response and preparedness, recommends packing such a kit with jumper cables, a small shovel, a flashlight, warm clothes, blankets, bottled water and nonperishable snacks, plus a bag of sand or cat litter to regain traction on snow or ice.

“You won’t see the like of this kind of a storm probably another time in the next 25 or so years,” Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells The Verge. “It’s really intense, and in some locations, the impacts will be extraordinary.”

Along the way, testimony provided by Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, a group that conducts exit polling, and Dr. Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, highlighted the use of polls and methodology, a key feature of elections that are sure to continue to be put under scrutiny in future cycles.

So how can we best navigate this icky viral chaos? I asked Elizabeth Stuart, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health professor, and James Conway, a physician specializing in pediatric infectious disease at the University of Wisconsin. Here’s their advice, edited for length and clarity.

But, some psychologists dislike the term. Robert Enright, Ph.D., an expert in forgiveness science and professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says “toxic forgiveness” is a “misunderstanding of what forgiving another person actually is.”

Leah Horowitz, a cultural geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, takes a different view. “It stops being persuasion and becomes manipulation when you’re offering someone something they don’t feel that they can refuse,” she said. This kind of process, Horowitz added, is shaped by massively unequal power dynamics between the corporations, local elites and villagers. In many cases, the latter are very poor and have not been empowered to make informed choices. Shukla, the Chhattisgarh-based activist, put it like this: “How can you even expect villagers to give a free and informed consent in such compromised situations?”