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Scheufele: What does research say about how to effectively communicate about science?

The Conversation

Truth seems to be an increasingly flexible concept in politics. At least that’s the impression the Oxford English Dictionary gave recently, as it declared “post-truth” the 2016 Word of the Year. What happens when decisions are based on misleading or blatantly wrong information? The answer is quite simple – our airplanes would be less safe, our medical treatments less effective, our economy less competitive globally, and on and on.

Cats catch the flu from new strain of feline influenza

New York Post

An outbreak of flu among 13 cats at an uptown Manhattan animal shelter has veterinary experts across the country scratching their heads — because cats just don’t catch the flu.“ That’s the main question. Where is this flu coming from?” says Dr. Sandra Newbury, director of the Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Wisconsin.“This is something new,” she said.

Meet the woman who keeps Badgers basketball humming

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Madison – On Sept. 29, Kat Vosters had a nice dinner with her fiancé and her best friend at Gray’s Tied House in Verona, enjoying the best Buffalo chicken wrap in town and just a glass of water, as usual, because work could call at any minute.

Foot power

Isthmus

Associate Professor Xudong Wang holds a prototype of the researchers’ energy harvesting technology, which uses wood pulp and harnesses nano fibers. The technology could be incorporated into flooring and convert footsteps on the flooring into usable electricity.

Retrieving Short-Term Memories

The Scientist

Neuroscientists have long tried to uncover the neuronal connectivity and patterns of activity that explain human cognitive behaviors. The prevalent theory of working memory—using information stored in short-term memory to complete a task—is that the brain’s connections that code for the needed information must fire continuously. Now, in a paper published today (December 1) in Science, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their colleagues provide evidence for a different theory, in which information can be stored in working memory in an inactive neuronal state.

The Trump voters you don’t know

Christian Science Monitor

Noted: The promise to “Make America Great Again” “appeals to a time when white working-class men had a higher status in society than they do now, and race is in there,” says Katherine Cramer, who has spent the past nine years talking with rural Wisconsin voters for her book, “The Politics of Resentment.”

Deserving families go on shopping spree

NBC-15

The holidays are just around the corner and for some families, gift giving may not be possible.That’s why Nigel Hayes, UW-Madison student athlete and the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County teamed up to help local families by taking them on a shopping spree. Life hasn’t been exactly easy for the Schultz and Keaton families.

Cramer: For years, I’ve been watching anti-elite fury build in Wisconsin. Then came Trump.

Vox

Something extraordinary happened in rural America in the 2016 election. Donald Trump appealed to folks in rural communities in an unprecedented way — yet polls failed to capture the depth of support for him in such places. Many pundits have since taken stabs at explaining the problem, yet little of the commentary is rooted in actual research.

Trump’s Victory and the Politics of Resentment

Scientific American

Katherine J. Cramer is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she heads the Morgridge Center for Public Service. Her work focuses on the way people in the U.S. make sense of politics and their place in it. Cramer’s methodology is unusual and very direct. Instead of relying polls and survey data, she drops in on informal gatherings in rural areas—coffee shops, gas stations—and listens in on what people say to their neighbors and friends. It is a method that likely gets at psychological and social truths missed by pollsters.

Why Do Raccoons Flourish As Urban Pests?

Wisconsin Public Radio

In Wisconsin, like most of the country, Raccoons are practically omnipresent. Their adaptability has allowed them to move from the country landscape as a wildlife creature to an urban life in cities and towns across the state. There are a few factors that make the raccoon especially adept at finding the food and shelter they need living among people, said University of Wisconsin-Madison professor David Drake.

Voting Early, and in Droves: Nearly 22 Million Ballots Are Already In

The New York Times

Quoted: According to Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, any increase or decrease in early voting between election cycles depends on three factors: whether the availability of early voting has changed, whether the state has become more competitive, and what the campaigns have done to promote early voting.

Using wood pulp and footsteps, a professor just found a new source of renewable energy

Digital Trends

While thousands of people the world over continue to go solar to generate alternative energy, a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison just made a major breakthrough on a completely unique new conductive material: wood pulp. While the mention of wood pulp mention leave many scratching their head, the lab found a way to manufacture floorboards out of the commonly wasted material, and did so in a manner that took advantage of its composition of cellulose nanofibers. In other words, the team of engineers managed to develop a flooring material capable of generating electricity by something as simple as a footstep.

Sims: ‘Bay’ imparted wisdom that shaped grandchildrens’ view of world

Madison Magazine

My grandmother, whom my family affectionately referred to as “Bay” because she was the youngest of her siblings, was one of the wisest people I’ve ever known—especially when you consider the fact that she only had an eighth-grade education. She would often tell me, “If you don’t stand for somethin’ you’ll fall for nothin’.”

Taking Gard Way a good route for Greg Gard

Madison Magazine

The Cobb Corn Roast Festival was winding down. The softball, volleyball and bean bag competitions were over. The Texas hold’em poker games, garden tours and 5K run had raised money for the local library. As locals gathered at the burger and brat stand and beer tent on that sunny August afternoon, excitement was in the air. The proud citizens of Cobb—population 458, in the rolling farmlands of southwestern Wisconsin—gathered to celebrate the town’s most famous son, University of Wisconsin men’s basketball coach Greg Gard.

‘Passing the Mic’ celebrates hip hop in Madison

WISC-TV 3

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives will host its annual Passing the Mic event this weekend that will celebrate the transformational potential of hip hop arts in the Madison community and on the UW-Madison campus. This is the 12th annual Passing the Mic event, which is one of the truly diverse, multicultural events that the city of Madison will see.

Even trust in fact-checking is polarized

Vox.com

Noted: But fact-checking itself can be an inherently controversial and “risky” form of journalism, as Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison and author of the book Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism, told me earlier this summer.