When Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston, coined the terms “buckynomics” and “buckymarkets,” he couldn’t have predicted he’d end up in a legal battle with the University of Wisconsin and its iconic mascot, Bucky Badger. But according to a report from the Houston Chronicle that is exactly what is happening.
In an August presentation, Somesh Jha, a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the technology could be a threat to cybersecurity and could be misused to spread misinformation.
For example, there’s already a “fine-tuned” AI that can write spam emails, he said. AI can also be used to create fake images and videos that look real, known as “deepfakes.” Jha said deepfakes could be used, unethically, during elections to sway public opinion.
“This is coming,” he said. “I can tell you that there are people (who) are really scared.”
Lola Loustaunau, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers, said that “it would really open the door for a lot of protections for workers” if OSHA consistently inspected small dairy farms that provide housing to immigrant workers.
“If they are politically interested in doing something,” she added, “it looks like they have all the basis to do it.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of the partners behind the tech hub application, and contributes to the biohealth industry through academic research and providing an educated workforce through its medical physics, biotechnology and medical engineering programs.
In a statement, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said the university is thrilled to be part of the collaboration that helped secure the federal designation.
“Our culture of innovation and strong collaborative spirit, both within the university and across the state, make us well-positioned to make the most of this important opportunity,” she said.
University of Wisconsin-Madison clinical law professor Mitch said the price listed is likely less than what the homeowner would get by listing their home for sale publicly.
The fake check at the top of the ad appears to be one of the many marketing methods people are using to buy and then resell homes for profit, Mitch said.
“The idea is that sending out lots of letters or texts could be worth it if they get enough responses from people looking to sell,” he said.
Wisconsin on Monday was named one of 31 regional tech hubs by the Biden administration, a designation involving Madison companies such as Exact Sciences and Accuray that allows the state to compete for $40 million to $70 million to grow its biohealth industry.
“(The tech hub status) will help ensure that we continue to push forward innovation, economic growth and transformative advancements in healthcare,” said UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin in a statement.
Kurt Zimmerman, Senior Director of Biohealth Industry Partnerships at UW-Madison, said submitting their proposal took more than 18 months. Still, the hub is already focusing on how this potential funding will help Wisconsin to stand out as an emerging leader in the field.
Consortium members include GE HealthCare, Rockwell Automation, Exact Sciences Corp., Accuray, Plexus, Employ Milwaukee, Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Milwaukee and Madison area technical colleges, Milwaukee 7 and the Madison Regional Economic Partnership.
The tax credit provides the biggest benefit to families “who can afford to spend a lot on child care,” says Tim Smeeding, an economist and emeritus professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin. The proposal doesn’t help people for whom the cost of child care is out of reach, he added.
“This is a very pressing issue for many people in Wisconsin,” said Laura Dresser of the Center for Wisconsin Strategy, which has published “Can’t Survive on $7.25,” a report that explores the impact and issues of low wages for Wisconsinites.
“We know that there are fewer people working very close to the bottom of the wage floor – that $7.25 per hour minimum wage – today than there were even three years ago,” Dresser added, “but there are still some in the state who do and others who don’t make much more than that.”
The program will officially launch in fall 2024, with select courses being piloted among current students.
Kathy Cramer, a political science professor, quoted.
Miss America, Grace Stanke, a University of Wisconsin-Madison nuclear engineering student, won the pageant in December and chose to spend her year holding the title to promote nuclear energy.
Track offers specialization in sustainable development, inequality in housing.
Jeremy Morris is a professor in media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how digital technologies are affecting the music industry. He said concert films are neither better nor worse than live performances, but rather different.
“I think there is that kind of gut reaction to sort of look down on these other ways of presenting concerts,” Morris said. “But it provides a different experience that some people can really enjoy and latch onto.”
UW-Madison urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen explains how government policy and business practices that discriminated by race continue to affect homeownership rates of Black families in Wisconsin.
Ron Kean, poultry specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said prices are still elevated compared to before last year thanks to the broad impact of inflation.
“We’ve seen transportation costs increase and feed costs increase and labor costs and things like that,” Kean said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to the prices we saw pre-COVID, but they’re certainly down from what they’ve been in the last year.”
Nationwide, big-name retailers and small community pharmacies are struggling to find pharmacists. The challenge to recruit more is magnified in rural areas.
UW-Madison is offering a new program to help build a pharmacy workforce in Wisconsin. It’s called the PharmD Early Assurance Program.
The bill reintroduces funding for programs that Evers had written into his budget proposal that were later removed by the Legislature’s Republican-led budget writing committee. It would extend a pandemic-era child care subsidy, establish a paid family and medical leave system and provide grants for the University of Wisconsin System and workforce development programs.
Faulkner, a computer programmer with a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, founded Epic in a Madison basement in 1979 with just two assistants and $70,000. Today, the company employs over 13,000 people.
With recruiting season underway, many UW Computer Science and Data Science students are actively seeking internship, co-op or full-time job positions. But recent layoffs in the tech sector have made the job application process more challenging for some students.
Steven Deller studies public finance and economic development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although he doesn’t have direct knowledge of Fast Forward, he said there are “hundreds if not thousands” of federal and state-level grants that are not fully taken advantage of.
There are two main reasons, he said: a lack of awareness and cumbersome application materials. The need to ensure government money is being spent properly creates a lot of paperwork.
“If the agency is perceived as being ‘sloppy’ handing the grants out, there is a huge political price to pay,” Deller wrote via email.
Kasey Keeler is an author and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. She is an enrolled citizen of the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians and descendant of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Sandra Stuttgen, a former veterinarian and current agriculture educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said the new requirements are a part of the federal agency’s efforts to address how animal use of common drugs is contributing to the global problem of antibiotic resistance.
“As humans, if we have a condition where we need antibiotics, we want them to work,” she said. “They’re trying to protect the antibiotics that are of human significance, so it’s the drugs that humans and animals share.”
Amanda Gevens, potato and vegetable pathologist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said potatoes are already generating heat heading into harvest through a process called respiration. If weather conditions raise the temperature of the tubers even further, that can make it difficult for farmers to properly cool them down for storage.
“There may not be adequate cooling air available to get control of this heat load,” Gevens said in an email. “Refrigeration is a great option to cool potatoes at harvest, although the system must have the capacity to handle the high heat load and fresh air also must be provided to purge carbon dioxide.”
The change isn’t unprecedented and stems from a case in the 1960s, according to Michael Childers, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Workers.
“What they’re basically saying now is that, if any unfair labor practice has is found to have occurred after an employer asks for an election, then they don’t need to have the election. The union will just be recognized and bargaining should commence,” he said. “That absolutely could have some impact on unions being formed in the private sector.”
On Friday, Alliant Energy announced that they had received a $30M federal grant to build a CO2-based energy storage facility in Columbia County, Wisconsin—the first of its kind in the US, and the first ever on this scale. We talk with Mark Anderson, director of the Thermal-Hydraulics Laboratory at the UW-Madison, about what the new technology means for the future of renewable energy storage in the state and beyond.
“I am doing everything in my wheelhouse to be able to afford to live,” said Olivia Steele, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree and about $25,000 in debt. “I drive an old car; I don’t go on fancy trips or anything. Having payments come back will ruin me.”
The school’s economics department hosted Dr. Karen Dynan, an economics professor from Harvard. Dynan spoke with students about the Federal Reserve’s moves to increase interest rates and how the Fed is trying to cool down the economy just enough that it doesn’t cause a recession.
For example, SHINE Technologies in Janesville is looking to use fusion to recycle fissile material from reactors, past and future. Company founder Greg Piefer said climate change can’t wait to be solved by fusion energy, but safe fission energy is possible now. The nuclear engineering programs at UW-Madison are also a part of that research mix.
Accuray makes radiotherapy machines for cancer treatment, including the image-guided TomoTherapy, developed from research by Thomas “Rock” Mackie, a now-retired UW-Madison medical physicist.
Recent research from the Wisconsin Paper Council examined the often-overlooked role of the state’s paper converters in the state’s paper industry. Scott Bowe, a professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains what paper converters do and why they’re booming in Wisconsin.
Accuray makes radiotherapy machines for cancer treatment, including the image-guided TomoTherapy, developed from research by Thomas “Rock” Mackie, a now-retired UW-Madison medical physicist.
New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that talking through a PVC tube can alter the sound of someone’s voice enough to trick these types of systems.
Kassem Fawaz, an assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering, led the research. He said this type of voice identification security is becoming popular for applications like banking. So, he wanted to test its limits.
Victor Jew, a University of Wisconsin–Madison senior lecturer in the Asian American Studies department, said bubble tea is a “pan-ethnic phenomenon.”
It “speaks to a key idea in Asian American studies that you have all these different communities and histories and groups — they can find common ground, which is that pan ethnicity, that decision to identify an umbrella away as Asian American.”
“We are a nation with many resources, and yet, generic medications across the board, and things like infant formula, are resources that some of our citizens don’t have access to because we haven’t really built the policies to ensure that there would be access,” said Kari Wisinski, chief of hematology and oncology and palliative care at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Medicine.
“As a physician, I believe that these deaths are almost completely preventable,” said Bill Kinsey, a physician and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Until we determine as a society the importance of a human right for people to work in healthy situations, we are going to see continued illness and death in this population.”
The nonprofit National Young Farmers Coalition surveyed more than 4,300 farmers ages 40 and younger in 2022, with the help of the University of Wisconsin Survey Center. The biggest challenge faced by current, former and aspiring young farmers: finding land.
Michelle Somes-Booher, director of the Wisconsin Small Business Development Center at the UW-Madison School of Business, said that coming out of the pandemic, business owners have had to make lots of adjustments.
“We’ve had wage increases and whatnot,” she said. “And then with higher interest rates, that always causes business owners to have to do things maybe they wouldn’t have done in the past.”
Flux XII launched in 2021 and is the brainchild of Patrick Sullivan, CEO and graduate of UW-Madison’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and co-founder and UW-Madison assistant professor Dawei Feng.
Includes Q&A with Jonathan Ferguson, financial capability specialist, University of Wisconsin-Madison-Financial Education Division of Extension.
The notion of planting miles of trees to hold back encroaching deserts is misguided and damaging; we should promote programs that secure livelihoods and respect dryland ecologies instead
Co-authored by nature-society geographers Matthew Turner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Diana Davis of the University of California-Davis) and Emily Yeh of the University of Colorado Boulder.
This achievement is a milestone, according to Gerald Kulcinski, director emeritus of fusion technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It doesn’t change any physics, but what it does is that we can now say with confidence that there’s a nuclear process going on and we can tell where it’s located,” he said. “It’s confirmation of something that we’ve known for a long time, but now we actually have visible evidence of it.”
Dietram Scheufele, who studies science communication and technology policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that while some of the doomsday predictions about AI are overblown, “we’re definitely entering a new world.”
The technology, he said, “gets real creepy real fast.”
A conservative estimate from a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study puts the number of undocumented Hispanic workers on medium-to-large farms at roughly 6,200. That figure excludes the many immigrant workers on smaller farms, those with fewer than 500 cows.
Dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd says consolidation in the industry has allowed processors, distributors, and retailers to keep consumer prices high even as farmers are paid less. “There’s been reduced competition in the marketplace,” said Lloyd, who’s worked as a food systems scientist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems.
“Farmers don’t have the power to push back…and consumers are also getting a raw deal,” she said.
A series of Meta-supported are finding Facebook’s algorithms alone weren’t responsible for harmful polarization in the 2020 presidential election cycle. But an independent audit found Meta maintained strong control over what data to provide researchers for study. We talk with Mike Wagner, a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison, about research into the power of social media algorithms and what makes an independent study.
We talk to an expert on early childhood media consumption about the potential harms of unregulated kids’ content on YouTube, and what parents need to be aware of. We also talk to a PBS Wisconsin education engagement specialist about what outreach is being done to help kids and parents make healthy media choices.
The Federal Trade Commission is finalizing its antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. Peter Carstensen, University of Wisconsin Law School Professor Emeritus and an antitrust expert, explains.
And yet 35% of the audience were men. What gives? “The current level of uncertainty and turbulence and anxiety accounts for part of that crossover among genders,” said Nancy Wong, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “People associate ‘Barbie’ with a more comfortable, simple and stable time in their lives.”
Somesh Jha, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Google researcher who specializes in A.I. security, called the new paper “a game changer” that could force the entire industry into rethinking how it built guardrails for A.I. systems.
The Barbie movie has seen great success at the box office. We talk with Christine Whelan, a UW-Madison consumer science professor, about the doll’s cultural legacy and latest form.
Yellow perch, rainbow trout and tilapia are just a few of the fish farmed for food in Wisconsin. We break down the aquaculture industry and take a tour of a fish farm. Interview with Sharon Moen, an outreach specialist for the Sea Grant Institute at the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute.
Shawn Conley is a soybean and small grain specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said many farmers who just finished harvesting winter wheat brought in quality grain. Conley said soybean fields are also doing OK, but they’ll need at least an inch of rain per week until September to reach their best yields.
“If we don’t get rain, we’ll start seeing a yield hit on the soybean side of things,” Conley said. “Corn is a different matter. I think we’ve already started to see some corn yield losses out there.”
While paper converters often go overlooked, they play an important role in both Wisconsin’s paper industry and its economy, according to a recent study from the Wisconsin Paper Council and University of Wisconsin titled, “Adding Value to Our Economy – Paper Conversion in Wisconsin.” More than 145 paper converters operated in Wisconsin in 2022, according to the study.
That number gets bigger a lot faster if you factor in companies that use paper along with plastic and other types of products, Scott Bowe, a professor and wood products specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in the May 31 episode of the Wisconsin Paper Council’s “The Paper Files” podcast about the study.
Written by Chris McCahill, managing director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Protesters frequently targeted information technology, not only because of its role in the Vietnam war but also due to its association with the imprisoning forces of capitalism. In 1970, activists at the University of Wisconsin destroyed a mainframe during a building occupation; the same year, protesters almost blew one up with napalm at New York University.
Leonard Polzin tracks dairy markets at the UW-Madison Division of Extension. He said the state is feeling the effects of a post-pandemic lag in milk demand.
“Total supply is up, and demand is down. We’re increasing inventory, cows keep producing every day, and we just can’t turn it off. Our inventory numbers of all dairy products are increasing, and buyers know that. Buyers are not hungry for product,” explained Polzin.
For 37 years, the Center for Dairy Research (CDR) has helped innovate the dairy industry.
“Cheese-making has been around, there are lots of different guesses right now, but probably somewhere in the region of 8000 years,” CDR and University of Wisconsin Madison Professor of Food Science John Lucey said.
