Michael Childers, a business and labor education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the news may be bigger than the agreement the United Auto Workers reached with major U.S. auto manufacturers late last year, ending a nearly two-month strike that had shut down multiple plants.
“Historically, the service sector has struggled in a huge way to successfully organize and bargain contracts,” Childers said. “This is really exciting news for … workers wanting a voice at work.”
“Many politicians, law enforcement personnel and ordinary citizens are nonetheless incensed because this person should not have been in the country and thus capable of committing a crime,” said Michael Light, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has published several studies showing undocumented immigrants are not more crime-prone than native-born Americans. “This view that the person’s undocumented status is an aggravating factor is also likely a reason why these crimes generate such strong responses.”
For about a decade, Jonathan Martin, a professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, has analyzed the size of the cold pool at this level — or the area of the hemisphere covered by temperatures at or below 23 degrees (minus-5 Celsius). This winter’s cold pool will finish the winter as the second-smallest on record, Martin said.
In Madison, Wisconsin’s capital in the southern part of the state, temperatures rise into the triple digits in the summer but have never hit 60 degrees in January, said Steve Vavrus, Wisconsin’s state climatologist.
Daniel Vimont, a UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic science, has seen a trend in Wisconsin’s climate: it’s getting warmer. Stanley Temple, a UW-Madison professor emeritus of forest and wildlife ecology, sees concerning changes in bird migration patterns.
University of Wisconsin- Madison professor and Consumer Science department chair, Cliff Robb tells News 3 Now the shift indicates the company is facing a labor market shortage.
Joe Lauer, who studies corn and silage production at UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, said Monday that Wisconsin typically receives most of its precipitation in April, May and June so the lack of snow could have a minimal negative impact on corn and soybeans.
Wisconsin ticks, which normally become active in April or May, are already on the move because of the unusually mild winter, said PJ Liesch, an entomologist and director of UW-Madison’s Insect Diagnostic Lab.
Shopping is actually a very normal, human response to chaos. It’s what Christine Whelan, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, calls credible costly commitments. These are purchases we think may solve our problems.
Olaf Jensen, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology, studies fish, fishing and fishery management. He said what’s more exciting to him is what lies under the surface.
“It’s a glimpse into that mystery of life under the ice when you go ice fishing,” Jensen said. “You realize that life goes on under the ice. Lakes don’t just go to sleep for the winter and wake up again when the ice comes off.”
“Maybe there’s a reason some of us old people have kept our landlines,” said Barry Orton, telecommunications professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Eric Ely, who teaches in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has made some of his assignments more personal, asking students to write about topics that connect to their own lives. In a new assignment this semester, he has students engage with an AI chatbot and document the process. “Part of my job is to prepare students for life after college, right?” he said. “This is the world that we’re living in, and so I feel like I would be doing a disservice to students if I would not talk about this or limit or completely prohibit the use.”
For UW-Madison professor Dietram Scheufele, the big question isn’t what AI can — or cannot — do for college students. “What I’m much more concerned about is the fundamental disruption to our social system and how we prepare students for that,” said Scheufele, whose research includes technology policy, misinformation and social media. “The question for universities right now is why this degree will be worth something 40 years from now.”
John Zumbrunnen, the vice provost of teaching and learning at UW-Madison, said the most-asked question he gets about AI is whether the university has or will have a policy on it. UW-Madison does not, meaning students navigate at least four different class policies per semester. In some cases, individual assignments will have their own AI expectations. That’s why it’s important, he said, for instructors to offer grace in this new world.
“The answer in the teaching and learning space cannot be one-size-fits-all,” he said earlier this month at a UW Board of Regents meeting.
Dogs are our furry friends, but have you ever thought how this relationship connects to economics? UW-Madison Professor Dave Weimer and Simon Fraser University Professor Aidan Vining coined this connection as ‘dogonomics.’ Weimer said dogs are a big part of our finances.
Miriam Seifter, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Law, said similar cases have been brought before state supreme courts across the country since the U.S. Supreme Court ended federal abortion protections in their 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
“At least a dozen state high courts have expressly held that these types of provisions protect abortion, at least to some extent,” Seifter said. “There are a number of others that have reached those types of rulings at the lower court level, but haven’t fully resolved them in the high courts yet.”
As political battles churn over funding for diversity, equity and inclusion at the Universities of Wisconsin, changing demographics influence how K-12 educators prepare new generations of college students.
David Kreling, professor emeritus in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the U.S. price quoted by Baldwin sounds about right.
“The $500 number may be in the ballpark for U.S. patented (brand-name, newer) drugs,” Kreling said in an email to PolitiFact Wisconsin. “That would be consistent with my understanding of market data on sales by firms in the U.S. Things in the $7 range, here, only reside within the off-patent generic drug market (where we have low prices, sometimes at or near lowest in the world).”
“What is remarkable is we have a second disruption to the stratospheric vortex happening right now,” Andrea Lang, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in an email. “Two major disruptions to the polar vortex in one season is not common. It has happened before, but it is not something that you expect to happen in any given winter season.”
Joe Biden and Donald Trump would be the two oldest candidates to ever be nominated for President. We talk to Allison Prasch, a political rhetoric professor from UW-Madison, about how age plays in the race and how previous candidates have faced similar questions.
Barbara Bowers, a UW-Madison nursing school expert, explains why nursing homes in Wisconsin would benefit from bigger changes to how they operate, in addition to simply complying with a new federal requirement to increase staff size.
UW-Madison’s new Sustainability Research Hub is scheduled to launch this spring – as part of a campus-wide initiative Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin announced earlier this month.
The initiative’s stated goals range from promoting collaborative research to achieving net-zero emissions by 2048. WORT News Producer Faye Parks spoke to Missy Nergard, UW-Madison’s director of sustainability, and Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, to learn more.
UW-Madison pushed its decision date from May 1 to May 15 to give families more time to weigh financial offers.
Helen Faith, director of the office of student financial aid at UW-Madison, said the “new and major” change to the application had a big impact on students. “Of course, they’re very anxious. They really want to know whether they can afford to come here,” Faith said.
LB Klein, an LGBTQ+ Health Expert & Associate Professor at UW-Madison, says, statistically, society sees a lot of LGBTQ+ community members who face depression and anxiety. Klein believes this isn’t because they’re a part of the LGBTQ+ community, but because they’re living in cultures where people are trying to change who they are.
“If we provide access for folks to have supportive therapies, and to live in on a state local level, in a way where they’re affirmed and supported, we actually see those disparities around health and mental health go away,” Klein said.
Includes interview with Ted Gerber, a UW-Madison sociology professor, regarding the latest news on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Includes interview with Yoshiko Herrera, a professor of political science.
Karen Oberhauser is the founder and director of the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project and former director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. To put 2.2 acres in perspective, she said that’s less than two football fields.
“So that means that all of the monarchs from this huge area in the northern part of the United States — imagine the northeastern quarter of the United States — all of those butterflies are in an area in Mexico right now smaller than two football fields,” Oberhauser told WPR’s “The Morning Show.”
Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the GOP calculations seem to be right, except for one aspect:
“They calculate numbers for ‘a household’ when it’s unclear how many people are in a household,” Chinn said in an email. Chinn previously analyzed the report for a Wisconsin Watch fact-check of an ad that said Wisconsinites are spending $10,000 more per year compared to 2021.
Several systems govern our body’s sense of balance: the muscles, joints, inner ears and more. Our physical therapists are back. They’ll share the exercises you can do to bolster your balance and decrease your risk of falling. Interview with Jill Thein-Nissenbaum, a professor in the Physical Therapy Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Lori Thein Brody, a physical therapist at UW Health Spine Physical Therapy Clinic.
The High Road program is an improvement compared to many other workforce programs, which often prioritize training people for jobs regardless of the quality, said Laura Dresser, the associate director of the High Road Strategy Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She helped coin the term “high road” and served as a consultant to California’s workforce programs in 2017.
UW Health Distinguished Psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain says spending time with loved ones – family and friends alike – can reduce stress and anxiety, lower blood pressure and may even improve our cardiovascular health.
“There has not been a line in terms of what modifications are okay,” said Dietram Scheufele, who studies misinformation and social media at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Public opinion about what’s acceptable in altering content has changed, such as editing photos of ourselves on Instagram or LinkedIn, he said.
“If some deepfake comes out of Biden falling down repeatedly right before the election in key states, and it all turns out to be fake five days later, that’s completely irrelevant,” Scheufele said. “We don’t have video-assisted review like we have in in football, which means the game will have ended and the result will stand.”
Now that Evers has signed the new maps into law, one of the parties involved in the court case could ask the court to dismiss the case as moot, UW-Madison Law School associate professor Robert Yablon said.
Michigan and Minnesota — two Midwestern states where Democrats took control in 2022 for the first time in many years — could serve as examples of what Wisconsin Democrats would do with a legislative majority, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center.
Democrats in those states have “eagerly legislated in new directions on issues such as criminal justice and environmental protection,” Burden said. Given the chance, Wisconsin Democrats would likely pursue a variety of policy changes unavailable to them under GOP control, he said.
Kyle Cranmer, a professor of physics and the director of the Data Science Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the emergence of Chat GPT has certainly sparked a major increase in artificial intelligence.
“For people who have certain injuries, a gait analysis can help us correct the mechanics that might cause it to recur,” said Dr. Bryan Heiderscheit, a professor in orthopedics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of Badger Athletic Performance in Madison.
Dr. Samantha Pabich, a UW Health endocrinologist who treats many patients with obesity, said the newer drugs can help obese people lose a higher percentage of their body weight than older drugs. That can help control diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleep apnea, pain and other conditions, and prevent the need for treatments such as home oxygen therapy and liver transplants, she said.
Barbara Bowers, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Nursing who has studied the long-term care industry, also said innovation is needed. Bowers said her research has found that the majority of resident concerns center around the lack of staff at facilities. On top of being short-staffed, she said the typical nursing home model is “stuck in the past,” with nurses and aides working separately instead of utilizing a team approach to patient care.
“If we had more staffing just by itself and didn’t do anything else, I don’t think we’d see the improvements we’re looking for,” she said.
Conducted by the UW Survey Center and analyzed by UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, the survey went to around 3,500 people across the state. Researchers compared the responses of participants who have children under age 6 with those who don’t.
None of those findings are really “huge surprises,” said La Follette School professor Sarah Halpern-Meekin, who analyzed the results.
“If you say, ‘I have a fear of return,’ it triggers a protection under our laws that ensures that a government official will review your case to see if you are likely to be successful with qualifying for asylum in the U.S.,” said Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin.
Not every type of import is raising a red flag right now. For instance, imports of industrial supplies, materials and other intermediate goods got more expensive. But those are just a small part of what goes into a finished product that a consumer buys, says Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist at UW-Madison and the state’s climatologist, said the weather is already causing economic impact, especially on the tourism industry in northern Wisconsin.
“They depend on snow and ice for skiing and skating and ice fishing and so forth,” Vavrus said. “There’s been closed snowmobile trails. There’s been winter festivals that have been canceled, unsafe ice conditions for fishing and so on.”
Although the recent avoidance of a U.S. recession has surprised many economists, a downturn could still occur in the coming months. That’s the view of UW-Madison economics professor Menzie Chinn.
Slightly more Wisconsin farmers reported taking steps to protect soil and water quality in 2022. They planted nearly 754,000 acres of cover crops — plants that protect the soil and keep it in place during the offseason — about a 23% increase from 2017. The number of acres that were not tilled also increased, from about 2.2 million in 2017 to about 2.4 million in 2022. No-till practices reduce soil disturbance.
Those acres are still just a small portion of Wisconsin’s total farmed acres. “I would have hoped to see that pick up a bit faster,” said Erin Silva, a professor of organic and sustainable agriculture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sulfuric acid clouds circle the entire planet at a height of 25 to 37 miles above the surface. They contain tiny acidic aerosols that are about a hundred times thinner than human hair. Together the droplets resemble the air pollution in highly populated cities on Earth. “It’s like a haze that you find when you fly into, say, New Delhi or Beijing,” says Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW professors offer explanations, helpful tips on classic V-Day tropes.
If Evers signs the proposal into law, one of the parties involved in the court case could ask the court to dismiss the case as moot, UW-Madison Law School associate professor Robert Yablon said.
Includes interview with Dr. Tanya Schlam, a UW-Madison researcher, about how Wisconsin could improve its response to tobacco use.
Valentine’s Day reminds us to show our love to the important people in our lives. We usually declare our romantic love, but sometimes all the hearts and flowers remind us to express our love to others who are important in our lives as well. For a lot of us, this could mean our dogs. About half of U.S. households keep dogs as pets. Not only in word, but also in deed, many people express their love for their dogs not merely as pets, but as family.
Written by David L. Weimer is the Edwin E. Witte Professor of Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is coauthor with Aidan R. Vining of “Dog Economics: Perspectives on Our Canine Relationships” (Cambridge University Press 2024).
Written by Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a Professor of Public Affairs with the La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Vaughn Bascom Professor of Women, Family, and Community in the School of Human Ecology.
Some cheese varieties naturally have a moldy appearance, explained Mark Johnson, assistant director at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The blue veins in a wedge of gorgonzola or the white rind on a wheel of brie are examples of mold.
Scientific research has consistently shown that video games do not make people more violent. Playing games can, however, improve perceptual and cognitive functions, says Dr C Shawn Green, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Office of Naval Research funded Green to research how certain games (mainly shooters) improve warrior performance. “These games have lots of speed in them,” he says. “There’s lots of what we call ‘transient events’ – things pop up on the screen and disappear.” He says this can improve basic visual perception as well as heighten levels of cognition (such as working memory).
The race could be shaken up dramatically if the Wisconsin Supreme Court agrees to hear a redistricting lawsuit challenging congressional boundary lines, said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor. The court has not said whether it will hear the challenge.
“Everyone appreciates and remembers experiences more than ’stuff,’” said J. Michael Collins, professor of public affairs and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin. “There are lots of fun and memorable experiences that are not expensive, from moonlight walks to scavenger hunts to simple at-home dinners. Being creative can be better than bling.”
The sounds of summer could be a lot louder this year depending on where you live in Wisconsin.
That’s because for the first time since Thomas Jefferson was president, two rare broods of cicadas will emerge at the same time. PJ Liesch, an extension entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said this event only occurs once every 221 years. “It’s something that is really unique and special for us,” Liesch said.
Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and the ethnic Chinese demographic in Singapore—all populations that observe the 12-zodiac lunar calendar—also posted small increases, University of Wisconsin-Madison demographer Fuxian Yi previously told Newsweek, citing China’s annual census data.
We speak with Robert Golden, the outgoing dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Whether you love beets or hate them, you probably haven’t given them as much thought as Irwin Goldman.
A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Goldman is also former chair of the department of horticulture. The Goldman Lab there is even named after him. He and colleague Nick Breitbach spent decades trying to breed a better beet. Now the Badger Flame Beet is getting attention nationwide from growers and chefs as it becomes increasingly available.
“This tool is likely to be very useful for young people and their families as they’re trying to present themselves in the most appealing way to college admissions,” said Mitchell Nathan, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at UW-Madison and author of “Foundations of Embodied Learning.”
Earlier this month, UW-Madison’s Student Success Through Applied Research (SSTAR) Lab released a new report revealing how, in higher education, students and schools with the least financial need often receive the most government funding. We talk to Nick Hillman, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and director of SSTAR, about the causes of funding disparities and how “equity-based” funding models could address them.
State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, and state Rep. Deb Andraca, D-Whitefish Bay, were approached by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison professors and asked to strengthen campus firearm laws.
Jack O’Meara represents the Public Representation Organization of the Faculty Senate, or PROFS, a nonprofit advocacy organization of UW-Madison faculty. He said there was increased concern after the Feb. 13, 2023, mass shooting at Michigan State University. In that incident, three students were killed and five others were injured when a gunman entered a building on the East Lansing campus.
Groundhogs, also known as woodchucks, are one of the few true hibernators that reside in Wisconsin. Their heart beats five times per minute while they sleep through the winter months, and their body temperature drops to 37 degrees Fahrenheit. We learn more about the fabled animal, plus cover wildlife news from around the state. Interview with David Drake, extension wildlife specialist and professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, and Jamie Nack, extension senior wildlife outreach specialist, both from UW-Madison.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel talked to Marquette University research fellow John Johnson and University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden about what common redistricting concepts mean and how they apply to the case.
“Wards are usually viewed as the building blocks of districts, so that gets done first,” Burden said. Because there are only 72 counties, “some of them are going to have to be sliced in order to make districts. Especially the more populous ones, like Dane, Milwaukee and Brown are going to have multiple districts in them.”
