UW In The News
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How to be happy without earning more
Hsee says that research with University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bowen Ruan and Zoe Y. Lu reveals a nuance in the relationship between curiosity and happiness.
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Chancellor Rebecca Blank: Wisconsin and the future of undergraduate education
Public education has been one of our greatest success stories as a nation.Our country pioneered in making public elementary and high schools available to all children and created land-grant public universities that made college possible for citizens from all backgrounds.
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A mesmerizing story
Shawn Francis Peters couldn’t believe his luck. After writing 2012’s The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (Oxford University Press), the instructor in UW-Madison’s Integrated Liberal Studies Program was searching for an intriguing Upper Midwest-based true-crime subject when Harry Hayward entered his life.
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Attention, America: We’ve All Been Saying Gerrymander Wrong
Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center , finds his students and fellow academics puzzled when he uses the hard G in speeches and lectures. “Sometimes a person will ask, ‘What word did you just say? What is that word?’” Mr. Burden said.
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Why Facebook will never die
Quoted: “Almost everybody comes back,” says Catalina Toma, associate professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin. “Social networking sites tap into what makes us human: we like to connect with others.”
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The 10 best cities for new grads starting out
Madison is #1. Wisconsin’s capital has lots of young educated adults, in part because it’s home to the state’s flagship campus, the University of Wisconsin. Combined with its low unemployment rate and high percentage of workers in management, business, science or arts jobs, Madison vaults to the top. Though its median income for those 25 and older with bachelor’s degrees, $46,275, is average among other cities in the top 10, the median gross rent, $981, is relatively affordable. As a result, rent as a percentage of income, 25%, is among the lowest in the top 10, and about average for all cities in this analysis.
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Structural Dynamics Challenges in Launch
Matt Allen, Associate Professor in Engineering Physics at UW-Madison, discusses the physics behind rocket design. Allen highlights the structural dynamics, the vibration limits, and the amount of engine thrust that is necessary to successfully launch a spacecraft into space.
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New study suggests future hurricanes will be slower and wetter as Earth warms
Quoted: Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas on Aug. 26, 2017, and lingered in the region for nearly a week. As much as 60 inches of rain fell in the storm, setting a U.S. rainfall record. More than 20 inches of rain fell across about 29,000 square miles. No storm rivals Harvey, said Shane Hubbard, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin who made and mapped that calculation.
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Don Blankenship Announces Third-Party Bid for West Virginia Senate Seat
Quoted: “It looks to me like West Virginia intended for there to be a ban on sore losers, including in legislation this year. It looks like they were intended to stop someone like Blankenship,” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “However, the law is not written perfectly.”
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McDonald’s is being sucked into the movement to ban plastic straws
Quoted: Tom O’Guinn, a University of Wisconsin expert on consumer behavior, said packaging issues aren’t enough to sway diners’ decisions on where to eat.”The average American doesn’t care lot about this,” he said. “People don’t want to sit there and think, ’Gee, this is a slight improvement in packaging.’”
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Why You Should Stop Being So Hard on Yourself
Quoted: “Self-criticism can take a toll on our minds and bodies,” said Dr. Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also teaches psychology and psychiatry.
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Texas Shooting: Schools Can’t Stop Violence
Quoted: He may have an explosive temper; he may even have access to guns. “But if he hasn’t come right out and said, ‘I’m going to kill someone tomorrow,’ or ‘I’m going to kill myself,’ you’re not going to be able to involuntarily hospitalize him,” says Michael Caldwell, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin who works with dangerous young men at a juvenile treatment center in Madison.
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Could This Low-Cost Device Provide Clean Drinking Water To Those In Need?
The research was described in a paper published earlier this month in the journal Advanced Science. The work, funded by the National Science Foundation, was a collaboration between University at Buffalo, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Fudan University in China. The first authors on the paper were Haomin Song and Youhai Liu.
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UW-Madison will partner with community to raise incomes of 10,000 Dane County families by 2020
On Wednesday afternoon, the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced that it was chosen as one of four universities across the nation tasked to achieve that goal, in partnership with the community, by 2020. They’re looking for creative ideas from throughout the community to build up the county’s middle class and hopefully narrow racial inequities.
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UW-Madison Plans To Increase Families Incomes
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty will spend the summer collecting data and trying to identify community members’ needs in an effort to raise 10,000 Dane County families’ incomes by 10 percent in two years.
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Living on the Edge: Wildfires Pose a Growing Risk to Homes Built Near Wilderness Areas
Quoted: “The Forest Service is concerned about more and more houses built in and near wildland vegetation because of this double whammy,” says the study’s lead author Volker Radeloff, a forest ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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Tiny Brains of Extinct Human Relative Had Complex Features
Based on the regions of the brain that Homo naledi shared with modern humans, the authors suggested that it may have exhibited complex behavior. But what they did not say was what those behaviors may have been, said John Hawks, an paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an author on the paper.
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What we found in Facebook ads by Russians accused of election meddling
Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who published some of the first scientific analysis of social media influence campaigns during the election, said the ads show that the Russians are attempting to destabilize Western Democracy by targeting extreme identity groups.
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Half of Russian Facebook ads were aimed at dividing Americans on race
A recent study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that more than half of the sponsors of Facebook ads that featured divisive political messages ahead of the 2016 election were from “suspicious” groups with little or no paper trail to identify them. One in six turned out to be linked to the IRA.“I expected that we would find some unknown actors in the digital media political campaign landscape, because there are some regulatory loopholes,” Young Mie Kim, the study’s lead author, recently told me. “The findings are a lot worse than I thought. It is shocking and surprising.”
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Individual experiences shape the path of thousands of UW-Madison graduates
When Angeline Mboutngam first attended Madison Area Technical College in fall 2012, she was enrolled in a math class that covered basic concepts such as 1 + 1 = 2. She went on to conquer calculus.On Thursday afternoon, Mboutngam settled into a desk on the third floor of UW-Madison’s College Library to study for the last exam of her undergraduate career — organic chemistry.At 45, Mboutngam, who received no formal education growing up in the Central African nation of Cameroon, will walk across the stage Saturday at Camp Randall to receive her bachelor’s degree from one of the top-ranked public universities in the United States.
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What parents and teachers can do to not make the 7th grade the worst ever
Noted: A professor of communication sciences and disorders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rountrey also can’t understand how her only child can be so disorganized.
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How training doctors in implicit bias could save the lives of black mothers
Quoted: “The Implicit Association Tests are humbling. I have every bias in the book,” said Dr. Molly Carnes, director of the Center for Women’s Health Research at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and an internal medicine doctor.Carnes has developed workshops for the university’s faculty that increase awareness about bias by teaching participants how to recognize it.
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The U.S.-North Korea summit could be Trump’s ‘Nixon-to-China’ moment
After the release of three U.S. prisoners Wednesday in North Korea, President Trump tweeted that the “Date & Place” for his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was “set.”The recent thaw in U.S.-North Korean relations has taken many foreign policy analysts by surprise.
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Study: Illegal Immigration Linked To Decrease In Violent Crime
But a new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology professor Michael Light suggests people living in the country illegally are linked to a decrease in violent crime, not an increase.
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Scott Walker is giving Wisconsin families $100 per kid. Democrats should learn from that.
Quoted: What’s more, there are some barriers to poor families getting the money, like the requirement that recipients of the funds have bank accounts for direct deposits. After looking over the procedure for filing for the refund, Tim Smeeding, an economist and poverty expert at the University of Wisconsin Madison, commented, “I am sure poor people won’t follow all of this and won’t get the money.”
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State Seeks Different Avenues To Improve Opioid Addiction Treatment
Quoted: Aleksandra Zgierska, a professor who specializes in addiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, says one possible explanation for the surge in emergency room visits is that people hooked on prescription drugs don’t have timely access to treatment and may be turning to illegal drugs.
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Urban predators
A recently published two-year study of urban canids in and around Madison, Wisconsin, sheds light on the issue. Researchers used radio collars and statistical analysis to assess the movement and home ranges of coyotes and foxes through a mosaic of residential, commercial, and public natural areas, including tallgrass prairie and oak savanna located within the University of Wisconsin–Madison Lakeshore Nature Preserve.
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Are There Enough Young People In Rural Wisconsin?
Research shows the loss of young adults raises the cost of schools, public services, and recreation for individuals. The Applied Population Lab at the UW-Madison projected that 15 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties will have smaller populations in 2040 than they did in 2010.
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Fox, Sinclair vie for executive with ties to Hannity
Quoted: “If they’re interested potentially in Hannity and they’re interested in Pirro…that gives us some clue of what’s going to be on the Sinclair cable network,” said Lewis Friedland, who directs the Center for Communication and Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Harassment should count as scientific misconduct
When I talk to senior scientists, many view harassment as an injustice that happens somewhere else, not in their field or at their institution. But data suggest that the problem is ubiquitous. In separate surveys of tens of thousands of university students across Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, upwards of 40% of respondents say that they have experienced sexual harassment.
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