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UW In The News

  • In Wisconsin’s supreme court race, a super-rich beer family calls the shots

    The Guardian | February 21, 2023

    “It’s escalating rapidly,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin – Madison. “If $15m, $20m, $25m is spent on this race it’s more than you see in governor’s races in some states.”

  • Wisconsin Supreme Court race holds high stakes for abortion, redistricting and 2024

    CNN Politics | February 20, 2023

    “This seat is crucial to the balance of the court, and the court is crucial to the balance of the state,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of its Elections Research Center.

  • How to let go of a grudge

    Vox | February 20, 2023

    Grudges exist on a spectrum, says Robert Enright, a professor in the department of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a founding board member of the International Forgiveness Institute. Some grievances don’t impact your daily life, but you remember them nonetheless. These surface-level grudges are easier to relinquish, Enright says. Others take root in the soul and can grow into hatred.

  • Mother Nature Has the Best Climate-Fixing Technology

    Bloomberg | February 20, 2023

    Gregory Nemet, a co-author of the “State of Carbon Dioxide Removal” report and a public policy professor at University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me that pretty much all successful CO2 removal to date has come from natural climate solutions like protecting forests, planting trees and better managing soils. So I asked him, “Why not invest heavily in that?” To my mind, supporting and expanding the extraordinary potential of natural ecosystems to perform carbon removal is what investors and policymakers should be focusing on — not fantastical machines.

  • The EPA is updating the social cost of carbon to better fight climate change

    The Indicator from Planet Money : NPR | February 17, 2023

    I called up a philosopher to help me make sense of this. His name is Paul Kelleher. He’s a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin.

  • Invasive Rusty Crayfish Appear to Be Dying Off and It’s Not Clear Why

    Newsweek | February 17, 2023

    “It can be tough to get an actual population estimate because there’s so many rusty crayfish in a lake,” lead study author Danny Szydlowski, a Ph.D. researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology, told Newsweek.

  • Ex-‘Shark Tank’ guest star Matt Higgins: Ditch backup plans to succeed

    CNBC | February 16, 2023

    In a 2016 Wharton and University of Wisconsin-Madison study, two groups of research participants were given the same assignment and the same plan for completing it. One group had a backup plan. That group performed worse, and lost motivation to see their initial goal through.

  • If ChatGPT Can Replace What We Teach, We Should Teach Something Else

    Newsweek | February 15, 2023

    If AI that doesn’t really understand medicine (or much of anything else) can pass the test for being a doctor, then we need to change what we teach doctors—and everyone else. – David Williamson Shaffer is the Sears Bascom Professor of Learning Analytics and the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Data Philosopher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

  • Animals with love lives more complicated than yours

    CNN | February 14, 2023

    Male Neopyrochroa flabellata beetles are attracted to a chemical called cantharidin. “Males eat the stuff like candy,” said Dan Young, a professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “They then sequester it away in their bodies, and they then transfer it to females when they copulate.”

  • It’s Time We Talked About Our Bambi Problem

    Mother Jones | February 13, 2023

    In the forests of Wisconsin and Michigan, research suggests, expanding whitetail populations are responsible for at least 40 percent of the change observed in forest structure. “It’s rare in ecology to find one factor that accounts for so much change,” says Donald Waller, a retired professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has studied white-tailed deer for over 20 years.

  • ‘Stakes are monstrous’: Wisconsin judicial race is 2023’s key election

    Guardian | February 13, 2023

    “The stakes are monstrous,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. “There’s a confluence of factors that have come together, intentionally or not to make this a terribly important race for the future of the state.”

  • Childbirth Is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Expansive Study Finds

    The New York Times | February 13, 2023

    “It’s not race, it’s racism,” said Tiffany L. Green, an economist focused on public health and obstetrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The data are quite clear that this isn’t about biology. This is about the environments where we live, where we work, where we play, where we sleep.”

  • In dire need of more space, UW-Madison Engineering gets System’s top priority

    Wisconsin State Journal | February 13, 2023

    UW-Madison will aggressively seek a new College of Engineering building as its top priority in the upcoming state budget cycle as growth stagnates and faculty compete with one another for coveted and increasingly limited lab space.

  • UW-Madison expands tuition promise for low-income students to cover room, board and other college costs

    Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | February 10, 2023

    The University of Wisconsin-Madison is expanding its tuition promise program to cover not only tuition for some low-income students, but nearly all other college costs that can derail progress toward a degree, such as room and board.

  • FTC cracking down on wellness industry marketing

    Marketplace | February 10, 2023

    “It’s very much tapping into our insecurities that we are not well enough. And it taps into our hope that we could be better,” said Christine Whelan, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • Why Ben & Jerry’s is chunky, and Häagen-Dazs is smooth : Planet Money

    NPR | February 9, 2023

    SMITH: That economist I met at that big conference, the person who first noticed something amiss in the freezer section, is named Christopher Sullivan. He’s a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

  • How Moore v. Harper at the Supreme Court could become moot

    NPR | February 7, 2023

    And the flip-flopping in state court rulings that could come out of the North Carolina Supreme Court’s rehearing for this case could become more common in other parts of the country, explains Robert Yablon, an associate professor of law who helps lead the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

  • Immunocompromised worry they’re getting left behind again

    Axios | February 7, 2023

    “With no mitigating measures in place and now no #Evusheld, immunocompromised patients are at even higher risk. Better meds must arise to make this world safe for all,” tweeted University of Wisconsin-Madison anesthesiology associate professor Bill Hartman.

  • UW-Madison exhibit has ‘something new to say’ about race and art

    Wisconsin State Journal | February 6, 2023

    When incoming museum director Amy Gilman first saw “Emancipation Group” on display at the Chazen Museum of Art in 2017, she reacted like many visitors: She stopped in her tracks.

  • Samsung exec says he wouldn’t give a smartphone to his daughter until she was 11

    CNBC | February 6, 2023

    Deciding whether or not a child is ready to own a smartphone should be based on their own development rather than a specific age, according to Megan Morena, a pediatrics professor at the University of Wisconsin.

  • Northeast U.S. Latest to Experience Polar Vortex Temperatures

    The New York Times | February 6, 2023

    “I wish I had a clear answer,” said Steve Vavrus, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin. With Jennifer Francis, now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts, Dr. Vavrus wrote a seminal 2012 paper that presented the idea that Arctic warming was affecting the polar vortex. “Unfortunately the state of things is still ambiguous,” he said.

  • Madagascar’s sacred trees face existential threats in a changing world

    National Geographic | February 6, 2023

    “That’s one of the most amazing things about the Malagasy baobabs,” says Nisa Karimi, a botanist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “One species occurs all across continental Africa, and then you get to Madagascar, and you have six.”

  • Why Bad Bunny’s Grammy nominated Un Verano Sin Ti is such a big deal

    Vox | February 6, 2023

    “There was a particular audience consuming this and it was divided along generational lines,” said Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a Caribbean historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is penning an article for the Bad Bunny Enigma, an academic journal analyzing the star. “It’s really interesting how Bad Bunny became this global superstar while in conversation with things that were happening in the archipelago. He was basically making music for people in the archipelago, referencing things that only Puerto Ricans would understand.”

  • The EPA is updating its most important tool for cracking down on carbon emissions

    NPR | February 6, 2023

    The EPA uses higher dollar amounts for deaths in higher-income countries and lower dollar amounts for deaths in lower-income countries. Or, as Paul Kelleher, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, puts it…PAUL KELLEHER: The badness of a death from climate change in India is treated as not as bad as exactly the same death if it happened at exactly the same time in the United States.

  • The Blurred Lines Between Goldman C.E.O.’s Day Job and His D.J. Gig

    The New York Times | February 6, 2023

    “There’s a kind of prima facie appearance of: ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours,’” said Yaron Nili, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in corporate and securities law.

  • Opinion | Why I’m not worried about my students using ChatGPT

    The Washington Post | February 6, 2023

    Lawrence Shapiro is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    ChatGPT has many of my university colleagues shaking in their Birkenstocks. This artificial-intelligence tool excels at producing grammatical and even insightful essays — just what we’re hoping to see from our undergraduates.

  • When Americans Lost Faith in the News

    The New Yorker | February 2, 2023

    So why didn’t they report what they knew? McGarr, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks it’s because the people who covered Washington for the wire services and the major dailies had an ideology.

  • How New Year’s resolutions boost the wellness business

    Marketplace | February 1, 2023

    “So literally I could just buy health and wellness,” explained Christine Whalen, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin. “And that sounds very enticing.”

  • Muslim-American opinions on abortion are complex. What does Islam actually say?

    NPR | February 1, 2023

    The current tension between state laws and some Islamic beliefs may be setting the stage for further legal battles over abortion. Asifa Quraishi-Landes, an Islamic and constitutional law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that abortion bans tread on Muslims’ First Amendment rights.

  • Race to vaccinate rare wild monkeys gives hope for survival

    ABC News | February 1, 2023

    “There are people who say we shouldn’t touch nature, that we shouldn’t alter anything. But really, there are no pristine natural habitats left,” said Tony Goldberg, a disease ecologist and veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who supports vaccinating wildlife when it’s safe and practical. “People are waking up to the magnitude of the problem and realizing they have to do something.”

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