Author: jplucas

Noted: Karen Holden said she thinks that today there’s much more support for women, socially and in the form of information, which helps in times of financial stress. “I think with the increase in divorce, singlehood through marital dissolution is more common, so you get much more information – so there’s also much more information for widows,” Holden told Reuters Health. “Also, marriages are much more shared financially, so you don’t get the disorientation of suddenly having to manage on your own,” said Holden, who studies poverty and aging at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and was not involved in the study.

Quoted: Social media, particularly Instagram, messes with our perception of reality. Catalina Toma of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison explained it this way: “You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don’t necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing.”

Quoted: UW-Madison finance professor Oliver Levine says looking at what happened to Heinz after Warren Buffet and investors bought the company is a good tell tale sign of what’s to come.

Quoted: Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes in an email that that “the official poverty line was about half of median income in 1963, but is less than 30 percent of median now because of general economic growth.”

Noted: “Patient involvement and perceptions, as well as those of providers, are very culturally specific, so findings in one setting are not necessarily generalizable,” said Safdar, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin Department of Medicine. told Reuters Health in an email.

Quoted: “When you look at early intervention for autism, there are lots of different models, and we have a pretty good sense of evidence-based practices for young children with autism,” says Leann Smith, whose research as a developmental psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison focuses on adolescents and adults with autism and on their families. “There isn’t anything analogous to that for adults.”

Noted: Monica Turner, an ecology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said a similar study she and her colleagues published last year found similar results to the CU-Boulder study. She said it’s easy to think the dead trees would burn better — after all, we build campfires with dry, not wet, wood.

Quoted: UW-Madison Political Science Professor David Canon says such hot button issues have prompted special interests to begin pouring money into the races. “They realize it’s in their interest to try to influence who’s going to sit on the Supreme Court, to have sympathetic justices who agree with their positions. It’s a much more open process now, to be more open about that partisanship than we had say, 20 years ago,” Canon says.

Quoted: With few candidates officially in the race so far, there are some questions about what impact waiting is having on Walker’s campaign. While UW-Madison political scientist Ken Mayer says he expected an announcement by now, he says the biggest risk the governor is taking by waiting is losing some ground to other candidates, both in building support and possible funding sources.

We turned to Barbara Ingham, a professor of food science at UW-Madison, to get the facts on canning, pickling, freezing and drying, some of the most scientific processes one can attempt in a home kitchen. But while great for preserving excess fruits and vegetables, canning and pickling can also make you very, very sick if you don’t know what you’re doing. Knowledge is key.

Noted: Ann Sheehy, an internist and associated professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, admits that hospitals do sometimes change a patient’s status retroactively, sometimes days into the hospital stay. However, she says, that’s because it’s not entirely up to the attending physician. A doctor, on seeing the patient, might write down “inpatient” only to be told after the fact by administrators that by law the right code was “observation.”

Quoted: “I struggle to find any ethical justification for a call-in show host/news director to accept a gift of any kind, much less a Corvette, from someone at the behest of a talk-show guest, much less when that guest is the governor of the state,” said Robert Dreschel, the director the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Journalism Ethics. “Accepting such a gift inherently compromises or at least leaves the appearance of compromising the independence of not just the host/news director, but of the public affairs/news operation of the station itself. Although there may seem to be no quid pro quo here, I think there actually is. Surely a gift made under such circumstances leaves the host vulnerable to feeling beholden to the guest who has facilitated the gift, and to the gift-giver as well. Surely it would be reasonable for listeners to suspect as much.”

Quoted: “The short answer is the president can’t use an executive order to affect overall spending levels,” said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power. “But there’s always discretion for the president to administer the law and wind up spending some money.”

Noted: The Wisconsin high court has considered several politically-charged issues in recent times. Those include Wisconsin’s Voter ID law and Act 10 – Gov. Walker’s bill dismantling most public unions. UW-Madison Political Science Professor David Canon says such hot button issues have prompted special interests to begin pouring money into the races.

Quoted: “If you don’t have enough information to do this and not come out with a profit, the risks of a deficit here are huge,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies federal education policy. “This is a pretty darn complicated task that, frankly, lots of really smart banks were doing for a long time. These guys [in the government] are not that well versed in it.”

Quoted: There are two broad schools of thought on modifying the human germline, said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the Doudna group. One is pragmatic and seeks to balance benefit and risk. The other “sets up inherent limits on how much humankind should alter nature,” she said.