Category: Research

“This is what anonymous did to my elbow.” It was 10 p.m. last Friday night in Philadelphia, and I was sitting outside at a restaurant with the sociologist and author Alice Goffman. Goffman, a small woman with a drink and a plate of chicken wings sitting mostly untouched in front of her, swiped back and forth on her phone, showing me photos from last month in which one of her elbows looked normal and the other one, the site of an old injury, appeared red and inflamed. Her elbow got inflamed because she is now a controversial figure.

Late last month, a Northwestern University law professor published an article calling into question the veracity of a widely lauded book by Alice Goffman, one of sociology’s brightest young stars. The book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, is an ethnographic study of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia where, according to Goffman’s research, residents live in a mini–police state, constantly in fear of being arrested and sent to jail or prison, often for minor offenses.

UW-Madison is the fourth-largest research institution in the United States, according to a recent study released by NorthStar Consulting. The College of Agricultural and Life Sciences – CALS – alone has about $102 million in research funding. It’s difficult to quantify direct and indirect economic benefits because of the many complex connections and partnerships across the university and UW-Extension. But certainly several current research projects are contributing value to agriculture in the state and beyond.

A paper in the Journal of Marketing Research by Page Moreau of the Wisconsin School of Business and Marit Gundersen Engeset of Buskerud and Vestfold University in Kongsberg, Norway asks a question we’ve all pondered at some point: Is it better for kids to free-build with LEGOs or to follow the instructions of kits?

In what may be the first study of its kind, Anita Mukherjee, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, compared average time served and recidivism at public and private prisons. She found that the lower costs that make private prisons attractive are undermined by longer stays.

A team of researchers has turned to the ocean to help unravel the mysteries of cloud formation by peeling back the mysteries of the structures of tiny aerosol particles at the surface of the ocean. The University of Wisconsin-Madison work shows how the particles’ chemical composition influences their abilities to take in moisture from the air, which indicates whether the particle will help to form a cloud, a key to many basic problems in climate prediction.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor has launched the Farmers Market Metric Project to help communities measure the impacts local farmers’ markets have on economic growth and community building.

Adena Rissman is on the faculty in UW Madison, studying relationships between people and natural resources.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in the case of the University of Wisconsin’s Cool Science Image Contest, some of those words are going to be a bit lengthier than usual.

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers will spend the summer and fall studying the damage that frac sand can do to ballast after sand particles leak out of rail cars and onto railroad tracks.

An assistant professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison is under siege amid allegations of illegality and dishonesty in her acclaimed book about the lives of young black men in urban Philadelphia.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering research and development team thinks a computer chip made mostly of wood could be the answer to potentially toxic, non-biodegradable electronics filling up landfills.

UW sociology professor Alice Goffman has gained rare acclaim for her scholarly work, “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.” But with the success comes criticism.

Great Lakes Bioenergy is a DOE, Office of Science-funded Bioenergy Research Center. Its mission is to develop ways to produce ethanol, advanced biofuels and chemicals from the non-edible, lignocellulosic part of plant biomass. The Center includes researchers at UW-Madison & Michigan State University, plus partners in a DOE-national.

If blaze orange is not your color, a proposal at the Wisconsin Capitol would could give you another option. The legislation would add blaze pink to the list of approved colors that must make up half of the outerwear worn by hunters who head out into the woods in Wisconsin throughout the year.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Real men — and women — could wear pink in Wisconsin’s woods if a group of lawmakers get their way.

The Open Source Seed Initiative wants to make carrot seeds more like software. That may seem like an odd project, but consider this: It’s currently possible to patent plants with certain traits, whether they are created through traditional breeding or biotech modification.

A group of Madison-based scientists is forming a team to find the remains of long-lost World War II veterans and bring them home for proper burial. If private fundraising goals are met, the Missing In Action Recovery and Identification Project would meld the skills of UW-Madison scholars of history, genetic analysis and archeology.

Wisconsin is home to largest number of organic dairy farms in the country and cows on each of those farms get part of their diet from grazing grass and other plants. Now, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are trying to find ways to improve those pastures.

In August 2003, hundreds of Parisians returned from their summer holidays to an unholy smell. Ascending the stairs in their apartment buildings, they found the source: dead bodies. Between August 1st and 20th, a heat wave baked Europe, and nearly 15,000 people died in France alone. Richard Keller’s intrepid new book, Fatal Isolation, is a social autopsy of those deaths. (Subscription required.)

It was America’s first metropolis.Cahokia, the largest prehistoric settlement in the Americas north of Mexico, flourished in the 1200s, with a population of 20,000 people at its peak – but was mysterious abandoned by 1400. Now researchers think they know why – a megaflood that raised the Mississippi River by 10m.

Alcohol consumption questions have become commonplace in the repertoire of a doctor’s assessment of a patient in Wisconsin, but the brief dialog isn’t prompting those most in need to seek treatment, a study shows. The study, performed by UW-Madison assistant professor of social work Joseph Glass, said the process known as screening and brief intervention helps people with milder drinking problems but not those who need counseling or treatment.

More than 100 people in Door County spent their Saturday thinking about how exactly the world is going to be affected by climate change during the second annual Door County Climate Change Forum at Stone Harbor. Attendants were first introduced to Professor Molly Jahn of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who leads research in creating modern knowledge systems for sustainability.

Researchers have long debated the reasons behind the rapid rise and swift disappearance of Cahokia, a sprawling, ancient city-state near the modern city of St. Louis. Now an analysis of sediment cores reveals that the city’s ups and downs correspond to the timing of Mississippi River megafloods, according to a recent study from University of Wisconsin geographers Sam Munoz and Jack Williams.

Psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cardiff University have found that people from different countries can be grouped into ’cultures of smiling’.

There’s a significant relationship between depressive symptoms and short-term debt, according to a new study of 8500 consumers

Narrow provider networks are often considered synonymous with a lower quality of health care, but a new study challenges that conventional wisdom.