Skip to main content

Category: UW Experts in the News

Uber Could Save Billions in Taxes With This Little-Noticed Move

Posted on
Fortune

Quoted: The new IP value generated a big set of “deferred tax assets”—like pre-paid tax payments or credits—in the Netherlands of $6.1 billion, according to Dan Lynch, an associate professor of accounting and information systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who read the quarterly filing. The taxes would be calculated through multiplying profits by the tax rate. The rate could be either 25% or 7%, the lower number reserved for profits from IP “innovation” developed in the Netherlands, according to Dudley.

Opinion: The future of high school students with autism

Posted on
Los Angeles Times

Quoted: Currently, mostly families from higher incomes are able to help their autistic high school students succeed. According to an article by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Adityarup “Rup” Chakravorty, “Children living in census tracts with lower socioeconomic development [are] less likely to be diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder than children living in areas with higher socioeconomic indicators.”

Toforest Johnson is on Alabama’s death row for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit

Posted on
The Washington Post

The investigators appear to have been afflicted with tunnel vision, a form of cognitive bias that is common in wrongful convictions and especially in high-profile cases. Tunnel vision, writes Keith Findley of the University of Wisconsin Law School and the Wisconsin Innocence Project, “leads investigators, prosecutors, judges, and defense lawyers alike to focus on a particular conclusion and then filter all evidence in a case through the lens provided by that conclusion.

Backers Say Congressional Plan Would Save Traditional Pensions For Thousands In Wisconsin

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: “Most young people graduating college in Wisconsin are going to be going into work where they are covered by a defined contribution plan, what is also known as a 401(k) plan. Unless they are working for a state entity or some other collectively bargained organization, they are probably not going to have a pension,” said Gordon Enderle, an actuary at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.

Hurricane tracking technology is about to regress 30 years, thanks to 5G cell networks | Salon.com

Posted on
Salon

Quoted: “There is going to have to be some sort of agreement between the telecommunications and weather enterprises on what is a viable strategy on what protects the interests of atmospheric observing compared to delivering data via 5G,” Jordan Gerth, an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center, told Salon.

Wisconsin At Risk For Measles Outbreak Because Of Low Immunizations

Posted on
Scary Mommy

Quoted: Though a measles outbreak has yet to hit the state, many are concerned that with immunization rates this low, it’s only a matter of time. “I would not be surprised at all if I woke up tomorrow to hear that the measles outbreak had reached Wisconsin. Not surprised at all,” said Malia Jones, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Applied Population Laboratory.

Both sides in 2020 election fight are watching farm country for political fallout from Trump tariffs

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Even glimmers of good news come these days with a sobering twist. Milk prices have rebounded a little, but partly because enough farmers have quit that it has reduced milk production, said Matt Lippert, a University of Wisconsin-Extension agricultural agent in Wood County.

“Some of them are supportive of the president and say, ‘We just have to be patient. We’ve not been (treated) fair and the president is going to fix it.’ Then some of them are like, ‘We’ve given him enough time already.’ And there are others who are like, ‘No this wasn’t the way ever to do it.’ But they all uniformly think that loss of markets and the tariff thing is hurting them.”

Hiring more workers, investing in communities — should corporations focus on more than shareholders?

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: Focusing on increasing shareholder value has not benefited society overall, said Joel Rogers, director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The theory itself was wrong,” said Rogers, who also is a professor of law, political science, public affairs and sociology.

“Markets drive firms to be short-sighted and make insufficient investments in their workers and communities,” he added. “We know that. Unfettered markets are not the recipe for a happy society. That was the great Freidman lie.”

50,000 unvaccinated children head to Wisconsin schools as the U.S. copes with worst measles outbreak in 27 years

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: “I would not be surprised at all if I woke up tomorrow to hear that the measles outbreak had reached Wisconsin. Not surprised at all,” said Malia Jones, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Applied Population Laboratory.

“I would say that if a child was given the facts themselves and told what these diseases would be like to go through, they would choose to be given something that would not make them have to go through that disease,” said James H. Conway, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Shiva Bidar to Moderate Panel on Standing Together Across Ethnic Lines

Posted on
Madison 365

Another BIG announcement from the Wisconsin Leadership Summit: Madison Common Council president Shiva Bidar will moderate the panel titled “Together We Stand: Building Community Across Ethnic Lines.”

In her role as the first Chief Diversity Officer for UW Health, Shiva provides vision, coordination and strategic leadership for the design and implementation of UW Health’s initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Wisconsin Fares Well Comparatively When It Comes To Credit Card Debt

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Financial capability specialist Peggy Olive breaks it down like this: half of all people who have a credit card balance pay it off entirely each month. Another quarter carry a balance a few months of the year, and the rest regularly owe money on their cards.”Definitely, there’s different ways that people handle that credit card debt,” said Olive, who works with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology’s Center for Financial Security and UW-Extension.

Revisionist History Podcast

Posted on
Revisionist History

Featured: Throughout the 1970s, a biologist named Howard Temin became convinced that something wasn’t right in science’s understanding of viruses. His colleagues dismissed him as a heretic. He turned out to be right — and you’re alive today as a result.

Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins

Posted on
Quanta Magazine

Quoted: “But that kind of very simple approach isn’t very good at sorting out the complexity” of how those lost populations interacted, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Nor does it allow researchers to test specific hypotheses about how that interbreeding unfolded.

Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought

Posted on
New York Times

Quoted: Because information about the past informs predictions of global change in the future, in terms of climate and land use, hard evidence of past land use is invaluable, experts say. “It’s an important paper,” said John Williams, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the project.

Of Course Citizens Should Be Allowed to Kick Robots

Posted on
Wired.com

Noted: Sure, sometimes people do get in the way. They’re curious. What’s this thing for, anyway? They’ll follow the robots to see what they do or tap their buttons to see what happens. “People want to explore them, and they don’t know how to do that,” says Bilge Mutlu, who runs the University of Wisconsin’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Rarely do the interventions cause damage.

Americans love soda, fancy water and fake milk. Can the dairy industry keep up?

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: “When I grew up, my mom poured a glass of milk at every meal and you were expected to drink it,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at UW-Madison. “My mother would say, ‘Drink your milk because it is good for you,’ and scientists said ‘It’s good for you’ and you believed them.”

The Amazon Is on Fire, but Earth Has Plenty of Oxygen

Posted on
The Atlantic

Shanan Peters, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is working to understand just how it was that our lucky planet ended up with this strange surplus of oxygen. At a presentation in June, at the North American Paleontological Convention in Riverside, California, he pulled up a somewhat unusual slide.

How do we improve forensics?

Posted on
Washington Post

Noted: Keith A. Findley, Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, University of Wisconsin Law School

Easiest reforms:

If forensic science wants to claim the mantle of “science,” it must follow fundamental scientific principles, like double-blind testing. Systems should be created to at least shield analysts from domain-irrelevant but contextually biasing information. This can be complicated at times, but it can be done without disclosing the vast array of information that analysts routinely receive today. Proper case management and intake systems can ensure that analysts receive only the information they need, and only when they need it.

Who to recruit to win Congress: Former pro athletes

Posted on
Washington Examiner

Noted: As political scientist and University of Wisconsin professor David Canon points out, athletes garner more media coverage than traditional candidates, which is especially advantageous when running against an incumbent, according to the Dallas Morning News. Typically incumbents dominate the media coverage, as one July 2004 study concluded, so a background in professional athletics can be a major boost for a challenger.

Should You Let Your Kid Play Football? Experts Weigh In

Posted on
Parents

Quoted: Despite the publicity of CTE, doctors cannot predict whether a child will have it later on, says Julie Stamm, Ph.D., LAT, ATC, who researched the issue at the Boston University CTE Center. “We do not understand why one person gets it and the other does not get it,” adds Dr. Stamm, also a clinical assistant professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Should Schools Teach the Scientific Method? New Book Says Maybe Not

Posted on
EdSurge

Think back to what you still remember from science class. No, there’s no need to strain your brain recalling the particulars of cellular mitosis or the periodic table. Instead, consider the idea that spanned any science class from biology to physics: the scientific method, the five-step process for analyzing problems, collecting data and coming to a well-supported conclusion.

But what if the scientific method is actually inaccurate—or at best reductive? What if spending so much time on this framework is giving students the wrong idea about how rigorous work is done by scientists?

That’s the unusual hypothesis being made by John Rudolph, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “How We Teach Science: What’s Changed, and Why It Matters.”

US Rep. Sean Duffy says he’s leaving Congress in September

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Noted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison, said while Duffy’s district heavily leans Republican, it’s not impossible for Democrats to win it in a special election.

He said before the 2011 map making that redrew the district in Republicans’ favor, former President Barack Obama won the district by 13 points in 2008 when he won Wisconsin by 14 points. In 2012 — after the new maps were drawn — Obama lost the district by 3 points, Burden said.

The History Of Food Safety With Deborah Blum

Posted on
WORT FM

Deborah Blum is a science writer and the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. Prior to that, she was a professor of journalism at UW–Madison from 1997 to 2015. She is the author of many books, including The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (Penguin, 2010) and The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2018).

Five ways parents can help their kids transition smoothly to middle school

Posted on
Washington Post

Quoted: If a new sixth-grader has no one to sit with in the lunchroom one day or bombs a test, “they may start to question whether they fit in socially or can succeed academically,” notes Geoffrey Borman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Borman and Rozek conducted research to see whether it was possible to bolster kids’ sense of belonging by underscoring that all students have difficulty at the start of middle school but eventually feel better.

Want to live longer? Be an optimist, study says

Posted on
CNN.com

Quoted: “Optimism is one important psychological dimension that has emerged as showing some really interesting associations with health,” said neuroscientist Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds.

“And I would add other positive attributes, such as mindfulness, compassion, kindness, and having a strong sense of purpose in life,” Davidson added.

GOP Congressman Sean Duffy To Resign From Office

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the district tends to favor Republicans.

“It really is a combination of the drawing of the district lines in a way that was intentional to favor Duffy and Republicans who were in charge of that process, but also just really migration of that district in the Republican direction,” he said.

Biased Evaluation Committees Promote Fewer Women

Posted on
The Scientist

Noted: Régner suggests that a “habit-breaking intervention,” such as that described by the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Patricia Devine and colleagues, might help to facilitate gender equity at academic institutions. In these sessions, participants are made aware of their implicit biases and learn strategies to counter them. This year, the CNRS began offering training sessions on gender stereotypes to evaluation committee members and each committee has appointed a reference person in charge of gender equality issues. Raymond tells The Scientist this self-evaluation and corrective action should take place at all academic institutions, but may be a long time coming.

Psychologist: Back-To-School Jitters Are Common. But Talk To Your Kids About Them

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

New pencils, notebooks and backpacks may be on the checklist as the summer winds down and kids gear up for a new school year, but Dr. Shilagh Mirgain says it’s also an important time of year to check in with kids on how they’re feeling about heading back to school.

“We spend a lot of time preparing our kids for school by buying them school supplies or back-to-school clothes, but our families should equally spend time preparing kids mentally for the start of the school year and pre-school jitters and anxiety,” said Mirgain, a clinical psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

As Amazon Wildfires Blaze, Deforestation May Be to Blame

Posted on
The Great Courses Daily

Quoted: “Deforestation was a well-known problem in the classical world,” said Dr. Paul Robbins, Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “For example, the historian Strabo wrote in the 1st century B.C.E. that the lowland areas of the island of Cyprus were once covered with forests that prevented cultivation, but these had all given way to farming and other activities.”

Want to live longer? Be an optimist, study says

Posted on
cnn

Quoted: “Optimism is one important psychological dimension that has emerged as showing some really interesting associations with health,” said neuroscientist Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds.

One year after major flooding, Coon Valley grapples with what comes next

Posted on
La Crosse Tribune

Quoted: Throughout the country, 10-year storms, which have a 1 in 10 chance of happening in any given year, are occurring about 40% more often than in the 1950s, said Daniel Wright, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the eastern half of the U.S., 100-year storms are happening 85% more often.

It’s very clear that climate change is increasing the number of storms we’re seeing, Wright said. “If we continue to ignore these problems, the cost of ignoring these problems is going to increase as the planet continues to warm.”

Where Trump Stands on Israel

Posted on
The Atlantic

Quoted: Among Christians, “it’s much more of a culture-wars mentality,” says Dan Hummel, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies Christian Zionism. “It’s about winning and maintaining power.”