Category: UW Experts in the News

Quoted: “There are numerous studies out there that have suggested that sometimes states get so wrapped up in winning the game, the incentive package never really pays for itself,” said Steven Deller, UW professor.

Quoted: “We don’t know what the benefits package is or the incentive package is because they’re holding their cards very close to their face,” said Steven Deller, Professor of Agriculture and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “I hope that cooler heads prevail when putting these incentive packages together,” Steve Deller, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of agriculture and applied economics, said Tuesday. “Sometimes states get so caught up in playing the game that they lose sight of the costs these incentives incur. Wisconsin has historically not played that game.”

Noted: The entire Trump-versus-Sessions episode is “jaw-dropping” in how ill-advised it is, says Ken Mayer, a professor of political science who specializes in the constitutional powers of the presidency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Robert Drechsel, the former head of the University of Wisconsin journalism school and an expert on media law, agreed that someone who decides to speak at a public hearing has given their consent to have what they shared be made public.

Noted: “We see the same pieces of legislation being proposed in state, after state, after state,” says Julie Underwood, an endowed chair in education policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has been investigating ALEC’s actions in education for the past five years. She has tracked versions of ALEC bills through public records in state libraries.

James Tinjum, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Engineering Professional Development (EPD), will travel across four Midwestern states by bicycle in July to visit wind turbines and bring attention to wind energy.

Tinjum will “bike the wind” in a 1,250-mile long journey entirely by bike that will take him past more than 50 wind energy sites in an educational journey that combines his passions for bicycling, sustainability and energy.

While the species can carry the virus, UW-Madison entomologist PJ Liesch says there’s no sign of it happening in Wisconsin right now. He says this type of mosquito is already widely found across the southern United States, while the only cases of Zika transmission in the U.S. have been in southern Florida and in southern Texas.

Noted: Susan Paskewitz is a professor and director of entomology at UW-Madison and is the director of the Upper Midwest Center of Excellence in Vector Borne Diseases.

Noted: Clinical psychologist Dr. Julianne Zweifel at UW Health Generations says that anxiety and depression often appear as a pair – but that doctors may be more accustomed to screening new moms for PPD than anxiety, so it could be overlooked.

Noted: “My concern about ALEC is that [it] takes the private corporation and gives them such incredible power,” said Julie Underwood, UW-Madison School of Education Dean.

Noted: “What has happened over time is that development has become less dense in the US,” says Volker Radeloff, a forestry professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and lead author on that 2005 WUI study. “People like to move to a 5-acre ranch, and that creates this volatile mix of houses and flammable vegetation.”

So what makes the price of milk so variable, and what does that volatility mean for the Dairy State? Bob Cropp is a professor emeritus and dairy marketing policy specialist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He says there are three main factors that impact the price of dairy nationwide.

Noted: “It was only three mosquitoes that we’ve been able to detect,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison entomologist Susan Paskewitz. “And we went back out to the same location and have looked and just haven’t been finding them. So at the end of the summer I might say something different after we’ve looked in more places and had longer to see if this represents an opportunity for these mosquitoes to get more of a foothold.”

Noted: “There’s movement around integrating demographic data with how students interact with the online digital classroom. I think higher education institutions are just getting their feet wet in that area,” University of Wisconsin–Madison Chief Data Officer Jason Fishbain tells EdTech. “One thing that is technically possible is that we can start to personalize the student experience.”

Quoted: “The scientific interest in solar eclipses has evolved from pinning down the location of the moon to discovering planets near the sun,” said Jim Lattis, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Place.

Noted: Lee Welhouse is an instrument technician who oversees weather satellites put on the continent by the UW Antarctic Meteorological Research Center.

Noted: The case could ease the “sense of distrust between the parties,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “I don’t think it can get much worse.”

Noted: The article was based on a new book, “Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics,” by Jonathan Renshon, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Quoted: “These Asian earthworms that we have in Wisconsin live in the top layer of the soil,” said UW Arboretum Ecologist Brad Herrick, noting the reddish-colored earthworm can damage the soil they live in. “They decrease nutrients in the soil so that obviously has implications for plant growth.”

“The last three months have only been about the fourth or fifth wettest, but out of 123 years, that’s a lot of precipitation,” said Ed Hopkins, assistant state climatologist through the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: “It’s possible there is some classified intelligence report on China and North Korea and U.S. elections, but I have never heard this claim before, nor seen any evidence,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Yoshiko Herrera, who is the former director of the school’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia.

Noted: At Babcock Hall Dairy Plant in Madison, manager Bill Klein said every load of milk that comes into the plant for processing and bottling is tested for temperature, and if it’s above 45 degrees, they send it on its way.

Interviewed: Jonathan Gray, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (@jonathanagray).

Noted: Live at Four talks to UW meteorologist David Mikolajczyk about the implications of the event.

Noted: Donald Moynihan, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he worries that Republican-dominated legislatures could act on their low regard for public colleges and universities by slashing their funding, resulting in tuition increases that would swell levels of student debt already at record levels.

Quoted: Microsoft has tried using the TV buffer zones, or white space, to provide broadband internet in several countries. But the idea is “still in its infancy,” said Parmesh Ramanathan, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Quoted: “If you look at the promotional materials, the lobbying, it’s the same people who are pushing against Sharia around the country — holding rallies, talking about ‘Sharia creep’ and Muslims taking over,” said Asifa Quraishi-Landes, who teaches constitutional and Islamic law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and serves as president of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers. “They see any acknowledgment of Sharia in American Muslim life as a first step to the Trojan Horse.”

Noted: “We do know that people who are healthier are more productive and are more likely to work,” said Barbara Wolfe, a health economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We also know that the people who are most affected by the expansion [of health coverage], and would be most affected by cutbacks, are people with lower incomes.”

Noted: “There are a lot of dimensions to the decision of an individual to vote and the administration of an election,” says Ken Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin studying the voter patterns of the 2016 election. But from his research, some of which documents Americans forgoing the vote if the hurdle is unfair or too high, he is convinced that the “end game is to provide rationale for massive purges, and it’s not going to be Jennifer Andersons but Hector Gonzaleses who are going to face this.”

Often, developers cut down trees to construct their buildings, then wait until the end of the development — when there often isn’t enough space left — to consider where canopy trees should go, said John Harrington, a professor of landscape architecture at UW-Madison who is a member of the task force.

Noted: “We are still struggling with how to manage the dual-use dilemma. How do we get the benefit of the research without the risk of it being turned against us?” said Alta Charo, a law professor and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin who has followed the debate closely.

Noted: After President Trump announced a temporary travel ban in January, academic leaders were swift to condemn it, and to warn that it would shut out some of the world’s most talented scholars.

“Conflating doxing and journalism risks blurring or eliminating the public interest goal of good journalism,” says Andrew Zolides, a digital media scholar who has taught courses about doxing at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: However, an enzyme in rennet clips off the tails. The loss causes the clusters to stick to each other, explained David Montgomery, outreach specialist and assistant coordinator at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Sherry Herwig, director of UW-Madison’s Family Business Center, said the family dynamic can be the most complicated part of succession plans. Some families struggle to communicate, especially when multiple children are involved.

Noted: Dr. Monika Roots is a psychiatrist, a professor at UW and VP of Health Services for Teladoc.  She’s found there’s a comfort and convenience with telemedicine for PTSD patients.

Quoted: Tyler Tunney, a fish researcher with the UW-Madison Center for Limnology, was taken aback by the bloom when he saw it biking by the Yahara River.”I looked over and I was shocked,” Tunney tells 27 News. “Instead of this sort of clear, green water you can see plants through, the whole river just looked like someone had dumped a bunch of teal, blue paint.”

Noted: It was Richard Marsh, an affable, intensely curious scientist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who sounded a warning about questionable animal feeding practices more than a decade ago and kept sounding it until his death in 1997, even as critics dismissed him as an alarmist.

Quoted: Richard Bishop, a UW-Madison economist specializing in natural resources, said the Journal Sentinel poll results are encouraging. “It sounds like people are putting a lot of thought into what kind of risk they are willing to accept,” Bishop said.

Noted: Research by Daniel Phaneuf, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of agricultural and applied and economics, found that anglers were willing to pay the most money to catch a chinook on a Lake Michigan trout and salmon fishing trip.

Noted: The debate over voter ID “has been the most visible point of election reform,” says Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But this registration stuff is just as important but has been happening at a lower level that people aren’t necessarily aware of.”