Category: UW Experts in the News

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.”

Quoted: In many cases, says Christina Kendziorski, a biostatistician at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the tools used in bulk RNA-seq can be applied to scRNA-seq. But fundamental differences in the data mean that this is not always possible.

Quoted: “Nobody would use glass anymore,” says Richard Hartel, a professor of food engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Glass is obviously too fragile for industrial operations, and popsicles with shards would be wildly unpopular. Lucky for food manufacturers in the 1920s, there were lots of new materials coming down the pike.

Noted: “It is the responsibility of the news media in this democracy to be running down stories” like the probe into charges that Russia interfered in last year’s presidential election, says Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jonathan Renshon, a professor of international relations at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Renshon studies the psychology of foreign policy — how the way leaders and decision-makers think affects the way states interact. His new book, Fighting for Status, is about why leaders care so much about the way others perceive their countries, to the point that they’re willing to go to war over it.

Noted; Concerns at the time were substantiated in documentation by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, which reported that of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 93 were about black people. (The 2016 figures reflect a jump: Out of 3,400 books received at the center, 286 are about black people.)

Noted: Dipesh Navsaria, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, points out that Medicaid pays for a lot of sick children’s care, so children’s hospitals may lose enough business that they’ll have to close or roll back the services they offer. That affects everyone: children’s hospitals have a valuable role in training new doctors and developing new procedures.

Noted: But Dietram Scheufele, a life sciences communication professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advises that the results should be taken with a grain of salt.

Noted: “That’s an awesome photo. I have not heard of a mole being fed on by bass or any other fish, but I’m not surprised,” Peter Lisi, a post-doctoral scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology, and lead author of the 2013 paper, told me in an email. He noted that bass eat lots of terrestrial and semi-aquatic animals.

Noted: Digging deeper into the debt details, Houle and his study co-author Lawrence Berger, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Social Work, found that the type of debt makes a big difference. When parents took on or increased their home or education debt, it seemed to have a positive effect on their children’s well-being. On the other hand, additional unsecured debt – which includes credit card debt, medical debt, payday loans and loans from family and friends – tended to coincide with more behavioral problems.

Quoted:  “It becomes really overwhelming and overloading to be thinking about all of these choices,” says Evan Polman, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies decision fatigue.

Noted: “All of a sudden, they could now brew at colder temperatures and get crisper cleaner flavors,” said Chris Todd Hittinger, a University of Wisconsin geneticist who isn’t involved with the bumblebeer project.

Quoted: “It is a bit surprising that Democrats haven’t managed a single victory yet, and haven’t had more success in turning their anger against the Trump administration into something tangible,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The party can weather that for a while, but at some point it could become demoralizing.”

The training was held Tuesday evenings at the Spooner Agriculture Research Station and involved a different horticulture subject each week including: annual, perennial and native plants, houseplants, landscape design, fruit and vegetables, weeds, wildlife, soils, insects, plant diseases and low input lawn care. Participants learned from a wide range of instructors from University of Wisconsin, UW-Extension, local experts and through on-line materials.

Noted: Kathy J Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, has seen this sentiment in her fieldwork. “The feeling of cultural inequality comes out of the perception that it is urban culture that gets everything,” she says, meaning that her interview subjects feel that cities are receiving inordinate financial rewards as well as media attention and cultural respect. They believed this partly owing to what Cramer called their “rural values” – tastes and beliefs that they feel have been overlooked or cast aside – rather than their class position.

Noted: “There’s not really a solid theory about why dreaming is there,” says Benjamin Baird, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin ­– Madison. “It’s a big mystery.”

Noted: A lack of diverse representation in media tends to exacerbate polarization, said Sue Robinson, associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Noted: Patricia Devine, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is an expert in the study of racial bias and the unconscious effect of stereotypes. She said the court’s method of “tuning jurors into their biases” a generally sound approach, though it’s hard to predict how well it will work without some experimental testing. “They’re giving them generally good advice,” Devine said. “But they’re not doing research.”

Quoted: “The best possible outcome of this case, for the Democrats, is that SCOTUS grants review of the case, reverses the lower court’s decision and adopts a different standard by which to monitor the redistricting process within the state for the lower court system to reevaluate,” said Ryan Owens of the University of Wisconsin.

Noted: TV ads can have a powerful effect on local elections, where turnout is generally low, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.