Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Harvard, and the University of Virginia examined 499 studies over 20 years involving 80,859 participants that used the IAT and other, similar measures. They discovered two things: One is that the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought. They also conclude that there is very little evidence that changes in implicit bias have anything to do with changes in a person’s behavior. These findings, they write, “produce a challenge for this area of research.”

Noted: Politics are also at play. “When you think about, in state legislatures, who has the political clout, I’m going to bet you it’s the alumni from those flagships,” said Nick Hillman, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Noted: “The vegetation up there is one-of-a-kind in the world,” said Darrel Morrison, an internationally-renowned landscape designer and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

What scientific discoveries will 2017 bring? What technological innovations? Probably not time travel — or time-shares on Mars. But no one really knows for sure, and when we asked some of the biggest names in science and technology to share their predictions for the coming year, there was a bit of pushback. Includes UW–Madison’s Tracey Holloway.

Noted: “It was the first real shot in the arm here for the Space Race growth of planetariums in the coming decade,” says Jordan D. Marché II, an astronomy lecturer who has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: The law combines elements of legislation introduced by Russia and India in recent years to curtail foreign NGO activities, said Mark Sidel, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: While estimates vary, observers think that only about 1% to 5% of eligible customers may utilize their price matching perks. One big reason: the numerous hoops one has to jump through. “The search costs are very high and the rules may be quite restrictive when it comes to determining what constitutes an identical product at a competing store,” says Noah Lim, a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business.

Quoted: “Whatever’s built is going to be able to drown that entire system during the winter,” said James Burnham, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has researched how changes in China’s wetlands affect endangered water birds.

Quoted: “We have seen a glimpse of the future,” Tom Eggert, a senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the executive director of the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council, told The Christian Science Monitor last month, after 365 companies penned a letter to the president-elect, encouraging him to support low-carbon policies. “The future is that federal and state governments will not be playing as much of a leadership role in the sustainability space as private corporations.”

Noted: In Wisconsin, rural whites are similarly eager to “stop the flow of resources to people who are undeserving,” says Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.”

Noted: The findings are consistent with previous associations drawn between climate and another vector-borne disease: dengue. While dengue is a seasonal disease, peaking during the same time every year, data indicate that the largest epidemics coincide with strong El Niño years, said Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Quoted: Besides, swimming against the tide is nothing new for fact-checkers, says Lucas Graves, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who published Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism in September. “A fact-check never yields the immediate and decisive impact that we might hope for in an ideal world,” Graves says. “We always imagine that you can expose a claim as being false, and people will stop believing it and politicians will stop repeating it, but it doesn’t work that way.”

Noted: A University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor who was on hand for the vote said that once again in 2016, the Electoral College meetings playing out across the country have made history. “I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this in decades,” Professor Barry Burden said. “To have crowds outside protesting, a full room to watch the event, a lot of interest, a lot of opposition, frankly, to what was happening. Nothing like this before.”

A rare avian influenza strain, H7N2, has infected domestic cats for the first time, the University of Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory reported today. The outbreak has stricken 45 cats at the Animal Care Center shelter in New York City. One older cat whose infection progressed to pneumonia was euthanized.

Noted: For the more diehard believers who really thought the Electoral College would shock the world, Markus Brauer, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who researches group processes, offered a comparison to a kind of cult thinking.

Noted: “In the past, the court has always said that racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional if it goes too far, but that partisan gerrymandering has been allowed up to this point,” UW-Madison political science professor David Canon says.

Noted: Molly Knigge is a swallowing specialist and speech pathologist with the University of Wisconsin Voice and Swallowing Clinic at UW Health.

Noted: The Electoral College is as old as the republic itself, according to Barry Burden, political science professor at UW-Madison. He says the nation’s founding fathers set up the system because they didn’t have much confidence that voters would make the right decisions.

Noted: “If Assad really is successful in wiping out the rebels, in a way, it makes the question of the differences in US and Russian approaches moot,” Yoshiko Herrera, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in Russia, says.

Majid Sarmadi, a UW-Madison professor of Textile Science, joins Live at Four to discuss Pantone’s 2017 color of the year.

Noted: Richard Monette, who heads the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said this was one of the greatest takeaways from the Standing Rock protest. It showed the world that sovereign nations will not be silently trampled upon, and that government-to-government relationships should be taken seriously.

Noted: The 2016 Wisconsin Poverty Report produced by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found despite the creation of thousands of new jobs in Wisconsin, the poverty rate remains essentially the same as the last report at 10.8 percent.

Quoted: Lyn Van Swol, a University of Wisconsin-Madison communications professor who has studied political deception, said Trump in some ways fits the model of those who dissemble — they tend to be verbose, as if concocting a structure of support for their misstatements.

Noted: Much remains unknown about what happened before and after Caston sent the email to Duhe with the geometry test questions, including “how is it this individual has them, who-all did he share them with, what was communicated to those teachers,” University of Wisconsin professor James Wollack said.

Noted: Scientists have since tried to apply the constructs of neuroscience to mindfulness. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson’s research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Buddhist monks identified neurological changes associated with meditation, suggesting that meditation could be learned, like calligraphy or Go. Others found that meditation offset some of the effects of age-related cortical thinning.

Noted:  Democratic vulnerability was explored in depth by Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, in a book on voters in that state, “The Politics of Resentment,” which came out in March. In her study, Cramer described the three elements of “rural consciousness”:

Noted: “I think the legacy is in trouble,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied the life and death of government programs. The coalition that passed those — especially the Affordable Care Act and and the Dodd-Frank financial regulations — was a combination of President Obama and a Democratic Congress. And even then it was difficult. That puts those two items from the first two years on the chopping block.”

You have to love cats to be Jason Nolen, UW-Madison lecturer and the founder/curator of Instagram’s Cats of Madison. “It makes me seem… maybe a little bit of a cat maniac,” laughs Nolen.

Noted: Losing the popular vote “takes the shine off any Electoral College victory,” political scientist Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told PolitiFact Wisconsin.

Noted: On Friday, the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center held a symposium analyzing the 2016 election. Among the many thoughtful presenters was Katherine Cramer, a political-science professor at the university’s Madison campus.

Noted: Getting schools to focus on Americans’ shared identity won’t be easy. Take the Rust Belt towns that switched parties to elect Trump, becoming one of the biggest election stories. People in these communities tend to see their local schools as a source of local identity; they don’t take well to outside edicts, particularly those that originate in big cities, says Katherine Cramer, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research for the past 10 years has involved chatting with rural Midwest residents. “How do you not make it sound like ‘Oh, yet again urbanites are telling us that we are backward and we need to be brought back in line with urban society?’” she said.

The debate over whether or not to allow house cats outdoors is heated. While some conservationists say they kill songbirds and cause damage to native species, some cat owners argue that the urge to hunt is vital part of how cats are wired. Interviewed: UW’s Stanley Temple.

Noted: “That was the transition period where we started getting away from market hunting and we were starting to appreciate more of the natural resources for what they are not just the consumptive side of it,” said David Drake, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a UW-Extension wildlife specialist. “Some really influential people really made birding a cool thing to do.”

Noted: “There’s definitely a link between declining levels of federal funding and public views on the quality of science,” said Dietram Scheufele, John E. Ross Professor in Science Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But it’s much more pernicious than simply assuming that voters make inferences about the value of science from the amounts of money the federal government spends on the scientific enterprise,” he clarified.

Noted: “Surely the governor understands that China is a large export market for U.S. agricultural products and that a trade war with China, which is threatened by the U. S. president-elect, would not be good for Iowa farmers. This might suggest to Chinese leaders that Trump’s threats of a trade war are just a bluff in the hopes of a better trade deal for the U.S. with China,” said Edward Friedman, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on Chinese foreign policy.