Category: UW Experts in the News

Violence “almost always” hurts a movement, said Pamela Oliver, a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology professor who studies protests.

Noted: “Unprecedented.” It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot lately, with regard to Donald Trump. This time, however, it’s justified. Behind all the chaos, confusion and international consternation of Trump’s thinly veiled Muslim immigration and travel ban there’s a clear-cut constitutional crisis brewing, as argued on Twitter by Donald Moynihan, director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin.

Noted: Predicting the effectiveness of protests is difficult. It’s so hard to directly link the actions of demonstrators to bills getting passed or leaders making changes. “It’s such a chaotic, complex system,” Pamela E. Oliver, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, explains. “Imagine a sporting event where there are 12 teams on the field, and they all have their own agendas.” It’s impossible to guess the outcome.

Noted: “There were things that succeeded and there things that didn’t go as planned,” said Donna Friedsam, health policy programs director at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

Quoted: “It’s not only science and technology that we’re concerned about. It’s about human decency and dignity for everybody,” Bassam Shakhashiri of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a former president of the American Chemical Society, told BuzzFeed News.

Quoted: “I think the early optimism is probably directly tied to the fact that people just believe that a Trump administration will be much more pro-business given his background than say the Obama administration,” said Mike Knetter, CEO and president of the University of Wisconsin Foundation.

Noted: UW-Madison professor Robert Howard says Trump’s use of Twitter, in particular, may be opening the door for elected leaders to engage with the public in a manner similar to what celebrities have done for years. Howard is a professor of Communication Arts and director of Digital Studies and DesignLab at UW-Madison. He says politicians are adjusting to the new communication medium and so are the people who read the messages and try to interpret their meaning.

Noted: Plant protein tends to be of a lower quality than dairy proteins, though soy is close, said John Lucey, a food scientist who directs the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Dr. Rob Striker, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said many people who are infected with hepatitis C aren’t aware they have it.

Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Steven Deller said the level of union membership nationally has been declining for years as manufacturing is replaced by technology that requires more capital but less manual labor.

Noted: But it is still unclear exactly how, once bound to LSD, these receptor proteins go on to create the specific, often bizarre effects of LSD — like the frequently reported destruction of one’s sense of self, or careening uncontrollably into one’s deepest, most personal memories and emotions. The work only studied two of 40 known receptors that LSD touches in the brain, said Nicholas Cozzi, a pharmacologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the study.

To realize its full potential for innovation and success, science needs all kinds of scientists, said Tracey Holloway, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and president of the Earth Science Women’s Network. “For the well-being of the human enterprise, we want all hands on deck.”

Quoted: UW-Madison economist Steven Deller says the level of union membership nationally has been declining for years as manufacturing is replaced by technology that requires more capital but less manual labor.

Noted: This gives the president lots of leeway — so much, in fact, that executive orders can take effect even over the objection of Congress. That’s where much of the controversy lies, says Ken Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison biochemistry and chemistry professor Laura Kiessling, who cowrote the letter, said Pruitt’s skepticism about climate change could affect EPA’s willingness to protect the quality of life in Wisconsin.

Noted: Plant protein tends to be of a lower quality than dairy proteins, though soy is close, said John Lucey, a food scientist who directs the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Many researchers do not realize the effort and computing savvy it takes to pick through piles of such data, says Edgar Spalding, a plant biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “The phenotyping community has rushed off to collect data and the computing is an afterthought.”

Noted: “Here is the first thing to know: They are not treating gene-edited animals as drugs,” says Alta Charo, lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “They are proposing to regulate the altered DNA as a drug.” This refers back to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which defines a drug as something that intentionally alters a body’s structure or function. OK, technically, sure. But even the FDA agrees that altered genes aren’t drugs—its new draft regulation needs several exemptions and caveats before it can contort its 1938 law to wrap around 21st century technology.

Noted: Many researchers do not realize the effort and computing savvy it takes to pick through piles of such data, says Edgar Spalding, a plant biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “The pheno­typing community has rushed off to collect data and the computing is an afterthought.”

Noted: Julie Mead, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who was invited by the coalition to speak, said that vouchers erode public schools, which are required to serve all students and teach by a state-approved curriculum. Private schools have different requirements.

Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor David Canon said the question for the Women’s March movement is whether it will have a lasting impact on policy following Saturday’s marches.

The term ‘post-truth’ is now a mainstay in political discourse, its use firmly established in any analysis of the European Union referendum result and the outcome of the US presidential election. Academics already struggle to communicate their research findings to the broader society — a problem that is likely to be exacerbated if the public is happy to disregard facts. Dominique Brossard suggests that scientists “Show that you care.”

Noted: Elena D’Onghia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had predicted in 2009 that unless gravity is doing something very strange, we should see clusters of dwarf galaxies all on their own, even near our galaxy. “Based on dark matter theory, we expect a lot of little dwarf galaxies and clumps of dark matter in and around the Milky Way,” she says. So why have these clusters been so hard to spot?

Researchers could reduce experiments on nonhuman primates by studying data that have already been collected to answer new questions, says David O’Connor, a pathologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Noted: Brian Gould, an agricultural economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said exports are critical to the dairy industry, primarily in preventing domestic supplies from growing too large and depressing prices.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor says people shouldn’t expect the truth anytime soon about the authenticity of the dossier containing unsubstantiated information about Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.

Quoted: “It depends on how many people apply. They divide the money up, but I don’t think we’re looking at very many bucks,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Robert Cropp, who was an expert witness in the original case.

Quoted: Edward Hubbard, an assistant professor in the department of educational psychology and the neuroscience training program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that the brain regions involved in processing colors are adjacent to the regions involved in recognizing letters and numbers.

Quoted: “Anybody that bought some dairy bought some milk from 2003 to 2010 can claim some damages,” Bob Cropp, a UW-Madison economist, said.

Noted: University of Wisconsin medial law expert Robert Drechsel argues the opposite: “It is cautioning readers that such-and-such statement in the dossier has been found to be untrue as it continues wrestling with verification. So I think such acknowledgement might actually undermine any claim of reckless disregard.”

Noted: A centralized massive protest has its advantages, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology professor Pamela Oliver. “(Media) rarely get interested unless an action is either very, very large … or disruptive, or especially, violent,” she said.

Quoted: “This is amazing work that reshapes how we think about bacterial interactions and biofilm formation,” says Helen Blackwell, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study. “It shows us a simple and generic way for many different bacteria to interact thorough electrical signals.”

Quoted: Martin Ganco, an associate business professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is part of a nationwide effort to find out how widespread non-competes are, which industries use them, and how they impact companies, workers and the overall economy.