Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: An ICEE is a little bit like an avalanche. “If you are in an avalanche, it’s sort of like you’re swimming around in snow,” explains Scott Rankin, a food scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “As soon as the avalanche stops, it becomes very rigid, very cement-like.”

On this edition of In Black America, producer/host John L. Hanson Jr. speaks with Dr. John B. Diamond, the Hoefs-Bascom Professor of Education at University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, and co-author of “Despite The Best Intentions,”

Quoted: “This shows a relationship between inadequate hydration and increasing BMI,” said Wendy Hahn, a nutritionist at University of Wisconsin Health who was not involved in the study. “While we can’t draw a causal relationship, there is definitely something going on there.”

Support is growing for a theory that sleep evolved so that  connections in the brain can be pruned down during slumber, making room for fresh memories to form the next day. “Sleep is the price we pay for learning,” says Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who developed the idea.

Quoted: “If conservation is going to work in India, it is going to work where people live,“ says Paul Robbins, a conservation and wildlife conflict expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and a former colleague of Karanth).

Quoted: Kenneth Robbins, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said such comments should prompt questions about how psychologists comport themselves when they’re with clients.

Quoted: “He has actually proposed three — total, three — bills that have become law in his entire career dating back to 1999,” said David T. Canon, chairman of the political science department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. One named a post office in Wisconsin, a second changed taxes on arrows used by deer hunters, and the third, this year, established a $3 million presidential commission on “evidence-based policy making.”

Quoted: “There’s a high probability in the weeks ahead that we get hot and humid weather,” said Dr. Robert Cropp, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Cows then are under more heat stress and milk production per cow drops.”

Noted: But are patients with private insurance bearing just some, or all the burden of low Medicare rates? University of Wisconsin-Madison business professor Justin Sydnor said most of the studies looking at cost shifting haven’t found it to be the main driver behind increasing health costs.

Quoted: Howard Schweber, a UW-Madison professor of political science who reviewed Kelly’s application at Isthmus’ request, calls him a competent lawyer otherwise lacking qualifications for the state Supreme Court, aside from “an unwavering commitment to an ideology that is shared by Gov. Walker and the Republican leadership in the Legislature.”

Quoted: “This time of year, we get turtles going back and forth to lay eggs,” said Laura Wyatt, program manager for the Lakeshore Nature Preserve. “It’s wonderful to share the land with wildlife, but we have to do what we can to protect them.”

Noted: “The Johnson campaign needs to do something,” said Barry Burden, the head of the elections research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think they’re looking for a way to claw back to make this a competitive race.”

Quoted: Steve Barnet, who works with a University of Wisconsin astronomy team at the polar station but is in the US now, lauded the rescue crew.He said: “The courage of the pilots to make the flight in extremely harsh conditions is incredible and inspiring.”

Quoted: It is less efficient for companies to hire multiple regional insurers, and the merger could allow the few remaining national insurers to raise their rates, said Peter Carstensen, an antitrust expert and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Quoted: Kristen Bernard, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved in the study, praised the work, but told Scientific American that reducing infection by treating bug bites seems “far-fetched” because the person being bit would have to notice the bite and have medication at-the-ready.

Quoted: Despite conflicting media reports, the Supreme Court’s decision does not affirm states the right to ban assault weapons, nor does it affirm the lower court’s decision that put the ban in place, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Ryan Owens said.

Noted: Research by Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison published in 2014 shows that breathing-based meditation—specifically Sudarshan Kriya yoga, which is used by Project Welcome Home Troops and was chosen for its effectiveness at reducing PTSD symptoms among tsunami survivors, according to the study—reduced PTSD symptoms in U.S. veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Quoted: “I think the Trump candidacy has challenged journalism more than virtually anything in my memory,” said Kathleen Culver, associate director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I’m on some forums with educators trying to reason through how we’re going to teach this in the fall.

Quoted: Kansas’s gross domestic product is still less than it was at the end of 2011, said Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has been following Kansas’s economy. Meanwhile, the economy in the rest of the country continues to expand.

Quoted: “I don’t see anything here,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I see some broad generalities.”

Wisconsin’s Rebecca Blank and Michigan’s Brian Kovak (now at Carnegie Mellon) find that the share of single mothers with no earnings or welfare and not in school doubled from 10 to 20 percent from 1990 to 2005. If you include women with very low earnings and no SSI income, the rate goes from 12 to 22 percent. As work requirements spread, mothers who couldn’t find work lost benefits and were left getting by with nothing.

Why zebrafish represent a miracle for the economics of lab-testing?—?and why rats are overpriced. Maybe the biggest advantages of zebrafish, though, is the species’ expansive reproductive capacity. “One of the benefits is the number of offspring they can produce,” says Cara Moravec, a postdoctoral fellow in the genetics department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “A single female can lay several hundred eggs per week,” according to Sirotkin.

Here, via University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Menzie Chinn, is their result in a picture: On the horizontal axis, we see the strength of the effect of minimum wages on employment. A positive number means that a minimum wage is found to increase employment; a negative number means it decreases it. On the vertical axis, we see the precision of the studies — a higher point means a study with a bigger sample size, indicating greater accuracy.So what does this graph tell us? The average effect found in the econ literature is an elasticity of about -0.2 as indicated by the vertical red line. That means that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage would decrease employment by about 2 percent. So if we doubled the minimum wage — a 100 percent increase — we would expect to see the employment of young people go down by a fifth.That’s a small but real effect — a $15 federal minimum wage might throw a million kids out of work. We would have to balance that negative effect against the broad-based positive effect of raising lots of low-income people’s earnings. Balancing the good against the bad is necessary to make a decision.

“Naked protests in Africa have historically been symbolic forms of collective protest, generally by the poorest and most marginalised women in society,” says Aili Mari Tripp, Professor of Political Science and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Women have used these forms of protest throughout history and in many parts of the world, but especially in Africa.”