Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: Dr. Howard Steinberg, a veterinary pathologist at UW-Madison, was part of the committee for several years beginning in 2006. While he doesn’t recall seeing anything particularly alarming, he believes that “an institute of that stature” would benefit from a voluntary external accreditation. “The major issue is the fact that we felt they should be accredited by an agency that normally accredits animal care and use programs,” Steinberg said.

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

Quoted: “Fit your favorite foods into your diet so you don’t end up feeling deprived and saying I’m done with this,” said Julie Andrews, dietitian and chef at UW Health.

Noted: The Daily Caller News Foundation spoke with Kathleen Bartzen Culver, assistant professor and director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about the relevant legal standards in defamation lawsuits. Culver is a media ethicist who teaches a course in media law, but is not a legal expert.

Interviewed: We examine Mr. Obama’s so-called “Pivot to Asia” strategy with Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. McCoy has called Mr. Obama a “geopolitical genius”.

Noted: Though Neanderthals survived this turbulence, they were never able to build up their numbers. (Across all of Eurasia, at any point in history, says John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “there probably weren’t enough of them to fill an N.F.L. stadium.”)

Quoted: So what hell is an organ? Tom Broman, a science historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, laughs when I ask him.

Noted: Then there is a study by Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison more than three decades ago: They found that patients in for-profit nursing homes got heavier doses of sedatives than those in nonprofits got. Explaining the pattern, the economist Burton Weisbrod wrote that sedatives were “less expensive than, say, giving special attention to more active patients who need to be kept busy.”

Quoted: Ken Mayer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a book on executive power, agreed on this point: “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Discover Magazine corrects their error: So what hell is an organ? Tom Broman, a science historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, laughs when I ask him.

Noted: Meditation — sometimes as little as five to 10 minutes a day of focused breathing — has been shown to affect areas of the brain that control attention, emotion and habit, says Cortland Dahl, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds. If you want to stop making mindless or money-wasting choices, meditation may help build the “muscle” that enables you to pay attention to your thoughts.

Quoted: Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies China’s demographics, said half of all Chinese women eligible to have a second child were 40 or older.

Noted: Recently, “big data” analytics have supplemented surveys to develop microtargeting strategies for particular baskets of voters. These approaches have some value, but they are also overly static and overly national. Surveys and focus groups tell us what individuals in various demographic categories say in response to questions experts put to them, but they do not reveal how people in groups and communities think and talk about politics — as Katherine Cramer, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, discovered when she actually sat down with groups all over her state to “listen in” on their discussions of community affairs.

Quoted: “Earlier experiments show that a neural representation of a word disappeared,” said the study’s lead author, Brad Postle, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But by using a trio of cutting-edge techniques, Dr. Postle and his team have revealed just where the neural trace of that word is held until it can be cued up again.

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.