Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: To learn more, a great starting point is a map created by Carl M. Sack, a geographer and cartographer studying at the University of Wisconsin whose wider body of work can be explored at Northlandia.com.

Noted: Many scientists and public health officials are loath to identify those patients and avoid the term “patient zero” altogether, said Thomas Friedrich, an associate professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.

Quoted: “Some people are probably going to overreact, and there will be other investors trying to second-guess what those investors are doing,” said David Brown, a professor of finance at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, in Madison, Wisconsin. “There is a salience of short-term events, particularly bad events, that lead people to react to short-term information.”

Noted: That Hillary Clinton may not have the same black early voter turnout as President Barack Obama, our first African-American president, did in 2008 and 2012 is not particularly surprising. “In 2008 and 2012, black voter turnout rose enough to erase the gap in participation between blacks and whites,” early voting expert Barry Burden, a political scientist with the University of Wisconsin Madison, said.

Noted: Another reason for the shift, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is the Republican’s unorthodox campaign.

Noted: Sharing that you voted online or showing off your sticker face-to-face actually encourages other people to vote, said Mike Wagner, an elections expert and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Quoted: “In 2008 and 2012 black voter turnout rose enough to erase the gap in participation between blacks and whites. The early vote data suggest that black turnout might recede somewhat in 2016 while Latino turnout surges,” early voting expert Barry Burden, a political scientist with the University of Wisconsin Madison, said.

Jumping worms, consisting of various non-native species from multiple genera, have become established in a number of eastern and southeastern states. In 2013, species from the genus Amynthas were confirmed for the first time in the Upper Midwest, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

Quoted: “There’s always been controversy about the extent to which it accomplishes its goals,” said Dan Phaneuf, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “Aneurysms are not uncommon, and a great majority of aneurysms don’t rupture,” said Charles Strother, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “So when you are faced with a patient with an unruptured aneurysm, it’s a quandary because if it ruptures, it’s a serious condition and 30 to 40 percent of patients die.”

Noted: “The Fight for $15 and the simultaneous benefits is an amazing, unprecedented thing that I don’t think anyone five years ago would have expected, given our hyper-polarized political environment,” said Laura Dresser, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the impact of low wages. “This is a workforce that’s coming out of the shadows.”

Quoted: “The achievement disparities of Wisconsin are complex and far too many policymakers and politicians want to distill them into a single explanation, like poverty, parental shortcomings or cultural deficits,” Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in an email.

Quoted: Adrian Treves, founder of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was also not part of this research, agrees that these fossils do not shed much light on the story of cave lions’ extinction.

Quoted: “It was pretty clear that 2010 was a wave election and there was nothing that (Feingold) could have done to fend off the challenge from Ron Johnson,” said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Interviewed: WBEZ discusses Duterte’s rule, U.S.-Philippines relations and the current state of Obama’s “pivot to Asia” policy with Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. McCoy is the author of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. McCoy calls Mr. Obama a “geopolitical genius.”

Quoted: In recent years, however, some scientists have been trying to drum up interest again in a vaccine. They’ve demonstrated that the rhinovirus is not as harmless as it once seemed. “It’s getting more respect as a pathogen,” said Dr. James Gern, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine who studies colds.

Quoted: “There’s an interesting power dynamic that the elected D.A.s don’t have power over their employees like a factory manager,” said Ben Kempinen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. While a district attorney is hired and fired by the voters in a county position, the district attorney and assistant district attorneys are state employees.

Noted: Part D was conceived at a time when rapidly rising US drug costs were alarming seniors, prompting some to head to Canada and Mexico to buy medicines at dramatically lower prices. With the 2004 presidential election campaign coming up, Republican leaders saw “an opportunity to steal a long-standing issue from the Democrats,” said Thomas R. Oliver, a health policy expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the lead author of the 2004 paper about the adoption of Part D.

Quoted: With Election Day three weeks away, there are several groups of undecided voters who could affect the Nov. 8 outcome, said Chris Wells, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism and mass communication professor.

Noted: Marcus Cederström, who’s finishing his Ph.D. in Swedish culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, tells Science of Us the word itself fuses samman, or together, and boende, or accommodation.

The U.S. Supreme Court is clear: Children are not the same as adults, even when they’re tried as adults, and their sentences should reflect that. That’s the analysis of Eileen Hirsch, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, to whom USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin turned for an explanation of the things Wisconsin judges consider when sentencing juveniles.

Noted: “The Fight for $15 and the simultaneous benefits is an amazing, unprecedented thing that I don’t think anyone five years ago would have expected, given our hyper-polarized political environment,” said Laura Dresser, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the impact of low wages. “This is a workforce that’s coming out of the shadows.”

Noted: Some of the people most affected by trade—white, working-class older men—are those who have eschewed traditional candidates from both parties and supported the anti-trade platforms of Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump in the election. Both candidates had pledged to stop trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership. “In theory, the winners should repay the losers, but we don’t in our country,” Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me, a few months ago.

Quoted: “It certainly doesn’t feel right when they have a clear interest in the matter,” said Robert Drechsel, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “but I don’t think there’s any way to classify what they’re doing as illegal.”

Noted: “This is an old idea whose time has come,” said Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who directed the Institute for Research on Poverty there from 2008 to 2014. Daniel P. Moynihan, who advised former President Richard Nixon and was a Democratic senator from New York, actively supported this idea. So did Milton Friedman, the guru of conservative economic thinking from the 1960s through the 1980s.

“This is an old idea whose time has come,” said Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who directed the Institute for Research on Poverty there from 2008 to 2014. Daniel P. Moynihan, who advised former President Richard Nixon and was a Democratic senator from New York, actively supported this idea. So did Milton Friedman, the guru of conservative economic thinking from the 1960s through the 1980s.