Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: It’s like a cell phone data plan, in which people are charged different flat rates depending on their typical usage, energy analyst Gregory Nemet of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told BuzzFeed News.

Quoted: Many adults bank online, but kids still benefit from visiting a branch, says Elizabeth Odders-White, an associate dean at the Wisconsin School of Business in Madison.

Noted: Holly Gibbs, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says it is possible to identify some of the more successful policies. She and her colleagues found that deforestation was higher in areas not covered by the soya-bean moratorium, including on properties that are already on the federal land registry.

Quoted: Richard Simpson, the student health-insurance manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, contends, however, that student health plans are a better deal for students.

Quoted: Michael G. Thomas, a bacteriologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a chair of the session in Denver, said he was impressed by how much of an impact this simple peptide could make.

Noted: Gianofer Fields studies material culture at UW-Madison and is the curator of “Radio Chipstone” – a project funded by the Chipstone Foundation, a decorative arts foundation whose mission is preserving and interpreting their collection, as well as stimulating research and education in the decorative arts.

Noted: Karen Holden said she thinks that today there’s much more support for women, socially and in the form of information, which helps in times of financial stress. “I think with the increase in divorce, singlehood through marital dissolution is more common, so you get much more information – so there’s also much more information for widows,” Holden told Reuters Health. “Also, marriages are much more shared financially, so you don’t get the disorientation of suddenly having to manage on your own,” said Holden, who studies poverty and aging at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and was not involved in the study.

Quoted: Social media, particularly Instagram, messes with our perception of reality. Catalina Toma of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison explained it this way: “You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don’t necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing.”

Quoted: UW-Madison finance professor Oliver Levine says looking at what happened to Heinz after Warren Buffet and investors bought the company is a good tell tale sign of what’s to come.

Quoted: Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes in an email that that “the official poverty line was about half of median income in 1963, but is less than 30 percent of median now because of general economic growth.”

Noted: “Patient involvement and perceptions, as well as those of providers, are very culturally specific, so findings in one setting are not necessarily generalizable,” said Safdar, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin Department of Medicine. told Reuters Health in an email.

Quoted: “When you look at early intervention for autism, there are lots of different models, and we have a pretty good sense of evidence-based practices for young children with autism,” says Leann Smith, whose research as a developmental psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison focuses on adolescents and adults with autism and on their families. “There isn’t anything analogous to that for adults.”

Noted: Monica Turner, an ecology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said a similar study she and her colleagues published last year found similar results to the CU-Boulder study. She said it’s easy to think the dead trees would burn better — after all, we build campfires with dry, not wet, wood.

Quoted: UW-Madison Political Science Professor David Canon says such hot button issues have prompted special interests to begin pouring money into the races. “They realize it’s in their interest to try to influence who’s going to sit on the Supreme Court, to have sympathetic justices who agree with their positions. It’s a much more open process now, to be more open about that partisanship than we had say, 20 years ago,” Canon says.

Quoted: With few candidates officially in the race so far, there are some questions about what impact waiting is having on Walker’s campaign. While UW-Madison political scientist Ken Mayer says he expected an announcement by now, he says the biggest risk the governor is taking by waiting is losing some ground to other candidates, both in building support and possible funding sources.

We turned to Barbara Ingham, a professor of food science at UW-Madison, to get the facts on canning, pickling, freezing and drying, some of the most scientific processes one can attempt in a home kitchen. But while great for preserving excess fruits and vegetables, canning and pickling can also make you very, very sick if you don’t know what you’re doing. Knowledge is key.

Noted: Ann Sheehy, an internist and associated professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, admits that hospitals do sometimes change a patient’s status retroactively, sometimes days into the hospital stay. However, she says, that’s because it’s not entirely up to the attending physician. A doctor, on seeing the patient, might write down “inpatient” only to be told after the fact by administrators that by law the right code was “observation.”

Quoted: “I struggle to find any ethical justification for a call-in show host/news director to accept a gift of any kind, much less a Corvette, from someone at the behest of a talk-show guest, much less when that guest is the governor of the state,” said Robert Dreschel, the director the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Journalism Ethics. “Accepting such a gift inherently compromises or at least leaves the appearance of compromising the independence of not just the host/news director, but of the public affairs/news operation of the station itself. Although there may seem to be no quid pro quo here, I think there actually is. Surely a gift made under such circumstances leaves the host vulnerable to feeling beholden to the guest who has facilitated the gift, and to the gift-giver as well. Surely it would be reasonable for listeners to suspect as much.”

Quoted: “The short answer is the president can’t use an executive order to affect overall spending levels,” said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power. “But there’s always discretion for the president to administer the law and wind up spending some money.”

Noted: The Wisconsin high court has considered several politically-charged issues in recent times. Those include Wisconsin’s Voter ID law and Act 10 – Gov. Walker’s bill dismantling most public unions. UW-Madison Political Science Professor David Canon says such hot button issues have prompted special interests to begin pouring money into the races.

Quoted: “If you don’t have enough information to do this and not come out with a profit, the risks of a deficit here are huge,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies federal education policy. “This is a pretty darn complicated task that, frankly, lots of really smart banks were doing for a long time. These guys [in the government] are not that well versed in it.”

Quoted: “Given the historical relationship of employment in Wisconsin versus the nation, I would have expected Wisconsin growth to be faster,” said Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: There are two broad schools of thought on modifying the human germline, said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the Doudna group. One is pragmatic and seeks to balance benefit and risk. The other “sets up inherent limits on how much humankind should alter nature,” she said.

Quoted: Pinterest has some important user stats. Women make up about 70 percent of its users. And, one-third of its users are in $100,000+ households, which is also important, says Don Stanley, who teaches digital marketing at the University of Wisconsin and is founder of 3Rhino Media.

Quoted: Greg Landry, the University of Wisconsin Athletic Department’s lead physician, said Borland’s decision may give pause to other young football players.

Quoted: One of the downsides of the mostly-awesome phenomenon of human consciousness is the ability to worry about the future. We know the future exists, but we don’t know what’s going to happen in it. “In other animals, unpredictability or uncertainty can lead to heightened vigilance, but I think what’s unique about humans is the ability to reflect on the fact that these future events are unknown or unpredictable,” says Dan Grupe, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. “Uncertainty itself can lead to a lot of distress for humans in particular.”

Quoted: “One of the Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Control Plan’s goals is to reduce the risk of people in our state getting cancer,” said LoConte, an oncologist. “By increasing the use of the HPV vaccine statewide, we are closing the door to cancer for our children’s generation.”

Quoted: Nadav Shelef is a professor of Israel studies and political science at the University of Wisconsin.Unlike in American politics, where candidates of similar ideology often settle their scores before election day, Shelef says the game of drawing distinctions never really ends in Israel.

Quoted: “It just changes expectations for who’s responsible for making elections work,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and director of the Elections Research Center. “In every other state it’s the responsibility for the voters to make sure it happens.”

Noted: But “cisgender” and “cis,” used for people whose gender identity aligns with their birth sex, didn’t begin catching on until around 2008, according to Anne Enke, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Before that time, she recalls, her undergraduates considered “cisgender” to have “too much of a subcultural ‘insider’ feel,” but then she noticed that an increasing number of students savvy about gender issues “began to casually toss ‘cis’ ” into classroom discussion. (Subscription required.)

Quoted: “In a crystal, everything is periodically arranged. If you know what’s happening in one little bit, you can predict where the atoms are going to be everywhere else. In glass, things are much more disordered,” explained Mark Ediger, an experimental chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study.

If science-as-political-football prompts people give up on the idea that a consensus emerging from a growing body of scientific evidence “is the best available evidence for decisionmaking … we’re basically undermining the very value of the scientific enterprise,” says Dietram Scheufele, who studies science policy and science communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Noted: Computer algorithms shouldn’t displace children’s real conversations with real friends, pediatrician Dipesh Navsaria, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said in the statement.

Quoted: But if annatto is flavorless, what accounts for the difference? According to Dean Sommer, cheese and food technologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, some manufacturers actually make their orange and white cheddars differently, altering the moisture, fat content, and aging times to reflect regional palates.

Quoted: The results underscored the extent to which chief audit executives “encountered some form of political pressure, almost on a daily basis, said Larry Rittenberg, one of the authors of the report and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: At the University of Wisconsin School of Business, Professor Charlie Trevor says in the future some companies could lose many good workers unless they make changes.

Quoted: The right-to-work bill is unlikely to have a major economic effect, because unions have been in decline for three decades, said William Jones, a University of Wisconsin-Madison labor historian.

“The assumption from past research has been that cities of all sizes will eventually decline in density,” says author Annemarie Schneider, a geographer at University of Wisconsin, Madison.