Category: UW Experts in the News

Quoted: ?I believe the argument that opponents of voter ID are racist is incorrect and twists our social science language in an inaccurate fashion,? said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, and one of the expert plaintiff witnesses accused by North Carolina of making an ?odious? ?racial classification.?

Quoted: ?I?m reluctant to be super-critical of him. The focus on him is intense, super-intense,? said Dr. Dennis Maki, a University of Wisconsin-Madison infectious disease specialist.

Quoted: Even with the recent ups and downs, a UW professor of finance says it?s not time to pull your money out of the market. “Even if you are close to retirement, you should not remove money out of the stock market just because you see a lot of volatility. In fact, most of the time we think that volatility will actually give you high rates of return going forward,” says Bjorn Eraker.

Quoted: Dr. Dennis Maki, a disease control expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says it takes at least half a day to train people in the protective garb alone. ?I?ve just gone through Ebola training in my own hospital for putting the garb on and off this week, and I can tell you that?s a very complex undertaking.?

Noted: Michael R. Newton, field-services captain for the police department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said his state?s concealed-carry law, which took effect in 2011, left institutions some wiggle room. “The legislation was written in a way that allowed businesses and colleges to make the decision on their own if they would allow concealed carry” in their buildings, Mr. Newton said.

The signature dishes served at supper clubs that long served as Wisconsins culinary and social backbone will be under the microscope during next weeks statewide science festival.

[T]here?s a big difference between a 40-bed community hospital and a 900-bed hospital like Texas Presbyterian or a big medical center affiliated with a university, said Dr. Dennis Maki, a University of Wisconsin-Madison infectious disease specialist and former head of hospital infection control.

Quoted: ?Every scientist that I?ve heard speak on the matter says the same thing,? said retired University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor Nina Camic. ?It?s not possible to develop with no damage to the Lake Waubesa wetlands. Yes, you can mitigate, but you cannot avoid it.?

Quoted: “When you put on your garb and you take off your garb, it?s a buddy system,” with another health worker watching to make sure it?s done right, said Dr. Dennis Maki, University of Wisconsin-Madison infectious disease specialist and former head of hospital infection control.

Quoted: Every emergency room needs to be prepared to isolate and take infection control precautions, because no one can control where an Ebola patient might show up, said Dr. Dennis Maki, University of Wisconsin-Madison infectious disease specialist and former head of hospital infection control.

Noted: Written before the last six months of authoritarian unpleasantness, Jessica Weeks?s just-released ?Dictators At War and Peace? nevertheless explains an awful lot of what?s been going on in Russia, China and elsewhere. An assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Weeks argues that international relations scholarship has focused too much on the differences between democratic and authoritarian regimes and not enough on the differences within authoritarian regimes. She sets up a typology of non-democratic states: authoritarians with powerful civilian audiences (think China or Iran), authoritarians with powerful military audiences (think Thailand), and personalist strongmen without powerful domestic audiences (think Putin in Russia).

Quoted: University of Wisconsin epidemiology Ph.D. student Rachel Bergmans, a panelist at the event, is trying to introduce a mealworm-farming kit to Zambian farmers. She said the effort could help provide a sustainable and environmentally-friendly source of food and has been warmly received so far by Zambians.

Quoted: Political science professor Katherine J Cramer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said she was surprised by the supreme court?s decision in the Wisconsin case. It could have national implications, she said, given that Wisconsin is not the only state to have implemented voter ID laws. ?If we can step back from the fact that voter ID legislation disadvantages voters, it?s an important statement about how we think about democracy,? Cramer said.

Quoted: “It?s certainly a very intuitive mechanism,” says William Alexander, a yeast researcher at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the paper. Alexander explains that for yeast, which lacks any cellular components like flagella to help it get around, the evolutionary benefit of being able to spread quickly through insects “to fruit just as it becomes ripe or a tree when it starts leaking sap, is enormous.”

Quoted: Howard Schweber, a constitutional law expert at UW-Madison, had even speculated in September that the conservative justices on the high court could not ignore the pointed challenge issued by Posner, considered one of the most respected conservative jurists in the country.

Quoted: Dietram A. Scheufele, a professor in science communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says he lectures about this sort of confluence of events.

Noted: As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, she studied with Darrel Morrison, who took his students into the prairie to study the principles of restorative landscapes. And her mother was an ecologist who led her five children through the forests and swamps of Pennsylvania, Maryland and the lake country of Wisconsin.

Noted: That doesn?t mean it?s ready for broader use, said Dr. Jonathan Temte, a University of Wisconsin family medicine specialist who heads a panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy.

Quoted: ?We?re definitely falling behind,? says Gary Radloff, a researcher with the Wisconsin Energy Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?It?s pretty remarkable and measurable.? Wisconsin had been seeing growth in this area before ?this massive drop-off in the last few years.?

Quoted: ?It?s because they can,? said Kenneth Mayer, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies campaign finance.

Noted: Games, it seems, can motivate kids to read?and to read way above their level. This is what Constance Steinkuehler, a games researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discovered. She asked middle and high school students who were struggling readers (one 11th-grade student read at a 6th-grade level) to choose a game topic they were interested in, and then she picked texts from game sites for them to read?some as difficult as first-year-college language. The kids devoured them with no help and nearly perfect accuracy.

Quoted: Now, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor believes he has evidence of what, for business owners, could be the most compelling reason of all: higher profits.”Thats what we find,” said Kristian Allee, an assistant professor in the UW School of Business. “It’s pretty interesting stuff.”

Quoted: Asked how the law might affect the close gubernatorial election, University of Wisconsin political scientist Barry Burden said that those who reach the polls on election day without the proper ID will be able to cast a provisional ballot.

Noted: Jennifer Reed, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said on White House Chronicle that universities contract with graduate students for five years, but the federal grants for research, when they get them, can be for less time. Reed said this is devastating to the research and the lives of the young researchers. Her funding comes from the Department of Energy and is aimed at using renewable materials to make alternatives to fossil-based plastics, as well as for energy storage.

Quoted: Steve Carpenter, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of its Center for Limnology, describes phosphorus management as the ?keystone? issue for healthy lakes. ?If we can get phosphorus under control,? he said, ?we have a much better shot at dealing with all of the other problems that the lakes have,? like invasive species, which can swoop in when a lake?s nutrient levels are unbalanced. There are ways to slow the gush of phosphorus into nearby lakes, such as contour plowing and winter cover crops, but Carpenter explains that the phosphorus load has gotten so high that those kinds of strategies ?almost don?t matter anymore.? Instead, we have to remove phosphorus from the system entirely.

Noted: A quintet of clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano was in the midst of rehearsing a work that was as yet unfamiliar to anyone ? except its composer, UW’s Laura Elise Schwendinger.

Quoted: David Canon is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says while big names help to energize the party base, it?s more important to get eligible voters to the polls.

Women have fretted for years that the simple act of wearing a bra, especially an underwire bra, may cause breast cancer. It?s a myth, and a new study proves it, finding no relationship between breast cancer and any aspect of wearing a bra?not cup size, not whether or not it had an underwire, not how old you were when you started wearing one. “It was a well-done study and it was pretty reassuring,” says Kari B. Wisinski, MD, a medical oncologist with the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center in Madison.

Quoted: ?I think we?ve learned a hard lesson,? said Tony Goldberg, associate director for research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Global Health Institute.

Quoted: To get a better idea, we consulted a medical expert, Dr. Benjamin Wedro, a clinical professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for his opinion on whether Gronkowski would get his explosion and burst back at some point this season. Unfortunately, fans, Wedro supports Dilfer?s view.

Noted: Jennifer Reed, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said on ?White House Chronicle? that universities contract with graduate students for five years, but the federal grants for research, when they get them, can be for less time. Reed said this is devastating to the research and the lives of the young researchers. Her funding comes from the Department of Energy and is aimed at using renewable materials to make alternatives to fossil-based plastics; also energy storage.

Quoted: Genetic engineering, precision planting and fertilizer application have increased crop yields over time, said Paul Mitchell, an associate professor of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But in the coming decades it will be ?big data? that allows farmers to finally achieve the potential of these technologies.

Quoted: ?I would suspect that the president and others in his administration have to already be considering his historical legacy as a two-term president,? Hall says of Obama. ?By giving an operational name to the ISIS problem, I think it?s potentially easier for his name to be associated with an operation that may, in a year, in two or five years, appear in retrospect to have been insufficient and unsuccessful.?

Happiness is a skill, according to Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. As such, there are ways to train yourself to be happier–which in turn will make you more empathetic, compassionate and kind.

Quoted: John Hall, a professor of military history at the University of Wisconsin, has a similar perspective. “My suspicion is the administration is so reluctant to create the impression that it is engaging in the kind of military activity that it has forsworn in that region,” Hall recently told U.S. News. “It has determined the best public relations strategy is to give it no name whatsoever.”

Noted: Amy Barger at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues note that on 9 February 2012, the Chandra space telescope saw a spike in X-ray emissions from the centre of our galaxy, where a supermassive black hole is thought to be surrounded by a maelstrom of particles.

Cosmopolitan.com spoke with four experts ? Women of Color Network senior director Tonya Lovelace Davis, University of Wisconsin law professor and co-founder of the Black Women in Sport Foundation Linda Greene, Sports Illustrated host Maggie Gray, and Nate Jackson, a former Denver Broncos tight end and author of the memoir Slow Getting Up on his time in the NFL ? about domestic violence, the culture of the NFL, and whether the league can redeem itself.

Noted: The most recent decrease, however, stands out because of the sharp drop in violent occupational deaths. They had spiked in 2012, more than doubling from the 2011 total, said Rebecca Adams, program policy analyst with the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene.

Noted: ?Well, I think, we in infection control and preparedness, we?ve been worried for a while,? says Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. ?Part of the reason for that is that a lot of preparedness plans had to be put in place and, I think, for places that are still working on those preparedness plans it?s time to really escalate the level of preparation.?

Noted: Bell is professor of agroecology and director of the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at the University of Wisconsin?Madison. He?s poetic about the cycles involved in D-Composition: the rhythms of art imitating life and life imitating art, the circles of life and death, the way creativity spurs further creativity. It?s easy to get caught up in his zeal for the process.

Quoted: Edward Friedman, Hawkins Chair Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sees a system on the brink. He likens conditions on the mainland to the final years of the Qing dynasty and the Kuomintang regime on the mainland.

An Ebola virus expert from UW-Madison is weighing in on the response to the deadly disease in west Africa.

Quoted: “If you talk to the scientific community, there is no doubt that the bees are declining,” said Christelle Guédot, a University of Wisconsin-Madison entomology professor and extension specialist.

Quoted: In many cases, private businesses and their insurers choose to settle civil suits even if they believe they can win, said Peter Carstensen, professor emeritus of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”Often, it?s an economic calculus. How much will I risk if I stand and fight?” he said. “An insurance company is dependent on its revenue, (whereas) it?s very hard for the taxpayers to see the details of what the litigation costs are for the city.”

Quoted: Much of the wage pressure stems from low-cost rivals, said Steven Durlauf, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prominent Wisconsin manufacturers, including the likes of Briggs & Stratton Corp., Harley-Davidson Inc. and Mercury Marine Inc., have adopted tiered wage systems that often offer significantly lower pay scales to new hires.

Quoted: ?It?s hard to tell when somebody had a heart attack and dies if that?s from heat or if that person would have died otherwise,? Tracy Holloway, a University of Wisconsin environmental studies professor, said.