Category: UW Experts in the News

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.

Quoted: “People live on social media now, and so one way candidates can reach out to voters is to hit them where they live,” says Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Candidates are spending more time trying to go viral – they?re spending more time trying to get people to share stuff on Facebook or retweet a candidate?s messages on Twitter.”

Quoted: Professors Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that ?hybrid? entrepreneurs ? people who maintain their regular gig and while launching their new ventures in stages ? are a third less likely to fail than those who jump in sans safety net.

Noted: There are only about three strains of flu each season, while “there are usually 20-30 different types of rhinovirus circulating each season in one geographic area,” explains Yury A. Bochkov, an associate scientist in the department of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Only about 10% of those will show up again the next year. That means, Bochkov says, that public health officials “cannot predict the spectrum of rhinovirus types for an upcoming cold season.”

Even if the court does not take Wisconsin?s case, but takes others, the results would affect all states, according to UW-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber.

Quoted: ?The people who propose these systems often oversell them,? said University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Mayer, who has spent a decade studying public campaign finance. ?From what we?ve observed in places that have various types of public funding, the impacts are actually a lot more marginal.?

Look beyond the deductible. Deductibles tend to be the priciest insurance component, so that?s where people focus, says Justin Sydnor, assistant professor of risk management at the University of Wisconsin.

Quoted: Richard Matland, a political scientist and visiting scholar at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the GOP offense indicates the party may be concerned about Republican women crossing over to vote for Happ. Research has shown that negative messages are good at “demobilizing voters,” Matland said.

Quoted: ?The gold standard would be to put it in quotation marks,? Robert Drechsel, director of the UW-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics, said of the use of the newspaper?s language.

Robert Vargas, a sociology professor at University of Wisconsin, initially became interested in gang violence when he volunteered at a Latino youth group. He was driven to study the educational performance of the kids, but the students? fear of a fast-approaching gang initiation was what caught his attention.

Quoted: Nicholas Hillman, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, calculates that one in 10 Americans only have one public college nearby. And that school is usually a community college. Most of the areas Hillman calls “education deserts” are rural. But other patterns he found also pose challenges for low-income and minority students who want access to a quality education. “In general,” Hillman says, “the whitest communities have the most colleges.”

This week, the U.S. Department of Education will release data on the percentage of borrowers who have defaulted on federal student loans over the last three years. Schools with high rates of default face consequences. There are new standards. According to Nick Hillman, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, a college doesn?t want its default rate to hit 40 percent a year, or 30 percent over three years.

Noted: The authors of the new study – from the Global Health Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, say a number of solutions are available to mitigate climate change. Many of them would improve the health of many people almost immediately. They authors say: “Reducing greenhouse gas, deploying sustainable energy technologies, shifting transportation patterns, and improving building design?many of which yield multiple benefits?are feasible, cost-effective, and attractive to multiple parties.”

Quoted: “The question is, do we really want that revenue from the casino … being sent to Florida?” asked Richard Monette, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor. “That percentage becomes key, and those factors should be public.”

Quoted: Michael Wagner, a journalism professor and elections expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the Burke case doesn?t fit the traditional definition of plagiarism.

Quoted: “It?s getting hotter,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and lead author of the new study. “And it?s the extremes that matter most to public health.”

Noted: Most retirement studies also don?t take the impact of children into account when projecting retirement preparedness. According to University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor John Karl Scholz, spending by couples with kids typically declines after kids leave home, allowing them to catch up on savings. So if you take a snapshot of their finances while kids are still at home and extrapolate from there, you get a a distorted picture of future readiness.

Noted: Dr. Howard Bailey, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, has seen hundreds of pleomorphic liposarcoma cases over the last two decades.

Quoted: The poverty increase among Wisconsin seniors is puzzling, said Robert Haveman, professor emeritus of public affairs and economics, and a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: This week, I conducted a review of the reports to determine whether the instances they cited truly qualified as plagiarism. I also asked two jourrnalism ethics experts ? Robert Drechsel, the James E. Burgess chair and director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kelly McBride, the vice president for academic programs of The Poynter Institute ? to review the reports. They came to the same conclusion I did: Fareed Zakaria plagiarized.

Quoted: ?Rents will be highest in those areas where we can get the highest return from the crops,? said Bruce Jones, a professor of agriculture economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?So the southern tier ? maybe Rock County and Dane County ? tend to have higher rents. As you get further north, where productivity of the land is a little less and climate is less conducive to row crops, you see a fall off of rents farmers have to pay in those areas.?

Quoted: According to Dr. Alison Brooks of the University of Wisconsin Madison, it?s not that simple. As Brooks points out, many football players are prone to high-risk behavior to begin with (seeing as they chose to be football players), and risk-taking individuals tend to be more inclined towards drugs, alcohol, and aggressive behavior. For many of these individuals, any number of additional factors might contribute to violent behavior: steroid use, drug and alcohol abuse, and underlying mental health issues.

Quoted: Geography is a relatively young discipline in terms of university academics, and for much of its history, geographers have struggled to define what exactly the discipline includes, said Keith Woodward, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Noted: Grain farmers saw corn prices drop 40 percent to around $4 a bushel in 2013, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. Farmers need to get around $5 a bushel for their corn in order to meet 2014 rent prices, said Bruce Jones, a University of Wisconsin-Madison agriculture economics professor.

Quoted: Some of the money may be overseas. Less than a quarter of U.S. currency resides abroad, estimates University of Wisconsin economist Edgar Feige. Where?s the rest? Legitimate business owners and those without bank accounts rely heavily on cash. And some is hidden away by the real-life equivalents of Breaking Bad?s Walter White in an underground ?cash only? economy. The U.S. may lose more than $100 billion a year in taxes on unreported income of over $400 billion, according to the Tufts study and others.

Quoted: Not everyone is equally eager to strike while the iron is hot. Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of education-policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, questioned the department?s intention to meet a fall 2014 deadline. She cautioned that including community colleges in the ratings system, for example, would have unintended consequences such as making the sole college in an “education desert” undesirable to students.

Quoted: “No one was keeping track back then,” said Stanley Temple, a retired professor of conservation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has digitized Mr. Schorger?s research for Project Passenger Pigeon. “No one was doing anything we would think of today as a wildlife census.”

Quoted: “It can be a fruit that?s a little overripe, it can be a little bit of organic debris that got kicked under the stove,” explained P.J. Liesch, manager of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab.

Quoted: The increase in consumer debt seizures is “a big change,” largely invisible to researchers because of the lack of data, says Michael Collins, faculty director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The potential financial hardship imposed by these seizures and their sheer number should grab the attention of policymakers, he says. “It is something we should care about.”

Noted: Few would quibble that Posner has sarcasm down to an art. But the highly respected judge, who was appointed to the court by Republican President Ronald Reagan, is not “a left-wing liberal,” says Howard Schweber, a political scientist and constitutional scholar at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “He is a leading light among conservative intellectuals.” Moreover, “he?s probably the leading intellectual light among currently serving judges, maybe including the United States Supreme Court.”

Quoted: Andrew Kydd, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is teaching a course specifically on terrorism this semester. Kydd said while ISIS has publicly beheaded two American journalists, the group has not made any direct threats on America?s homeland.

Quoted: Professor Donald Downs, a political scientist UW Madison, says the appeals court must interpret the role the third parties played in the recall.