Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: For my inspiration fix, I head to the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID), on the University of Wisconsin?Madison campus. The goal of the place, its lion-haired director, David Krakauer, tells me, exuberantly drawing arrows and intersecting circles on a whiteboard, is to bring together researchers from many historically isolated departments to share theories, concepts, and data sets. Krakauer, a geneticist who also happens to have deep and sophisticated interests in art and music and education reform, has written a quote from Niels Bohr across his office window in grease pencil: ?Your theory is crazy, but it?s not crazy enough to be true.?

Noted: Can charities use the phenomenon of warm glow to increase donations? Amanda Chuan, a doctoral student in applied economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Anya Samak, an assistant professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, sought to answer that question by conducting a field study involving holiday donations to a Chicago charity that provided blankets to people in need.

Noted: Some of the funds go to supporting the infrastructure that enforces the one-child policy, said Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin scientist. ?Local family planning committees never use the money for children,? he said. ?They use this money as bonuses, or to upgrade office equipment, or even for foreign travel. Not even the central government knows what the money is used for.?

Quoted: ?This is a major speech on a topic that American presidents normally stay away from,? Tim Smeeding, an expert on inequality at the University of Wisconsin, tells me, adding that it compares in some ways to Franklin Delano Roosevelt?s addresses. ?The fact that a sitting president faced with a crowded agenda had the courage to discuss this overarching problem is historic.?

Noted: The core of the argument made at a conference last month at the University of Akron by the political scientists Edward Carmines of Indiana University, Michael Ensley of Kent State University and Michael Wagner of the University of Wisconsin lies in the graphic representation in Figure 1, which shows the distribution of political orientations in the United States.

Quoted: Fuxian Yi, a medical scientist at the University of Wisconsin and author of ?Big Country With an Empty Nest,? estimates that far more than one million families are involved. He calculates that 220 million single children were born between 1975 and 2010. News reports in China often quote a lower figure of 190 million.

Noted: Some groups have been hit much harder than others. ?African-American children living in lower-income, low-education neighborhoods are seven and a half times more likely than white kids to experience the incarceration of a parent,? said Julie Poehlmann, professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin. ?And by age 14, more than half of these kids with a low-education parent will have an imprisoned parent.?

Quoted: ?The proportionality is off the charts,? Clif Forbes Conrad, a professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. ?I?ve never heard of anything like this.?

Quoted: Dairy farmers should benefit from the bumper corn crop if they buy corn to feed their cows. It could result in higher milk production and lower prices on dairy products, said Bruce Jones, an agricultural economist with University of Wisconsin-Madison.

?[We?re] working toward this dream that we won?t be taking a test, but we?ll just know from your learning and game play how you?re doing,? said Kurt Squire, director of the Games Learning Society Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a group that designs and studies educational video games.

Quoted: “It?s not healthy, and clearly there are alternatives to trans fats because the levels have been coming down in the food supply,” said Beth Olson, a University of Wisconsin Extension specialist and associate professor of nutritional science at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: ?Consumers think that science is definitive. But the important thing to remember is that science is a process,? said Lydia Zepeda, a University of Wisconsin-Madison consumer science professor.

Quoted: David Canon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, says this allows Ribble to stake out more centrist positions, without drawing a strong challenge from the tea party, which cheered the shutdown.

For anyone wanting to know if the U.S. housing market is turning into a new, speculative bubble, a good and overlooked way to tell is the price of land. A real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin has done just that?and concluded that there is no evidence of a bubble on a national level. Not yet, anyway.

Susan B. Ortenstone, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s College of Engineering, has received the Distinguished Achievement Award.

Quoted: ?They weren?t thinking about this in musical terms or a musical legacy, especially the race stuff,? said Matt Appleby, a curator at the University of Wisconsin library, which runs a Paramount discography. ?Their business model was just ?If we think we can make some money off this, then let?s record.? It was ephemera to them, with new songs out every month. That was the extent of their interest.?

With the controversial Snuggle House slated to open its doors in Madison in the near future, health professionals are questioning how effective snuggling is as a therapy for its clients.

While the sight of huge old trees collapsing under their own weight with every windstorm is horrifying for loggers, that landscape is exciting for ecologists such as Don Waller, botany professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A century after lumber barons cut down 1.5 million acres of timberlands now protected within the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest to help build Milwaukee and Chicago, industry managers said the riches within the regrown forest are being squandered at taxpayers expense.

Noted: And those who attended The Wildlife Society?s annual national conference Oct. 7-8 in Milwaukee heard University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Adrian Treves claim wolf poaching is rising. During the conference, Treves also said the DNR?s 2013 wolf quota is ?not sustainable nor responsible.?

Professor Awad Hanna of the University of Wisconsin Madison and the president of Madison-based Hanna Consulting Group, knows a thing or two when it comes to productivity in the construction industry.

Quoted: Mr. Xi?s handling of the past, however, is driven by political imperatives, not family memories, said Edward Friedman, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was an editor of the English version of Mr. Yang?s book ?Tombstone.?