Category: UW Experts in the News

Quoted: This is, quite simply, untrue. ?There is tons of research on this,? says Joanne Cantor, professor emerita of communications at the University of Wisconsin, and an expert on the effect of violent movies and video games. ?Watching violence makes kids feel they can use violence to solve a problem. It brings increased feelings of hostility. It increases desensitization.? Every parent understands this instinctively, of course, but those instincts are backed by decades of solid research.

Noted: “We now have evidence that engaging in pure mental training can induce changes not just in the function of the brain, but in the brain?s structure itself,” Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told an audience at the New York Academy of Sciences on Thursday (Feb. 6) evening.

Quoted: ?We know things like radiation might cause breast cancer, but we don?t know much that we can say specifically causes breast cancer in terms of chemicals,? said Michael Gould, a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a co-chairman of the 23-member committee that prepared the report.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin are suing the state Department of Administration over its requirement that demonstrators in the state Capitol obtain permits.

Noted: Planck data may hold evidence for what members of the physics community, like Peter Timbie from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, commonly refer to as inflation?s smoking gun: a massive collection of propagating bends and kinks in space itself, called gravitational waves.

Quoted: ?I wouldn?t criticize him for not knowing a lot of details about evolutionary biology,? said Elliott Sober, a philosopher of biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was highly critical of ?Mind and Cosmos? in Boston Review. But Mr. Nagel?s arguments, he continued, are marred by flawed reasoning about probability: ?He sees the origins of life and consciousness as remarkable facts which had to have had a high probability of happening. I don?t buy that.?

The University of Wisconsin-Madison was ranked seventh nationally in the 2013 Best Value public colleges and universities Tuesday by the Princeton Review.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor David Ward told the Faculty Senate Monday that university funding in the upcoming state biennial budget looks as though it will remain ?steady.?Ward said although the budget remains largely unclear until its release later this month, he is not expecting large cuts.

About 20 of the Madison area?s growing crop of entrepreneurs will share their experiences with UW-Madison students at the 2013 Madison Startup Fair, scheduled Tuesday, from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery Town Center, 330 N. Orchard St., in the lobby on the Randall Street side.

Quoted: Ronald L. Numbers, a science historian at the University of Wisconsin, said that many evangelical Protestants were once willing to accept the theory, as long as it was applied only to animals, not to humans.

Wisconsin-reared Carol Bartz, who grew up on a farm near Alma, took over Tuesday as CEO of one of the country?s most famous tech companies, Yahoo Inc.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison announced Thursday it will host a spring session for its traditionally annual fall Campus Diversity Forum Feb. 15.

Quoted: Remittances from the family member in the U.S make up a huge amount of many Mexicans incomes and comprehensive immigration reform could ostensibly make cross-border travel for work much easier, said Petra Guerra, the associate director of the Chicano and Latino Studies program at the University of Wisconsin.

Quoted: “Certainly, it?s unusual, but it?s not breaking the mold,” said Jonathan Martin, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Dan Schaefer, an animal sciences expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it?s all about supply and demand, and it starts with a shrinking U.S. beef herd.

Quoted: ?Our students have all the information that we have as professors,? says Aaron Brower, special assistant to the president of the University of Wisconsin system (and a professor on the Madison campus). ?So there is no premium on access to information.?

Quoted: Dr. Doug Laube, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and former president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, has condemned the new law.

It is not an ?achievement gap,? says Gloria Ladson-Billings. The disparity in test scores and graduation rates between students of color and white students that is frustrating school officials, parents and communities across the country is an ?education debt,? says professor Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education.

Quoted: Peter Carstensen, a University of Wisconsin Madison law professor who has watched the case for years, says he was not surprised by the settlement, but he was disappointed because most of the dairy farmers? problems won?t be addressed.

Turns out that “infringing” on the Second Amendment has a long and legally based history, according to a 2008 Supreme Court decision referred to me by UW-Madison assistant law professor and constitutional law expert Andrew Coan.

Quoted: “Probably at best, it tells us something about the white, probably better-educated, somewhat higher-income population in the U.S., which is a population we know a fair amount about already,” says sociologist John DeLamater of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What we really, really need are studies that look at these diverse groups in the U.S. That would go a long way in addressing the whole issue of ?normal.? “

Charles Franklin is a Political Scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Franklin says last Friday?s appellate court ruling on Act 10 upheld all of the provisions of the law that had been struck down by a Wisconsin federal court. Franklin called the appellate court two to one decision, “strong support for the state?s position.”

Quoted: Lawrence Berger, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of social work, has found that when the dollar amount of a person?s debt increases by 10 percent, depressive symptoms ? like not being able to shake the blues, feeling lonely or having trouble eating or sleeping ? increase by 14 percent.

Quoted: Deception online is far from new. About 81 percent of people misrepresented their weight, height or age in their online dating profiles, according to research from Catalina L. Toma, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Noted: It also surprised Mark Stephenson, the director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Quoted: Peter Carstensen, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin Law School, believes the merger will be approved, and it angers him.

Noted: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say the bug is now attacking whitebark pine forests in the northern Rockies in the western U.S. and B.C.

Today would be the 100th birthday of President Richard Nixon. From civil rights to Watergate, Nixon?s term shaped the office of the presidency. Stanley Kutler, professor emeritus in history at the University of Wisconsin and author of Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes, talks about the legacy of the 37th president.

Noted: For William Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the outgoing president of the history association, the problem is insufficient attention to basic storytelling. Historians, he said, tend to default to a dry omniscient voice that hasn?t changed since the 19th-century, despite the fact that historians no longer believe in that kind of omniscience.

Noted: Patricia Flatley Brennan, a professor of nursing and engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, heads up Project HealthDesign, a national research effort to explore ways to capture and integrate patient-recorded observations into clinical care. For that 2012 story, she noted that there hadn?t been much demand from the provider side yet. ?There is this delightful tension between what technology enables and social change,? she told me. ?The jury is still out on this.?

Quoted: Donna Friedsam, director of health policy programs for the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, said state Medicaid and insurance officials will have to decide whether to work hand-in-hand with those running the exchanges to give information to Wisconsin residents and help navigate the system.

Quoted: Cecelia Klingele, an assistant law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Walker?s decision denies people who have done their time a chance to make something of themselves.

Noted: A scientist at the University of Wisconsin became puzzled as he researched an ingredient used in energy drinks like Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy. The researcher, Dr. Craig A. Goodman, could not find any trials in humans of the additive, a substance with the tongue-twisting name of glucuronolactone that is related to glucose, a sugar. But Dr. Goodman, who had studied other energy drink ingredients, eventually found two 40-year-old studies from Japan that had examined it.

Quoted: Gary Diffee, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who examined some of her claims, said, ?Like many things of this type, the science seems to be a mixture of true, kind of true, true but irrelevant to the point she is trying to make, and wrong.?

Noted: The UW-Madison School of Education has worked with Favor Hamilton for “several years” in a one-week summer camp to encourage middle school-age students to pursue college, Associate Dean Dawn Crim said. Favor Hamilton had been scheduled to lead the “Movin? Minds” camp in July. Her name was on the camp?s website Thursday, but by Friday it had been removed.