Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: The University of Wisconsin system invoked eminent domain in 2009 to seize a local bar near the Madison campus. The university hoped to use the property to build a music performance facility. The bar?s owners, who bought the property after the university announced its plans to acquire it, questioned the necessity of seizing the property. They tried to drum up public support by waging a public relations fight and endorsing legislation that would have reined in the state?s power.

A research center at the University of Wisconsin has been brought into focus for its studies regarding education and effectiveness of teaching within the Chicago Public School system.

Quoted: Jordan Ellenberg, a University of Wisconsin mathematician who writes a mathematics blog, Quomodocumque, said, ?At first glance, it feels like you?re reading something from outer space.?

Noted: The Dane County ruling said that capping union workers? raises but not those of their nonunion counterparts was unconstitutional. The suit, filed by the Madison teachers union, applied to local and school employees, but not those employed by the state or the University of Wisconsin System.

Noted: David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he wouldn?t be surprised to see either candidate court moderate or independent voters by softening their rhetoric on divisive issues.

Noted: Andrew Coan, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said that while he could not comment on the merits of the case, in general ?it is well within the scope of a trial judge?s authority to issue an order declaring a state law unconstitutional.?

Quoted: ?[Tests are] the tail that wags the dog,? said David Williamson Shaffer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies education psychology. ?And the problem is we?ve got the wrong tail on right now. We have a tail that was literally developed 100 years ago.?

Quoted: ?If it?s a pretext for getting him not to say what he said because of the content of the movie or its impact, that would raise a First Amendment concern,? said Donald Downs, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Exactly why attacks on the U.S. Embassies are happening may not be a simple answer. One local scholar says the violence is deeply rooted in the relationship between the United States and the Middle East, not just a short movie.

Noted: Now another higher education researcher is questioning the methodology and findings of the Chingos-Peterson study. In a paper published today by the National Education Policy Center, Sara Goldrick-Rab asserts that Chingos and Peterson do not make the case that “the statistically significant result for African Americans that is set forth in the report is truly statistically significant or different from the non-statistically significant result for Hispanics.”

Noted: Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women?s studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has studied the gender gap across a broad spectrum of skills. She believes that men and women aren?t as different as they are often portrayed, and she has mined data on social, psychological, communication and physical traits, skills and behaviors to quantify the gap. After looking at 46 meta-analyses, Hyde found what she defined as a ?very large? difference in only two skills: throwing velocity and throwing distance.

Noted: Harvard?s ROTC ranks are still small, numbering about 10 cadets in the Army program and 15 midshipmen in the Navy program. It isn?t clear how robust the programs ultimately will become, but the move to bring ROTC back represents a start in “reintegrating” the armed services with some elite institutions that have been criticized in recent years for not pulling their weight in military service, said Donald Downs, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on the ROTC.

Noted: It?s possible the increase is partly due to better detection of diseases, as well as new technologies that allow researchers to better study viruses, said Tony Goldberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s School of Veterinary Medicine.

Noted: Dr. Robert Hardie, a surgeon at the University of Wisconsin?s school of veterinary medicine, turned to the orthotics lab at the university?s medical school in 2005 when he could not heal a post-surgery foot wound in Sam, a 200-pound Irish wolfhound.

Quoted: Kasey Fiske, who works at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Pamela E. Oliver, a sociologist who studies crime at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says it isn?t clear how to combine data from prison surveys and from national surveys that exclude prisoners. “There are a lot of complex assumptions necessary to do adjustments, and reasonable people will disagree about the best way to proceed,” she says.

Noted: Scientists are looking to a natural cause for the river?s change in color. Emily Stanley, who researches limnology (the study of inland waters) at the University of Wisconsin, believes it is possible microorganisms could be behind the sudden change, but that it is probable there is a much better explanation for it.

Quoted: While the study does not indicate when the symptoms of depression began for the women or for how long the symptoms persisted, it?s likely that in order for the depression to have affected the child, the mother may have been depressed for months, according to Dr. Kenneth Robbins, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, who was not associated with the study.

Noted: But predicting the future is never easy. Tony Goldberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the ecology and evolution of infectious disease, said the introduction of West Nile into the United States showed how challenging it can be to forecast new public health risks.

Quoted: Brent Hueth, director of the Center for Cooperatives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he?d expected an increasingly crowded landscape of organic purveyors, including from conventional stores, to be tougher on co-ops.

Noted: John Markley, director of the BMRB and a structural biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hopes to attract other federal funders to support the database.

Quoted: ?There?s a potential for a large variation of outcomes,? said Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?What matters as much as the absolute level of unemployment is the relative level — how people feel about economic uncertainty, the deficit, the middle class.?

Quoted: “Milk production is slowing down,” said Bob Cropp, the University of Wisconsin?s dairy marketing professor emeritus.

Do scarecrows work and, if so, why?

What is the source of energy for hurricanes?

Noted: Shanan Peters, a palaeobiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, isnt so sure the paper is noteworthy. Its primary result, he points out, is to overturn Mayhews own prior finding and bring the long-term diversity results into line with ecological common sense. “Palaeobiologists and climatologists have long referred to warm intervals as climate optima,” he notes, “precisely because it is during such times that palm trees and alligators inhabit the Arctic and life appears to be diverse and flourishing.”

Quoted: “It really does take a bit of getting used to. But once you talk to patients and they understand the theory, they accept it. We have had no trouble recruiting,” said Dr. John Fleming, a professor of neurology at the University of Wisconsin who is testing the drug in patients with multiple sclerosis.

Quoted: “Denisova is a big surprise,” says John Hawks, a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin?Madison who was not involved in the new research.

Noted: About half of the 31 copies came from the girl?s mother and half from her father, producing a genome “of equivalent quality to a recent human genome,” says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not part of the team.