Category: UW Experts in the News

Have you ever walked past Camp Randall?s Memorial Park on the way to a Badgers football game and wondered what really took place on the historic grounds during the Civil War era?

On a warm Tuesday afternoon, Weston Weber sat on a shaded bench next to Middleton?s Splash Pad while his daughter ran through the fountains that brought scores of kids, parents and day camp counselors to Lakeview Park.

Quoted: “I tell people to go ahead and balance on one leg, then the other for two to three minutes,” said Timothy McGuine, a sports medicine specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who added that two to three times a week is a good start.

Interviewed: And paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisonsin, Madison, agrees: “We definitely evolved to eat meat.”

Noted: ?At first only Chinese peasants were on my side, now an increasing number of Chinese intellectuals are with me,? Yi, 43, now a University of Wisconsin scientist, said in an interview in Beijing. He gave 23 talks at universities and forums in China in May and June opposing the policy. Yi Qiming, the Tangwan township head, declined to comment on the lunch.

Quoted: ?For most parents, the total benefits of children likely outweigh the financial costs,? said Lonnie Berger, associate professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. ?At the same time, parents may think about economic costs when making decisions about having children, especially with regard to timing and number of children.?

Noted: In a first step to get beyond polarization, the SPJ invited three panelists to address the issue: Tony Earl, former Democratic governor of Wisconsin, former U.S. Rep. Scott Klug (R-Madison), and Katherine Kramer Walsh, a political science professor at UW-Madison, whose research has taken her to coffee shops and community centers around the state to observe conversations about politics.

Quoted: Gretchen Viney, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor with expertise in family law, said it isn?t unusual for judges to waive bonding requirements entirely based on their high cost.

Quoted: “So called ?minor people? were very important in unravelling this story,” says Stanley Kutler, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Wars of Watergate.

Noted: University of Wisconsin researchers even found that profile pictures and the presence or absence of a declared relationship status can predict the level of harmony between two people. Men who post their status as ?In a Relationship? rather than leave it blank were more satisfied with their relationships, the Wisconsin researchers found. Women whose profile pictures include their partners were similarly more satisfied.

Quoted: ?There?s a lot of uncertainty about what the solution is,? said Mark Copelovitch, an assistant professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who specializes in the politics of the world economy. ?Investors are savvy and they realize this is a short-term solution and not a permanent fix.?

Quoted: All these Muslim warriors governed immense inkblots of territory that were extensions of the Arab-Persian world that lay to the west, even as they interacted and traded with China to the north and east. It was a land without fixed borders that, according to University of Wisconsin historian André Wink, represented a rich confection of Arab, Persian, and Turkic culture, bustling with trade routes to Muslim Central Asia.

Quoted: In 2010, Paul Mitchell of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that US growers of conventional maize benefitted economically from having an adjacent Bt maize farm, because it suppressed maize-damaging pests. “This paper is part of the ongoing research documenting the environmental, economic and social benefits that Bt crops generate for more than just their users,” he says.

Quoted: “They?re virtually all unnatural means to enhance performance,” says Norman Fost, professor of paediatrics, medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin.

Quoted: John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the research, said it would be interesting to learn how these genetic differences influenced behavior.

UW-Madison announced Tuesday that four finalists have been named for the position of dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, and two of those people currently work on campus.

Noted: That uncertainty is no better illustrated than in the essay “Diagnostic Quests and Accidents,” in which Norman Fost, director of the University of Wisconsin?s bioethics program, describes how mistakes in the diagnostic stage have affected many patients, including two contributors to this book: Arthur Frank (his doctor thought he had chlamydia) and Dresser (an ache in her ear and mouth didn?t seem unusual to her regular doctor). Not only do such mistakes delay the right treatments, they instill a lot of frustration and disappointment.

Noted: So while husbands and wives have become more equal, inequality between families appears to be on the rise. As Christine R. Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, puts it: ?Marriages are increasingly likely to consist of two high- or two low-earning partners,? rather than of one of each.

Noted: It doesn?t stunt their growth, as some have speculated, said Tom Cline, a graduate student at the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A long-term study there that involved capturing, marking and then angling for bass found they lose weight over the first one to three days after being caught. But they then feed so heavily that growth rates actually double for a time, Cline said.

Noted: God, the weather and the Packers used to be enough to diffuse any political argument among Wisconsinites, said Katherine Walsh, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin. but the tenor of the discourse during Walker?s short term in office has been louder than in recent memory, and Walsh isn?t totally convinced the end of the recall will mark the end of the tension.

A: Maybe if you?re standing on your head. “Nowadays, if corn is knee-high by the Fourth of July, it?s way behind,” said Joe Lauer, agronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin?Madison. The last time the old adage was a useful gauge of corn crop development was maybe two generations of farmers ago. “The technologies we have now for growing corn ? from the equipment we have to the plant hybrids we develop to the treatments we put on the seeds and in the fields ? have shifted things,” Lauer said. “With all that working for us, corn should be chest- or even neck-high by the Fourth of July.”

Quoted: Indeed, MadisonCommons.org at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently got some funding via a service learning grant to integrate the news website into the journalism curriculum, said its founder, Lew Friedland.

Quoted: Democrats are up against a well-funded and well-mobilized Republican Party that recently redrew legislative districts in its favor, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said.