Category: UW Experts in the News

Noted: Cytisine ?looks promising, but the jury is still out,? said Dr. Michael Fiore, director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Interventions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who had no role in the study. Fiore said that more studies are needed to confirm the findings, but that an inexpensive anti-smoking drug would be useful anywhere.

Quoted: Deborah Mitchell, executive director for the Center for Brand and Product Management at the UW-Madison School of Business and an expert on Internet retailing, said the growth of the company was likely helped by the slumping economy as businesses, large and small, began reassessing office supply costs.

Noted: The plan makes sense because it allows the three banks to break free of TARP?s restrictions, such as limits on executive compensation and transparency requirements, University of Wisconsin-Madison finance professor Ken Kavajecz said.

Noted: Lower education generally means higher poverty. About a fifth of people ages 25 to 34 with only a high school diploma in the United States were poor last year, compared with just 5 percent of college graduates, said Yiyoon Chung, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. For those without a high school diploma, the rate was 40 percent.

Quoted: Giri Venkataramanan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison.

Quoted: Steven A. Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences,

Quoted: Stephen Ward, who heads the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said: ?Has there been an actual conflict of interest? I don?t find it in this case. What about the perception of a conflict? That is where I think some might see the relationship between him and the public relations firm and have some reason to doubt.?

Quoted: Stephen Ward, a former B.C. professor and now the director of the Centre for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, lambasted police for blaming the media for the riots.

Quoted: “The working age population and the child population are most vulnerable economically,” said Katherine Curtis, a UW-Madison demographer. “These are our working families with children, our early- and mid- and late-career workers.”

Quoted: But Dennis Dresang, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor emeritus, said this isn?t the end of unions. He said that unions will instead enter a new, more efficient phase, which will likely include more lobbying.

Quoted: Times sure have changed since manufacturing kept the state?s jobless rate at 3 percent, said Timothy Smeeding, a director at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Timothy Smeeding at the Institute for Research on Poverty, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the Journal Sentinel “the middle class is taking a beating.”

Quoted: Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, said that another factor is that a lot of white households, especially among baby boomers, were more heavily staked in the stock market, through retirement funds or other accounts. And Wall Street, though battered, has bounced back more quickly since 2008 than the housing market.

Noted: Environmental studies/sustainability: Programs in environmental studies are spreading as energy, water, food, and climate promise to be defining issues of the century. Starting this fall, students at the University of Wisconsin?Madison can major in either environmental studies or environmental sciences, for example. Environmental studies is an interdisciplinary degree, requiring students to select among courses in food and agriculture, health, energy, biodiversity, climate, history and culture, land use, and policy.

Quoted: “This change in the policy has real implications for how people operate so we want to be a good community partner in that,” said Gabriel Javier, Director of UW?s LGBT Campus Center.

Quoted: In the meantime, economists operate without a code of ethics. At the very least, it?s something journalists need to be aware of, according to Stephen Ward, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: ?We?re trying to figure that all out,? said Jon Martin, professor and chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?We have a renewed sense of urgency and interest in this question after this horrible spring. Whether this is part of a larger cycle is very hard to discern simply because the record of actually counting these things and having reasonable statistics is not that long.?

Quoted: ?I think it is clear that the Republican party has shifted to the right, since 2001 when Governor Thompson was last in office,? said Charles Franklin, a political science professor at UW Madison. ?He may have a harder time selling some of the interest groups and activist groups within the party and outside the party, that he really is walking the walk and not just talking the talk, on this new, considerably more conservative Republican party.?

Noted: The surge in the number of independent candidates represents a desire for peaceful transition away from authoritarianism and toward greater government accountability, said Edward Friedman, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Quoted: “Educational progress sort of atrophied,” University of Wisconsin economist Tim Smeeding says. “So, in other words, we have not been graduating people from college as fast as we should have.”

Noted: Mr. Cronon, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was recently the subject of an unusual public-records request by a political group. The Republican Party of Wisconsin asked the university to turn over a batch of e-mail messages by the professor containing certain keywords, as The Chronicle reported, after he wrote a blog post examining how conservative groups had helped craft controversial legislation, including the 2011 measure to strip Wisconsin public employees of collective-bargaining rights.

Quoted: ?Gen Y people are more relaxed about their bodies, so there?s more attention to products that people would have been embarrassed to talk about before,? says Deborah Mitchell, executive director for the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin School of Business. ?It?s part of this trend of women saying, ?Hey, we?re not embarrassed to talk about this.? ?

A: Spiders make different kinds of silk for different purposes, says Phil Pellitteri, a distinguished faculty associate in the Department of Entomology at UW-Madison.

Noted: The city?s rankings, using a methodology called value-added modeling, have been produced by a center affiliated with the University of Wisconsin. Not producing them this year will save the city about $200,000, city officials said. Doug N. Harris, an economist affiliated with the center, said he thought the decision to end the contract  ?was more broadly a political issue than about whose model is better.?

Quoted: “Gen Y people are more relaxed about their bodies, so there?s more attention to products that people would have been embarrassed to talk about before,” says Deborah Mitchell, executive director for the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin School of Business.

Quoted: ?The big hurt has been in the manufacturing and construction industries, which were big in the Midwest and West,? said Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

An economist hailing from Washington D.C. with a background in health research will take the reins of the University of Wisconsins La Follette School of Public Affairs this fall.

Quoted: Andrew Reschovsky, professor of public affairs and applied economics at the UW-Madison?s La Follette Institute of Public Affairs.

Quoted: If that is the case ? that Republicans will continue pursuing what they say most voters elected them to do — is bipartisanship in the Legislature?s future? ?Well, I think you?ll see more than you have in the last eight months, because you couldn?t see any less,? says UW-Madison political scientist John Witte.