Category: UW Experts in the News

Six months ago, a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin sent an email regarding the fall 2010 Diversity Forum.

Quoted: Walter Dickey, a UW-Madison Law School professor who lost his younger brother in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Quoted: But even if a person believes assisted suicide is ethical, Dr. Ken Robbins, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin and director of psychiatry at Stoughton Hospital, said it is essential for a clinician to thoroughly screen patients to be sure they are not suicidal because of depression.

Quoted: “Every U.S. family has a finite amount of resources available to them, and every day they have to make decisions about how to allocate those resources. This is especially true in today?s economy where you hear people talk about ?feeling the pinch,?” study leader Lauren E. Wisk, a doctoral student and graduate research assistant at the School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin, Madison, said in an American Academy of Pediatrics news release.

UW Foreign Policy expert Jeremi Suri says the killing of Osama Bin Laden may give a boost to the American public?s feelings about the War on Terror.

Quoted: Charles Franklin, UW-Madison political science professor.

Quoted: Tim Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at UW-Madison.

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

Quoted: Jeff Sindelar, a meat scientist in the UW-Madison Meat Laboratory.

Quoted: Wisconsin?s more than 300,000 state workers represent about 14% of the state?s work force. They will experience the equivalent of a 7.7% cut in take-home pay due to a provision requiring them to pay for pensions and pay more for health care, according to Steven Deller, an economist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Quoted: “Once you have an exemption for [foreign-exchange] transactions, you immediately have one that also covers interest rate transactions, and the two together represent roughly 90%” of over-the-counter derivatives trades, said Antonio Mello, a finance professor at the University Of Wisconsin (Madison) School of Business. “So that would be a major portion of the [over-the-counter] market that would immediately become somewhat exempted” from the new derivatives rules.

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kathy Cramer Walsh says voters here have always had their disagreements, “but Wisconsinites, in general, are good at sort of smoothing over differences and getting along. And right now we?re not getting along, and it?s blown out into the open. I?d say it?s pretty different. It feels un-Wisconsin-like to me.”

It?s been a mission that?s taken ten years — Sunday night, two leading professors at the UW-Madison reacted to the news that 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden had been killed. (Video.)

Quoted: Paul Williams, a plant pathologist at the University of Wisconsin?Madison, developed a Brassica plant with a rapid life cycle for his research on disease-resistant vegetables, and it didn?t take him long to realize that his creation ?might be useful for teaching principles of plant biology.? Today, through the Wisconsin Fast Plants Program, which he developed, his Brassica plants have been shipped to thousands of classrooms around the world.

Q. While cooking my St. Patrick?s Day corned beef, I noticed a large amount of foam that formed on top of the boiling liquid. What causes this?

A. That foam is made of proteins released from the cooking meat, says Jeff Sindelar, a meat scientist in the UW-Madison Meat Laboratory.

UW-Madison Professor Scott Straus? extensive knowledge of genocide and African politics has landed him as an expert witness in the trial of Lazare Kobagaya who is charged with ordering mass murders during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Quoted: UW-Madison?s Jonathan Martin, chair of the UW-Madison?s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department.

Noted: These were the flashiest debates, and they brought some new light as well as heat to well-established disagreements. Listen for the judicious summaries of the differing positions by Molly Jahn, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and her essential call for adding the “environmental balance sheet,” similar to Hirshberg?s call to include externalities, in any discussion of sustainability. Jahn also mentioned a fresh-as-of-last-week coalition of growers usually on opposite sides of the table: industrial or, as Sarah Alexander, of the Keystone Center gently told us to call it, “commodity” agriculture, and small farmers, who know they need to share information and unite to save resources and keep farming. The group is just forming and will soon lay out a strategy.

Quoted: “It?s historic from just about any perspective that you want to take,” said Jonathan Martin, a UW-Madison atmospheric science professor. “Conditions have been perfect for a series of these outbreaks, one of the conditions is really moist air in the boundary layer, the lowest part of the atmosphere. Another very important condition is strong wave type disturbances in the middle troposphere, strong jet stream, and that?s been in place. We don?t know how it got as strong as it got in this particular instance; sometimes it?s interesting to find that out.”

Quoted: “It would be better to deal with issues like the undervalued renminbi more directly and openly,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin. “I am concerned that if these problems are allowed to fester for too long, voters will force Congress into an open trade war. And that would be bad for everybody.”

Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist, said, “… Duffy is definitely on the list of targets for Democrats trying to prevent that.”

Quoted: Troy Runge, a professor in biological systems engineering at UW-Madison.

Quoted: “There?s often talk of the sophomore surge, that someone who?s made it to their second term is much more likely to hold on to a seat for their career,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist. “And Duffy is definitely on the list of targets for Democrats trying to prevent that.”

Quoted: Tuls doesn?t yet milk any cows in Wisconsin, but other out-of-state farmers building operations in the dairy state are helping close a Wisconsin milk deficit, said Bob Cropp, a dairy economist with UW-Madison. So are Wisconsin farmers who are expanding their herds and improving production, he said.

Quoted: Michael Corradini, the chairman of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin, said that with power crews already setting up electricity transmission lines across the evacuation zone to the plant, and with heavy repair equipment being brought in as well, the movement of private individuals and their vehicles would probably not have much additional effect in spreading out the hot spots.

Quoted: ?You need some sort of system of mediating those conflicts, and trying to sit down and negotiate with various conflicting interests,? said William Powell Jones, labor historian from University of Wisconsin.

Noted: The authors of the note, led by physicist Sau Lan Wu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, say that ATLAS saw two photons whose energies add up to 115 gigaelectronvolts GeV. That?s the sort of thing you might expect if the Higgs boson had a mass of 115 GeV divided by the speed of light squared. Because energy and mass are related by Einstein?s famous E=mc2 equation, particle physicists often speak of mass and energy interchangeably. For comparison, a proton has a mass of about 0.9 GeV/c2.

A professor emeritus from the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s food science department has been presented with the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association?s Distinguished Service Award. Dr. W.L. ?Bill? Wendorff is being honored for his contributions in helping develop dairy manufacturing trends and helping to establish a trusted partnership with dairy processing companies.

Quoted: Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin at Madison political science professor and co-developer of Pollster.com.

….I initially turned a jaundiced eye toward a story in Tuesday?s paper about the GOALS (Growth, Opportunity, Acceptance, Leadership and Service) student group at Glacial Drumlin School in Cottage Grove, which is trying to help build students? empathy skills by having them complete the sentence ?If you were walking in my shoes, you would know ….?

Quoted: UW-Madison educational psychologist Bradford Brown

Quoted: Under federal rules, every transplant center must have an advocate for living donors. Health insurance problems do come up, says Rebecca Hays, a living-donor social worker at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison. Sometimes, Hays said, donors tell her about insurers that refuse to cover anything related to the organ donation for a year. ?More often I hear from people who have been denied insurance and they don?t know what to do.?

Quoted: “What?s happening is unprecedented. It?s hard to see who is really in favour of this dam,” said Ian Baird, an expert on Laos and specialist on hydropower dams and fisheries at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: As the new admissions director at the University of Wisconsin, Adele Brumfield is striving to create those warm, fuzzy feelings. Her office sifted through 29,000 applications ? a 12 percent increase over a year ago ? before offering bids to 14,404 freshmen for summer and fall terms. More than a third of those are from Illinois.

Quoted: ?NIH supports the most basic research in biomedical science, and any reduction in it inhibits our ability to research,? said Kim Moreland, associate vice chancellor for research administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: “At conferences, we ask each other how Anatoly is doing on the dictionary, how close he is,” says Joan Houston Hall, the editor of the DARE at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We are all rooting for him.”

Quoted: The law was challenged in a court case that may wind up before the state Supreme Court. Prosser presents himself as ?a judicial conservative? on his website, and often votes in a bloc with three other members to form a majority, Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, has said.